Shopify Was Worth the Wait

April 16th, 2006 at 12:23 am

I can’t help but love Shopify for the simply facts that they are based in my hometown (Ottawa) and are highly visible in the Rails community. Congrats on a great release!

April 16th, 2006 at 1:44 am

Sorry but it seems to me as if they are reinventing the wheel, but this time with a focus on typical blogging features. shopify lacks a lot of features that are needed today in a professional ecommerce solutions. And quite a few of the solutions that are available today on the market have already made the move towards the “web 2.0″ with tagging and stuff.

So in short, I really don’t think that “it was worth the wait”.

April 16th, 2006 at 3:05 am

> shopify lacks a lot of features that are needed today in a professional ecommerce solutions.

For example?

If I need just an online store to sell some stuff.. there’s no service for that rather than ebay, or installing some crappy version of oscommerce or something like that…

I love Shopify, is an easy way to create onlien stores

April 16th, 2006 at 3:11 am

Wrong url here it is

http://digg.com/technology/Sho.....y,_Shopify

April 16th, 2006 at 5:45 am

It’s a potentially interesting offering, although the devil in the detail. A 3.75% commission for doing nothing more than providing a simple e-commerce web system is too rich, at least for people that sell as a business i.e. to make a profit. Even companies offering services that relatively valuable e.g. handling transfer of money between customer and vendor don’t take 3.75%.

I guess the Shopify guys are either: a) hoping that there’s a long tail of vendors out there that sell almost nothing - so that the free set-up costs are useful to them. Even then, it’s not a slam dunk, given that there are free e-commerce systems available now; or b) that they’ll create a market place that adds more than 3.75% of value.

If both a and b are true, they’ll make a fortune!

April 16th, 2006 at 6:06 am

I am very impressed with the usability of their backoffice store management interface and the Vision software for building storefront themes.

Shopify is targeting a specific section of the e-commerce application target audience: companies/individuals who need a highly usable, quick to setup and low up-front cost e-commerce enabled website. This market segment is very large.

The other type of e-commcerce app target segment are web development companies who need an e-commerce platform to deploy for their customer’s websites. In many cases those websites may have sophisticated proprietary functionality, that is tied into the e-commerce component and serves as a differentiator for the online vendor.

For the aforementioned target segment the apropriate system would be an e-commerce software package, licensed on a per-store basis, open source (customer’s can moidify 100% of the source code but cannot re-distribute it without the e-com vendor’s consent) written in Ruby on Rails.

I am part of a team of 4 grad students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a team of people from newline Creations, LLC - the makers of WebAssemblyLine™, who are currently developing “Commerce on Rails”, an e-commerce software package, written in Ruby on Rails, that we’re planning in the model mentioned above. We’re about 2 months into the development. We’re starting a blog that will be located at http://www.commerceonrails.com this week. Some key features are: written in Rails, open source, paid license per store installation, REST type Web Services API (similar to Basecamp, Backpack).

Stay tuned.

April 16th, 2006 at 6:58 am

I have been waiting for Shopify, but I am somewhat disappointed, especially with the 3.75% thing. Also, how does shopify compare to X-Cart, which has a truck load of features, and is open source.

April 16th, 2006 at 7:05 am

Every market today has a bunch of “free” alternatives, except that:

- “free” isn’t free. They’re typically really hard to set up, error prone and not for the masses who don’t understand how to rebuild a Linux box from scratch. If it’s “free”, that means you have to get a box, rebuild it yourself, set up the software yourself, find some place to host it, manage all the banking relationships yourself, the list goes on. Free is only free if your time is worthless.

- the “free” products typically look like mud, and when you’re selling, your “look” is closely tied to your credibility. Bad look == reduced trust, when you’re an unknown quantity in the customers’ eyes.

Shopify looks like it will make online selling easy (and elegant) for regular folks, who now don’t have to be developers themselves to set up a classy online store.

April 16th, 2006 at 8:12 am

I really like the look of BigCartel, and they don’t take any percentages.

April 16th, 2006 at 8:27 am

Shopify is targeting companies/individuals who need a highly usable, quick to setup and low up-front cost e-commerce enabled website.

The other type of e-commerce app target segment are web development companies who need an e-commerce platform to deploy for their customer’s websites. In many cases those websites may have sophisticated proprietary functionality, that is tied into the e-commerce component and serves as a differentiator for the online vendor.

