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Comment by holidayacct | Hacker News Reader

I hope shopify understands the extremely long history of how walmart has dealt with their corporate partners in the past. Walmart typically extends a friendly hug and then slowly squeezes their corporate partners to death. They had better be ready to unravel the relationship at any sign of trouble and be working on a parallel plan to replace walmart. It seems like an unnecessary shorcut that may backfire.

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Shopify* has three non-merchant-driven discovery channels now: Walmart, Facebook, and their own Shop app.

I think Shopify is in a much better bargaining position than Walmart.

I don't think Shopify really needs discovery or awareness among customers/buyers.

Shopify's customers are merchants, businesses and manufacturers, each advertising their very own store and sales channels. For them it's hard not to consider Shopify as their ecommerce platform of choice. Meanwhile I'd argue that end customers couldn't care less about which ecommerce platform their store of choice is using. Therefore I think the Shop app isn't all that important actually. Or do people really seek out Shopify stores in particular? That seems ridiculous to me.

Most customers rightly don't care.

I do though. I tried to place an order on an online service providers website to get some work done that I couldn't do on my own with my work laptop. They used shopify to process all payments and my order got denied. Not by the provider, not by my bank. But by shopify. I got a hold of one of the companies cs staff who looked into it and told me I was sol. Shopify had flagged my transaction as fraudulent and there's nothing he could do. Calling my bank didn't help, they didn't see the transaction as suspicious and would have authorized the transfer. Ultimately I gave up and will have a vile taste in the back of my mouth whenever I hear of shopify. The company I tried to patronize lost a customer, and shopify gets free bad press from me.

So, while shopify doesn't need discovery or awareness among customers, shopify can't afford to get bad press without decent consumer ad spend else their actual customers may jump ship to avoid being tainted by their brand.

If shopify fubars this deal with walmart that could start a snowball.

As a fun fact, a former Directo of ine from Amazon, ops side, joined Shopify a while ago. A couple of years ago, I started to wonder what an ideal Amazon-"killer" would look like. And came to the conclusion it would something with aPOS-system, a rudimentary inventory management for bric and mortar shops, a webshop solution, the possibility to interface with fulfillment software and other marketplaces. That would transform every single brick-and-mortar shop using that POS software into a fulfillment center. It would create abasically global dropshipping network. Withou any real fix costs, while Amazon is building fulfillment centers by the dozens.

Amazon could have done so, but they didn't. Shopify can do so building upon there Webshop and POS environment. And they seem to do.

That would transform every single brick-and-mortar shop using that POS software into a fulfillment center.

That's how thousands of businesses have operated for decades or more.

Sure, locally. Combined with a global E-Commerce platform, that is pretty powerful.

Not locally. Globally. My wife works with this sort of thing every day and has for her entire career.

Does Shopify have its own POS hardware? I wonder if they’ll buy one. Lots of companies are hurting and could be gobbled up in the cheap.

They do: https://www.shopify.com/pos

Shopify is building fulfillment centers.

Thanks for that! Well, that changes things doesn't it? mens my plan H for a company is still valid then!

I seek out places where I'm not going to have to reenter my payment information and/or roll the dice on a new customer-service UI. At the moment that means Amazon, Ebay or Etsy. If Shopify are offering some equivalent experience then I'm certainly interested.

They do: Shop Pay saves details across all Shopify stores https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/payments/accelerated-chec...

i think only across all stores using Shopify Payments.

Is the Shop app popular? Just heard of this now.

Very popular.

It used to be a popular app called Arrive for automatically tracking packages by parsing tracking numbers from connected email accounts. Arrive was also the branding for shipping updates by check in Shopify Checkout on all Shopify based eCommerce sites.

A few months ago Shopify:

1. Rebranded the app as "Shop"

2. Rebranded every Shopify site's checkout to "Shop Pay."

3. Began forcing users on Shopify based sites to create a "Shop" account at checkout

4. Changed the Arrive SMS shipping updates feature to text you an app store link for the Shop App (which you already have an account for now)

5. Integrated every item from every Shopify based eCommerce site with the Shop App for direct purchase, using the universal Shop account you just created.

So they took an already popular app with high engagement, forced people to make accounts for it, used dark UX patterns to get millions to text themselves a download link.

In a matter of months they went from being one of the largest eCommerce platforms for independent retailers to being a one-stop "shop" for every eCommerce site that used them, with millions of daily active users.

Thanks. I just downloaded it without going through a previous Shopify checkout workflow and it asks you to add a 'store' with no prompting or list of 'popular stores'. Just a search box.

It badly needs a prominent browse feature if it wants to take on Amazon. Or maybe I just missed something in my brief tour.

You might want to check out the Honey app, which actually lets you search for items across 100s of stores. Plus gives ‘gold’ bonuses on top of the coupon testing it does

Shipping updates by text (SMS)

[joke removed]

This is the first I’ve heard of this. Where have you heard this?

I think dannyw originally wrote "Spotify" instead of "Shopify", and askafriend was making a joke about it.

> typically extends a friendly hug and then slowly squeezes their [corporate] partners to death.
Walmart sounds just like Amazon.

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