Of anyone in commerce, Shopify is the undeniable behemoth. They’ve made commerce accessible for independent merchants. All good, right? Not entirely…
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~~ Background ~~ As some background, Shopify is an end-to-end commerce platform. This means that they have to provide a full suite of services out-of-the-box. With limited resources in the early days, they couldn’t build it all.
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Introducing… the Shopify App Store. Launched in 2009, the App Store allowed others to build new features for Shopify, make them accessible to Shopify merchants, and make money. Startups and developers went to work.
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The App Store blossomed

Developers and startups flocked, many of which built entire businesses on top of it.
It was a thriving community.Show this thread -
Shopify benefited tremendously from this ecosystem. Developer partners provided critical functionality since the earliest days. With them, Shopify would not be what it is today. For context, Shopify is now worth $80B+.
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Anyone familiar with the history of Shopify knows this: It has been built by partners.
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But as Shopify grew, they had a decision to make: Prioritize openness and commit to empowering the community. -or- Replicate these apps as their own products, sell them, and drive direct revenue.
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What was their decision? Twofold: 1/ Publicly commit to being open: thus incentivizing more partners to build on them. See their post on “community over competition”https://www.shopify.com/partners/blog/business-competition …
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2/ Clone the most profitable apps: putting those partners either out of business or at a significant disadvantage.
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Effectively, Shopify uses app partners as their R&D engine. Anyone too successful gets cloned. *The problem: you don’t know until it’s too late.* Shopify has been telling you they are here to support you the entire time.
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~~ Let’s take a look at some prominent examples ~~ In 2013, Shopify launches as Shopify Payments, their own payment processor amidst an ecosystem of 100s of other payment processors. Fun fact: Stripe powers this; accounting for a large % of Stripe’s total volume.
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Then comes: Shopify Shipping (2015) Shopify Capital (2016) Shopify Arrive, order tracking (2017) Shopify Fraud Protect (2018) Shopify Email Marketing (2019) ...
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Shopify Fulfillment (2020) Shopify Subscriptions (2020) Shopify POS (2020) Shopify Balance, cards & bank accounts (2020) Shopify Installments (2021) ... and much more.
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Few are safe from Shopify cloning their products. Marketing tools would surely be far enough outside their core focus, right? Not anymore. Shopify has an entire suite of marketing tools.
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Shopify will rarely “kick out” anyone directly due to the PR backlash. Instead, they put restrictions that drive superiority to their own product. Mailchimp received so many data limitations that it had to break up with Shopify (April 2019).
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That said, rebuilding Mailchimp is pretty darn hard. Shopify learned that lesson. After realizing this, they “made up” with Mailchimp and lifted the restrictions (Oct 2021). I can’t imagine how tough this was for Mailchimp and the thousands of Shopify merchants using them.
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~~ The Bolt Story ~~ Bolt was founded in 2014 with a vision to build the world’s most delightful checkout. An early focus (2016) was Shopify, given their growth and traction. We built our product and signed up droves of merchants who loved it.
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Like many Shopify app startups, we were helping improve the Shopify ecosystem. Checkout was a sore spot of theirs for many years.
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Then something interesting happened. Shopify’s checkout got an uplift. It was just like Bolt.
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But that’s not all. Then Shop Pay launched (2017). It was Bolt’s seamless one-click authentication flow almost exactly.
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Shopify was copying Bolt. Even still, I held onto the hope that we would simply let the best product win. Their philosophy is “community over competition.” And any time we spoke with them, they reassured us of this.
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We kept building features, making checkout even better. … And then one day we got an interesting email:pic.twitter.com/TBIJHn62Jz
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Harley - Shopify’s COO - wanted to meet. We had our call a couple days later, and he told me he had some bad news and some good news.
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The bad: they were banning all external checkout providers on Shopify. The good: he believed in Bolt and wanted to make us the only exception to that rule
I felt honored and hopeful.Show this thread -
Harley’s ask: in order to be a good partner we should unwind our Shopify integrations. i.e. turn off Bolt on all our Shopify merchants. In turn, they’d work with Bolt on a formal partnership. We wanted to be a formal Shopify partner badly. So, we followed instructions.
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1 by 1, we turned off our customers on Shopify. I reassured our team, who had poured so much into our customers, that it was for the best. The COO had said explicitly that they wanted to partner. Quickly, nearly 100 customers that we had spent 4yrs cultivating were turned off.
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What happened next was a rude awakening to the world of business. We followed the instructions. And then… Harley never answered back.
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I sent countless emails with no replies. Here I send a reply explaining what we'd need to make Bolt's checkout work with Shopify. *Note: I say it's a subpar merchant experience due to the API restrictions we faced; I'm not saying Bolt is a subpar experience.pic.twitter.com/F0wWWNnkl1
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We were ghosted time and time again. For years, I kept up the optimism.
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