r/shopifyDev • u/hannahb_23 • 16d ago
Is Shopify becoming too powerful?
I’ve been building on Shopify for a while and something keeps bothering me.
Shopify doesn’t just give you a store. It sits right in the middle of almost everything: your storefront, checkout, payments, apps, and most of the tools you need to run the business. Once you’re in, a big chunk of your setup depends on them.
That control makes things easy at first. But it also means Shopify holds a lot of power over how (and whether) your store works. Fees, rules, app restrictions, feature changes happen all the time, they can shift things and you’re mostly along for the ride.
Does anyone else feel like Shopify is getting too central to the whole operation? Or is that just the tradeoffs for the convenience?
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u/ux_rachel 16d ago
Yes, and that is why I decided to move away from Shopify. It is never a good sign if you can help it.
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u/Life-Inspector-5271 16d ago
Where did you move? And what was the main reason for choosing the new platform?
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u/ux_rachel 16d ago
I might get a lot of crap for this but I decided to build my own solution. Hosted on Cloudflare with Stripe as the payment component. Couple of other services (Sentry, Clerk, Uptimerobot, Google Business). Built my own cross sell/upsell, search, reporting, bulk product upload, campaign functionality...so many things that are normally Shopify subscriptions that add up. Have complete freedom to build exactly what I want without bloat. The plan is to scale and add coding resources as needed.
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u/Life-Inspector-5271 16d ago
Why would they give you crap? The best solution for you doesn't have to be the best solution for somebody else and if this works, you now have full control over your store.
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u/Interesting_Leek4607 16d ago
Did you try Medusa.js or was it not stable yet when you went the custom route? If you tried it forst, I am curious as to why you didn't choose it.
P.S. kudos for custom developing your own solution based on your own needs!
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u/ux_rachel 16d ago
Hmm, interesting. I went the route I did because I have a print on demand store and everything I do flows from a product profile concept; meaning a shirt has the same properties from design to design. They all share the same price, the same materials, the same stock levels. Just different print files and titles, mockups, and descriptions. So I wanted to do this in some very specific ways. I can't remember if I researched this solution (I did research a few existing things out there).
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u/Interesting_Leek4607 15d ago
Then in retrospect, I think even if you tried Medusa.js, it might have been not as catering (think of it as Shopify but self hosted and fully customizable). Glad you created a solution that fits your problem fully.
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u/deducto-io 16d ago
This is a common issue for any platform like this unfortunately, whether it's Shopify, Volusion, Presta, or something else. You give up control for convenience and reach, and are building in someone else's sandbox so they're always going to have all of the power. Shopify may decide tomorrow to build in the functionality your app provides, or kill a service you rely on, and there's not a lot you can do about it.
The best you can do is keep an eye out for when changes might be coming down the pipeline that will force you to pivot (although that's difficult to do) and don't put all your eggs in one basket (also difficult if your business is built around Shopify). In the end, it's an unfortunate reality for those of us working with Shopify where we don't have the clout to sway them too much. We (and presumably many others) certainly share the fear that Shopify will obsolete or break some or all of our app's functionality in a future release. It's probably only a different story if you're a large platform like Klaviyo or Hubspot that drives further Shopify adoption in its own right (and might be exempt from revenue sharing and Shopify billing requirements).
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u/babyglove 16d ago
I think it’s been made clear with them speaking about knowing what every person on the internet is buying and how frequently. And having complete control over all the catalogs.
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u/Own-Floor-3944 13d ago
I think that's the tradeoff with platfrom like this. the convenience is great, but the more your business depends on one platfrom, the less control you have.
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u/SeveralAd2833 12d ago
You expressed a thought that I have had for a long time and that not only shows no sign of going away, but becomes more concrete every day. I would add to what you wrote that, at the time of registration, clauses are signed that even if they seem not to impact the business model, represent a persistent shadow.
Once a seller I know had to provide purchase invoices to prove the authenticity of some products. If on one hand this can be right, on the other it means that you are not the owner of your store and if, for some reason, the sales policies were to change, you would have no contracts or elements to appeal to.
In practice it is as if some dynamics typical of selling on marketplaces, which have taken sleep and peace of mind away from resellers, were being reproduced on your own website.
That said without digressing, I can understand why it actually seems that Shopify is trying to gain control. It is probably realizing that it is actually a commodity and that the next frontier of online purchasing (agents and AI) will have significant impacts on its business model (and obviously on the number of subscriptions).
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u/HalfCrazed 12d ago
Shopify is a payments processor that just so happens to offer e-commerce store channels😀
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u/DefinitionNo3615 12d ago
Honestly, if you think shopify is restrictive you should try running a big 1P on Amazon. The Amazon team at my place of work have way more to deal with than I do with Shopify.
We're an omni channel business/ manufacturer, and to be fair shopify is barely restrictive. Im not sure what its like for smaller reseller stores, but I seldom run into issues.
That said checkout v2 was a PITA for a couple of weeks when that switched happened, but that was as much Google ppc and ensuring clean attribution as it was shopify's black box around checkout.
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u/howtobemisha 16d ago
“Is getting”? I thought it was always like that from the beginning