I love this move by Shopify. As a merchant (in Canada, where typical shipping prices are extortionate) I'd love to give Shopify more money (but presumably less than we pay 3rd party shippers) for better overall delivery service for my customers.
As a buyer, I'd love to spend more with not-Amazon and get comparable service.
I'm increasingly disappointed with Amazon. It's full of knockoff crappy products with unrelated 5 star reviews. That eroding trust in Amazon is pushing me to smaller brands who have a face and stand behind their product for key purchases. This move by Shopify will just accelerate that transition away from Amazon.
Just waiting for the search bar to shop every Shopify store so I have a viable alternative to Amazon to buy whatever I need.
Search bar would bring the same problem to Shopify. Knockoff will always sell for cheaper, and will try to game the search so they'll end up at the top and quickly become the most purchased.
It's the lack of search that differentiates Shopify. You get to hear about the shop itself, instead of wanting a product and searching for the cheapest/best. This latter behavior means you'll always end up finding drop shippers or asian sellers. While in the former you find a merchant that you like, trust, feel has a good reputation, and you don't mind purchasing from them even if they don't have the best price (mostly because you can't easily compare the price).
You have to experience trying to sell on Amazon to understand that their policies forbid quality markers like stating patents. The entire system is rigged so that people who design and make products can’t even differentiate from the knock offs.
Amazon needs the competition so there is someplace on the internet where domestic manufacturers can have a leg up.
> You have to experience trying to sell on Amazon to understand that their policies forbid quality markers like stating patents.
Can you expand on this? Do they have rules that stop you from saying things like, "Patented Blozzle Technology prevents the widget from snagging on gadgets" or listing a patent number in the description?
Yes, absolutely. If you say covered by patent X your product page won’t go through. It’s explicitly states in their guidelines that mentioning patents are disallowed.
What if you name your product like "Patented Toaster #54386549"? And you trademark that. Surely they can't prevent you from using the registered product's name to describe it?
You're guilty of applying computer-thinking to human-problems, unfortunately.
Amazon, much like a judge and jury, will not find your "clever loophole" interesting, and will deny you. Even if you have done everything to the letter, they may still ban you should they have their reasons.
Having worked for a firm that attempted to publish applications to the Amazon app store that would have in some sense competed with their own (reading app), we had an experience where we did everything to the letter, our app would be "approved" but would magically be unavailable for download when we attempted to download it. Some form of hell-ban applied to the app store.
Our C-Suite had previously sold a firm to Amazon and had a rolodex of high-level contacts at Amazon who all went from "good friend" to "cold shoulder" when asked if they had any clue or guidance from their former colleagues.
> (mostly because you can't easily compare the price)
there would be third party scrapers to compare prices. I don't think you can really solve the problem of poor quality dropshippers, except if the platform mandates a return policy which doesn't cost the user.
Love the Shop app. But one major compliant is that there is no email verification. So I get notified of every order that accidentally used my email address (common Indian name @ gmail.com). Wish I could only be notified of orders that I placed.
>> So I get notified of every order that accidentally used my email address (common Indian name @ gmail.com).
Someone needs to solve the (common Indian name @ gmail.com) problem. Preferably, Google/Gmail would solve this. But my email gets signed up on a daily basis to new services.
No it seems like the name is just common, so someone else mistypes their own email and it then becomes common indian [email protected], which is actually OP's email
I actually have people use my gmail.com like this. Someone even signed up for facebook with this. I accidentally clicked 'yes' like an idiot and then it took months before they'd let my email off the bloody account.
Everyone uses my (real first name / not my middle name) email for all sorts of receipts. I've received African tenant agreements, some dude's Intel payroll document, all sorts of shit.
That's pretty funny. Sorry for the trouble. This has literally never happened to me. There are two other Arthur Collé's in the world, hopefully the booby traps work and I become the one true king one of these days
Super sweet. I love Shop app. Tracking shipments is a nice way to get app installs... and you can backdoor a shopping experience as you roll out new versions. Well played!
It's funny, I sent them an email long long long time ago asking if there was some way to source all products on Shopify so I could build just this. Maybe they noted it and turned it into a product.
This reminds me of my number one response when "friends" come to me with startup ideas.
Your company is another company's feature. As in, you are trying to build a business, on something that is an afterthought, tiny feature for an existing company to add.
Shopify has been around for a while—since before Amazon became the everything-retailer that they are now. It started out of frustration at the myriad annoyances in trying to get set up using osCommerce and other tools of that generation.
I think an even better solution would be a curated search. Like Amazon there are plenty of dropshipping low quality stores / products on Shopify. I would like someone to build out a search of the best 500 stores.
I had a look, #1 there doesn't seem to be a search option (maybe not public to all yet?).
#2 I had a look at some of the stores shown in the "search" icon tab, aka explore, but how am I meant to find out if something is just a dropshipping product from ali, marked up at 400% or a genuine, good quality product, worth spending $40 on.
(the one I saw, could well have gone fro $4 on ali)
That, and I hope this arrives on desktop, I dislike shopping on mobile, makes it hard to compare and verify a product isn't cramp from ali.
One main distinction is that Shopify shops have a direct to consumer relationship. They can send you emails, and build up a brand. Amazon keeps the customer relationship, and if you succeed, they'll try to commoditize you. So it isn't that much different for the user (with a unified checkout out cart), but is much better for the store owner.
Edit: you might find this article about the differences between the Shopify and Amazon ecosystems interesting
Shopify is mostly crappy drop shippers buying of Alibaba and selling for x more. If you add a search bar the problem will just come to the surface. Just say you don't like amazon.
Amazon is mostly drop shippers too, and Etsy for that matter, what's being sold by "shops" on Shopify or "merchants" on Amazon isn't really the issue. It should not at all be surprising that "low effort" shops are more numerous. There's quality stuff on all those platforms, and Shopify (for now) is better to the merchants.
