The dark side of Shopify

https://twitter.com/mattzollerseitz/status/1541994356521013248

by danpalmer • 4 years ago

782 217 4 years ago

m0llusk3• 4 years ago

Also sad that Shopify isn't all that good. Their scale enables them to have a community with helpful guides and videos and stuff, but the actual product is arguably less sophisticated than what competitors offer. What they have is a zinger of a name and a big marketing budget. Anyone in this space should really check out alternatives. Unless there is a specific plug in or use case you want to use there is not much good reason to choose Shopify.

Readywater• 4 years ago

What are some of the alternatives you’d recommend?

jdjdjdjdjd• 4 years ago

Bigcommerce

m0llusk3• 4 years ago

primarily volusion.com, but it is a big space and often one or two key features make an offering work for a particular enterprise

zippergz• 4 years ago

Sophisticated is not what is called for in a LOT of ecommerce setups. I have assisted employers and clients with Shopify, Bigcommerce, Miva Merchant, and selling on platforms like Amazon and eBay. For most "small business" style use cases, I find Shopify far better than the others, because it's a lot easier for the business owner (who isn't an ecommerce expert) to run, and they don't need or miss the flexibility that the others offer. Invariably it costs more to configure and run something like bigcommerce, and that's only justified if you actually need what they offer.

thanatos519• 4 years ago

Indeed.

An e-commerce site on which I have 4weekly subscriptions of multiple products has an astoundingly bad UX ... and it's driven by Shopify. Either Shopify's recurring order system is fundamentally broken, or this particular site is misconfigured.

In either case, it's a deficiency of Shopify.

flappyeagle• 4 years ago

Shopify has no recurring system. They are using a plug-in.

core-utility• 4 years ago

As stated, Shopify has no recurring subscription system (which is astounding since it seems basic enough for them to offer, but I guess they're getting profits either way). I've experimented with a few popular recurrence "apps" and I can say that one of the most popular ones was awful to setup and maintain. I chose a more indie option (Seal Subscriptions, if you're a Shopify store go check them out) and got much better results.

jamal-kumar• 4 years ago

What are your favorite alternatives, particularly if there is one that allows for use of a pin pad for in-person sales?

soared2• 4 years ago

Literally nobody uses Shopify because of its cms features. They use it because it quick cheap and easy to set up a really good looking ecom site that has tons of good integrations for shipping/business needs/etc.

jancsika• 4 years ago

Anyone in this space should really check out alternatives.

Please quickly name your top three. Then we can check the veracity by seeing how they get dissected by HN pundits.

m0llusk3• 4 years ago

It has been a while since I evaluated these, so this list is probably not all that good right now. That doesn't change the fact that Shopify is flat out not that good whether you are comparing features or price. And this is all the more reason to check out current alternatives available now instead of thinking you can get what you want from heated discussions with people on HN: volusion.com, ashopcommerce.com, bigcommerce.com are the first that come to mind. This is a big market so it might make more sense to make a list of the top dozen or so and then look more at the ones that offer features that have value for you.

basch• 4 years ago

https://www.cococart.co/

found here https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?query=commerce&status=...

https://www.techinasia.com/cococart-seed-funding

also https://techcrunch.com/category/ecommerce/

https://www.owler.com/company/shopify/competitors

disantlor2• 4 years ago

I make my living as the developer for a few large e-comm businesses that all use Shopify and it works really really well. I never get why people (devs especially) call out whatever feature they think Shopify should have without realizing that pretty much anything you could want to do is enabled by their API.

dismalpedigree• 4 years ago

Custom pricing for certain customers is a nightmare on shopify. I have built several sites and even made custom apps. I have figured out work arounds, but they are less than ideal. Do you have some ideas that I missed?

adventured• 4 years ago

Nortel syndrome takes over another would-be Canadian giant (what do I mean by that? read up on the crazy behavior of the bubble era Nortel; for Shopify there will be a pre bubble valuation crash era and a post valuation crash era).

cardy312• 4 years ago

Just because they’re Canadian doesn’t mean they’ll be Nortel. Nortel had one money making division and a bunch of money losing ones. Gross mismanagement ended them. Shopify looks very different than Nortel (or Blackberry) did.

AinderS4• 4 years ago

It's time to legally compel platforms above a certain (modest) size to treat their customers and users "fairly", transparently, and without discrimination. Because giving a competitive advantage (from economies of scale) to actors willing to sell their independence to some giant corporation is rapidly leading us to where we are at the mercy of those corporations for even the smallest commercial activities, such as buying or selling a book.

Such a state is incompatible with a free society, unless you redefine restrictions on freedom as only what is done by the government. A definition that is little comfort to businesses bankrupted by unaccountable corporations.

throw_nbvc1234• 4 years ago

It's time to legally compel platforms above a certain (modest) size

I personally don't agree with "modest" but having two (or more) classes of corporations to divide laws and regulations between seems like an obvious step in the right direction. Right now there seems to be "monopolies" and everything else. Obviously Amazon or Shopify are not the same as a family owned business; treating them as such should be the exception not the norm.

crmd• 4 years ago

It makes perfect sense that as a firm’s market power grows, it’s regulatory burden scales appropriately.

zdragnar• 4 years ago

Until it turns into regulatory capture, whereby the regulatory burden prevents others from growing their business beyond a certain point.

kache_• 4 years ago

Doesn't scale :P

majormajor• 4 years ago

"Transparently" has major issues for dealing with bad actors, which needs to be taken into account when crafting any regulation.

I would probably try to start with just making fairer appeals processes and such (some sort of third party arbitration system, in this case, is probably better than just companies getting to set their own individual and opaque and hard-to-comply-with policies).

