Shopify Overtakes eBay as Second Biggest Shopping Site After Amazon
observer.com
observer.com
> The company has quickly become the most popular online shopping destination, second only to Amazon, thanks to an astronomical increase of its shares in the past year. So far this year, stock has soared 160% with revenue coming in at $362 million during its last quarter.
Shopify has a high stock price is the only take away from this article. It's not an ecommerce destination and is not comparable to Amazon or Ebay.
Data also shows the platform recently overtook competitor eBay, once a powerhouse in this space, in terms of quarterly sales.
If you want to compare Amazon vs eBay as a platform you wouldn't look at AWS to give an example of what I am talking about.
> The stock has climbed more than 150 per cent since the beginning of 2019, making Shopify more valuable than well-known internet companies including Twitter, Square and Spotify. Its market capitalisation — now more than $40bn — surpassed that of ecommerce pioneer eBay earlier this year.
It's all rather silly, it's sort of like saying Square is the second largest seller of coffee because a lot of coffee shops transact with it. AWS also hosts a ton of other eCommerce infrastructure, we have to include all sales made using AWS if you want this sort of comparison. It's a bunch of nonsense.
tl;dr If you sell shovels you can't claim you're one of the world's biggest miners.
> "Its market capitalisation — now more than $40bn — surpassed that of ecommerce pioneer eBay earlier this year."
> "Most of the shoppers who spent more than $40bn across 800,000 Shopify merchants last year would have had no idea they were transacting with the Canadian company."
$40 billion is mentioned in two different contexts.
https://www.ebayinc.com/stories/news/ebay-q4-2018-results/
> In 2018, eBay enabled $95 billion of gross merchandise volume
They do discovery, checkout, inventory, fulfillment, etc. It just happens to have a slightly different approach than the others.
A main difference is shoppify you do still need to bring your own consumer traffic to your site, others have a captive audience of shoppers already, but will likely cost you more out of each sale because of that.
Both types of sales channels have their own value props and are complimentary to each other. Furthermore, even each marketplace attracts their own customer archetypes so they can also be complimentary to each other. This isn’t a binary strategy where you choose to sell on one or the other!
I’m the founder of Trunk[1] which helps online e-commerce stores sync their inventory in real-time across their sales channels. Most of my customers on average sell on least 3 places (e.g. Shopify, eBay, and Amazon).
Congrats to Tobias and his team. He’s come a long way from being a Rails core team member back in the day!
Do you have plans to include syncing for woocommerce stores?
Yea, we do! WooCommerce is one of our most requested integrations and I’ll be getting to it soon. Trunk doesn’t yet support cross-posting however but this will be a Q4 intiative. Would inventory syncing be enough for you to get value from Trunk at the moment? I’d love to get in touch: james@trunkinventory.com
By no stretch Shopify is bigger than eBay, market cap is a game played by investors and this kind of article are used to boost it. If someone is holding Shopify stocks it will be the best time to sale.
Funny enough by this ridiculous metrics SAP's commerce cloud and Adobe's Magento will become the largest shopping site miles and miles ahead of shopify.
This kind of articles I believe are paid for to affect the stock prices to move market, I am sure it will result in large stock sales after increase in prices.
Shopify has consistently been loss making so it's very hard to see light at the end of tunnel given it is similar to many open source platform and commerce platform. It's just trying to outspend it's way to take over SAP, Adobe and Salesforce commerce offerings, let's see how long it continues.
Someone from shopify's marketing might be working to contain critical comments.
Shopify is a company that got big by totally being in the background and making other brands look good instead of itself. I fear what happened in the last little while is that we became too big to be ignored and the Shopify vs Amazon vs Ebay angle seems to be the most accessible angle for writing. It seems to be working though, for whatever reason this made it on Hacker news even though in the same week as this article was written we also bought a robotics company for $450m to automated warehouses and announced a $5m carbon sequestration fund which should really be appreciated on hacker news. Alas we talk about GMV number comparisons.
Also with the recent postal changes in the US I think that will hurt AliExpress, Banggood and help Shopify and Amazon.