Amazon's total dominance of online shopping is because of their logistics network and having more than one company providing fast inexpensive shipping is good, it means people have somewhere else to go if Amazon gives them a raw deal.
Isn't shopify also a lot of non-Shopify branded web shops? I don't think crappy dropshipping stuff from Asia will ever go away, that's why middlemen are important, those can filter out the bad crap products. At which point those middlemen also become a brand, it doesn't work without reputation. Funny little commerce actually changed from the first time someone sold a stone knife for a handful of berries.
yes it is. Alot of apparel and sneaker sites use shopify. I’ve interacted with them when i used to make bots,but Filtering products won’t work when buyers are looking for the cheapest product at least in my opinion. Also imo shopify is the reason bots are/were able to become so dominant.
disclaimer I work for Shopify, opinions are my own.
I do not think this is true. I don't know the % of shops that are drop shippers, but I do not think it's the majority. Most Shopify merchants are selling things. A lot of stores are Shopify stores that are on custom domains and unless you look at the source, nothing tells you that they are a Shopify merchant. I know of RPG and Board Game publishers and designers with Shopify stores, a local coffee shop and coffee roaster is a Shopify merchant, food companies, etc. There are companies that that have IPOd that started as Shopify stores selling their own things; Which is really cool.
> and unless you look at the source, nothing tells you that they are a Shopify merchant
Unless they are doing a headless integration, the Shopify UI is very easy to spot. For me this has started to become a signal of shops to take great caution and best to avoid.
If not during shopping, then once you add the product to the cart, it is very obvious.
> this has started to become a signal of shops to take great caution and best to avoid
Interesting, I've generally felt the opposite. Do you feel it is as bad as Amazon? Do you have some examples of Shopify shops that are particularly bad?
You do know that as soon as you set up a new Shopify store, the first suggestion from the install wizard is to add a plug-in that makes it easier to drop ship AliExpress products, right?
I buy lots of stuff from Shopify merchants who make / source unique products: clothing, bike gear, skincare, electronics. I'm sure there are a lot of crappy drop shippers too but I'd hope to not see them in a search experience. Guess that would be up to Shopify to sort out. But I'm hopeful. Anything who's been paying attention realizes that trust in Amazon is eroding fast. It's an opp for Shopify.
Shopify basically has the data for this. They could just exclude from the search sites that don't already get a decent amount of direct sales. There are other metrics as well like refunds/ chargebacks and return customers.
The next shopify site I'm queued up to work on is something I'm choosing the platform for because its POS offering looks like it offers a better rate than stripe terminal. I think it's a pretty sweet option if you're selling something in-person or services to this end, I like the timeslot plugin stuff.
Pretty sure as I understand it that a lot of that dropshipping crap from alibaba kinda petered out with those massive shipping container delays
As with any open marketplace, there will always be varying degrees of quality.
The best way to respond is to build tools that allow the market to bring high quality shops to the top, and lower quality shops that provide poor customer service or fraudulent products to be suppressed. In this way, the consumer benefits through the consumer experience of others.
Shopify is a little too close to their shops to be able to provide this type of tool, because they have the obligation to support each and every one of their shops.
Third party search engines, built to support the Shopify platform are able to implement these types of tools and bring a user curated shopping experience to shoppers.
So, you're right in that a search bar can shine a spotlight on the dark corners of e-commerce, but that doesn't mean that there aren't ways to create a better experience.
The big problem I have with Amazon is that the damn search is just so terrible - even if you try to search for an exact item (which you know exists and is legit and sold on Amazon) half the time it gives you a bunch of unrelated aliexpress garbage. Especially for more niche queries.
Fun example: there is an issue with Amazon grocery search where it will tell you that they are out of a very common item, such as bananas, but when you check out it will suggest that you add bananas. You can also add the allegedly out of stock items by going to your previous items page. Just bizarre.
And it happens even if there is a good number of relevant products. I've searched for something like "[brandname] 12v fridge" and had a few [brandname] results mixed in amongst countless other random brands. If I'm searching for a specific brandname, that's exactly what I want!
Yea this is super frustrating. Rarely the actual brand name product does not show up until like the second page if its something without a lot of reviews or popularity. And it does not seem like they allow any types of "advanced" search...
We appear to be working on solving the same problem! :)
I had a chance to use delomore and you're off to a great start... Just finding the shops to index is certainly a challenge. When we search for an item like "Oxford Shoes" the search returns are for all the shops that may sell shoes, presumably oxfords.
Are you also building out the ability to return individual items that match the search query? In order to be a functional shopping search engine, users will want to be able to view and click on relevant results, and not just the shops that might sell the items.
We have built a search engine that indexes 100 million items from 140,000 shops... We are currently returning product cards from relevant results for the search query, and we're working to help shoppers find the exact item they are shopping for, and compare against other items from other sellers...
I always considered doing something like this and then I realized the only technique I know to get all shopify sites is subdomain enumeration and that's probably not uhhh white hat or whatever the term is
I'm sure there's people doing market research out there who don't really give a damn about any of that but I'm curious as to how you build out your search functionality if it's not that?
I've listed all of the (English language) shops I can find through Common crawl etc. That gives me 56 million products from 395k shops. Shopify quotes 1.75 million shops in all languages. So I've got a fraction of the total, but enough to be interesting, I hope.
I've pretty much given up on any kind of shopping aggregator.
I go to the brand/manufacturer website directly and buy online there if possible. I feel that's the best way to get what I am intending to buy, even if it's not the lowest possible price.
Before you totally give up, perhaps try one more? We built a search engine / shopping aggregator to help shoppers find items to purchase directly from independent shops and brands. We currently help shoppers find items from 140,000 Shopify shops, making 100 million items searchable for the shopper.
By Shopify building out their fulfillment network, this will help close the gap between the product offering from Shopify shops and Amazon. In the end, the shopper will get a better shopping experience by shopping directly from the independent shop, because they can control the customer service experience, and not a third party that sits between the shopper and the seller.