AinderS4• 4 years ago

"Transparently" has major issues for dealing with bad actors

So I've been told. What I haven't been told is how telling a spammer that they were banned for spamming (instead of the opaque "breaking terms of service") helps them evade detection in the future. They already know they were spamming, and can be 99% sure that's what they were banned for. It's only the innocent that don't know what they did wrong.

rtsil• 4 years ago

And yet transparency is a major element when dealing with bad actors in the physical world in democratic countries. If a suspected murderer is brought to the courts, they have the right to be informed what charges are brought against them, and the right to request all relevant documents from the accusing party to defend themselves.

Why are Internet platforms unable to do that, other than it's too much of a hassle and makes our business unsustainable? Which may be a legitimate reasons for the platforms, but are not legitimate at all for society as a whole.

bawolff4• 4 years ago

This isn't facebook. Shopify is B2B. I assume there are contracts involved. If shopify is not holding up its end, there are already legal avenues to compel them.

indymike2• 4 years ago

If shopify is not holding up its end, there are already legal avenues to compel them.

The issue is that you can't use the standard, low cost venue for small b2b disputes (this one was over $7,000): the local small claims court. Most contracts will stipulate a convenient venue to the author of the contract (which may cost more than $7k to litigate if you are out of town). Federal court requires a bigger injury and won't hear your case. In many jurisdictions, business cannot self-represent in small claims, so even if it is available, it's expensive. You end up hiring outside counsel, even if you have lawyers as employees which raises costs a lot, and opens up the possibility of a suit where the awarded legal fees dwarf the amount in dispute.

tomrod• 4 years ago

I assume there are contracts involved. If shopify is not holding up its end, there are already legal avenues to compel them.

The answer to consistent bad behavior can't be "well, just sue!" because the US court systems are already underfunded and jam packed as is. It just doesn't work to (only) have breach of contract lawsuits in David v. Goliath (202X) suits.

AinderS4• 4 years ago

If a platform is big enough, it will write one-sided contracts permitting their abuse.

bel_marinaio• 4 years ago

I wish everyone could wrap their mind around one thing.

*THE SYSTEM WORKS AS INTENDED*

Anytime someone suggests a good idea like this or says "we should" you need to go back to the root of the problem. The system is designed to give all the breaks and funnel all $ to the top. That is the way corporations want it and they own the politicians.

This isn't government incompetence or some idea that you came up with. This idea will not be implemented because it would benefit the 99.5% to the detriment of the 0.5%

kitsune_• 4 years ago

I just read the entire Twitter thread. What a Kafkaesque nightmare.

soared2• 4 years ago

Why the hell would you continue using Shopify if they are freezing your accs/etc?

Put a banner up on your site saying the shop is down temporarily, rebuild a barebones version of the site just for ecom, etc.

Shopify needs to do better, but I can’t help but question the business decisions made by op.

ceejayoz• 4 years ago

The thread talks about preorders already sold via Shopify. Switching away doesn’t help with those.

LegitShady5• 4 years ago

they did switch - the issue were sales already made within shopify, and two charges to their account from shopify that shopify did not identify why they were taken such that the small business' bank considered them to be suspicious.

adrr4• 4 years ago

I don’t understand how shopify is predatory. Shopify isn’t a merchant processor, they don’t hold merchant funds. Stripe is the merchant processor for shopify payments. They are the ones that froze the payments. Freezing money has no benefit for Shopify.

tehwebguy3• 4 years ago

Shopify has operated as their own payment processor for a few years.

sarora27• 4 years ago

Note: I work in the payments space.

Shopify is one of Stripe's largest customers and a very heavy influencer of their roadmap (example: Stripe Treasury, BillPay (coming soon!), and more!)

adrr4• 4 years ago

Not yet. Still stripe. I assume their eventually do it as they seek larger merchants that will require interchange plus billing and not blended.

ZephyrBlu• 4 years ago

Shopify Payments is a Stripe wrapper.

cardy312• 4 years ago

Untrue. They use Stripe.

cheriot2• 4 years ago

Hazard of white labelling. If shopify brands the product and sells the product, they own the outcome.

Spivak• 4 years ago

Yeah but some things pierce the white label veil.

Grocery stores have been out of all sorts of products this year and the normal response isn’t “this is an outrageous failing of Kroger” it’s “Kroger isn’t able to source Wheat Thins because of various supply chain issues.” Same story with everything in the tech sector.

If you went to McDonald’s and they couldn’t process your order because Visa banned you then that’s not really on them. Or in a more individual level you probably don’t get told “well you should have picked a better car supplier” when you call off work because your car breaks down. Customers are also pretty understanding when shows or channels get yanked due to contract disputes.

The bigger issue seems to be that it wouldn’t have mattered who they went with and any financial institution would have yanked them after getting a chargeback from their bank.

Brystephor3• 4 years ago

I don't know how Shop Pay is engineered, but Shop Pay is Shopifys payment processing platform. I don't know if they're using another provider such as Stripe on the backend though or if they've gone through the PCI compliants.

With that said, just because you're not the one processing payments doesn't mean you're not the one holding it.

tehwebguy3• 4 years ago

I responded with an email restating that the First Sale Doctrine makes such a request both nonsensical and illegal, and asked a few more questions.

The rest of the thread notwithstanding, this is not what First Sale Doctrine does, at all!

rhester• 4 years ago

Instead of above, if replying (for the benefit of this community) why not explain how or why you disagree?

bawolff4• 4 years ago

I don't even see the above in the tweet thread, but i think its pretty obviously true that the first sale doctrine doesn't make it illegal for shopify to ask more about your business and where you are getting your products from. They don't need any excuse to ask that, they are allowed to ask their customers anything they want.

LegitShady5• 4 years ago

If you buy goods from an authorized place and sell them, you do not require any authorization or proof to sell those 'branded' goods, because first sale doctrine means that the original seller has exhausted their legal rights to control the sale and distribution of those items.

So it sort of is what first sale doctrine does. shopify is asking them to produce proof they have authorization to sell something they've already purchased and need no special rights to sell, regardless of whether they're branded or not.

KennyBlanken• 4 years ago

You're assuming his use of copyrighted and trademarked material is authorized.

