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Comment by jonknee | Hacker News Reader

Note that they are not the second biggest shopping site by any reasonable metric (sales, visitors, unique shoppers, orders, SKUs, really anything). This article is using market cap:

> 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.

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No, the article goes on to explicitly state:

Data also shows the platform recently overtook competitor eBay, once a powerhouse in this space, in terms of quarterly sales.

But that defeats the purpose of reading an article and pick and choose what you want to talk about.

I read the article and the FT article, it's all about market cap. But since Shopify isn't actually a shopping site this is all a moot point.

The given link is hard pay walled and I don't see any more explanation of the number. Did they actually have more sales of consumer goods to consumers than eBay or are they saying the company which is on paper a competitor to eBay had more sales total which isn't the same thing.

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.

But the link doesn't actually say that. It is also talking about market cap. From the Financial Times article:

> 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.

Amazon and eBay are also selling shovels.

Amazon and eBay are selling shovels and claiming to be shovel merchants. Shopify is selling shovels and claiming to be a miner (as presented in this article).

Limited share of the FT article it's linking to: https://on.ft.com/3098o7k

> "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.

OK, but that's less than half of eBay. This is just a non-serious puff piece and I have no idea why it's being voted up on HN.

https://www.ebayinc.com/stories/news/ebay-q4-2018-results/

> In 2018, eBay enabled $95 billion of gross merchandise volume

Yes, but it is also an ecommerce indirectly, it provides products to its users 'drop shipping'.

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