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Comment by mikeryan | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a "feature"? Not to discount the churn numbers - but being able to quickly and at low cost set up a high quality commerce site where folks don't have to be heavily invested seems like they're providing the service as intended.

I enjoy the Shopify experience from the Vendors that use it and do stick around.

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I suppose as a user you could definitely look at it that way.

As an investor I'd be worried about losing their churned-out merchants to other platforms like Etsy and Woocommerce and Weebly and about ten other platforms hacking away at their knees. To be fair to Shopify though, I think they know they've already lost the battle for the little merchants and have fixated on other things.

I'm assuming The shops are startups that failed after s while. They are enabling them to be started quickly.

There are tons of scammers using Shopify. They’ll put up dozens of storefronts selling name brand sneakers or AirPods at “90%” off and stuff like that.

Of course, they never ship product (because they don’t have any) or if you’re lucky you get some super low quality alibaba knockoff.

With all due respect, if you are foolish enough to believe you can buy name brand sneakers and AirPods at 90% off from anywhere, you had it coming. There are many ways a scammer can set up a quick site, hook up a payment processor and start taking money. This is not a Shopify problem. It’s an internet-wide problem.

It’s not really a a good look for Shopify to be leaving those stores up.

I think you'll find the churn is mostly small businesses that go nowhere, not losses to other platforms.

Magento is probably the biggest loser to Shopify after making v.2 impossible for smaller merchants to maintain so they're moving their v.1 stores to Shopify instead. Shopify is also way simpler for your work-from-home new mum than setting up a WooCommerce store.

The only reasons to go to WooCommerce would be support for a specific payment gateway or content management which Shopify is still lacking. Maybe ongoing fees for some functionality that is standard in WooCommerce or can be had for a small one-off fee is a turn-off for some as well.

Coming from a background building stores in Magento 1 & 2, WooCommerce, ZenCart/OpenCart and now wrapping up a fairly complex Shopify integration I'm warming to it.

As a consumer, at least in Europe, I have a bunch of rights executed via the retailer. If I have a serious doubt the retailer will be around in 2 years, I'll choose a different one. This should limit Shopify's prospects of international growth.

It doesn't.

Seeing this point remembered here will help some, but overall you A. either won't know you're shopping at a shopify.com store or B. you'll not care because the company is too big to fail (Tesla).

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