They're selling books and even soaps with "deadwood" in the name, and they / the publisher (sounds like they're both run by him?) appear to have directly lifted the photo for the cover of one of the books:

https://mzs.press/The-Last-Western-Deadwood-and-the-End-of-A...

...from here: https://deadwood.fandom.com/wiki/Deadwood_(episode)?file=Sea...

My guess is that Seitz got nailed by trademark and copyright infringement claims and is now spinning a story about how his poor poor book shop is getting screwed over by the Big Evil Corporation, as witnessed by the very histrionic language he uses in his tweets.

tehwebguy3• 4 years ago

If you buy goods from an authorized place and sell them, you do not require any authorization or proof to sell those 'branded' goods, because first sale doctrine means that the original seller has exhausted their legal rights to control the sale and distribution of those items.

Right, but it doesn't make it illegal, as stated by the seller, for Shopify to have these requirements.

I'm giving the seller full benefit of the doubt that they were not selling anything that violates copyright / trademark law. The point is the doctrine still doesn't make Shopify's request or requirements illegal.

Thorrez3• 4 years ago

Shopify banning you for not producing documentation is not a violation of first sale doctrine.

Just like a web forum banning you for posting something annoying is not a violation of your constitutional freedom of speech.

The current law and constitution don't protect you from these actions.

hoten2• 4 years ago

Isn't this what lawyers are for? Seems like he's just spinning his wheels trying to get through at the customer support level.

lin83• 4 years ago

Hiring lawyers is probably going to cost more than the 7000 dollars taken from him. Large companies probably spend that much on their legal teams per hour.

ShakataGaNai2• 4 years ago

100% this is the problem with our current legal system. The little guy is going to have to pay, by the hour, for a lawyer. Where as shopify has, I'm sure, an entire team on the payroll. It costs shopify, in effect, nothing to battle this until the heat death of the universe (or the little guy runs out of money, which ever comes first)

bawolff4• 4 years ago

IANAL, but shopify is a canadian company not american, so if the seller wins wouldn't they also get legal fees - which makes it harder to bury them under legal fees?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_rule_(attorney%27s_f...

webmobdev• 4 years ago

I don't get this logic - why shouldn't he express his anger, frustration and annoyances with shopify publicly? If I was in his position I would do the same too, whether it gets me some response from Shopify or not. Even if I hired lawyers, I would still prefer to tell the public about shitty customer service, especially if it costs me money and time.

hoten2• 4 years ago

I think we both agree that complaining in public is cathartic. However, it isn't always the most productive nor protective (of your own emotional state) option available. If that is realized at all, it typically is only with hindsight.

jstgord2• 4 years ago

oh.. I had assumed this referred to the _technical_ dark side ..

Was just toying around with porting a friends very successful shopify store to another platform .. noticed the main home page weighed in at 89MB .. wowza. [ To be fair a lot of that was large pngs which are much smaller as jpg or webp ]

Scrolling thru the endless html/css/js page sources injected plethora of 'liquid' inclusions, I can only describe as otherworldly.

SquareWheel• 4 years ago

It would take some very large images to add up to 89MB, even if they were png. I'm guessing they were not sized correctly for the web.

jstgord2• 4 years ago

indeed ..

Top offenders were essentially 2048 pixel wide png photos which should have been 1024 wide jpgs at max - weighing 6MB instead of 250k for a difference the human eye probably cant detect : )

but.. more than that, just an endless stream of js html css inclusions .. I suspect 85% of which is dormant, 20% actually repeated, if I were to guess.

hehe

savrajsingh• 4 years ago

Fun fact: Shopify user accounts are a disaster. Customers cannot stay logged in to your site for more than 24 hrs.

SenHeng• 4 years ago

Maybe the shops you’re using have done that on purpose? I worked on a shopify storefront for the past year and our users stay logged in for an indeterminate amount of time.

We actually have a problem figuring out the exact amount of time their access token stays valid as it seems random, from a week to a month to 3 days.

CptFribble• 4 years ago

It's easy to shoot yourself in the foot with Shopify dev, especially since many merchants are non-technical and there are an unlimited number of very cheap Shopify "dev" shops that will paste anything you want into your theme with no regard for bloat.

Many people running brands, either professional digital marketers or small business owners, have absolutely no concept of page weight. I continually fight battles about this with the various ecomm brands my employer owns, and yet when a marketer updates the home page content somehow we still wind up with 20 MB above-the-fold autoplay movie files.

fallat• 4 years ago

Still surprised to this day there isn't some installer that just handles everything once you give it a webhost and the payment processor you want.

adrr4• 4 years ago

You can bring your own merchant account to any saas e-commerce site and not have to worry about getting your money frozen. Most banks offer merchant accounts and you just pay for a gateway like authorized.net. It’s going to be $30/m gateway and $30/m merchant account + setup fees.

ratww• 4 years ago

Yeah, that's how I used to do, and it was quite simple. I actually had much much more trouble with things like Recurly (whose API and packages are absolute garbage, IMO) and even Stripe than with the simpler gateways.

The only problems I had were solved with a few phone calls, as I had a bank manager very interested in doing business with the company I was working for.

But I was not in the USA/EU when I did this stuff, so I have no idea if Stripe and co. have improved things or not. For me (I later moved to Europe) it was a massive regression.

ShakataGaNai2• 4 years ago

Shopify should be scrambling to do a public post-mortem right now. They "Fixed" the situation within a few hours of the tweetstorm, showing that they know they f'd up. Shit happens - but how does shopify assuage small businesses that this won't happen to them next? A public apology, post-mortem and steps to make sure this never happens again.

nerdponx• 4 years ago

Unless this ends up being widely reported in the media, most of their customers and potential customers won't even hear about it, and it will only change the behavior of a small fraction thereof. Shopify doesn't have to do anything, and they know it.

runnerup• 4 years ago

Even if people read enough of these that Shopify stops seeing new merchant signups…I don’t think Shopify would understand WHY they’re not getting any new customers. They’d probably blame it on SEO or something.

