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Comment by MentallyRetired | Hacker News Reader

Shopify made a change to their API that was easily measurable on who it would affect, but didn't email us. Refused to grant us a temporary exemption (they would do it for $2000/m they said). The end result? They've sunk my business. I've replaced shopify now by writing my own but it's too late. My customers have all gone to my competitors and we're looking at pivoting.

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Can you share more details? I run Shopify and that's not something we would do.

Hi Tobi,

It was the change on limitations for variants. We woke up one day to product additions failing. Took about a week for the tech team to figure out that we were being throttled because we were exceeding 50k variants. Totally understandable in the bigger picture of things, but I didn't feel we received adequate warning. Developer support had told us that sometimes they grant temporary exemptions but in our case they refused. They advised we upgrade to shopify plus (they quoted us over $2000) to remove the throttling/limitation. Financially it was out of scope for us, so we had to throttle our own customers, which led to a massive disadvantage.

I ended up writing our own cart software, which was always part of the plan, but in the meantime our business suffered.

I don't hold any grudge about it since we were getting incredible value out of the previous arrangement, and I do think Shopify is amazing software. I've been a paying customer in multiple capacities since at least 2008 and recommend it to people all the time. What happened was just unfortunate timing for us.

Thanks for taking a minute to listen, though. Much appreciated.

You couldn't pay the 6,000-8,000 for like 3-4 months and keep your business afloat until you rewrote it? Kind of sounds like your business was really really in the red already, or more information is missing?

Not everyone is in the “money is no object” startup economy. Outside of tech small businesses are actually small.

OP wrote that they have employees. if 6k-8k is too much for a company with employees to literally keep it running, that means it was months away from going completely bust anyway

I believe you may have lost a connection to the developer experience over time Tobi and developers keep Shopify relevant. Look at any store it’s packed full of slow loading plugins picking up some of the very basics. It might be that 2020 is better suited to making some of the tooling better and if we can hope for consistent.

I'm working on an open-source app that allows users to use React and build their own interactions with the API instead of relying on apps:

https://github.com/openshiporg/openship

I would love to read more about this case study on how an API change by a business service sinks a business.

> Shopify made a change to their API that was easily measurable on who it would affect

What was the change?

What was the change? AFAIK Shopify would never give a temporary exemption for money, that's very much against their philosophy as a SaaS. Either you provide accurate details or this is just FUD.

It was a limitation on the number of variants. They had no limits prior to this API update I'm talking about. My business allowed people to create merch and we'd add it to a collection on our storefront. Developer support told us sometimes they grant temporary exemptions. They did not. They told us we could upgrade to shopify plus which has no such limitations, but being a bootstrapped company we couldn't swing the $2k per month.

Edit: Just to be clear, it was always on our roadmap to migrate away from Shopify's platform, but they accelerated our timeline and we had to limit the amount of merch our customers could add which obviously led to upset customers.

We're still operating, albeit close to insolvent, and have since launched our new platform. But our reputation has been irreversibly damaged.

> The end result? They've sunk my business.

What was the business?

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