A very large portion of SMBs want to sell a handful of things without the overhead of maintaining and paying over the top for a e-commerce cms.
This plus social media will be a huge win for a lot of businesses
The case study here is Facebook introducing the ability to schedule posts in Facebook directly, theoretically hurting Buffer et al.
Take a look at Buffer's publicly-available revenue data [1]. Can you see when this change occurred?
In general, by lowering the barriers to entry into an activity, MORE people participate in it. This makes the general market larger. A portion of those users have a measure of success and end up wanting more advanced functionality, so they move to a tool that will give them more advanced functionality.
In this case: Stripe Payment Links will enable a lot more people to conduct ecommerce, most of who would never have tried. Some of those people will be successful, find that ecommerce merchants need a lot of tools to manage their businesses, and will acquire those tools.
I believe this is good news for Shopify, rather than bad.
This is definitely very cool, but I think Shopify still offers a lot (and still has their simple checkout this for $9 a month of whatever, which has a bunch of useful features).
Shopifys success is largely due to the fact that they were willing to do the messy dirty work of making a Ecom CMS that works and doesn’t run on Wordpress.
Tech has changed and is catching up. With stripe handling the hardest part about ecom, other companies will sneak up behind Shopify because of better tech and replace traditional websites
Now, if Stripe could offer their own hosted ecom solution... Hey, Stripe, get on this, it makes all the sense.
Shopify is the 2008 equivalent in the tech world. Hugely overvalued, no secret sauce (pretty web fronts that are powered by stripe)
Shopifys moat is nonexistent.
Here's a screenshot. I did not make an account with any of these completely independent websites. Yet I checked out on all of them without typing my address or payment info. And all my orders appear here with tracking.
Shopify built a good ecom cms and they’ll be right for some companies, but they’ve also cornered themselves as that company that makes ecom software. Remember Shopify POS? Me either.
Anyways, consumer trends change. The way people buy online will change. There’s a future where ecom websites are basically the back catalogue of the future.
It is one more software offering that lets you build a store online.
You can have a store up in an hour or something. You don't have to integrate software from various places. It's a one stop shop.
That's worth a fair amount.
I'm a web dev, and I've still chosen shopify in the past for side projects. I didn't want the headache of my own stack.
They have competitors, sure, but they're a solid option in the space.