Amazon sellers are moving to alternative ecommerce platforms during Covid-19
betterthansure.com
betterthansure.com
Shopify has said they’re serving Black Friday levels of traffic and volume every day since this started and our clientele on their platform supports that data point.
Depending on how the next 6 weeks goes for “opening up” around the world, it will be interesting to see how much of this increased demand sticks around.
As someone who advocates for owning your own data, I think it’s a good thing to move away from these larger platforms when you can. Going from amazon to Shopify is a good step. When you need more customization or data control, WooCommerce is a decent choice given the unlimited flexibility of the platform (though this comes with downsides if you are not aware how to run it in a way that is performant).
Despite the cultural ubiquity of Amazon, not everyone was getting items delivered for their day to day needs. One barrier is that not everyone got around to creating accounts for online shopping, a barrier that’s been forcibly overcome for basically everyone. The chances of 100% of those people reverting to prior behavior is very, very low.
Just took a look at both those sites, and on the consumer side I don't see how these are even remotely comparable: I don't see any way to search for products. They seem geared to creating independent stores that must be linked to from some other location.
Consumer side isn't relevant here. These are two backend ecommerce platforms. The platform part doesn't extend to anything that consumers know they're interacting with.
Report here https://www.marketplacepulse.com/articles/sellers-are-not-di...
Not having heard of this company, I can only take their analysis with the same grain of salt that I would with other 'market research' firms that don't have access to actual transaction data or don't conduct surveys with representative samples of sellers.
At the company I work for, we operate a fulfillment center for eCommerce sellers and we've been booming lately from businesses choosing to leave the closed ecosystems and marketplaces like Amazon and run their own Shopify, WooCommerce and others while still having a third party handle their fulfillment needs.
Ebay is even worse than Amazon now though. I was an avid Ebay user from when they first came here until not long ago, but in the last year or 2 I find it's just chock full of scams, fake products, lies about shipping (advertised as local stock with 2-5 day shipping, arrives 4 weeks later with postage marks from China), etc etc. I flat out just don't trust anything on Ebay anymore unless it's an actual local individual selling something used and I'm picking it up.
We also see that issue sometimes. I hope you ruthlessly leave negative feedback for those sellers, at least.
Room for someone to be a discoverability platform? One stop discoverability, whichsometimes is all Amazon is for a particular transaction.
Find it at IFoundIt, and then directed to the seller's store.
It only includes Shopify sellers, and of those only the ones that choose to be listed on Shop, but with the Shop app and their new fulfillment network, I think Shopify is currently best positioned to become a real threat to Amazon.
Source: consumer who buys lots online, almost daily, and would absolutely love to support local (national) stores.
Amazon's interface, without the centralization.
I can use a 34" for Amazon, I'm not gonna switch to comparing products on my phone. Especially given that I'm locked so my computer is always nearby.
(Though, of course, the team behind the alternative might be better at resisting the gaming? Google, the company, isn't magic.)
I see this more like an open index of local online stores, curated and not using scrapers/bots to index but by stores submitting their URL and search endpoint for meta-search across all their products. Let the user sort the results by price, location, etc.
Obviously there's always going to be people trying to game the system but it would still be better than what we have now, which is us consumers needing to use Google/DDG/etc to scrape through the 99:1 noise:signal ratio of search results these days just to try fluke upon a local online store that has what we want.
https://www.oberondesign.com/collections/journals...
which the website reports as a 404
I'd also like to filter by region, since I don't want to buy small, cheap items from the other side of the world.
On the other side, you no longer have a central entity helping you with issues such as warranty, scams etc, but given the behavior of late of Amazon, I don't think that it is a big deal.
The main Czech sites:
It kinda seem like Amazon has been a bit too successful in some parts of the world, to the point people can't imagine alternative online shopping workflows.
There is another valid decision: Diversify your channels and sell on multiple platforms. This way, you're not completely dependent on Amazon anymore, but still present on the biggest eCommerce marketplace.
Sell on your own shop (and, if you do marketing, direct it there) but also on Amazon, eBay and probably other marketplaces that work well for your niche.
This can be done with Shopify and probably most of the other solutions listed in the post as well.
Disclaimer: I work for commercetools, an API-first eCommerce platform.
I would love to give Amazon less business, but Google’s results aren’t super helpful a lot of the time either.
Eg: review fraud, selling stolen items, counterfeits, inventory comingling, inconsistent return policy, warehouse worker/driver treatment, terrible search/discovery, bad ux, etc.
I'd worry about that problem when it's a reality not before.
The fact that there is not some global “hey i have x for sale” machine readable message bus is sort of crazy to me.
But they seem to have died out
Knowing if some random store is safe is more of an issue I suppose. Usually I find it pretty easy to tell and avoid them. Trustpilot (and a couple of similar services i forget) seem to be pretty reliable, in Europe at least.
Not familiar with Shopify, is it obvious if a store is using their platform? I guess if they do some due diligence on the businesses they host that provides a basic level of safety.
Also, I don’t have a favorite alternative store, nor do I know of very many alternatives in the first place. An aggregator would be helpful, or even an index.
On Amazon, there's on search bar on top where I can search thousands of sellers.
For Shopify, there's just hundreds (thousands?) of smaller shops with no centralised search. Many products I want might be there, but they're not easy to find.
(Disclaimer: Amazon is unaffected in my region and continues to deliver all products as usual, so I quite biased)
Fair point, but it's not that hard to do a Google search after an Amazon search. I usually check Amazon first, and then the manufacturer's website to see if they link to the Amazon storefront. If not, I jump to a 3rd party reseller.
For me, it doesn't matter whether or not a specialty storefront is a Shopify one. I would pay a premium for that extra trust that I'm getting an authentic item. For instance, I buy my fountain pens from Goulet Pens [1] which is Shopify but you would never know it. I've tried buying fountain pens and consumables off Amazon but have received enough fakes to drive me toward specialty storefronts.
But for dish soap and other stuff that are not worth counterfeiting, sure, I get them off Amazon. Fulfilled by Amazon is slightly better, but I've still gotten duds.
I just hate wasting money on counterfeits.
A google search is usually dominated by products that don't.
That's its own advantage for some people. It means you can sell in countries the US has trade restrictions against, integrate your shop with your WordPress site and modify the source code to your heart's content. Can't really do that with Shopify.
As for the hosted platforms? Eh, I guess like with anything, the market is still big enough for multiple players, even if one of them has a huge percentage of it overall. Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and Rackspace still manage to do well, even if AWS has more users. GitLab still exists despite GitHub having far more of the market. Etc.
WooCommerce, Magento, Spree, etc. are often chosen for customizability, since Shopify doesn't always serve every need (even with apps). And for control over the platform.
I expected them to have a much stronger setup in the US.
Sure I may have to wait a bit longer to get what I need, but there have only been a few cases where something has been completely out of stock (except for the things that Amazon has publicly said they are no longer selling to consumers and only sending to hospitals, like disinfectant and other medical items)
Its basically back to pre Prime days where stuff would take a week to show up.
Partly C19 related, but I was moving away from them in the before-times, as well.