We're extremely bullish on independent online shops, and we want to help them get as much traffic as possible. There are a number of reasons for this, but it all comes down to, we want to help shoppers support their local communities first, and if that isn't possible, then help them choose where their money goes.
A lot of the time that's gonna be more expensive in Canada, if not only cause a lot of manufacturers only have warehouses in the US. You'll likely pay more for shipping (which could be significant, like $15 shipping on a $20 item), potentially get a letter a few weeks later from the courier saying you owe them money for import fees, and will likely wait longer than if you just got it through the free Prime subscription you're already paying for.
They already did that with Canada post shipping. If you buy directly from CP you pay $x. If you buy a CP label from Shopify it costs less than $x because they’re a massive CP customer.
> As a buyer, I'd love to spend more with not-Amazon and get comparable service.
Comparable service? My experience buying from Amazon is a nearly 100% rate of telling me my item will be delivered on a certain date, and then, the day after, saying "We're so sorry that unforeseeable circumstances (really?) have resulted in the late delivery of your item. We hope the date wasn't important! No, we do not offer any compensation for late deliveries. Please suck it."
I wonder if this is ___location dependent... I order way too many things from Amazon, and 90% of the time they deliver on time. I live in a very large city, though, so I wonder if that explains the difference.
I can't stand Amazon. In my mind they are equivalent to a cancer that society needs to collectively purge. I don't say this hyperbolically, I say this after much experience. I only do work on GCP now
Amazon’s catalog quality and customer service is going downhill very fast. Shopify has a real opportunity to fill that void.
Amazon was known for maintaining high quality of their catalogue. But since opening up their store front for third party sellers it’s resembling flee market by the day. For example they had a very strict policy of one product one page I.e Single Detail Page (SDP), indexed by ASIN. But now exact same product has multiple ASINs. You don’t know if it’s a fake or genuine.
Not sure if I’m allowed to post this, but I worked that exact technical problem in the Amazon catalog. It’s extremely difficult to keep high data integrity of the Amazon catalog when all these 3rd parties are contributing information. It gets abused in every possible way.
Basically third party sellers add info about Asins, which in real time gets merged with existing Asin information. It’s all automated
Honest question: why not swiftly ban 3rd party merchants who do anything that is clearly unethical (e.g., changing product listed while keeping reviews from old product, or buying reviewers off to change their review). If it’s an issue of whack-a-mole, ask new 3rd party sellers to post a modest bond. The bond earns interest, and gets returned after N months of good behavior, but gets forfeited if there is a clear ethics violation. Bond amount is proportional to number of items listed, and is set as small as possible to make bad behavior unprofitable.
Also, Amazon customer service continues to be amazing for me. Refund basically anytime for any reason, instantly and fast.
Bonds are an interesting idea. I think there is a similar idea for email (it cost 1 cent per email to send, refunded if the email isn't spam). I think it would keep a lot of small sellers off the platform, and the math must say it's better to play the wack-a-mole game.
The machines are just doing what they are told. Im no growth hacker, but if I were in this situation, I would be doing the math to see if the cost of slowing down and having a human in the process provides more money in the long run by increased customer satisfaction and return business rather than the current strategy which could be non filtered for all we know, judging by what we see.
There was a sweet spot, in my recent memory, with Amazon years back where I just got the things I ordered, and it took 2 days at most. This was right before the Amazon button things theyd send with your fabric softener where you'd just press the button and more Snuggle would appear.
The first thing, in my case, was being sent the same items twice, one time it was an entire mattress, which was great, but it was a sign. Next came counterfeit items from known reputable sellers, a side effect of product being binned together, as someone explained to me. Buying from the correct amazon store was a crapshoot, because the counterfeits were in the same bin, allegedly. Essentially someone buying the knockoff could have received the genuine item I paid for.
The final straw was in the same week: receiving a completely different order of items than what I ordered, dog food and womens products when I ordered a keyboard, the price of prime going up, and the fact that everything in the catalog was obvious eastern origin products, misspellings, run-on sentence item titles and other hallmarks that Im about to be alibaba'd when the gear arrives.
The headache just wasn't worth it anymore. I never ordered from amazon again. I absolutely have more cost in finding certain items in town, but I feel better knowing there is a person whos face has pointed in the direction of mine while an item was being exchanged for money, hand to hand. There is a trust in that which Amazon is hopeless to ever capture. I hope this catches on.
A solution is often just getting rid of the problem. No third party = no problem. The real problem that surfaces then is probably that it's too profitable to throw out and so it becomes something Amazon just chooses to live with as long as it can.
Hypothetically this is not a binary option, they could significantly ramp up the strictness of 3rd party sellers increasing the costs of making multiple, temporary fake seller accounts more challenging.
That said though - this would clearly impact profits proportional to the level of strictness/barriers.
Amazon's whole business is being the fulfillment for 3rd party sellers, you take away that you take away the whole reason people use it. If Amazon was just online 1st party Walmart they would sell almost nothing.
It’s true they are double dipping but a seller in some random video said they liked to have their listing show up twice to increase engagement. This is for an Etsy seller though so yea Etsy also does ads too
It's not too expensive, it's just not in Amazon's interest.
Amazon made the decision to pivot to third party sellers because they realized how poorly being an actual online merchant scaled. Why get into that game when you can be the platform and vertically integrate everything from the listing to last mile delivery charging a fee every step of the way?
> It’s extremely difficult to keep high data integrity of the Amazon catalog when all these 3rd parties are contributing information. It gets abused in every possible way.
So you're saying this isn't a technical problem that can be solved by a technical solution?
> It’s all automated
Well I think you found the problem then.
Sears never had this issue because they have humans who do this. They also never had the scale that Amazon has achieved because of those humans.
This is Amazon's blindspot. I'm super bullish on $SHOP because of this.
