Shopify is open for business
Posted by David June 05, 2006 @ 09:39 PM
We’re lagging the official announcement by a fair margin, but that won’t hold back our official word of congratulations for Jaded Pixel as they’ve launched Shopify. It’s instant-on stores that don’t smell like a candy bar left in your pocket in the mid-90’ies. Complete with its own templating engine, Shopify makes it silly easy to create great looking stores that doesn’t just follow a cookie-cutter format.
In Rails circles, Jaded Pixel is mostly known as the company starring Rails Core developer Tobias Lütke. The team has already been sharing a great many extractions from the work of Shopify. So if you’ve played with the template engine Liquid or installed the forum-system Opinion, you’ve been touched by Shopify (now isn’t that heart warming!).
Once again, major props to Tobi and crew for finally delivering on this massive undertaking.
This looks great. Does anyone know what if any benefits it offers over a Yahoo store? I know that Yahoo stores have a ton of features.
Business analysis anyone?
how is this better than substruct exactly? i see they’ve borrowed the content features and the customer response stuff now as well!
Why would anyone in their right mind want to run a commerce site on someone else’s server, on someone else’s domain and not be able to make any modifications to any of the code or markup? Oh wait, I forgot about kids who sell power ups they “earn” in video games to other kids even stupider than they are. Yeah OK go PayPal wooo
i think it’s quite appealing if u are a first time commerce person who know’s little about tech.
you can start up pretty easily and quickly with minimal outlay.
Wow, people, why so much negativity!
“Why would anyone in their right mind want to run a commerce site on someone else’s server”
Security, Maintainance, Constant Updates, Design, Law comformity, and Scalability.
That and the total control over the look and feel and even function of your shop with a dedicated easy to learn template language.
All that for zero dollars a month.
“Security, Maintainance, Constant Updates, Design, Law comformity, and Scalability.”
To be fair, each of these could equally well serve as negative arguments.
Still, the service does look pretty durned sweet.
The font default on “Opinion” is enormous (the font used on the Shopify forums). Do others really read stuff at this size? I understand Macs need fonts to be bigger (just to read them), but this is ridiculous.
This shop solution might look pretty, but it has a serious problem: from what I’ve seen in the screencast, it’s not obvious, to whom the buyer is giving his credit card info. I wouldn’t buy anything that way.
Vlad: Can you elaborate this?
I congratulate the developers for the launch. I have been watching and waiting.
As for some constructive criticism, how as a developer and seller of small ecommerce solutions for small business do I justify another person taking a cut? I can justify a few percent to credit card processors but I can’t justify to them someone else sucking profits. Paypal takes a few percent and now in order to use this service it is another few percent. Any plans for a flat fee structure that resellers could leverage? I think it has a different intended market than what I am thinking about but at least it’s something to think about for maybe the next release.
Congrats again and best of luck.
GQ: Huh? Macs need bigger fonts?
Bleh, who cares what he meant or how uninformed he is… font size is customizable. Non-problem solved.
Obviously there are valid criticisms of Shopify, but Whoopty Doo’s response doesn’t contain any of them. The only true thing he said was that the code doesn’t run on your own server. And whether that is a pro or a con depends on what you are trying to do.
what is the difference between shopify and the product that Paul Graham sold to Yahoo?
Probably, the coolest thing to have at shopify will be to have a full API stack to let website owners provide the same functionality of shopify at their site, to let their users create stores, which is completely transperant and the end users wouldn’t have a clue that it’s powered by shopify..then just watch your revenue grow like a nuke :)
And how many small e-commerce sites actually run on THEIR server? Usually they are cookie cutter solutions provided by their host just like shopify.
I salute this, and I’m trying to pitch it to my friends who have online stores.
tobi: I mean, anyone – including scammers – could create a site which looks that way. With conventional affiliate links the buyer is redirected to dealer’s website and can check it’s reputation (for example, search forums). With Shopify everything happens behind the scenes. The byuer is not redirected to dealer’s website, so he cannot see, who is really behind the deal. It could be a scammer, who delivers crap or just collects credit card numbers.
Let’s see how far this project will go. Their design is great :)
Security? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. All it takes is one vulnerability discovery and thousands (assuming they get that many clients) of stores could be affected in one fell swoop.
Maintenance and constant updates? What if I don’t like something they break in an “update” that was performed without my consent or the way they maintain it? That’s another non-feature.
Design? I guess if you find gradient filled boxes aesthetically appealing I can see how you might think this is somehow beneficial.
Law co[n]formance? What laws would those be? They’re certainly not going to file my sales tax forms for me.
If somebody tried something like this in PHP nobody would care, but they used Rails so hey it’s got to be the greatest thing ever 2.0.
Wow. Some interesting comments on this post. Personally having setup numerous Yahoo stores and messing with many “non-hosted” solutions I think this service holds some promise. For one, regardless of the technology used, the commission rates seem reasonable (3%). For a small ecommerce startup hoping just to make ONE sale this seems reasonable… I agree if you are currently operating an online shop doing a fair amount of sales I wouldn’t come right over to shopify. The way I look at it, it enables a small business owner to concentrate on the business and not the technology. I do agree that because it is using rails it is getting alot of attention … which my friends is a smart business move. Why develop in a framework which will not get any media attention…. rails is hot right now… and I hope these guys can sustainably ride the wave.
Good luck.
Sorry, but I’m rolling. Funniest thing I read 110 times all day. Bad Jon. Bad.
www.fivestores.com will also offer their free hosted store solution. Signup for beta invitation!
kool
back when e-commerce was cutting, I write shoppify in Zope! LOL. maybe u can keep it real with rails… ;-)
Tobi, Shopify looks great – is there any plans to include downloadable items -e.g jpgs ?