I actually helped my previous company migrate from Magento to BigCommerce, and found their offering incredibly compelling compared to Shopify. I do think BigCommerce is focused more on medium-sized businesses whereas Shopify is targeted towards smaller businesses or businesses that aren't really focused on their e-commerce side. My favorite feature of BigCommerce was the ability to run the site locally for development, using live product data from the site. I even made a few open source contributions to that framework, which was a nice change of pace compared to Magento development.
The main issue with BigCommerce is that they do not offer any compelling advantage over existing open source system. Moreover being a loss making entity like Shopify without any sticky system like marketplace which drives traffic, I doubt there is much value in it except that investors wants to cash-out given the current unrealistic stock market.
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.
> Its very easy to build a highly customized and resilient system using cloud offering combined with these open source systems.
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.
For those 100+ there are many companies and service provider which will help them built a highly customized and resilient system based on these open source that too with better flexibility and still very cost effective. The advantage offered by Shopify and Bigcommerce is good for companies with few SKU's or mom-pop kind of stores. If you really go through the links you can see the quality of the code and ease of use, its much better than what's offered by both Shopify and BigCommerce.
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.
> If you really go through the links you can see the quality of the code and ease of use
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.
There are many more option not just spree or saleor. Having not just studied but by building add-ons for shopify working with Shopify API including the new graphQL now I am sure it’s designed for mom-pop store trying to fit itself by custom coding into medium and large size. A medium or large size customer is better served with a custom solution built with open source base which provides all the necessary API and data models to start quickly including UI design see the storefrontUI and vue-storefront+magento.
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.
Shopify is serving multiple billion-dollar brands, and that’s a fact [1]
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.
>Shopify is serving multiple billion-dollar brands
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.
>Having not just studied but by building add-ons for shopify working with Shopify API including the new graphQL now I am sure it’s designed for mom-pop store
I don't know much about Shopify but if the following article is accurate, it's not just "mom & pop" stores:
I strongly disagree that Shopify is only good for "companies with few SKUs or mom-pop kind of stores". Perhaps that's where they started out, but their Plus offering is very solid these days and provides a good platform for retailers of all sizes.
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.
Having used shopify API and the new graphQL API I am sure shopify is for small business and then you need to rebuilt the system from ground up using partners to support any complex case. In Shopify collections and categories are not represented as graphs but as distinct entity relying on application code to make this link. Media management API is so worse than can be done with many opensource system like Saloer or Sylius or Spree. Same is the case when need to support multiple price lists for specific supplier or buyer. When it comes to data based security based on user role, one has to roll out their own system. After doing all that custom application code still do not have access to the API server code.
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.
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.
>depending on the whims of Shopify and BigCommerce.
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.
Shopify is profitable[1] even with the high levels of growth they are undergoing. There's little reason to think BigCommerce would be anything else.
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.
Sorry to burst your bubble Shopify is loss making except when it was itself a small service provider. In 2020 has a loss of 132 million dollars so far. It's a listed entity so you can check Income, Balance Sheet and Cashflow. The most important thing cashflow and Incomes both are negative for shopify. Since it's listing never made a single dime of profit. So please before putting a link to news verify on their annual reports [1].
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)
> So please before putting a link to news verify on their annual reports
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 company during the high-growth phase of their business, with a proven business model where the cost of revenue is less than the revenue gained. See their accounts on the link you posted.
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.
Met Brent at the BigCommerce partner summit a year or so ago. I can't think of a CEO I've met who is more open and accessible. He sat down at my table during the keynotes and asked for feedback during the breaks, went around the room and chatted about the product during lunch. Definitely fostered that culture with the full team, his exec leadership team all were equally inviting and open to feedback about the product and strategy. As SEC filings go, this one certainly makes me smile.
For SME/Enterprise, WooCommerce is not even listed on the Gartner quadrant [1] — so whilst the software might be fully capable and open-source, it's not represented at this level whereas BigCommerce and Shopify are.
The gartner quadrant is mostly pay to win, so who really cares about that one? I'd at least not make any decision solely, or to a large part, based on it.
they say they are #2. I thought Shopify and Woocomerce were #1 and #2 and they were a very distant third, or even fourth if Magento is to be believed. Or does WooCommerce not count as SaaS?
Yeah, I can't figure out what they're talking about there. There is no "SaaS ecommerce platform" category on BuiltWith (that I can find); none of the subcategories under the eCommerce category on BuiltWith has BigCommerce near the #2 position (https://trends.builtwith.com/shop).
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.
Just buy any of these stocks. Their PS is so high that they will always make numbers. Just buy their own product! (at 30+ price to sales, it makes sense!)