At the end of the day, satisfying the customer is what matters. And customers are satisfied when their packages arrive quickly. $SHOP can’t compete with that because it has taken $AMZN two decades to build out the logistical infrastructure to support fast delivery times. And now with Buy With Prime program, sellers can use $AMZN logistics as a service.
Shopify can partner with Walmart and others while it builds out its own. Amazon took that long because they were cutting through new territory. Now others can emulate them and shopify can buy those companies.
Which costs time and money, when you can just go what Amazon do now and not very them but instead take a percentage on most of their scam sales. It's not like Amazon don't know any of this is happening; they've crunched the numbers for sure. They make more profit being evil.
This is one of those big tech company problems that makes me wonder what I'm missing.
Amazon has money. If they cared about the integrity of their catalog, they'd pay people to maintain it instead of giving control over it to the people who most benefit from it being wrong.
They probably simply estimate that hiring a team to manually maintain (or moderate) their catalog of hundreds of millions of products would cost more than it would improve sales.
It lets manufacturers print a unique secret code on their products, and Amazon validates it when it enters and leaves their fulfillment centers. As a user, you can also validate it yourself using the Transparency app you can download from Google Play or the AppStore.
That way you know you're not getting counterfeit.
I think it's relatively new, so not a lot of manufacturers use it yet. And I don't think you can filter on transparency enabled products in the search yet either.
The consumer shouldn't have to parse whether or not their goods are genuine... that's squarely in the wheelhouse of the merchant. This is Amazon's problem to fix, don't you even for a second suggest foisting this onto the consumer.
That sounds like a wonderful way to shift work to the customer. Holy smokes, does this mean that Amazon has totally given up on actually solving the problem? I'll order direct from the manufacturer long before I start cryptographically verifying all my deliveries.
It says they verify the codes when it enter and leaves their fulfillment centers as well, but if the seller was shipping direct to you, not using Amazon fulfillment, there's not much Amazon can do, so they let you check it yourself.
This is not scalable. You are literally asking thousands of manufacturers to alter their manufacturing process. A much better way is to establish trust certificate. For example, if I want to sell something at Amazon and want to have “Verified” mark, I should submit my identification documents plus documents that establishes my relationship with manufacturers (ex “authorized dealers”). This is already done by many in real world and the question is just to bring it online.
Huh! This is pretty interesting, and it directly addresses the problem of inventory commingling that we've heard so much about.
The program doesn't seem to be in a very functional state yet, though, and I see a fundamental issue with it.
Products sold on Amazon do not indicate whether they are protected by the transparency program. (I checked for this by searching for the word "transparency" on the Cards Against Humanity product page - Cards Against Humanity is listed on the transparency program page as one of the brands enrolled in the program.[1]) This makes the program nearly useless to the customer. It could still be useful to the manufacturer, though, by preventing customers from receiving counterfeit products.
The fundamental problem is that the counterfeits-on-Amazon problem arose in the first place due to Amazon's method of not caring which individual item came from which vendor. Their system enabled them to not keep track of the provenance of an item. And this new system seems to require them to track genuine items. If they're going to do that, they can already do it entirely on their own end of things.
However, it does look like Amazon sees the transparency program as something to be implemented by manufacturers and not by vendors. On that model, they'd continue commingling everything like usual, and a vendor sending in a counterfeit item wouldn't be able to sell the item at all, as opposed to, say, selling it at a suspiciously low price and having their suspicious item reliably go to the same person who bought at the suspicious price. Amazon already tracks the identity of the item, so validity stamping by the manufacturer would fit into their system fairly seamlessly.
[1] This is itself entirely useless to the customer. No one will ever care if they get a "counterfeit" version of a card game, as long as the content of the cards is the same.
I agree about not being able to know the details as a customer, still not sure why they don't allow that.
> The fundamental problem is that the counterfeits-on-Amazon problem arose in the first place due to Amazon's method of not caring which individual item came from which vendor. Their system enabled them to not keep track of the provenance of an item. And this new system seems to require them to track genuine items. If they're going to do that, they can already do it entirely on their own end of things.
I'm not so sure about that. If there was a time they couldn't track, that's long gone. Amazon can definitely trace back what product from who was eventually delivered even if it was commingled.
They don't even store inventory together anymore, they'll have them store per-vendor.
I think the issue is that vendors are the ones that sell counterfeit, maybe willingly or sometimes unwillingly, their own supplier might be giving them counterfeit without them knowing.
Each vendor can opt-out of commingling, but then they have to print an Amazon barcode on their products to use FBA (fulfilled by Amazon).
For certain products, Amazon forces that anyways, like perishables and registered brands, unless you're approved by the brand. To be approved by the brand, you need to provide invoices from the brand to Amazon amongst other things.
If you don't want to put Amazon labels on each of your products, your options are to have Amazon track the existing manufacturer barcode, in which case commingling is also applied, but still Amazon can trace back your exact product based on the manufacturer barcode, they also won't physically mix your products with other products in the warehouse.
The other option is for you to ship it yourself and not use FBA, then you do what you want, you probably don't even need to have a barcode at all.
What Amazon then does is random product inspections and everytime someone returns an item with reason counterfeit or not as advertised, it gets inspected as well. And since they can trace it back to the exact vendor, they suspend that vendor if found selling counterfeit. Probably there's some level of like 3 strikes or appeals process, etc.
But that leaves open vendors selling counterfeit that fools the inspection or the customers. Or new vendors until they get inspected or have some customer return made. Since vendors are hard to trust, manufacturers can protect their authenticity of their products by signing up to transparency.
Anyways, that's what I gathered from reading their latest help and support, and from forums.
I'm still with you, as a buyer, I'd love to be able to see which vendor is selling commingled or not, which product have transparency or not, and even be able to filter for that in the search. I'd also love a country of origin for both product and vendor personally.
Quite a while ago I was asked what a potential Amazon killer could be. My answer was someone who could scale drop shipping to every brick-and-mortar store in a seamless suite covering last-mile delivery all the way down to in shop inventories and POS solutions. Because that would be a limitless catalogue, from local shops and businesses as well as big name brands and everything in between, without any significant inventories.