LegitShady5• 4 years ago

it does not sound fixed to me. It sounds like they're still threatening this small business because the business' own bank flagged payments shopify took from their account, and were reversed, and shopify can't justify the charges, and is again threatening them. I don't see anywhere its resolved, just that they sent a reply.

Kiro• 4 years ago

You're overestimating the impact. This is just one of thousands of similar stories, none of which has gotten a public apology or post-mortem.

hackernewds2• 4 years ago

"sorry because we got caught"

nathanvanfleet• 4 years ago

I think their plan is to not acknowledge it so it doesn't blow up any further. Fix the problem and let this person tell their story until they run out of steam.

krmboya• 4 years ago

It seems to me companies beyond a certain size become so dysfunctional that no one person can handle a situation like this coherently. It's all different factions internally each pursuing their own objectives, protecting their turf or fighting for survival. It's likely there's not so much the customer service team could have done.

It's not like a small business where the owner themselves can guarantee high quality services

mrguyorama2• 4 years ago

It's not dysfunction, it's purposeful negligence, to save money.

Nobody at Google or Amazon will ever be fired for writing code that bans a few too many people, or labels legitimate users as fraudulent. It simply does not harm the company at all. A few people here on HN talk about how their small group went with an alternative, or they personally de-google'd, but for the rest of us, the option is cross your fingers and hope or just do what will happen when you get banned anyway.

chaostheory2• 4 years ago

What Shopify did wrong was that it wasn’t fast enough to respond with transparency. However, I do agree with them in requiring proof that 3rd party sellers have a legal right to sell “trademarked” or “branded” products especially for books. Amazon is so rife with fake products that it’s no better than eBay now. I can no longer impulse buy on Amazon. Depending on the product, I will check if there are 3rd party sellers using Amazon warehousing. If there’s any evidence of commingling, I just buy it elsewhere. We’ve been slowly using Target more and more since they have limits on inventory commingling.

LegitShady5• 4 years ago

I do agree with them in requiring proof that 3rd party sellers have a legal right to sell “trademarked” or “branded” products especially for books.

lets say a bookstore goes out of business and I buy their stock and sell it in my own store. Do I need proof that I have legal right to sell those books? First sale doctrine is established law - your discomfort with 'fake' books has nothing to do with anything - no one said anything about counterfeit goods. They're asking them to get some 'proof' they can sell merchandise they bought to sell.

chaostheory2• 4 years ago

Shopify doesn’t want potential fakes, and many customers like myself are sick of them. My discomfort with shady 3rd party sellers has a lot to do with it because I will take my business elsewhere, or eat up customer support hours and ramp up costs related to returns and exchanges.

It’s a free market. There are plenty of other online platforms to choose from that don’t care whether or not they sell fake garbage. You can also create your own online store if needed.

Apt username

askafriend• 4 years ago

As a customer, yes I will require proof before buying anything from your hypothetical store.

If Shopify can provide that assurance to me - I will transact on Shopify-hosted stores more with confidence.

tzs2• 4 years ago

The first sale doctrine (both the copyright first sale doctrine and the trademark first sale doctrine) doesn't apply to counterfeits.

ffguuficc• 4 years ago

I just was about to buy P100 filters on Amazon but all the listings say they are fake. Amazon combines the inventory of all the “same” product together and it lets fakes get through. For me, it’s not worth the risk of getting a faulty filter so I’m just going to Ace. As you said Amazon needs to crack down on these counterfeits.

amluto3• 4 years ago

I’m not entirely convinced that Shopify should be involved in IP enforcement. Amazon, despite all their claims to the contrary, acts as a retailer. When shopping at Amazon, Amazon is helping you find products and even makes it look like Amazon is selling them.

Shopify, in contrast, stays in the background. For the most part, unless I recognize the checkout flow or see the shoppay option, I, as a customer, don’t even know that Shopify is involved in a transaction. I’m not buying, in any material sense, from Shopify.

theturtletalks• 4 years ago

It's MC/Visa that's forcing Stripe and therefore Shopify to "police" for trademarked goods. MC/Visa are effectively determining what people can and cannot sell online. If the US accused you of selling trademarked goods, the burden of proof is on them. With MC/Visa, good luck getting a chance to even provide proof.

mattbrewsbytes• 4 years ago

I wanna bet Shopify’s legal department, and their budget for lawsuits, may disagree with your opinion. I have to imagine running a huge online store backend or payment processing system has huge fraud departments. If their platform allows fraudulent activity to run rampant (i.e. no checks on intellectual property, etc.) then many companies will go after them for diluting their brand and other types of legal matters. They can get money out of Shopify but they’re not going to get anything out of someone selling fraudulent product.

I agree with others in this thread - they should provide a layer of actual humans to help shop owners. And have a process for dealing with AI/ML gone rogue - like the address verification system in this example - where a set of humans can override and make sure a shop owner can continue to operate. Heck send someone to PR to help validate addresses every month.

potamic• 4 years ago

Even if there are no 3rd party sellers currently, it's possible they were active before and the current stock is still commingled. The only thing I use Amazon these days is for white-labeled Chinese goods. For everything else I prefer retailers with an end to end supply chain.

philliphaydon• 4 years ago

Buying from Amazon can be really frustrating to buy from. I was looking for wool the other day. 100% Australian wool. But it’s spun in China. 100% Canadian cotton yarn!!! Spun in China… it’s hard to find something not made in China even if you’re willing to pay for it.

LaundroMat• 4 years ago

I'm afraid the EU Digital Services Act (which states that platforms are not "liable for hosting content unless they know it is illegal") will lead to more problems like this.

Platforms will want to be safe, and will content block up-front, meaning it's the user who has to prove the legality of what they are selling. Good luck with that (as the Twitter thread demonstrates).

bawolff4• 4 years ago

Honestly, i strongly suspect there is more to this story.

If there wasn't, seems like it would be a slam dunk lawsuit.