For the aforementioned target segment the apropriate system would be an e-commerce software package, licensed on a per-store basis, open source (customers can modify 100% of the source code but cannot re-distribute it without the e-com vendor’s consent) and written in Ruby on Rails.

I am part of a small team of grad students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a team of people from newline Creations, who are currently developing Commerce on Rails, an e-commerce software package that will be targeting web development companies. We’re about 2 months into the development. We’re starting a blog this week. Some key features are: written in Rails, open source, paid license per store installation, REST type Web Services API (similar to Basecamp, Backpack).

Stay tuned.

April 16th, 2006 at 9:48 am

Why go with shopify when Yahoo! Store has offered the same product for years, except your products get listed in Yahoo! Shopping? The marketing power of Yahoo! Shopping eclipses any product feature.

April 16th, 2006 at 12:42 pm

An interesting Web 2.0 site. However, with a plethora of similar sites already in the foray, it would be interesting to see the unique feature set that this site offes. Ease of usage should be a big plus for Shopify though.

April 16th, 2006 at 1:37 pm

3.75% comission isn’t much if you consider the other costs/hassle you save = no hosting fees, no servers to maintain, no software to upgrade or patch.

Look at Basecamp or Backpack, both hosted apps; the cost to entry is very low, and you get a high quality service and product that a lot of people have purchased subscriptions for.

Shopify won’t fit everyone’s needs, just like every other app available, but it sure looks like a fantastic tool for those that it does. I know I’ll be brining at least 2 stores, currently in Miva, over to Shopify.

April 16th, 2006 at 3:44 pm

If you’re looking for e-commerce and rails that’s NOT hosted check out substruct.

http://dev.subimage.com/projects/substruct

April 16th, 2006 at 6:09 pm

some new and innovative stuff that other sites currently in the business lacks

April 17th, 2006 at 3:46 am

hey,
web 2.0 is alive and well in canada!

mark

April 17th, 2006 at 7:37 am

3.75% is about half what you would pay eBay. Between GBase and now Shopify, it’s great to see more marketplaces challenging the eBay monopoly…

April 17th, 2006 at 11:26 am

Shopify is not an alternative or a competitor to eBay/Google Base. It’s, in fact, the opposite of the marketplace approach.

There’s no better template engine that the access to the source code and I think the Rails Engines approach of Substruct is a key difference!

Similar to WordPress, I expect soon hosted Substruct services (for pay or for free), which will mark the end of Shopify or at least will force Shopify to lower their unreasonable “partnership” fee.

April 24th, 2006 at 4:47 pm

Shopify is an example of business principles playing 2nd fiddle to great design and technology. This might be what goes down as the lesson of “Web 2.0″ - looking like a million bucks is not the same is making a million bucks. Technorati.com is another prime example.

Specifically, I think Shopify is targeting the sort of boutique sellers (not ebay, not yahoo stores) who currently thrive precisely because they are operating outside of a system that provides simple and immediate comparison shopping and cross-seller searching. And make no mistake - that 3.75% is not their profit, that covers their cost. Their profit is in generating high traffic by providing these kind of cross-seller comparison tools that will please the end-user (who is looking for a specific snowboard at the lowest price) but drive away their clients (like a local ski shop using shopify to sell online who has neither time nor interest in competing with other merchants to attract Shopify customers).

June 9th, 2006 at 5:47 am

I like design… However 3% commision is quite a lot just for a hosting? Have anybody heard about hosted stores by fivestores.com ?

January 8th, 2007 at 3:51 pm

I’m beta testing Shopify and for me the big difference maker is the template engine. It’s super-powerful.

The admin interface and the low-fat approach are great, but I find the templating scheme quite lacking… I’ve been struggling for hour to display Collections and Types lists. I mean, you can create and manage Collections of products (categories) but you can’t dinamically list them. It is also quite cumbersome to do things like display a product’s tags on a product page. I hope they power-up their templating capabilities to fully leverage their superb admin interface on the public templates.

January 12th, 2007 at 4:05 am

Note that the service is still in beta, BUT the software (Workspace) has been developed since 2001, so i think it is quite stable and there is already a LOT of features. And there is also a growth path if business expand (Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition, wide integration support, etc)

I don’t know how shopify works, so i can’t compare these two.