The War Between Shopify and Its Partners
By far the biggest flashpoint in the Shopify world is its complex relationship with its partner ecosystem.
Ultimately, the Shopify partner flywheel is spinning fast so there is NO stopping the train. But along the way, a few companies have gotten ground in the gears. A few areas I will be discussing soon:
Middleware. The demise of StitchLabs, TradeGecko, and others is not accidental. The latent cause is Shopify's progress. The center of mass has moved to their app store, but what impact is that still having on connectors and even development agency partners? This is the battle of the past.
Payments. By far the trickiest flashpoint right now is the innovation in the payments space, and how Shopify has positioned itself right smack in the middle of it. Subscriptions, installments, upsell, financing, and returns are all in the mix. I've never quite seen an entire industry quietly cheering against an eCommerce growth story. This is the battle of the present.
Supply Chain. Think what is happening to middleware and payments could never happen to supply chain? I want to construct a thought experiment for a few alternative universes depending on what Shopify does here. Not all of them are pleasant for the current players. This is the battle of the future.
It seems the elements I outlined above struck chords with different people.
Stephen Jones said:
Number 1 is super interesting to me, given that I personally work in the space. Where was the battle there? There's been huge M&A movements in inventory/warehouse management over the last year. How does one distinguish between a "demise" and an "exit"? Stitch being 'acquihired' by Square with a sunset coming soon, after circa $20m of investments is undoubtedly disappointing for them. TG being acquired for a reported $80m after similar capital raised is arguably less disappointing but still not a great ROI for their investors. It'll probably be built into QBO though so it's not like the product is likely to die completely. From a more technical perspective, the key differences between them and Veeqo would be that neither of those products integrated directly with shipping carriers or provided a warehouse management system. TG focused more on wholesale and Stitch seemed to have a stronger focus on working alongside 3PLs. We've recently listed on Shopify's App Store - leaning into our connection with Shopify. Struggling to see how Shopify growing could be anything but a good thing for systems like Veeqo? I certainly hope they aren't the 'latent cause' of our pending demise!
Rafael Zimberoff added this:
3rd party ecosystems are a balance, and players always get crushed on the way. And some players hit home runs. Sometimes the parent product evolves too slowly, and the third party that built the obvious lacking feature makes crazy hay for too long filling in a core gap. But in the case of Shopify, they are executing so well, and iterating so quickly, that the big gaps will be filled...by Shopify itself. That leaves shorter runways for third parties to exploit. This is the first time I can recall seeing both a large, dynamic third party ecosystem combined with top shelf execution by the parent platform. Supply chain deserves Shopify's attention, because that is where ecommerce is hardest. It fully deserves (and is receiving) top of mind attention from the Shopify team. I would add that the third party approach to solving supply chain topics has shortcomings. Third parties will do best here solving niche workflows, and let Shopify itself solve the primary/most frequent use cases.
There’s more to come in this space - there’s more thinking and writing I want to do to expound upon these main ideas, so stay tuned.