I also dont understand why they continued to use shopify if shopify was keeping their money.

boringg• 4 years ago

Yeah I feel the same way. I read his comment thread but it didn't really add up and seemed written in an over the top way. Too me that means there is more to the store than this one side. We will never know the full account for sure.

memorable• 4 years ago

Alternative front-end version:

https://nitter.net/mattzollerseitz/status/154199435652101324...

ornornor2• 4 years ago

Thanks, so much better than twitter.

hackernewds2• 4 years ago

Why doesn't Twitter look like this? Now that Jack departed and the Musk dilemma, perhaps they can start disassociating from their troubled pasts

ipaddr2• 4 years ago

Shopify nickels and dimes you at every chance.

baskethead• 4 years ago

Companies need to spend more money on customer service. Period. End of story. But it's expensive so they would rather risk fucking over a percentage of their customers in hopes that they can contain any problems.

At some point, governments need to step in and regulate this once their customer support to customer ratio drops below a certain percentage. Otherwise it's a form of tax that creates extreme victims and its usually the small customers because big customers can always pick up the phone and call someone.

jollybean• 4 years ago

EBay, Paypal the same.

Admittedly, it's hard to be an intermediary, because the sheer amount of fraud you there. These companies become, due to liability etc. a kind of 'financial police' which isn't their role.

And then have to do that for every little jurisdiction.

I suggest that there needs to be way more transparency about their own terms, and paths to redress grievances.

But probably we need to change regulations a bit as well for e-commerce.

hklgny• 4 years ago

I suspect this is more of a stripe problem than a Shopify one. Having dealt with them shutting down our customer accounts on several occasions with no information as to why and ambiguous documentation requests that seem to go on forever, it seems perfectly plausible to me that this was just as frustrating for Shopify as it was the customer. Doesn’t mean they couldn’t have handled it better, but I’ve definitely experienced the other side of this story and it’s awful.

canucklady• 4 years ago

Nope, it's de rigeur for every ecommerce company. Shopify legal gets some BS email from some big corp, and they slap some vague technological solution on it ("flag anything thay says Star Wars"). Then they get a bunch of overworked, underpaid people to try and enforce their nonsense policy based on the results of the tool. Ultimately they get what they want, because they frustrate these problematic small customers into leaving the platform. Meanwhile they continue to bend over backwards for Jeffree Star or whoever because he'll have a hissy fit on Youtube if his flash sale doesn't happen at the right time.

ShamelessC• 4 years ago

Almost like tech solutions don’t always scale to handle international growth. That can’t possibly be right though… Growth is the only thing I’ve ever known. What will I do now? Nobody’s going to let me play with hundreds of millions of dollars if I merely make something that “works correctly”.

(Dead inside and being sarcastic, btw)

ojkelly• 4 years ago

This problem seems endemic to big tech platforms, particularly when money is involved. I remember hearing similar stories about PayPal a decade ago (still do for what it’s worth).

While I can understand the desire to not interact with a user of the platform (shopify, google, PayPal, etc), because of the cost, and because many are likely to be bots or actually fraudulent. It’s precisely at these edge cases when computers and automated performs the worst.

These are the situations where the scenario is imperfectly modelled in the system. Maybe the engineers didn’t think of the edge case, or an ML model never had training data to cover it.

Point is, it doesn’t matter. People problems need people solutions. Remediating edge cases involving people’s livelihoods strikes me as most likely a people problem.

When you’re asking a person or company to trust them in a business relationship into the future, such as by being their shopfront, there’s only so many you can destroy before word gets around. I haven’t used or recommended businesses to use PayPal for a decade, because I saw them time and again inflict pain and financial stress with no recourse.

As another example, look at the general sentiment around Google Cloud. Would you build a business on top of it? Does that include an exit strategy to multi-cloud, because you’re unsure if they’ll support the service you use?

If you can’t scale to provide a human to help other humans caught in the edge cases of your own system, then you need to acknowledge you’re causing harm.

A dog food company that kills a puppy every week, is really a puppy killing company that sells dog food.

It’s a matter of perspective yes, but if you got into it to help feed dogs, surely the last thing you would want to do is harm them?

And if you became aware your killing puppies, would it not be the top priority to ensure it never happens again?

imachine1980_• 4 years ago

What alternative for PayPal?, and what for cloud?( I know things like linode, but I mean big cloud).

tluyben22• 4 years ago

There are many alternatives for PayPal; stripe being one but there are many others as well that won’t totally screw you as merchant like PayPal does. I use a local one who actually defend me when there are chargebacks and I can visit and talk to a human in case of other issues.

42365767567• 4 years ago

What's the "general sentiment" around Google Cloud?

wodenokoto• 4 years ago

HN seems to think it’s impossible to get access to a human, but I’ve had Google engineers fix my Python code that inexplicably didn’t work in a cloud function.

johnywalks• 4 years ago

Not just Google Cloud, any google service in general. If you have a problem or one of their "AI" systems locks you out, then you're out. No way to resolve the issue.

IG_Semmelweiss• 4 years ago

Paypal lies and tells you you can take money out of a US account without linking, instead taking funds out via mailed check. But in fact it does not allow for this. The UX has a dark pattern that will lead you to think this option exists, but it will fail. Any mailed check attempt will end as an error.

Customer service escalation confirms its not possible to take funds out without bank link.

Instead of refunding 5k to customers and asking them to inconvenience themselves by paying again via ACH, we had to open a new bank account.

I repeat.

I went as far as opening a new bank account with a new banking institution that would be solely used to link to PayPal.

Do not link paypal to any core business accounts. You really should segregate your core business accounts from any linking, stripe etc or yodlee-type service, if you can help it.

Let the payment relationship be between your bank and your customer bank only.

No middle man. No surprises

TazeTSchnitzel• 4 years ago

You talk about automation, but a lot of these bad decisions are made by humans! Overworked and underpaid ones.

kamranjon• 4 years ago

This seems pretty damning and I had considered Shopify to start my own online store selling products that I make in the future.

