Hacker News Reader

Comment by ShakataGaNai | Hacker News Reader

Shopify should be scrambling to do a public post-mortem right now. They "Fixed" the situation within a few hours of the tweetstorm, showing that they know they f'd up. Shit happens - but how does shopify assuage small businesses that this won't happen to them next? A public apology, post-mortem and steps to make sure this never happens again.

View on HN

Unless this ends up being widely reported in the media, most of their customers and potential customers won't even hear about it, and it will only change the behavior of a small fraction thereof. Shopify doesn't have to do anything, and they know it.

Even if people read enough of these that Shopify stops seeing new merchant signups…I don’t think Shopify would understand WHY they’re not getting any new customers. They’d probably blame it on SEO or something.

I think their plan is to not acknowledge it so it doesn't blow up any further. Fix the problem and let this person tell their story until they run out of steam.

You're overestimating the impact. This is just one of thousands of similar stories, none of which has gotten a public apology or post-mortem.

It seems to me companies beyond a certain size become so dysfunctional that no one person can handle a situation like this coherently. It's all different factions internally each pursuing their own objectives, protecting their turf or fighting for survival. It's likely there's not so much the customer service team could have done.

It's not like a small business where the owner themselves can guarantee high quality services

It's not dysfunction, it's purposeful negligence, to save money.

Nobody at Google or Amazon will ever be fired for writing code that bans a few too many people, or labels legitimate users as fraudulent. It simply does not harm the company at all. A few people here on HN talk about how their small group went with an alternative, or they personally de-google'd, but for the rest of us, the option is cross your fingers and hope or just do what will happen when you get banned anyway.

it does not sound fixed to me. It sounds like they're still threatening this small business because the business' own bank flagged payments shopify took from their account, and were reversed, and shopify can't justify the charges, and is again threatening them. I don't see anywhere its resolved, just that they sent a reply.

"sorry because we got caught"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com