Also as the source is under the company using the system, they maintain a full control over their own destiny instead of depending on the whims of Shopify and BigCommerce.
Disagree on this completely; I've studied this space before and using something like Spree and Saleor seems like a world of trouble unless you are willing to commit significant, permanent, and highly specialized development resources to it.
Also, the ecosystems for many of the solutions you describe are quite fragmented and niche; I looked into Spree / Solidus / Saleor devs in my country and couldn't find one, whereas I could find thousands for other more popular (PHP-based) solutions. In my case this would mean that if you wanted to hire local Python / Rails devs, you would have to train every single one of them in the use of the framework.
Finally, I don't think these solutions are as fully featured as some of their competitors. In my comparison I saw that Spree had a plugin for bundled products but the code repo looked desolate, full of issues and left to rot for years, whereas many others had much better support baked in.
Due to all of the above, many medium-sized companies with typical use cases are going to be better served by a more out-of-the-box solution, rather than taking charge of a Rails or Python codebase that's going to grow wild with custom code.
As for Shopify, it's definitely not for mom and pops anymore - they are serving massive customers throught their Plus offering, and their move to an open and comprehensive API (with both REST and GraphQL) allows anyone to build highly customized headless apps around it.
Shopify and bigcommerce are good for small or mom-pop kind of stores which wants to spend $30-$1000/month based on sales, here shopify can take some trouble out of woocommerce and opencart kind of platform. If it’s more than that open source is still better with custom additions.
My point is that even in the large enterprise space there are businesses that have fairly straightforward eCommerce needs that can be better served by ready-made solutions.
If your requirements don’t fit that, then sure, go with a framework and build around it. My secondary point was that I believe in this scenario it’d probably be less risky to go with one of the long-time PHP incumbents like Magento, which you now mention, than something like Spree or Saleor.
I don't know much about Shopify but if the following article is accurate, it's not just "mom & pop" stores:
https://wemakewebsites.com/blog/37-of-the-biggest-brands-on-...
Examples of big brand names with more than a few SKUs include Hasbro toys, Penguin books, etc.
I run an agency that's highly specialised in Shopify, so obviously I have a dog in the fight, but as someone who's recently helped migrate a business with ~$6b/year in revenue to Shopify I think it's time to retire that particular misconception.
So for a partner it guarantee regular stream of revenue but at the cost of customers’ interest who is now at the whims and mercy of company which wrote the custom code and also shopify which control the core API server code.
If you want to built a reliable and resilient system for 6 billion business a custom built based on open source is far superior to proprietary and black box of shopify+closed custom code written by partner.
aka "doing a bunch of things that might get them ready to make money at some point in the future" - which is what I originally said.
Thanks, I'll pass. Give me a revenue today and time to iterate over what one I might make 6 months from now any day.
Cashflow wins most debates.
True that’s the reason Amazon, Walmart, Alibaba, Rakutan, Flipkart, Pinduoduo, JD, eBay, Lazada, Shopee, Momoshop, offer better value and platform compared to Shopify and BigCommerce and valued much more than them, because they solve the biggest problem of multi-channel commerce driving traffic, bring sales, manage logistics and seamless payments.
Shopify, Bigcommerce are competing with Magento, SAP Commerce (Hybris), Salesforce Commerce and the open source solutions listed earlier. So they do not solve immediate cash-flow problem. For any meaningful multi-channel commerce be it Shopify, Bigcommerce or open source based require similar efforts, except for small retailers, niche manufacturers and mom-pop shops.
That’s the reason if you look at BigCommerce S1 they ran out of money in 2019 (negative working capital of 2.2432 million) and need investor to save them. Now given the bull run those investors wants to cash-out. Shopify is lucky that in spite of loss making for years they got some boost due to COVID-19 and stock investors are waiting for big cash-out. Devil lie in details if you read BigCommerce risks and also footnotes in Shopify annual reports you can know that what they offer is easily available from many providers. Both might have been driven by technology but now they are primarily marketing and sales company to get as many customers as possible to survive and have an edge. You can observe it in Shopify annual reports consistently they need to spend a lot on just marketing and sales.
Conversely, by becoming a subscriber, you gain all the downstream development funded by every other customer. There are strength in numbers benefits to investing in a tool that has momentum and growth.