I am curious if anybody has suggestions for good alternatives to Shopify for building an online store?

system2• 4 years ago

WordPress / Magento / OpenCart + Stripe / Authorize.net / BrainTree / Paypal. Why use Shopify and depend on it? Host your own stuff for nearly free ($2-5) and pay very little for the payment gateways.

Shopify charges additional 1% per transaction for 3rd party payment integrations. Weird.

Brystephor3• 4 years ago

I work in payments. I'd guess the 1% on top of 3rd party integrations is to encourage folks to go through Shop Pay, which is owned by Shopify.

As for why people don't self host, it's likely just easier not to. You start off on an easy platform because who knows if your business is gonna work, then the business grows and you're already on there so why self host when it's working right now? And you continue down that path until it doesn't anymore.

tomnipotent• 4 years ago

For most Shopify sellers, that 1% is still less than it would cost to pay the person to setup what you're suggesting. Really not weird at all.

matiasfernandez2• 4 years ago

This exact thing happened to us. We have a store located in Puerto Rico and Shopify would randomly stop payouts every 3-4 months or so because they needed to re-verify our owner address information. Apparently, most of Puerto Rico is not verifiable by their shitty address verification API, so it triggers the freeze every time it retries the verification. It was one of the most frustrating experiences I've ever had and cost us thousands of dollars.

Stripe also did the same exact thing for very similar reasons and at one point we had over $300,000 USD frozen with them, which was basically our entire monthly payroll expense. We had to explain to our bank why our accounts were suddenly drained. This one was worse than Shopify's since we actually never received any communications notifying that this was going to happen. At least we got an email from Shopify that we just hadn't noticed.

They're all broken. And Know Your Customer needs to eat shit and die.

thejosh2• 4 years ago

Address validation is the biggest piece of automation that needs to stop.

You're not going to stop people from misentering addresses, and many countries have terrible validation or streets that don't exist yet take forever to show. Or the system that suddenly decides to start doing validation doesn't actually accept valid addresses.

Companies think automation can handle it, but it's an absolute nightmare.

rexf• 4 years ago

Address validation is not 100% reliable, so systems should have an override "Yes, this is my address" option. Unfortunately many forms assume address validation is foolproof, so there is no mechanism for entering in your actual address. It just gets rejected.

As a customer, I wanted to buy something and the website wouldn't accept my address (since it wouldn't accept any "/" characters). Guess what? There are plenty of addresses in the US with "/", such as 50 1/2 Foobar Street. Address validation does not always work, so companies shouldn't act that way.

jessaustin• 4 years ago

...many countries have terrible validation...

In "federal-style" countries like USA, it is possible for some jurisdictions to have adequate validation while other jurisdictions (e.g. the rural county where I live) do not.

mrjin• 4 years ago

The problem was really why keeps validating an address if there was no change since marked as verified?

TacticalCoder• 4 years ago

You're not going to stop people from misentering addresses, and many countries have terrible validation or streets that don't exist yet take forever to show.

I live in a place where the official address changed: as in we got a letter (in 2016 I think) from the town hall saying "your address is now ... and you have to ask everybody to mail you at that new address". Well... Most utility bills' systems have been programmed in a way that make it impossible to keep the same "installation ID" (as in the ID on our electrical install) while changing the address. Somehow "the street got a new name" is a case that had never been planned.

The implications are wild (for example the bank refusing to open an account because the official, legal, address doesn't match the address on the utility bill and then the contry's IRS thinking there are shenanigans going on).

That's in a civilized, western EU, country.

It's Brazil (the movie).

urza9• 4 years ago

Bitcoin literally fixes this. Bitcoin is the first public infrastructure for sending money online without intermediaries and trusted third parties. This is the problem it solves, yet any mention of this on HN gets downvoted.

You can use something like https://btcpayserver.org/ and be your own payment processor with very little work.

Kind of frustrating that HN hates bitcoin so much, that even under link/article about small merchant getting harassed by shopify/stripe, they would rather downvote any mention of real solution..

HorizonXP• 4 years ago

I don’t know if BTC fully fixes this, but I agree that crypto in general is heading down the path that will likely fix this. And agreed, HN continues to hate crypto due to 99% of it being garbage, and ignoring the 1% that is actually revolutionary.

oldprogrammer2• 4 years ago

It may fix this particular problem, on one side of the transaction, but it creates new ones. What if I, as a purchaser, want to dispute my purchase? What if I was ripped off? What if the product was broken, not as advertised, etc. I like knowing there is recourse through chargebacks.

For example, I rented a vacation home last year, on VRBO, and the highly unusual contract (that was not shared until after the purchase) made me very uncomfortable. As an aside, I was also surprised that I was billed directly by the rental company via Stripe, rather than through VRBO. I requested a refund within an hour of booking.

For two weeks, I attempted to contact the rental company. I never received a single acknowledgement from them, and VRBO provided zero support. The only way I was able to get my money back was with a chargeback, showing my request for a refund within the cancellation window.

I am 100% confident that if this had been a bitcoin transaction I would have lost that money. I would also expect a rise in bad actors abusing that lack of recourse if bitcoin did increase in popularity for payment. In my mind, that is the challenge that crypto needs to solve before it can become widely adopted as a payment option.

theplumber6• 4 years ago

The main issue with crypto is the exchange rate and volatility. The local ATM gives you a shitty rate on bitcoin and by the time you spend it its value may be lower or higher by a big margin. The merchant may experience a similar issue.

brunes• 4 years ago

You're ignoring something critical here.

The whole reason these address validation and KYC measures exist is to protect against fraud. They aren't done "just for fun".

Please explain how bitcoin solves for that problem. Hint: it doesn't.

theplumber6• 4 years ago

Ohh so the old "paypal" issues are back. Fortunatrly there is a true peer to peer payment technology: "crypto". Unfortunately it's been hijacked by speculative "investors"

jwolfe• 4 years ago

And requires centralized exchanges subject to Know Your Customer regulations to get your money out as fiat.

