Last year, we found out that a group of folks at Shopify were using my company's product, iDoneThis, when Tobi Lutke (CEO) emailed me about a customer service issue. They were by far our highest profile customers and we were super amped to have them. We thought, how cool would it be to visit Shopify up in Ottawa, get to know them and see how they were using iDoneThis?
I emailed Tobi and basically invited ourselves up there to visit with them. He not only said yes, he got excited, told me that he thought it was an awesome idea and that he wished he'd spent more time with customers in the early days of Shopify. They made space in their office and everyone on the team made time to talk with us, and we ate lunch and hung out with them and talked iDoneThis and Shopify for a week!
My co-founder and I were blown away by how good those guys are. Meeting the team was the kind of experience where it's just like, man, those guys are really good at their jobs and they're doing it their way. The culture had a distinctiveness and authenticity that made the concept of "culture" real to me. Shopify is an original. I joked that we had to leave Silicon Valley and go to freezing cold Ottawa, Canada, to learn about how to start a company.
And we became friends--I still play Starcraft with one of the engineers there and email and hang out with others when they visit the states. Because of the Shopify guys, we have a bunch of Ottawa-based companies that use iDoneThis and when we raised a round, Tobi invested in us, too.
Our visit counts up there as one of the best learning experiences as a company and it opened my eyes as a founder to what entrepreneurship could mean.
I was struck by this comment, though:
"Using Shopify and Shopify POS together reveals our true
ambition: To be the first company in the world that fuses
all the distinct parts that are needed to run a complete
modern commerce business - all in one amazing product."
Shopify's missing a lot more than that for retail. I wouldn't use their current POS app for running more than a flea market table or street vendor. It's just too basic even for the smallest store.
You can't handle hundreds of SKUs by paging through product thumbnails at checkout; you need barcode scanning, and from experience, iPads and bluetooth scanners are a real pain to work with. Shopify also has no real inventory management (figuring out what to reorder, entering in the new orders as they get delivered, tracking cost of goods sold and spoilage, printing price tags and barcodes, etc). The couple of reports they've built are inadequate for proper accounting.
I hope they get there eventually, but the number and complexity of features they need for a small shop to run their POS on Shopify means they're at least a few years out.
It's clear the POS app is a test product for them, and I'm happy to see them experiment. I just wish they'd put a little more love into the core functionality. Even for ecommerce, Shopify is lacking some really basic things:
- Editing orders (e.g. marking an item canceled)
- Editing tracking numbers (fixing typos -- not allowed today)
- Allowing coupons to offer both a discounted price and free shipping (today they're mutually exclusive)
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2745880 for more info. IIRC, some people have had success emailing info@ycombinator.com to get unbanned.
Edit: state, if you don't have showdead=yes set in your preferences then you won't see the hellbanned posts. I don't know about the posts that got them hellbanned in the first place, but the dead ones here are completely unobjectionable .
Knowing a good handful of other small to medium-sized business owners I know we're not alone in this (as your comment points out), and it makes me all the more eager to open source everything we do. But first, there are bugs to fix.
And that's before you even get to pick/pack/ship an item and sync to your company file in QB, drawn down inventory on hand, send tracking info to your customer and update your CRM...
There seem to be a handful of startup software co's in this space but none can handle the entire picture:
methodintegration.com lettuceapps.com
Weebly is starting to be a real competitor in the lower end of the online store market.
The Real-time carrier shipping calculation feature shopify has might have kept me around but I can't justify the 2k+ a year plans just for that feature (that frustrating realization is why I started looking around) and I like weeblys layouts and site builder tools better.
Also, the shopify admin console was really really slow when I was working with it yesterday and I've had that experience at other times in the past as well.
[1] www.weebly.com - same price as the shopify basic plan for commerce.
Except now instead of focusing on the other aspects of your business you need to focus on the infrastructure as well. What if your products get super popular? Not you'll need to work on scaling out your store which will cost a boatload in equipment and specialization.
But, in addition to the organizers that run these awesome events, Shopify actually did something about it. AFAIK they will be keeping the lounge after they move to Elgin, which is a nice gesture; it has become a hub to many people outside the company.
They're a paragon of the developer community and they host a variety of developer-related events on a regular basis, for example the recent Random Hacks of Kindness[1] event.
I've been dabbling in Go lately and Shopify seems like the only place in Ottawa that's using it to support their bottom line.
It's too bad I just missed out on that humanitarian hack-a-thon. Sounds like it would have been fun and worthwhile.
It would also be good to see Shopify Payments launch in the UK - hopefully this money will speed that up. Our clients are often concerned about the double commission (payment gateway + Shopify) on the lower plans, though I know it's money well spent and an equivalent bespoke/self-hosted ecommerce solution would be orders of magnitude more expensive. We have to explain this to our clients a lot though and a simplified and cheaper setup via Payments would be great.
We've watched Shopify since 2009 when we started our business and even in that short time the progress in what the platform offers has been outstanding, as has the support. Today we rarely use anything else for our clients as we don't need to, even 'high end' features are available when you take in to account the app store.
A lot of people here are commenting on the limitations of Shopify, which I agree exist, but the key thing is that they don't matter to a huge number of small/medium businesses. Shopify has enabled so many fantastic businesses that would have been otherwise stuck on crap platforms.
All this from a RoR developer that was dissatisfied with the existing market offering.
If you watch Tobias speak - interview on TWIT http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxBaDs0sGPw - you'll be enamoured with his vision, which this funding will let Shopify pursue.
This is a refined and enlarged version of a comment I posted on the OP.
I think a world with Shopify in it is a happier place than a world without, and I wish them all the success in the world.
http://podcast.rubyonrails.org/programs/1/episodes/tobias_lu...