Shopify Drops Native Support For Amazon Connectivity
In the last few days of August, Shopify decided to drop support for its native #Amazon connector, saying that sellers would have to go to third-parties. On the surface, this kind of petty BS is what people hate about corporations. How many Shopify sellers are on Amazon? Likely a lot. As a champion of brands, if a brand wants to sell on Amazon it should make it easy.
Shopify loves the narrative where it is arming the rebels against the Empire of Amazon. But... I guess if the rebels want to trade with the Empire, the rebel leader isn't going to make it easy.
Although this is considerably less petty than what they put someone like Mailchimp through in its previous connectivity spat -- which for the record have been totally fine on any other platform until the one that wanted to enable an ecosystem but also controls it tightly.
On the flip side, integrating into a marketplace is harder than you think. Shopify isn't in the business of keeping up with Amazon's changes and second, Shopify though in theory, it agrees that it will always be a multichannel world, every sale for Amazon is a sale not direct to the merchant.
I expect this was more of a pragmatic decision than anything. The integration was never best in class, and there are many third parties in the space.
