BigCommerce S1(sec.gov) |
BigCommerce S1(sec.gov) |
In case a company use magento [1], Saleor [2], Sylius [3], Shuup [4], Solidus [5], Spree [6] combined with vue-storefront [7], storefront UI [8] and openflutttercommerce app [9] the amount of efforts to build a highly resilient and functional system is cheaper with complete control over customer, supply chain, pricing, product, marketing, sales and promotion data. Also the efforts will be similar to using shopify, bigcommerce with more cost-savings. Indeed shopify itself use many components from rails eco-system built by Spree and Solidus community.
Its very easy to build a highly customized and resilient system using cloud offering combined with these open source systems. So I do not see why a mid-size business will choose shopify or bigcommerce. They are good for mom-pop shops and simple commerce, but for unique shopping experience they fall short and better to build customized one with complete control.
[1] https://github.com/magento/magento2
[2] https://github.com/mirumee/saleor
[3] https://github.com/Sylius/Sylius
[4] https://github.com/shuup/shuup
[5] https://github.com/solidusio/solidus
[6] https://github.com/spree/spree
[7] https://github.com/vuestorefront/vue-storefront
For you, maybe.
Odds are for every person with the knowhow to do this, there are 100+ who don't even know what "open source" is, let alone have the skills and understanding to even attempt what you describe.
Even among those who know what it is and might consider doing it, some portion rather spend their time selling their products (aka making money) rather than doing a bunch of things that might get them ready to make money at some point in the future.
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.
Most commerce companies don't want or need complete control. They want a unique look and feel (which Shopify/BigCommerce gives) but beyond they they want reliability and ease of integration with things like stock control.
[1] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200212005238/en/Sho...
2019-12-30:
Total Revenue: 1.578173 billion dollars
Operating Income : -141.147 million dollars
Net Income: -124.842 million dollars (i.e. loss of 125 million dollars)
To this month (TTM):
Total Revenue: 1.727692 billion dollars
Operating Income: -178.590 million dollars
Net Income: -132.120 million dollars (i.e. loss of 132 million dollars)
I highly doubt that. Which ones do you have in mind?
It's an awesome TypeScript/NestJS/Vue modular e-commerce FOSS.
and Michael is a great stweard too, can't recommend it enough: https://github.com/vendure-ecommerce/vendure/
[1] https://ok.commercetools.com/hubfs/Images/Website/EN/Webinar...
They do note later in their document that their competitors include Magento, Shopify, and WooCommerce.
I almost scrolled by and didn't care except for your comment, which surprised me quite a bit. The number of Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento sites I've had to do some amount of work on over the years more or less tracks with BuiltWith's stats. I've never worked on a BigCommerce site.
The link I had in my comment was to their 2019-12-30 financial release to the SEC. It has the same 2019 information you have: Net income (loss): (124,842)
But that includes their selling and marketing expenses of over $400M, and their cash and cash equivalents at hand went from $1.97B (2018) to $2.46B (2019).
They are making lots of money and they have good accountants. Astonishing..
That’s true their accountant are good at sugar-coating the bad state of company, negative cashflow along with net income loss which is consistently increasing since listing. Not making one dime in profit and still claim profitable business.
For $1 revenue they spend more than $1, so sorry they are loss making company not profitable and on top due to negative cash-flow much worse.
The numbers speaks for itself without sugar coating that shopify is loss making venture. As long as investors money through stocks will keep coming they will survive and will be bought out by someone one day to cash-out those investors. Anyways with cost of borrowing 0, sooner or later someone will acquire it.
They are a "loss making venture" because they are investing in growth. That's why the cash-at-hand is important - if it's low then one can question if they can cut expenses quickly enough. That's the difference between WeWork (unprofitable, not much cash, unclear what they could cut to make profits) and Amazon 10 years ago (unprofitable, lots of cash, easy to see places to cut to make profits)
Shopify have over 2 years of expenses as cash just sitting there, and they can cut the marketing by 10% at any point and become profitable. That's why investors have confidence in them, and it's why customers can have confidence too.
This isn't a hard balance sheet to read - it's a rapidly growing business with plenty of resources they are investing in growth. That's the same situation Amazon was in for years - "unprofitable" because all their revenue was going into the business.
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.
Your are right except an exception Shopify might be used in some very small parts of big brands with few SKU's. For moderately large SKU most use flexible systems and shopify or BigCommerce is not one of them. Indeed like many companies even if one small division in one country of an MNC or brand is using BigCommerce or Shopify they will add their logo on their site to show they have this big brand as their customer.
Having worked for many multi-national brand can say they use Magento, Hybris, Demandware (now salesforce commerce) more than Shopify or BigCommerce.
Indeed even all those brands can be served better by open source multi-channel commerce system whose source code they control, otherwise they might have same issue when Oracle and IBM stop investing in ATG and WebSphere commerce platform. Indeed many of our old customer moved to in-house system as ATG, WebSphere commerce and even hybris cannot keep pace with the fast paced changes required in multi-channel commerce. Shopify and BigCommerce will need to primarily serve their SaaS customers and being limited by single code-base for all customers, cannot serve the needs of individual brands or multi-nationals that effectively. Even if they come with a program to provide on-premise or deployment option on a cloud of customers choice, given domain expertise they still will not be able to provide that flexibility offered by customized solution.
So for those brands its a better choice if they retain control of their core multi-channel commerce platform than leave to the whims of Shopify or BigCommerce which are anyways not that flexible and all the additional functionality needs to be developed in-house with partner using plugins or extensions.
That article is absolutely bang on, We Make Websites is one of the best in the business when it comes to Shopify.
Disclaimer: my company has worked with WMW on a number of projects, including Hasbro (which last time I checked weren’t particularly “mom and pop”).
