Shopify’s Misunderstood Disruption Path
I think one of the things people don't get about Shopify is how it thinks about its path to disruption.
It doesn't think about the most features, or the most flexibility. It thinks about "good enough." The late Clayton Christensen would call it low-end disruption.
Shopify is the platform of good enough. Shopify's long-term bet is that it can disrupt a billion dollar platform industry by developing a templated, app-based platform that is good enough for most people to both use and operate. Oh yeah, and one that innovates faster than anyone, thereby raising that "good enough" water mark every day.
It does this partially via cloud, which helps it significantly reduce a brand's cost of ownership over on-premise. But it also does it by bundling as much as possible in there.
By reducing the amount of customizability, you reduce the things that agencies are able to do. And agencies - as a general rule - charge a lot of money to implement these platforms to brand's specifications.
Another big key here is that by limiting the options that agencies have, it can create disruption. How is that possible? At the end of the day, even Shopify Plus is based on a template engine.
The reason so many Shopify sites look similar is that they are similar.
And that's OK. Because "good enough" ecommerce is OK for a lot of people. And the reason Shopify stock is on a tear, is that more and more brands are discovering that.
Tino Liebich said “I‘d say Shopify offers max. customizability within a framework which ensures nothing totally breaks. The themes, the apps and all the rest...is there anything more one needs to build a great online shopping experience? Honestly, I am not missing anything yet and the “good enough” keeps getting better!”
Mitch Foster asked “Is the customizability really reduced? I’ve never thought of it that way. If you have the $$ you can make your Shopify store do whatever you want.” It's a good question. In my opinion no. But the edge cases are all over the place to trip you up. For some people those edge cases are not edge cases at all. B2B. Pre-orders. Tokenization. # SKU variants...I could keep going.
Corey Krafte added “…what I've found is that even when competing platforms offer more configurability, more depth in their feature set, etc. it is only a subset of their customers who are actually leveraging those features and that flexibility. For that subset, they made the right choice and Shopify would have created some uncomfortable limitations for them, but for the overwhelming majority they are getting an intuitive, easy-to-use platform, scalable infrastructure, robust client/partner community, rapid (relatively) time-to-launch, all at a lower cost. And they are still getting most if not all of the features and functionality that would have been utilized in their day-to-day use of the more "robust" platform.” - I agree. And it just gives people more opportunities to trip themselves up. Sometimes constraints are helpful, and that whiz-bang design idea doesn't lead to conversion.
Max Kafka shares from personal experience: “We were on Magento before Plus - everyone with a technical e-commerce background told us we needed to have full customization of our platform, including the headache of hosting, updating, designing. The limitations of Shopify honestly served as best practices when we migrated. Turns out, the really fancy widget we needed before didn’t move the needle. Plus - these new themes are insanely customizable and the network effect of their app partners have been able to solve pretty much every problem we’ve found.” Here's the reality: eCommerce is marketing and fulfillment. If your conversion rate is good enough and your ROAS/CLV is above your target you have solved marketing. If your per-unit fulfillment costs are too high, you will never be profitable. If you are over-spending on your eCommerce platform, you are running with lead shoes, as my friend Stuart Spiegel likes to say.
Marco Ruschioni chimed in to say “So true that many clients are bamboozled into going for something full custom but the vast majority simply don’t need it, and don’t need the headaches and overheads that come with it either. I’ve seen this so many times…Perfection is the enemy of good.” Amen.
