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Comment by markdown | Hacker News Reader

> but they also power some massive eCommerce businesses and growing number of enterprise shops.

This makes no sense. Why would any company that starts making serious money continue to give SquareSpace money for a template. There's nothing you can do in SquareSpace that you can't do better in a custom app running on one of the many free software CMS's out there. I don't get this.

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For lots of brands, the core competency is marketing and every other aspect of the company is outsourced. E.g. Kylie Cosmetics which has 360M+/yr in revenue and uses Shopify.

A more provocative example is Tesla. Literally their whole car buying experience is powered by Shopify.

They did ~$21B in sales last year.

I don't think this is true - I believe it's only their merchandise store that's on Shopify. Car purchases are done through their own, custom platform.

That said, there are definitely plenty of huge merchants running on Shopify turning over hundreds of millions of dollars through the platform - we work with quite a few of them.

I can give Squarespace $10 a month and get a beautiful page with modern templates, https, hosting, CDN, and a CMS that even my graphic designers can use.

Or I could get Wordpress, pay for hosting, pay a developer, buy an ssl certificate, leave wp admin on a default url and get hacked...

Now I know how to fix those things with cheap hosting, Lets Encrypt, etc... but my graphic designers don't. $10 a month is very very cheap for a business.

Except it isn't $10/month. You give them a significant cut of every sale, don't you?

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