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All organizations question their tech stack and choices. Healthy orgs do that constantly and proactively. Slower orgs usually raise these questions when the pain is starting to become unbearable. Regardless of what kind of organization you are part of, one thing is certain - changing your tech stack is expensive.
Altogether replacing your e-commerce solution - now that’s a huge investment - in time and money. Why would anyone do that?
The Renbizz team meets many mid-sized brands and retailers. In the past year we’ve been witnessing quite a few of them migrating from e-commerce platforms like Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Adobe Commerce (Magento) to Shopify. Shopify Plus, to be exact. In this article we’ll try to understand why they are doing so.
Shopify Welcomes External Innovation
Shopify will collect from app developers %0 (that’s zero percent!) revenue share on every app’s first $1,000,000, annually. Regarding their intentions of growing the ecosystem around their platform, that’s literally putting their money where their mouth is.
As a Shopify app, there’s so much you can do! The documentation for Shopify’s API spans so many topics and areas of the e-commerce merchant and customer journey. It seems that throughout the years they’ve made it possible to extend every bit of these journeys, while maintaining robustness and quality of service. Honestly, the docs can get overwhelming at times.
You can spin up a simple app in a matter of days, and get it deployed to the Shopify app store in pretty much the same timeframe. In 2022, Shopify bought Remix, one of the most prominent full-stack web frameworks around. This is yet another proof of their commitment not only to better merchant/customer experiences, but also to better developer experiences.
Yes. Developer experience. I can’t stress this more - if you’re an e-commerce platform and you want your ecosystem to grow, invest in your developer experience. Adobe Commerce’s learning curve is so steep, it took me over a week just to set up a local development environment. With Salesforce Commerce Cloud, it feels like they’ve intentionally created a wall of bureaucracy so high that it’s nearly impossible for a startup or an independent developer to cross.
External innovation does not happen in a vacuum. It sits on the shoulders of internal innovation. Salesforce Commerce Cloud used to be Demandware (which Salesforce acquired back in 2016). 8 years have passed and the systems are still somewhat separate. Most of Salesforce’s internal innovation happens on its core product, not on Commerce Cloud. That means Commerce Cloud users have a hard time enjoying the latest internal innovation at Salesforce.
Merchant-Led Internal Innovation
Shopify is in the business of making others do good business. Specifically, they make more money when their merchants make more money. The only way merchants make more money is when customers buy, and in order to buy, customers need to complete the most delicate part of the e-commerce journey: the checkout.
Shopify is constantly improving the checkout experience, trying to make it as frictionless as possible.
It started with the transition to one-page checkout. From a multi-touchpoint, slower-loading 3 page experience (information -> shipping -> payment), to a slick single page experience that’s a delight for customers.
One-page is nice. However, there’s still so much friction in manually entering all of your details (even though modern browsers auto-fill this information, it never seems to “simply work”).
What could be simpler than that? One-click checkout. Shopify did the reasonable thing to do and realized they have such a vast network of stores - why not utilize its size and make it better for every store in it as the network grows? With Shop Pay (150M signed up customers), shoppers no longer need to enter their information, or shipping address, or payment details - they click a button. That’s it.
I wish this would become the standard in everything we do. One-click Uber to my home. One-click invest and balance my portfolio. One-click candle-light dinner… you get the point.
In an off-the-record conversation I recently had with a Shopify employee, I learned they are now working on zero-click checkout! Now that’s a revolution.
Laughs aside, this strategy pays off. At least that’s what Shopify is claiming. In a study they conducted with a “Big Three Management Consulting Company” (why not disclose the firm’s name? Or the study’s results?), they found out that the conversion rate for Shopify stores exceeds the competition’s. Average of 15% more checkout conversions. That’s many more dollars for their merchants.
It’s Just a Faster Time-To-Market
E-commerce brands that want to grow have to constantly innovate. A crucial part of innovation is the ability to experiment fast and try things out. Scale them if they work, dump them if they don’t. A brand just can’t afford spending too much time and money on ventures that might not be worth it - and that is why experimenting has to be light on both these resources.
For these reasons, Renbizz takes pride in the fact we can set up an end-to-end rental offering on a brand’s existing e-commerce in just 2 weeks time, while eliminating any inventory commitment or risk.
So if you’re a brand or a retailer, with an idea for something that would help your business grow, and you’d like to try it out - what are your options with the different e-commerce platforms?
If you’re on Salesforce Commerce Cloud, you’ll need to speak with an agency (must be a Salesforce certified agency!), go through endless meetings (billed hourly!) to define the exact specification of your proposed product and have them jump through hoops to get the platform to do what you want (every hoop is billed on its own, btw). I wouldn’t call this the most agile or moderately-price process around.
Adobe Commerce Cloud, though, is way easier. It’s an open source platform, and there are quite a lot of folks on Fiverr and Upwork that would work their magic to make your dreams a reality. Some specialized agencies as well. From personal experience, I wouldn't brag about the development process itself. Magento is written all in PHP…. not the most modern of web technologies.
Now with Shopify, you’re lucky. Shopify developers are everywhere and come in many different forms - freelancers, agencies, and some brands even employ in-house Shopify devs! This is a direct result of Shopify’s efforts to grow their ecosystem.
Let’s take Nike for example. They wanted to try out a sub-brand for home gym equipment for athletes - Nike Strength. Their brand’s main website (and all of its international market variants) does not run on Shopify. Yet they decided to deploy Nike Strength on Shopify Plus. Quicker, easier, cheaper, does not require heavy internal politics and bureaucracy for making changes on an existing live platform. There is some criticism on the website’s “basic” design (they used Shopify’s default theme, Dawn), but hey, if it looks nice and works and brings in the revenue - can’t really complain.
What’s next?
We’ve seen different reasons why Shopify is the market leader in the world of e-commerce platforms, and what steps are they actively taking to keep their dominance in this field.
For me personally, in my everyday work as CTO at Renbizz, I keep getting reassured that we’ve made the right bet on choosing Shopify Plus as the first e-commerce platform on which we integrate our product. I have a hunch that we’re going to see more and more brands making this transition.
If you’re a brand that’s considering making this move, and still have some concerns - talk to me. I’d love to connect and throw in my 2 cents on the topic.