It seems that Shopify is kind of going in that direction.
This would be way harder than most could imagine. Each of these pieces in aggregate would be interesting but aggregating, expanding, managing each part of the experience would be close to impossible. Kind of like asking what a killer car might be and throwing every feature you can think of into the BOM (like the Simpson's Homer car).
Supply chain, logistics, retail and back office applications of each are very messy. Businesses are messy.
It's kind of funny how Amazon got totally owned by sellers on their SDP policy. Why compete for the buy button when you can take the same item and sell it under your own trademarked brand, thus making it no longer the same.
I hate the flea market Amazon has turned into, but I have to admit it's a brilliant end run.
Not to mention that it is somehow possible to hijack totally unrelated product pages so you get the reviews. Or straight up offering to pay for a good review and not be instantly and permanently banned.
I think the future of Shopify would be aggregating selected best sellers themselves and trying to beat Amazon on a category per category basis from a single or multiple sites.
As long as there's a near-monopoly masquerading as market domination we will have those problems. Company excels enough to beat bloated dominant competitor until it becomes bloated itself and gets eaten by the next trendy disruptor. Shopify is already really close to it. It's the circle of life!
I guess it can’t avoid that trap but time will tell. Funnily a big selling point of Amazon over EBay was SDP. Where as EBay would throw up hundreds of pages for a product Amazon would have just one. Ironically Amazon is now where EBay was 25 years ago. As someone commented above, it’s all circle of life.
Large online marketplaces like Amazon have trained consumers to expect products delivered to their doorsteps within 1-2 days at no extra cost. As a result, millions of merchants on other marketplaces are falling behind, unable to cost-effectively deliver products to their customers within 1-2 days. Our mission is to enable any merchant, regardless of size, to delight their customers with fast and cost-effective fulfillment.
It takes several days to drive across the US. You need a logistics network with warehouses spread across the country to service a meaningful portion of the country in 1-2 days.
I assume based on your bio, that your country is the Netherlands? The US is 236x the size of the Netherlands, so you can imagine getting something to a customer in 1-2 days requires a more complex and extensive logistics system.
Small merchants probably don't want to be going to the post office multiple times a day. Even if they were large enough for that to make sense the US is too big for cost effective next day delivery to the entire country, you need to have distribution centers all over.
I own an ecommerce business, and I recently moved away from my previous 3PL (third party logistics company, like Deliverr). In doing so, I evaluated a number of 3PLs, including Deliverr.
For those who aren't familiar, Amazon Multi Channel Fulfillment, which allows you to fulfill orders not placed on Amazon from their warehouses, is much cheaper than all alternatives for a lot of smaller packages. As an example, I have one item that's 2.5 pounds, and about 8.5"x4"x4". To ship it via USPS would cost me $10-12, depending on where it's going. Amazon charges me $6.77.
Deliverr, at least when I evaluated them about six months ago, matched Amazon's pricing exactly. That was pretty shocking to me, since Amazon's clearly only able to maintain those prices because they have their own fulfillment network and lots of revenue from elsewhere to subsidize the actual cost of delivery.
I am currently using Amazon MCF as my 3PL, and one of the reasons I went with them over Deliverr was a genuine concern that Deliverr had a money-losing business model that would only work at Amazon scale, which is obviously a nigh-impossible thing to achieve.
I'm glad to see they got acquired by Shopify, as I think the competition for Amazon is a good thing in the marketplace. That said, I'm definitely curious to see if Shopify will be able to maintain price parity with Amazon.
Not sure about the US, but for my, failed, start-up that went in a similar direction like Deliverr I did some price calculations. And for Europe it was, before Covid, very realistic to achieve price parity with FBA. I'd have too look the numbers up again, but the volumes were easily within reach for a single, not too big FBA merchant. Not enough to make a whole business based on that profitable, with all the overhead and such, but profitable on a transaction basis.
Here it definitely depends on the types of packages, and my experience is very much in the 1-5 pound range - as you get larger, it's clearly more profitable. Still, however I ran the numbers, I just couldn't see Deliverr taking on my company as a client and not losing money on shipping alone (before factoring in all the overhead). Obviously it'd depend on their mix of business, but overall I just think being a 3PL, unless you have some specialty that allows you to charge a premium, is just a brutal, low-margin, race-to-the-bottom kind of business. I'm glad that Shopify made the acquisition, as having both Deliverr and Amazon MCF run as part of broader ecommerce platforms, as opposed to standalone 3PLs, will be good for ecommerce merchants and customers.
Being a 3PL is a brutal business, that's true. Logistics is, for what it's worth, regardless of industry. Not sure if it is actually a race to the bottom, because costs are the same for every player, more or less, in the same region. And the region is defined by infrastructure, customer requirements and so on. Which leaves salaries, and there it is sometimes a race to the bottom. Amazon, funny enough, is paying their own warehouse workers above average so (at least in Germany last time I checked).
Amazon does have an advantage on small item (sortable in Amazon parlance). For larger items 3PL operations are actually pretty straight forward. Edit: or rather items you don't mind to ship as singles, one item per package.
I work at an international logistics unicorn and I used to work at Amazon in some of these groups.
Amazon has a glass jaw. They are good at being an aggressor but I don't know how they will cope with some of the changes taking place in the logistics industry.
I don't really understand what you mean - it's not like others can just decide to aggressively come after them when it comes to fulfillment. It takes enormous scale to be able to do that. In every part of logistics, Amazon's scale acts as a moat.
Seeing that they raised $500M in 5 rounds, they were probably just paying the difference themselves, there never was real parity
The fact they were bought for the same value as their series E valuation 6 months ago also doesn't say good things about their cash flow. Imagine every new employee these past 6 months just got $0 profit from their options/RSUs (assuming there was some double trigger)
Anyone else worry that we don't really need everything "port to porch" in two days? It's impressive logistics, but I worry about the environmental impact when we so strongly stress urgency over efficiency.
