Shopify isn't a homogeneous marketplace that is comparable to Amazon.com. It's a SaaS ecommerce platform. I've seen these comparisons made lately and I don't understand it. What am I missing?
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
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.