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0 pointsboringg5y ago0 comments

I hear your generic complaint about platforms but in this case the Merchant and actually customers (not third party developer) are the people who should be protected. Partners (third party developers) should have access to provide Merchants much needed services and get paid for that but as I see it Shopify has to regulate what those Partners are doing so that neither their Merchants or Customers are getting taken advantage of. (I.E. avoid any kind of fallout similar to facebooks cambridge analytics level or fraudulent payments).

In this case the third party developer was circumventing the user agreement clearly for their own personal gain and potentially putting customer/merchant data at risk, or at the very minimum not willing to pay the terms that they agreed too. At least thats my perspective.

In terms of glorified website builder - the level of sophistication on these multi channel e-commerce and IRL platforms, inventory management, taxes etc is actually quite daunting to manage.

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brmgb5y ago

> Partners (third party developers) should have access to provide Merchants much needed services and get paid for that but as I see it Shopify has to regulate what those Partners are doing so that neither their Merchants or Customers are getting taken advantage of. (I.E. avoid any kind of fallout similar to facebooks cambridge analytics level or fraudulent payments).

People were building complements and addons to pro software long before the whole plateform and app stores fad took hold. The whole thing is pretty much a naked cash grab from publishers and the whole "plateform" strategy which has been so dear to management consultants for the last decade is just another world for artificial barriers to entry but entraving competitions doesn't sound as good as building a plateform.

boringgOP5y ago

I don't disagree with the building complements and addons forever - no one is arguing that. I would say that the difference between building an application for one company vs building for a platform has some pretty distinct differences.

I think in this instance if you are building for large swaths of a population (ie. merchants) and the brand reputation (Shopify) is at risk of a bad actor (i.e. in Facebooks case cambridge analytics) it is in the interests of the brand (ie Shopify) to manage risk from bad actors.

This may be a cash grab, I don't know the true details only the comments from the aggrieved developer. Though reading the aggrieved comments they seem to have been playing by their own rules and got caught.

If the argument you are trying to make is upstream of that in that the layout of the internet is no longer favor of individual developers - thats a bigger debate that I don't think we can address here. It's a market structure argument in its essence.