NonEUCitizen• 4 years ago

Does Evertec (or other PR-based payment systems) have a solution for Puerto Rico businesses selling to customers outside Puerto Rico?

matiasfernandez2• 4 years ago

I don't know, but we've tried our hardest to migrate all of our software as far away from Evertec as possible. We're still stuck with their payroll software that still requires a Java Applet on Internet Explorer. It's horrible.

pikelet• 4 years ago

It's not just merchants (until reading this I actually had the impression that Shopify's intention was to protect merchants at all costs). I've heard many horror stories from other developers in the Shopify Partners Slack Community. For developers this is potentially even worse than it is for merchants, as many Shopify apps simply cannot be migrated to another platform (and your customers can't follow even if you are able to).

The stories I've seen appear to come under two scenarios.

1. A new developer builds their first app (significant up front time investment). Upon submitting their app, Shopify bans their account giving some vague reason such as 'developer's name matches that of a known terrorist' (are names globally unique now?) or 'we believe your business presents a level of risk that we will be unable to support'. Shopify doesn't explain beyond that, and further communication is impossible. All the developer's hard work and trust in the platform comes to nothing, and Shopify doesn't care.

2. Existing developers with successful apps are suddenly delisted from the app store or even shut down entirely. New installs are not possible. Shopify refuses to explain the reasoning. Months pass without any resolution as the developers lose users and revenue.

In the latter case, many partners suspected that these apps were being delisted due to competitors paying for services to flood their app with fake positive reviews, knowing that it would lead to the app being delisted. I don't what came of this situation; whether the matter was finally resolved or those affected just moved on; as I've seen nothing since (this was about 3 months ago). Shopify gave a few vague acknowledgements in Slack along the lines of 'we are taking this seriously, but can't offer details', but nothing more. The casual and/or secretive way Shopify dealt with these cases (where a developer's livelihood is at stake) makes me very worried that I could find myself in a similar situation at any time.

It's not even act first, ask questions later. It's simply act, case closed.

Shopify wasn't always like this. It's a recent trend.

sekl• 4 years ago

“developer's name matches that of a known terrorist”

Happened to my wife, who has an extremely common name, when ordering something online and the shipping company blocked her package. infuriating…

whatisweb3• 4 years ago

An option for a crypto payment system could make a difference for this seller and shift some of the power away from Shopify. They would have no way to block access to funds or restrict a willing customer from paying the seller for an item.

There should be an option for a payment provider that is a credibly neutral protocol.

urza9• 4 years ago

aaand get downvoted by HN crowd in 3, 2, 1.. :)

xmodem3• 4 years ago

That entirely depends on if shopify is still an intermediary in that scenario or not.

nibbleshifter4• 4 years ago

Unfortunately the "default" crypto payment acceptance providers people use are user hostile (Bitpay, Coinbase Commerce).

Other options (BTCPayServer) are available, but they need more work to integrate.

kweks2• 4 years ago

Sorry to hear about your situation. A lot of people have been pointing to the "roll your own" versions of e-commerce stacks.

We've been running e-commerce for the last six years, and have tried everything (woocommerce, open commerce, bigcommerce, magento, prestashop).

They are all light-years behind Shopify.

We've had bumps along the way with Shopify as well (similar problems to yours).

A few thoughts:

- Know who you are in bed with : Shopify Payments is actually Stripe Platform in most locations, and PayPal in Europe. We refuse to work with PayPal because of their predatory behaviour, so we choose not to use Shopify Payments in the EU.

- The Shopify Payments platform is for better or for worse a "start without friction, KYC later" experience. Be aware of what this entails.

- Get on RocketReach, find key people in Shopify relevant to your problem and send a succinct email asking for assistance. It's unblocked every problem we ever had

- Do the same with your merchant processors : Edwin from stripe actively reads HN, and can often provide assistance on Stripe related issues.

- Get lawyers. Not the Go-Sue-the-Pants-off-everyone lawyers, but business / commercial lawyers. Not only can they provide excellent advice for your business, they often spécialise in these types of situations to have conversations and results that you can't access individually.

At the end of the day, know your business partners and establish a relationship with them.

Using a combination of the above, we've survived competitors using fake C&Ds against our processors and platforms, amongst other things.

omnimus• 4 years ago

Are you sure about the paypal in europe? AFAIK you can set it up Stripe only if your country supports Stripe which most of EU does.

kweks2• 4 years ago

We use Stripe as our primary, when Shopify Payments became available in our region (France) it routed through Paypal.

I couldn't see any backend option to select the preferred Shopify Payments backend processor, but would be interested if you have insight into how to achieve this.

In what gives weight to the GP, we enabled Shopify Payments, confirmed it went through PayPal and switched back to Stripe to avoid the "process with PP for a week and then have them freeze your funds for 6 months" grind.

uxcolumbo• 4 years ago

Do you have more details why Shopfiy is light years ahead of the other ecommerce platforms you mentioned?

When you say you're running ecommerce - you mean your own shop or building ecommerce solutions for others?

jeromegv3• 4 years ago

Shopify surely has the highest amount of retailers for ecommerce. There might be more websites selling with magento, but when it comes to actual retailers being active right now, it’s the best and most popular option. Retailers don’t have the tech knowledge to roll out their own tech so it won’t be an open source DIY platform so most will start with shopify.

Their App Store is the biggest, which as we know from apple, it is quite important for your ecosystem. You want an advanced inventory tool? A 3pL? A new packing slip app? A new discount app? Any of the best apps out there that are actively developed are integrating with… shopify.

jstummbillig• 4 years ago

Idk.

I got scammed buying a NAS from a smb electronics shop recently. No one will ever know. No one cares.

Logically I think it's far more likely that big companies are compliant because they operate so much in the open and are under constant scrutiny. Every disgruntled customer has the potential to go viral and do enormous damage.

