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

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.

You need two components to build a successful e-commerce business, the software that runs the online store and the marketing to get customers to come to the store. A large part of what makes marketplaces like Amazon so attractive to merchants is that it provides both components.

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.

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.

“Amazon is designed to commoditize products to the lowest common denominator of what they stand for,” Joey Zwillinger, Allbirds’s co-founder

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.

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.

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.

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