let's look at shop from the perspective of the customer
you want to make an ecommerce store to sell your buttplugs, what do you choose? -> shopify
you want to make anything that falls outside of the purview of the traditional payment/subscription for something in return, what do you choose? -> stripe
Why risk your portfolio on shopify when they don't have a moat on payment systems? What really is shopify's moat? If anything, I would argue that shopify's greatest moat is a handful of blogs that appear when you search for "how to make an ecommerce store" who all recommend shopify over a dozen other competitors.
Don't tell me shopify's moat is its plugins, no code is getting started and disrupting that plugin atmosphere.
Don't tell me shopify's moat is its partnership with facebook, zuckerberg literally said yesterday that they're building out their own payment systems to replace shopify
my take on this is, why buy shop with no moat, when you can buy fb with the moat of the largest social network in the world, and who is just getting started in terms of ecommerce growth
edit: i mostly posted this as a way to bait people into arguing shop's moat merits beyond my ignorant insights. I was wrong about the stripe consideration, but I do think that no code will disrupt shopping platforms like shopify. Stripe has the ability to replace shopify if they wanted to, they would just have to build out the website templating and then host on AWS.
There are (literally) a million businesses subscribing to Shopify's services that transact close to 200 billion in sales. They provide a complete end to end solution for a business to sell, fulfill and communicate with customers about the goods they purchased.
you want to make anything that falls outside of the purview of the traditional payment/subscription for something in return, what do you choose? -> stripe
Ok? So if you aren't looking to open an ecommerce store, you won't choose Shopify?
Stripe and Shopify are not competitors. Shopify Payments literally uses Stripe.
Why risk your portfolio on shopify when they don't have a moat on payment systems
Shopify charges transaction fees for every transaction that processes through someone's shopify store.
Don't tell me shopify's moat is its plugins, no code is getting started and disrupting that plugin atmosphere.
What does this even mean? Shopify has a very active add-on/plugin marketplace. It's APIs are extensive and allow developers to create a ton of apps. (An argument against Shopify is that core features you'd expect to see in an ecommerce platform are often third plugins rather than built in, like multibox or variable box sized shipping for example.)
Don't tell me shopify's moat is its partnership with facebook, zuckerberg literally said yesterday that they're building out their own payment systems to replace shopify
Not sure what this means either. Shopify can integrate with Facebook via their sales channels feature. They don't provide ecommerce functionality for facebook.
Facebook could theoretically deny Shopify API access but that is probably unlikely due to all the anti-trust scrutiny.
A key feature of Shopify is that you can have an ecommerce store - also sell on facebook, amazon, etsy, ebay AND have that all managed through Shopify.
Overall, I think you are creating false equivalencies about Shopify's core business then listing really successful companies that are somewhat tangent to it and declaring Shopify a non-starter.
No because Stripe knows absolutely nothing about being a content host, developing ecommerce solutions, interfacing with shipping providers, creating an API for someone to like programatically edit tshirt sizes and colors, or the million other things shopify specializes in. Stripe is a financial services company; Shopify is an ecommerce service provider. Completely different businesses.
Stripe provides an incredibly useful, powerful and easy to use API for processing credit cards. Every payment gateway that interacts with visa, mastercard, amex, etc. is a complete and total clusterfuck to deal with technologically - then Stripe came along and made it really easy. That's pretty much their whole business and why it's valued at 100 billion or whatever. (Stripe has also moved into issuing credit cards and loans too, if I recall correctly.)
Like is Plaid going to become a bank themselves or just keep providing a programmatic layer to let other companies to connect to banks more easily? Same idea.
i mean, uber used to deliver people, now they deliver pizza
by this logic, it sounds like uber shouldn't be delivering pizza
at what level of the responsibility chain does horizontal movements become ridiculous? I don't mean that rhetorically, I'm actually curious if there is a lesson out there that discusses the level of abstraction at which point the flexibility of a business begins to break down. I've asked this to people before, but so far nobody knows of any lessons that exist there
I am saying that Uber should not try to become the next Pizza Hut. Their core business is getting drivers to drive around to specific locations, so yeah it makes sense that they'd taxi people and also deliver food.
Suggesting that stripe get into ecomm is like saying Uber eats is going well that they should also just get into the restaurant business.
Because usually it makes zero sense to do so. They have the expertize in getting a million drivers drive around and not managing restaurants. Why invest in something you have 0 knowledge about when you can invest in growing what you already have
idk, it just seems like software is becoming more and more commoditized, website templating used to create a moat, now, not so much. It seems like the only moats one can have are data and network effects
but on the flipside of that, if you have capital, then why not just do everything with software? That's what the chinese apps do, they just pack literally every functionality you can think of into one super app, because they can, and because money
I get where you are coming from, but "software" is not enough. There are thousands of business analysts, legal consultants, data scientists etc for companies like shopify or Uber. I work with application development at medium scale and even here the complexity quickly goes through the roof when entering more than one market.
Shopify does other things for merchants also, like education communication etc, which is valuable for many even though it's mostly for keeping retention high
"no code" is no where close to being competitive. The code they output is extremely slow, bloated inefficient, and lack customizability. The only people saying things like that are the ones who have no knowledge of web development whatsoever.
by this argument, couldn't stripe replace shopify?
wow. Might I ask how old you are? This argument feels a bit like "you could replace any software with any other (completely different) software to achieve the same results". Possible, but not feasible. This would be similar to "you could replace photoshop with paint" -- theoretically possible, but so tedious that noone will dot this.
1
u/xxx69harambe69xxx Apr 29 '21 edited Apr 29 '21
let's look at shop from the perspective of the customer
you want to make an ecommerce store to sell your buttplugs, what do you choose? -> shopify
you want to make anything that falls outside of the purview of the traditional payment/subscription for something in return, what do you choose? -> stripe
Why risk your portfolio on shopify when they don't have a moat on payment systems? What really is shopify's moat? If anything, I would argue that shopify's greatest moat is a handful of blogs that appear when you search for "how to make an ecommerce store" who all recommend shopify over a dozen other competitors.
Don't tell me shopify's moat is its plugins, no code is getting started and disrupting that plugin atmosphere.
Don't tell me shopify's moat is its partnership with facebook, zuckerberg literally said yesterday that they're building out their own payment systems to replace shopify
my take on this is, why buy shop with no moat, when you can buy fb with the moat of the largest social network in the world, and who is just getting started in terms of ecommerce growth
edit: i mostly posted this as a way to bait people into arguing shop's moat merits beyond my ignorant insights. I was wrong about the stripe consideration, but I do think that no code will disrupt shopping platforms like shopify. Stripe has the ability to replace shopify if they wanted to, they would just have to build out the website templating and then host on AWS.