In what ways? I'm sure there are businesses they refuse to support (like any company) but I have a family member running a Shopify store (selling things that you couldn't over Amazon due to logistics) and Shopify
- Doesn't have any pre approval process for products. We can add and edit products instantaneously with no process involving anyone else.
- Has never appeared to care, even when "products" are things like "we agreed on a delivery method over the phone".
I'd also point out that the store owns the brand with Shopify. We could switch out the backend for a different ones and the users wouldn't really notice. You couldn't do the same with Amazon.
You used to be able to install custom Shopify apps on your own store, now they make you jump through hoops. Their ideal situation is an Apple like walled garden where you can only install apps from their store. Had a friend trying to vibecode a custom Shopify app so he could replace one from the App Store that was running him $250/m. It was so confusing that he just gave up. I’m trying to get him to switch to an open-source alternative.
Try selling Vape products or adult products and you’ll see you don’t really control the software. Selling used Apple products, vapes, and adult products is completely legal. Yes Stripe and PayPal can stop you from accepting payments for those products. But why is my business software doing the same?
Instead we setup our own site and were quickly getting large orders for 1 million+ masks per week from big box stores and hospital groups.
https://directpaynet.com/banned-ppe-seller-get-merchant-acco...
Don't ask me for details but I got the impression they got just involved enough to maximize harm.
It's not software but a platform which has both pros and cons.
How many? A few dozen? lol
I have much more freedom with Shopify, it's not even comparable. It's not even apples to oranges, it's apples to calculators.
Amazon places a lot more restrictions on everything, from products, product descriptions, images, it's quite difficult to list original products on Amazon (took me 2 weeks of work to register our product backlog when I started selling via Amazon, despite having GTINs and everything already in place). Cashflow etc is not comparable in ANY way.
Just wanted to call out a blatantly wrong comment.
Then we realized we weren’t really building a brand on Amazon so we started a Shopify store. Listed the same products and one day just unpublished. Messaged Shopify and they said we can’t sell used Apple products. Send them our Amazon and eBay stores with thousands of sales. Didn’t care. I brought in a payment processor myself, still unpublished. I just built my own Shopify alternative at that point.
In the end, you’re selling products that Shopify deems ok so you’re not going to face these issues. Do you really think Shopify doesn’t have issues just cause you don’t face them?
And even then we won't be able to tell if it's because of the AI or because they fired everybody that knows what they are doing.
This is an important distinction worth teasing apart when these events happen
Last month I found a critical bug in the forum where you could edit anyone’s post title.
You will never know. Lots of pretty important people publicly laid down the law that AI must be used; any indication that it produces crap will be hidden.
have found Shopify's AI implementation to be sane and really useful ( building flows and surfacing documentation correctly ).
"Employees must explain why AI can’t be used before asking for additional resources, like more staff or time. [...] Shopify is now factoring AI usage into performance reviews and peer evaluations."
I ask because with the major AI push at Shopify lately, I would like to know if it is affecting stability.
This isn't the first outage and won't be the last but it's one of the most disruptive in recent memory.
I can't speak to stability but I get the impression it's a poster child for being all in on AI, moreso than other tech companies. By far.
This has to be one of the hardest parts of working there. A bug takes down other peoples businesses.
I hated their CLI tool for app dev because I like tinkering myself, but I would've probably built the same thing in bash, so having a maintained CLI is nice.
Too bad I'm a medior, so there's a low chance they'd hire me ;P
Never worked there, probably never will, but they have my respect for the things I have seen, read and heard.
Apparently not
I was glad when it finally came back on, after four hours off, so that I could order some material for a job... only to find that my supplier's site wasn't working. It's on shopify.
So too the two the other suppliers I use who offer the same thing I need, so I'm kinda stuffed as ordering from anytime now means I likely won't get my stuff in before the weekend, which is when I was planning on working with it.
Wonderful.
All my sites are affected, I guess this is general.
