Shopify Still Wins Because It Works Better

Only those who have been through a headless eCommerce RFP can truly appreciate what Shopify has done for eCommerce.

And I say this with love to all my friends in the headless universe. ;-)

There are really only 2 keys to Shopify's performance.

One is the checkout. It's hard to argue with results, and the performance of the checkout is great compared to the rest of the market.

The fact that a lot of the world is still cobbling together their own Stripe components I find disturbing. Furthermore, the fact that Stripe has not tried to become its own consumer-facing brand is (I believe) a huge missed opportunity for them. They have really zero control over their own distribution channels - a tremendous risk for such a large company.

The second is the App Store. Due to the number of merchants on the platform, this attracts the developers.

The ease and selection of both great and crappy apps is astounding. Obviously it's important that there is quality, but anyone who has spent time in previous open source ecosystems like Magento or osCommerce....

I'm just going to leave this here. Extensions were a nightmare of conflicts and maintenance.

While Shopify ecommerce invented the theme language that everyone else adopted, the flexibility has become not good enough.

Now the risks:

- Many of the higher-end Shopify store owners I have talked to have been at least temporarily "saved" by Online Store 2.0, which is a boon for agencies to create the experiences that people need.

But likely not everyone.

- Shopify's vision of Checkout is not everyone's vision of checkout. That much is well-documented. There have been and will continue to be a lot of casualties on this road.

This brings me to my last point.

Here's my advice to app builders in every generation -- it's not Tobi's job to care about your business. Period.

Just like it wasn't Bill Gates' job at Microsoft, and it wasn't Steve Jobs' job at Apple. Think you want to develop a new headphone that works with Apple? Try again. Apple wants to do that too.

Ultimately as the CEO of an app developer, it's your job to understand how you will distribute your product to your customers, and that you are building on a firm foundation.

Either you bet on a different set of platforms, and hope the market is big enough, or you start fishing in a different area, on the platform where all the fish are.