Or are there ways to make rapid home deliveries efficient in ways I don't comprehend?
I wouldn't expect Deliverr to add much, if any, environmental impact.
The way they work is by partnering with hundreds/thousands of warehouses throughout the US. The merchant sends units in to a few of these, and now the units are closer to the end customer, so it can get there faster.
Whether it's all stored in one central warehouse, and then distributed, or done via Deliverr (& Amazon FBA & Walmart's) way, it still needs to get from A to B. Just now it's closer. There might be a little extra shuffling.
What I love about Deliverr is they have very predictable pricing. I used them for some small units I experimented with adding to my catalog.
reverse logistics actually can be environmentally positive. Instead of mailing a return back to the headquarters, you drop it off at kohls or cvs and then it gets batched and sent as a palette rather than as loose mail. Pretty cool stuff
Something I like about Amazon is the ability to nominate an "Amazon Day" (e.g. Friday). When checking out, you have the option of next day delivery as usual, but so have the option to choose your Amazon Day.
As you say, a lot of the time you don't need things the next day, so this is a nice way to group all your orders into a single delivery, while being more climate friendly.
I live in Canada but have family in the US. When I was there many years ago I ordered some stuff on Amazon and got the option to delay delivery to a more efficient time, and in return was offered some coupons for either future orders or the Amazon app store (can't quite remember).
I order from Amazon somewhat frequently and would be happy to have 'weekly' delivery rather than next day. 99% of the time I don't need it right away.
I'm in the UK and Amazon has offered this for a while now - they call it Amazon Day. I don't order regularly enough for it to be worth it, but I think the idea is that you order whatever through the week and it's all delivered together on one day each week.
Interesting, I wish they would bring that to Canada. I hate seeing my recycling bin full of one time use cardboard boxes.
There's a small chain of hardware stores in North America called Lee Valley (think specialty hardware and tools, not HomeDepot). The owner was so annoyed at all the boxes he offered to pay anyone $0.25 for any box they brought it. He even used not so subtle language like "Those boxes with a smile." It was during the pandemic so I suspect it was a little self serving (ex. their supply of boxes was hard to come by or their cost was greater than $0.25 for regular boxes), but the message came off as very genuine.
Perhaps they've improved this, but when I tried using "Amazon Day", it just meant fewer deliveries, but those deliveries still resulted in the same number of boxes.
It also, hilariously, sometimes didn't even result in fewer deliveries, just all of those deliveries occurring on one day.
I look at it this way, and see two counterpoints (though I could be wrong):
1) the product has to get to you anyway. Whether they do that in two days or a week, it doesn't seem like the T+NUM_DAYS variable would impact the environment differently.
2) if not for rapid shipping, a lot more people would go out shopping at stores a lot more. A single truck making a lot of deliveries-- even though it's running for 8-13+ hours, may still be more efficient than all of those people making multiple trips to different stores to get what they need.
Once you put the infrastructure (airplanes capacity, delivery cars, processing centers, etc) to do next-day deliveries in place, in a lot of places you don't have enough scale to saturate it, so it's more efficient to run everything over it than to use something else.
This is a very normal thing in logistics. I imagine on the places where there is enough scale, they do offer discounts for slower options.
Reminds me of conventional vs organic milk. Organic milk was far more expensive and in short supply for so long, related to conversion costs for conventional dairy farms. However once McDonalds switched to organic milk, it became cost effective for most dairies to switch over to organic.
then again, if deliveries took 5-7 days instead of 1-2, more people would probably just drive out and buy what they want, which is worse for the environment than one truck making 200 deliveries per day.
Does it, though? The Amazon truck that delivers my packages drives down our street stopping every few houses. Stopping once extra for my house isn't going to add extra fuel usage.
If the truck is full every day, and drives the same route every day, it won't save fuel to batch deliveries.
If Amazon took longer, I would have to take a trip to the store for a lot more things. Me driving to a store and back uses a lot more fuel than a single truck that is bringing things to dozens of houses on my street.
As others have said, I'm not sure the environment impact is different between 1-2 days vs. a week. In terms of fuel costs etc. Maybe travelling by ship instead of air, or on long haul might affect this though.
I'm more concerned about the human toll on the rapid delivery tbh. As someone joked, I created a prime order that sets off a rube goldbert level of dystopian suffering for a number of humans, just so I get a product at my door that I could have picked up from a local retailer in under an hour.
We already live in this broken future. Deliverr powers Walmart warehousing and a recent order for 12 units of dental floss resulted in 5 packages arriving over several days.
TBH, while I'm worried about that, I'm far more concerned with the poor state of reverse logistics. The sheer amount of returned product that ends up in a landfill is shocking and, assuming direct-to-consumer online purchasing continues to thrive--and I think that's inevitable--we desperately need a solution that allows products to be rapidly inspected, recovered, and returned to supply chains in a way that's efficient and sustainable.
If you mean vehicle emissions that's a consequence of our country's car-centric design. I lived in a large Asian city for a while and nearly everything that could be carried by a single person was delivered delivered via electric bikes/scooters, both online retail and food delivery.
I appreciate your concern, and I'd support some kind of increased transparency into delivery options' carbon intensity; I'd be happy to choose as delayed shipping as possible if it could help guarantee a lower-carbon trip!
On the flip side, how much of the environment has been paved over for strip malls and their parking lots? A warehouse is much more dense and a delivery route potentially more efficient than everyone driving to the store and back.
I've not attempted to calculate the difference. Just a thought.
Absolutely agree.
Jimmy jet set is getting his vibrolux pen set delivered biweekly in record time, meanwhile some of the world waits exorbodently for deliveries of life saving medicine and food, or are otherwise greatly dissserviced by supply and delivery operations.
that's $330,000 is now $150,000. What percentage of your portfolio was it? I never really understood what shopify was, it seemed like most of it were drop shippers and people thinking they can make $100 t-shirts.