Pretty sure Shopify's head is screwed-on straighter than that.
Tesla.com is powered by Shopify. They sell all of their vehicles through their site since they don't deal with dealerships.
Likewise Kylie Cosmetics is powered by Shopify. That's a billion dollar brand that's not going to be OK with being placed in a dusty corner of Amazon. They have enough brand value to drive their own audience through their own channels (Instagram, Snap, Twitter, etc).
While this may have been true in the past, it is no longer the case. Neither the main Tesla store/website [0] nor the merchandise store (for t-shirts, assorted knick-knacks, some chargers; basically everything except the cars) [1] use Shopify. You can validate by going to those websites and Ctrl-F through all of the sources of the webpage for "shopify". The main Tesla website uses Salesforce (Ctrl-F through the sources for "salesforce").
[0]: https://www.tesla.com (definitely Salesforce)
[1]: https://shop.tesla.com (it appears that Tesla rolled their own implementation of a store)
If you're building a real brand, you're building a relationship with your customers that you own. You're going to do it on your own terms because you can drive your own audience.
I still remember using liquid templates back in the early days of Rails as it was a problem no-one else in the space was really running at.
I had absolutely no idea they were making that kind of revenue these days. It's nice to see that hard work can still pay off.
And since they just rent software to people who sell things I'm not sure it makes sense to compare them to more traditional eCommerce plays (if you started selling homes through Shopify somehow it would hugely increase "sold goods", but not in a way that impacts anything).
Now, is that a useful basis of comparison? It's fun fact but not much more given the difference of the platforms.
This doesn't concern the massive drop shippers operating 10k transactions per month, as they can easily eat the cost of the occasional scammer. It is very effective deterrent against casual sellers like me, though.
Ebay started out as "Yard sales, except on the internet", and nowadays it's more like Ali Express.
Amazon can also be easy and safe if they want what you want to sell. But you won’t get the best possible price. Still I’ve done it as the path of least resistance.
At that point I gave up. I think I have $14 in Ebay seller credit still in my account from 10 years ago. My guess is that there was some kind of malfunction or someone was using a bot to bid on particular products. Weird experience. I've moved to selling stuff on Craigslist, and never had a problem with a sale.
eBay also owns a classifieds business with around $250 million quarterly revenue which does not originate from GMV due to the nature of classifieds business.
1. Payment processing. You’re forced to use their Shopify Payments. There’s no flexibility for managing that via API. Once something goes in there it’s stuck. Our particular requirement entails tokenized card info. And we needed to access the tokenized card for recurring orders. Shopify told us that was impossible. And want us to use one of the handful subscriptions app, which btw, also have no flexibility. We then hired a 3rd party to see if they can extend the cart...nada. So, if you already have an internal recurring/subscription system - trust me, Shopify will not work for your e-commerce platform. Dont waste your time.
2. Most of the apps are shady. We spoke with two regarding upsells and cross-sells, they couldn’t give us a clear answer if our customer data they collect will never be shared or sold.
The platform is for small self managed stores.
It definitely has an A+ front end, but the backend needs to be more flexibility for the enterprise.
Sorry that private joke was to easy not to be made....
If you buy a Tesla online, for example, that’s a Shopify site.
Your point stands that Shopify's largest merchants make up a huge proportion of GMV, but it's not because of big ticket items like cars.
1) It is an E-comm platform for selling Goods & Services
2) It is an app development platform that allows other businesses to be built on top of it with sites and apps (ie- the apps are integrated to manage distribution, inventory, warehousing, invoicing, marketing, CRM, etc)
As an example, Bold Commerce has become a significant company because of the Shopify platform. They are the largest developer of custom Shopify apps and sites in the world – they recently raised $16.5M (USD) to scale further
Overall, Shopify processes a huge amount of GMV through the platform and, of that, its Net Revenue is still in the Billions each quarter. The article may be misleading to some, given the headline, but Shopify has a significant impact on the economy globally.
Hint: There is plenty of stuff like that.