Can Shopify Compete With Amazon Without Becoming Amazon? (Published 2020)

If the key to Amazon’s success has been to put the customer first, for Shopify the key has been to put the merchant first.

Unlike Amazon, which is an online marketplace where customers go to buy stuff, Shopify is a software platform visible only to merchants. You don’t go shopping on Shopify the way you do on Amazon; Shopify doesn’t list products directly on Shopify.com.

In a landscape where customer attention is the scarcest resource, Shopify’s very identity as a neutral platform and invisible infrastructure is perhaps both its greatest asset and its greatest limitation.

But Finkelstein is keen to point out that while Shopify made a billion dollars in revenue last year, Shopify app developers made almost $7 billion as a community.

Shop resembles Google Shopping more than Amazon, and it lacks the convenience of a single cart. It’s a product that reflects the philosophical tug-of-war between Shopify’s original antimarketplace stance and its stated ideal of helping merchants be as successful as possible.

It took eight years for e-commerce as a share of retail sales in the United States to grow to 12 percent from 5 percent. It took only the 12 weeks between March and June this year to reach 16 percent from 12 percent.

Influencers, in turn, have realized that it’s more lucrative and meaningful to promote their own products rather than someone else’s.

For these sorts of e-commerce brands, what’s being sold isn’t just some product with utility. It’s a feeling, a community, an identity. Shopify, being the blank canvas it is, is much more suitable for this kind of projection than Amazon, which, by virtue of being Amazon, effectively eclipses individual brands on its site.

Now that companies like Shopify have turned software into a commodity, what distinguishes you isn’t whether you can write code, but whether you have something to say and an audience to say it to.