Shopify is, for all intents and purposes, the last breath small e-commerce businesses have before being absolutely suffocated by Amazon. Amazon is now operating at a scale that gives them operational, logistical, and economic efficiencies most small businesses can't even dream of. I think Shopify is doing an awesome job of bringing together a load of small businesses inside one platform so these smaller retailers can leverage some of these same efficiencies even without the scale Amazon has, and I think they're doing it in a super elegant way. I once heard someone from Shopify say something along the lines of, "If you've ever bought from an e-commerce business, and the experience didn't suck, then they probably use Shopify." I fully agree with this. The look and feel of the platform is phenomenal.
Now it's just a matter of who eats whose lunch first: Shopify or Amazon. Amazon has been the untouchable king of delivery logistics the past five years, but if Shopify is going to continue growing, I think it's pretty inevitable that they will begin offering shipping or delivery services similar to what Amazon offers for its third-party sales partners. Shopify will be able to leverage its entire network of small businesses to justify the fixed cost of setting up such a network, and they will ultimately try to rival Amazon in this aspect of e-commerce.
Likewise, I think it's inevitable that Amazon will try to build out a more well-rounded and equitable web platform for small e-commerce businesses much like Shopify. This will not only help Amazon's antitrust case by showing a "genuine" effort to support smaller digital retailers, but it will also help rectify the downright laughable blunder Amazon made in 2015 when it sold Webstore to Shopify for only $1 million, writing Shopify a first-class ticket into this space. At this point, Shopify has proven there is indeed a market for providing the web infrastructure for a collection of smaller businesses, and Amazon is not going to let Shopify go uncontested in this space for long.
So who will win? Will Shopify steal Amazon's competitive advantage and build out a logistics infrastructure first, or will Amazon steal Shopify's entire business and become a thriving marketplace for third-party e-commerce businesses? I'll never bet against Amazon, but it's a smackdown I'm really excited to see play out.
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