The Giant {Jack} Killer
Shopify takes on the new King of Commerce
We had what we believed to be a brilliant idea, a top notch product, and pent up customer demand. In many ways, that was the easy part. After a year of product development, we then had to actually sell the product, both online and in person, and run our back office.
The battle is heating up for dominance in the virtual and physical worlds of commerce — and small and medium sized businesses like us are just some of the benficiaries.
Virtual
At Mizzen+Main, we decided to focus on e-commerce first before moving into physical retail. Within the last few years, there has emerged a variety of platforms, apps, and tools to make selling online quick, seamless, and generally painless. Shopify has arguably become the leader in helping successfully launch new businesses and grow them to sizable entities with their innovative and intuitive e-commerce platform. We’ve sold to nearly every state in the US and many countries abroad all with almost no significant investment in our development, back office, or infrastructure.
Shopify has enabled E-Commerce 3.0 and dramatically altered the path to success in starting a new business.
Physical
The ubiquitous Square has shifted entire paradigms on commerce itself. Swiping a credit card at a cash register and getting a two foot long receipt seems archaic at this point. The ease of use from a customer perspective is so high, few companies, or entrepreneurs, in the world could have achieved it. Jack Dorsey changed the way the world communicates in creating Twitter. Not content to stop there, he spent several years building out the infrastructure necessary to enable Square to work as beautifully as it does.It wasn’t just a coding or UX problem though; he had to battle the powerful payment industry that still operated with a 90's mentality. Jack’s new empire seems poised to dominate face to face commerce. Taking on the established system is something he is familiar with — he took on communication and is now taking on payments. Jack is most certainly a giant killer and some argue the new King of Commerce.
From food trucks and cabbies to non-profits and bake sales, Square fundamentally changed in person transactions.
Crossing Over
For small businesses setting up backend infrastructure and handling payments can be an enormous burden. Shopify radically simplified e-commerce, from payments and shopping carts to hosting and store fronts. Square took a process that was virtually impossible — accepting payments in person without a complex and expensive system — and made it beautiful, affordable, and most importantly simple.
However, in using Square for our limited in person transactions (trunk shows and other events), we’ve noticed several limitations in terms of connecting into our back office and handling accounting and inventory. Until now, we’ve not been able to use Shopify for in person transactions. We had a great virtual system and a beautiful physical system, but overall it was not a sustainable solution.
Turf Wars
Shopify is taking Jack head on with its just announced Shopify Point of Sale Software that will enable businesses to have one unified system for the virtual and physical worlds of retail. This means we can run one platform, decide which products we sell online vs. in person or both, and all transactions pull through all our systems in a uniform manner.
I have a tremendous amount of respect for what Shopify has done, historically and with this bold move. When Shopify launched, your options for selling online were an expensive and bulky solution that required several experienced developers or eBay. I’d be curious to know what the total volume of transactions across all Shopify enabled stores is — politicians can talk about job creation all day long, but Shopify has helped businesses create countless jobs and pushed the economy forward.It isn’t just their e-commerce platform and now POS, Shopify is now taking on payment gateways with its service, enabling store owners to use Shopify to actually accept the payment instead of a company like PayPal.
Shopify will become the dominant player for small and medium business when it comes to all elements of enabling commerce.
Many entrepreneurs and businesses see a “giant” and do their best to stay out of the way. “Let’s focus on what we’re good at” or “we can’t possibly compete in that arena!” is what far too many people and companies say to themselves on a regular basis.
What makes this upcoming battle all the more exciting is this is exactly the opposite of how both Jack Dorsey and Shopify think and operate. It’s an exciting time to be growing a young business and a part of E-Commerce 3.0. While it remains unclear the extent to which Shopify will push it’s in person system — will they push for food trucks and drivers to use it too or just retail stores with an online presence — it has become perfectly clear they are just getting warmed up.This battle is just beginning.
Entrepreneurs will be better for it. Consumers will have greater choice and access because of it. Most importantly, our economy will grow as a whole, creating even more jobs and opportunities.
Shopify may just take down a giant killer of its own.
