I think Shopify should experiment with a centralized market place where stores can opt in. If you opt in, your store items are listed in a central location searchable in at single point, just like Amazon. Your item listing in the central market place merely directs you to YOUR branded store, allowing you to check out, and see your other products. That solves a huge problem of visibility that Amazon has mastered.
The reason they don't do this is a legal one. As a platform, they are not liable for what their sellers sell (copyright/trademark/counterfeit), but as a marketplace they would have deeper liability. A central marketplace also gives brands the ability to search through all Shopify stores, basically giving them a search engine to find infringement.
How do I know this? 10 years in ecommerce with a different ecomm platform.
I’m not sure it would be easy. Large hosting platforms like GoDaddy, Wix or Squarespace could try this too, but it puts you inherently at odds with your own customers.
If I pay you to host my site where I sell my products, but you index me into the central sales portal in a bad way, I’ll be pissed. Kind of like restaurants on Seamless.
It comes off as deep rent seeking - instead of helping me succeed, which is the real mission of most of these types of companies, you’re creating an artificially scarce resource (visibility within your central sales index) where now I have to pay you an arbitrary tax just to compete.
But I propose it as opt-in. If you don't want in, you aren't. It would also be entirely free, Shopify makes money on the transactions, so there are no ads but they have incentive to make you visible. I don't see how this is a negative in any way for anyone. Your store still exists in its own container, and the portal is just to drive sales to you by increasing your visibility. You could theoretically carry on your business as if this never existed within Shopify. It is basically just a giant search engine that only works across the Shopify network. If Shopify won't do it, I am near willing to bet this business model is eventually put together by someone. Wordpress.com kind of does it...but it's only with content and they don't make money on transactions. They key is that there are no ads, it's a pure search engine, the money is made from the new transaction/hosting.
GoDaddy, Wix and Squarespace couldn't really afford to do it because they aren't e-commerce focused.
This can’t be true, since no matter how you create the central sales channel, some sellers will get preferential treatment in terms of screen placement, appearance in search results, etc. Shopify could not pay the costs of operating and advertising that central channel unless the most successful businesses are placed more prominently and lead to higher conversions of some kind (sellers converting, leading to less churn or more subscribers, etc.). But every Shopify customer will want that - so who gets it? If you do nothing and “the rich get richer” and there’s no way for an outsider to break into the better display rankings of the sales channel, you’ll just alienate customers and see a huge drop in new subscribers. This is often a big problem for ecommerce companies that facilitate online sales portals like Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and even more niche things like Shutterstock.
You either “democratically” allow customers to pay for placement in your central product index, or you force customers to pay via lost business and lost opportunity, which they’ll be embittered by. But there’s no such thing as a “free” way to centrally index across all hosted subscribers.
> “GoDaddy, Wix and Squarespace couldn't really afford to do it because they aren't e-commerce focused.”
I think you are very unfamiliar with the hosting industry. All three of those businesses make the strong majority of revenue from subscribers of ecommerce plans and all three have huge platform offerings and nationwide advertising campaigns targeted specifically at ecommerce customers.
All three of them practically only exist (in terms of revenue) because they are a good hosting option for small businesses that sell online.
It's a very slippery slope. The portal is gonna cost money to create, and have a lot of brand value in itself. How could you ever trust that they were never gonna start charging for the portal? Or leaning on you to list in the portal.
Shopify already has sales channels that users can tap into like Amazon and eBay. If they themselves build a marketplace, I'm sure those channels will opt out.