Especially after Citron Research came out with a damning report on inflation of metrics.
I really don't get all the people cheering on Shopify in the comments for this acquisition when they are missing earnings by a huge margin and faces existential crisis...it's ngmi
If you were working in e-commerce you'd know why millions of merchant use them, it's a good and easy software to use. They have tons of problems, like any company, but people are migrating TOWARDS shopify, not the other way around, in huge majority.
Etsy, amazon, eBay, all missed earnings due to lower ecom growth after covid. People are cheering the product, not the stock price. Clearly those 2 are not always correlated (even if clearly they could do better)
I don't know about the others but Amazon missed things because of a $7B+ loss on Rivian investments. Otherwise their growth had slowed, but the actual core business is still growing.
The Rivian investment is a bit of a head scratcher though. I get that electricity costs could bring down shipping costs vs. ICE vehicles, but they could order their 100,000 trucks without buying 20% of a business that's somewhat orthogonal to their core competency, which is definitively not vehicle manufacturing. Sure they're more of a logistics business than retailer at this point but owning a manufacturer... do they have big stakes in the established traditional manufacturers?
Andrew Left's research methods were flawed to say the least, if they were even worthy of the word 'research'. A bit of Googling and then concluding the company is lying since he can't find all the Shopify stores. The FTC investigation he was so sure of never materialized and he deleted the video from https://citronresearch.com/citron-exposes-the-dark-side-of-s...
It's about 10% now of my trading portfolio right now. I've been selling options on SHOP for the past few years since the premiums are high, but admittedly I got caught flat footed on this one. My cost basis in SHOP is much lower given the huge premiums I've collected over the past 2 years.
Never forget though, the premiums are/were high for a reason.
The alternative title for this is "Shopify decides to compete against Amazon - no, no, not in the super profitable AWS part, but the money-bleeding, never-profitable fulfilment part that's near-impossible to do without incurring bad PR".
This in the backdrop of an economy that is grinding down, and crushed by inflation. We are 2/3s of the way into stagflation and Shopify does this.
I would be quite surprised if we're anywhere near the bottom. Give it a couple of quarters so we can see badidea.exe sink in.
Great acquisition in the short-medium term for Shopify. I do wonder how Shopify will differentiate itself in the long term. From the outside it looks like Shopify’s plan to compete with Amazon is to handle more of the logistics, create an ad network, and ultimately drive discovery across Shopify stores (via unified search?).
That plan will result in the same issues that Amazon has today. There is nothing inherently higher quality about products sold through Shopify today. Shopify attracts brand-focused sellers that correlates with higher quality. In order to grow they will have to attract high-volume (lower quality) less brand focused sellers, ending up with the same issue.
Yes, retailers can purchase software (well, usually rent via SaaS) where they can manage their catalog of inventory, fulfillment, product imagery, etc., all from a single interface.
Congratulations! We have been a partner with Deliverr since they were quite small, and has been fun to watch their growth. They help a lot of my clients ship packages fast.
SHOP stock has been absolutely slaughtered in the last 6 months.
They're either super geniuses with long term vision the markets can't see, or people have completely lost faith with them for exactly these kinds of moves.
I don't think Shopify stock being down so much in the last 6 month has much to do with their business fundamentals but rather is part of the broader tech sell off.
Which tech stocks haven't been slaughtered in the last 6 months?
To name a few that have: Square, Snap, FB, DoorDash, CoinBase, Pinterest, Lyft, Uber, Robinhood, etc.
Shopify seems to be moving from an asset-light to asset-heavy mode, but also significantly dialing down their investor communication: this is just so unlike them, considering how things have always been.
This is a classic example of "The best acquisitions start as partnerships." I'm not privy to any internal details of either, but reading the writing on the wall from Deliverr's website and posts around the web, Shopify was a huge integration for them (likely a majority of their business). I am willing to get they've worked together at a C-Suite level to make sure that's a good relationship for a while now, and that has a tendency to produce excellent terms for acquisition (for both parties)!
I been itching to work at Shopify for a little while now. This makes me even more excited for them! This should be interesting in how they are positioning themselves against the backdrop of Amazon and Walmart. Its strange to think that Shopify is almost the upstart against a giant like Walmart or Amazon in terms of capturing the retail end / customer experience side of things.
I suppose its a strategy to diverse their commerce portfolio.
Good luck getting through the process. Shopify HR is very slow. It was not pleasant dealing with them. I heard one reason for the slowness is that many HR employees have quit.
I recently accepted an offer from Shopify and they did a reasonable job. 3 or 4 calls over 2 weeks, with an offer less than 3 days after my last call. Rates were very competitive for my roll and skillset.
That said, they do seem to be going through--or have recently gone through--a fair amount of attrition due to declining stock prices. Not surprising given the stock situation and all, but definitely something to factor in if you're considering working there.
EDIT: I'd also like to mention that it was a very humane interview process. I felt well treated, and they definitely seem to be screening more for successful employees than they are to filter out as many applicants as they can. Take that as you will, but I respect an org that treats it's employees well.
I've been at Shopify since the beginning of this year. "Humane" is a great way to describe the hiring process, and I've found that it seems to be built to select colleagues who are self-aware and genuinely pleasant to work with.
You know thousands of people apply to Shopify weekly right? Put yourself in the shoes of the recruiter.
Just because you had a bad experience doesn't mean all of Shopify HR is very slow.
This goes for all tech companies not just Shopify. Many people believe that because the recruiter they were dealing with was slow, that must be the case for every candidate across the entire company they are dealing with.
As with all things in life, remember YMMV. Hiring is crazy right now at all tech companies.
I agree with you here, but regardless of how busy a company is it's not unreasonable to expect a minimum-bar of quality of experience.
Interviews often set perception of how well a company operates. If you or your company care about your reputation, get it right.