With the most empathic sigh: Shit happens. At big corps most of it. Relatively, probably not.

nickjj2• 4 years ago

The author mentioned they didn't like that transaction fees are not given back during refunds but unfortunately both Stripe and PayPal do the same thing. They started doing this a few years ago.

If someone buys your product for $100 and Stripe's fee is $3.20 and you issue a refund to someone you will refund the user $100 and Stripe keeps the $3.20 so that refund really cost you $3.20.

jeromegv3• 4 years ago

Yep. It’s very sad for the owner. And I empathize. But a lot of things they blame shopify for is actually the exact same across the ecommerce spectrum.

voiper1• 4 years ago

I understand that it's common practice, but here Shopify froze their ability to withdraw but still took orders.

tzs2• 4 years ago

To the processor and other entities such as the credit card companies and banks that are involved with processing the transaction there isn't much difference between a refund and charge. Both use most of the same resources on the same infrastructure the same way in the same amount.

If you had a deal where you were directly exposed to all the fees involved, what I'd expect is that you net fee on a transaction would be composed of fees from three different categories.

1. Per transaction fees that apply to both charges and refunds.

2. Fees proportional to the charge amount that apply to both charges and refunds.

3. Fees proportional to the charge amount that only apply to charges.

On a charge you'd pay the fees from all three categories. On a refund you might get back the fees from category #3 you paid on the charge, but you'd again pay the fees from category #1 and #2.

For example if you sell an item for price P and the fees from the three categories are F1, F2, and F3, your net gain on that transaction is P - F1 - F2 - F3. A refund transaction has a net gain of -P - F1 - F2 + F3. That would bring your total net for the combined charge/refund to -2 F1 - 2 F2.

This we should expect some net fee for a charge followed by a refund. For small transactions that net fee could be up to almost twice what the fee was for the charge alone.

Most processors though don't directly expose you to all the fees. That's because there are a bazillion different possible fees with each different subsets applicable to any particular transaction. So most processors expose a simplified structure based on averages over a large number of transactions across similar merchants. Most merchants prefer that.

When doing such a simplified fee structure, they could set charge fees based on the average for F1 + F2 + F3 and refund fees based on the average F1 + F2 - F3. But refunds should be much less frequent than charges, so it seems find to me when doing a simplified fee structure to just average the refunds in too, and just deal with fees on the charge side of things.

nickjj2• 4 years ago

Yeah, I wonder what provoked both Stripe and PayPal to start doing this after not doing it for like 10 years. They both did it pretty close to each other from what I remember.

dashesyan2• 4 years ago

I don't know about Stripe, but PayPal refunds PayPal fees if you refund the customer. Net amount in and net amount out are the same.

eurleif• 4 years ago

PayPal refunds PayPal fees if you refund the customer.

Your information is outdated. PayPal keeps the fees now. https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/20/20876570/paypal-refund-fe...

black_puppydog• 4 years ago

so, I get that shopify brings more to the table than just payment processing. but I'm surprised that nobody here has brought up regular SEPA payments and SEPA direct debits.

Of course they will only currently work in the EU, but fast, reliable, cheap direct transfer systems might be a model other countries could implement. The benefit is that banks (at least in Europe) are quite a bit more regulated than e.g. shopify and random lock-outs like this shouldn't be as common, or at the very least should have clearly defined escalation mechanisms.

In terms of customer protection as well, direct debits are super nice here in EU.

urza9• 4 years ago

Bitcoin fixes this. Ditch the intermediaries and 3rd parties.

https://btcpayserver.org

EDIT: aand get downvoted by HN crowd, how unexpected :)

xmodem3• 4 years ago

"0% fees" (apart from the transaction costs, which are significant, and never mind how long it takes the transaction to go through)

urza9• 4 years ago

First of all, nowadays you should be using Lightning Network, where fees are negligible and the payment is finalized and settled in order of seconds. BtcPay server has first class integration of Lightning Network.

And second, even if you want to accept onchain payments, current onchain fees are something $0.2 for confirmation within an hour. Which seems reasonable for having final settlement without any intermediary of your funds this fast. Compare this with traditional payment options like credit cards where you are waiting often times 30 days or even more for settlement and as the OP illustrates, you are at mercy of intermediaries.

nibbleshifter4• 4 years ago

BTC fees are basically fuck all these days, and you can just use LN.

jeromegv3• 4 years ago

Stop playing the victims on how the angry HN crowd has downvoted you.

You’re being downvoted because it’s a bookstore that sells to the general public. Less than 1% of their customers would know how to pay with bitcoin, and even for those who do, they would likely keep their bitcoin and hold them right now since it’s at a 1-year-low instead of using it as a currency.

It’s just not helpful to the situation. That’s why you’re being downvoted.

urza9• 4 years ago

Those are valid concerns, the "hodl only" mentality, the volatility.. but you do you see discussion about this on HN? No, just downvotes. I kind of doubnt that what you say is the motivation for the downvotes. I think if you are being honest, for some reason the HN users just hate bitcoin.

inflam52• 4 years ago

Shameless plug: this is exactly why I built SimpleStore. An easy way to manage a small store without worrying about the platform changing the rules on you. https://chrisdiana.github.io/simplestore/

chris_wot• 4 years ago

Holy crap… they made them take down a “Star Wars” section of their site? Why?!?

qwertyuiop_• 4 years ago

Does Shopify have a marketplace like Amazon ? Ie discovering the products and stores ? I’m struggling to understand the face of it.

RichardHeart• 4 years ago

Someone should invent a value transfer technology that routes around middlemen. Censorship resistant, so to speak.

npx13• 4 years ago

We are a very long established bricks and mortar Irish retailer that chose to go online with Shopify and use Shopify Payments for online transactions only at the beginning of the pandemic. Today, we were given essentially given a couple of days to provide invoices from all our suppliers and letters of authorisation from each of them.

We have a lot of suppliers all over Europe and this is the 14th July. To say that we are angry would be a gross understatement.

The dark side of Shopify

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