Google/Alphabet is still suffering from it's reputation for horrendous interview experience well after a year or so of getting things back on track. Reputational issues are sticky, be they deserved or not.
Shopify absolutely underpays its tech employees. It's often below market average, but they think the prestige of Shopify is akin to Google, so people will settle for less.
Can you define underpays its tech employees more specifically - salary or total comp?
I mean they don't have the same capital as a company like Amazon/Google/Facebook so obviously can't go toe to toe if that's who you are comparing against. However Shopify's equity compensation aligns with Tesla (underpay but employees earn on equity) probably more than made up and then some compared to all those companies if you have worked there for more than one year. If you just joined then yeah your equity packages just tanked - as did all the major tech companies.
They "underpay" compared to Google, etc and compared to the Bay. But Shopify is a Canadian company first (I'm in the US) and they pay me a salary well over the average for my area (double), not much less than what I was offered by other remote companies (within ~$10k) but pushed north of $200k/yr by adding stock.
We also recently received info on a new pay structure that basically lets us choose how much of our TC is $$$ and how much is stock. We're excited and people will be given raises. There are news articles you can read online.
Shopify also aims to be a "100 year" company. It means not paying in the top 10, but also not overworking employees or firing the bottom 10% every year.
As someone who isn't in the Bay... they pay just fine for new hires and for tenured employees once they finish raises.
I wonder if the job-hoppers in the bay area will realise before it is too late that they are participating in a bubble that will undoubtedly collapse (happening now maybe...), leaving them shocked at their inability to demand +20% per new job...
As someone in the U.S market, they recruit for US/Canada agnostic but they pay the Canadian TC. So for people in the U.S who can pass an average big company/FAANGMULA interview loop, they always end up dead last in the offer TC
I really can't speak for Canadians, but U.S engineers definitely need to take a potential pay cut to join the cul...erm company
Comparable to who though? No offense to Shopify but it isn't FANG level company on revenue/market cap so you can't compare Megacap to midcap companies salary comps
I'm probably thinking about this backwards, but I'm embarrassingly well trained to search for anything I need on Amazon. if I want to support Shopify at Amazon's expense, is there a straightforward way of breaking out of this training and find what I need among Shopify-powered merchants? Without getting lost in SEO-spam or influencer peddling?
There totally is... My co-founder and I created a search engine in early 2021 that indexes 100 million items from 140,000 Shopify shops and makes them searchable to shoppers.
We built this with the specific goal of helping small businesses be discovered by consumers looking for a way to support. You nailed the problem... without a place to search for items, it seems that there isn't an easy way to support small businesses, and bypass Amazon. From the shop's perspective, getting eyeballs is extremely difficult for them, so they end up relying on influencers and SEO in order to get eyeballs.
We would love to help you shop online without defaulting to Amazon first... Would love your feedback.
Oh, wow! Thanks for pointing that out. I'll take a look and try to get that cleaned up.
We don't have a lot of shops with electronics at the moment, so a query for "router" would be light anyway, but these particular results are not useful at all.
We have almost anything you could look for, but for some reason, we don't have a good selection of computer parts and accessories. Its like all of the electronics shops decided not to use Shopify or something :)
Of the 140k shops we currently have, the vast majority are clothing (shoes, shirts, jewelry, etc), home & garden (furniture, kitchen, cups, glasses, etc), and vehicle parts. The other categories still have a significant number of products in them, but we're light on the computer accessories, and much of what you find will be either older generation or enterprise. Its possible that the 140k shops that we selected just happen to not be electronics/computer shops, but until we're able to index the remaining 1.2M+ shops (that we're aware of) we won't know for sure.
One other thing to point out is that the filters (after you search), can be very helpful We're still not at a point where we can build out semantic search, so using the filters to select a category, colour, etc, can drastically improve the relevance of your results. Hope that helps!
BTW, I have made changes to remove the "Route Protection Package" from our index, and it should start disappearing over the next week or so. Thanks for pointing that out!
Cost. I'll list some reasons why hours is often not possible.
- Products can't always be fulfilled by the closest ___location. Especially for products that you can't assume infinite stock of, this is a big deal, but in general there is an incredibly long tail of things sold. Look around the sites of Target, Walmart, Home Depot, and similar, look at what's in stock where. It's not universal coverage, and Amazon has much lower density of locations as well as higher SKU counts. If an order is split across multiple locations, it would be cheaper but take longer to first combine them at one rather than deliver the parts separately.
- Last-mile efficiency. Stops are clustered and dispatched together, which reduces labor time and mileage. The total cost of 10 spread out stops could easily be the same as 40 more tightly packed ones, and the second won't be an option if they're out for delivery within hours.
- Labor efficiency. There are a lot of humans involved still, despite the best efforts of these companies, and a bit of latency allows for consistent utilization despite hour-to-hour and day-to-day changes.
Lastly, delivery within hours is offered. Walmart calls it Express Delivery, Amazon has Same-Day Delivery (as well as some 2 hour delivery), Target has Same Day Delivery. These are just premium services with limited selection because it's expensive to do, and modern Free Shipping is an illusion of shipping being too cheap to price when it really isn't. It's cost optimizations all the way down and still not enough.
Rephrased, individual merchants on Amazon don’t move enough volume to have their products stocked at every warehouse on the planet. And the ones that do Amazon has started offering “tonight” delivery.
It isn’t. $AMZN accelerated capex in the last two years to meet the demand brought on by Covid. They even over built, but have also launched Buy With Prime to open up their logistical infrastructure as a service. It takes a long time to get where $AMZN is at.
As a buyer, I'd love to spend more with not-Amazon and get comparable service.
I'm increasingly disappointed with Amazon. It's full of knockoff crappy products with unrelated 5 star reviews. That eroding trust in Amazon is pushing me to smaller brands who have a face and stand behind their product for key purchases. This move by Shopify will just accelerate that transition away from Amazon.
Just waiting for the search bar to shop every Shopify store so I have a viable alternative to Amazon to buy whatever I need.