[HN Gopher] The dark side of Shopify
___________________________________________________________________
The dark side of Shopify
Author : danpalmer
Score : 687 points
Date : 2022-07-09 12:57 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| m0llusk wrote:
| Also sad that Shopify isn't all that good. Their scale enables
| them to have a community with helpful guides and videos and
| stuff, but the actual product is arguably less sophisticated than
| what competitors offer. What they have is a zinger of a name and
| a big marketing budget. Anyone in this space should really check
| out alternatives. Unless there is a specific plug in or use case
| you want to use there is not much good reason to choose Shopify.
| zippergz wrote:
| Sophisticated is not what is called for in a LOT of ecommerce
| setups. I have assisted employers and clients with Shopify,
| Bigcommerce, Miva Merchant, and selling on platforms like
| Amazon and eBay. For most "small business" style use cases, I
| find Shopify far better than the others, because it's a lot
| easier for the business owner (who isn't an ecommerce expert)
| to run, and they don't need or miss the flexibility that the
| others offer. Invariably it costs more to configure and run
| something like bigcommerce, and that's only justified if you
| actually need what they offer.
| Readywater wrote:
| What are some of the alternatives you'd recommend?
| m0llusk wrote:
| primarily volusion.com, but it is a big space and often one
| or two key features make an offering work for a particular
| enterprise
| jdjdjdjdjd wrote:
| Bigcommerce
| thanatos519 wrote:
| Indeed.
|
| An e-commerce site on which I have 4weekly subscriptions of
| multiple products has an astoundingly bad UX ... and it's
| driven by Shopify. Either Shopify's recurring order system is
| fundamentally broken, or this particular site is misconfigured.
|
| In either case, it's a deficiency of Shopify.
| flappyeagle wrote:
| Shopify has no recurring system. They are using a plug-in.
| [deleted]
| dannyw wrote:
| That's on Shopify, not them.
| core-utility wrote:
| As stated, Shopify has no recurring subscription system
| (which is astounding since it seems basic enough for them to
| offer, but I guess they're getting profits either way). I've
| experimented with a few popular recurrence "apps" and I can
| say that one of the most popular ones was awful to setup and
| maintain. I chose a more indie option (Seal Subscriptions, if
| you're a Shopify store go check them out) and got much better
| results.
| WheatM wrote:
| soared wrote:
| Literally nobody uses Shopify because of its cms features. They
| use it because it quick cheap and easy to set up a really good
| looking ecom site that has tons of good integrations for
| shipping/business needs/etc.
| jancsika wrote:
| > Anyone in this space should really check out alternatives.
|
| Please quickly name your top three. Then we can check the
| veracity by seeing how they get dissected by HN pundits.
| basch wrote:
| https://www.cococart.co/
|
| found here https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?query=commer
| ce&status=...
|
| https://www.techinasia.com/cococart-seed-funding
|
| also https://techcrunch.com/category/ecommerce/
|
| https://www.owler.com/company/shopify/competitors
| m0llusk wrote:
| It has been a while since I evaluated these, so this list is
| probably not all that good right now. That doesn't change the
| fact that Shopify is flat out not that good whether you are
| comparing features or price. And this is all the more reason
| to check out current alternatives available now instead of
| thinking you can get what you want from heated discussions
| with people on HN: volusion.com, ashopcommerce.com,
| bigcommerce.com are the first that come to mind. This is a
| big market so it might make more sense to make a list of the
| top dozen or so and then look more at the ones that offer
| features that have value for you.
| [deleted]
| disantlor wrote:
| I make my living as the developer for a few large e-comm
| businesses that all use Shopify and it works really really
| well. I never get why people (devs especially) call out
| whatever feature they think Shopify should have without
| realizing that pretty much anything you could want to do is
| enabled by their API.
| dismalpedigree wrote:
| Custom pricing for certain customers is a nightmare on
| shopify. I have built several sites and even made custom
| apps. I have figured out work arounds, but they are less than
| ideal. Do you have some ideas that I missed?
| disantlor wrote:
| It's definitely easier to discount pricing than it is to
| increase dynamically.
|
| The wholesale store functionality has customer based price
| lists. I've also added products to cart with a discount
| amount as line item property, which is then picked up and
| discounted by line item script. Some concern there with
| people manipulating it but I think it's pretty theoretical
| and there are ways to combat that. Both those require Plus
| though.
|
| They announced the new backend pricing API/web assembly
| script thing a couple weeks ago that seems like it will
| solve this issue for real.
|
| Similarly to how the subscription stuff was pretty janky
| with apps until the selling plan stuff. That said, it got
| the job done even if it wasnt ideal, and now they have a
| good solution. I prefer that model to just rolling out a
| bunch of half baked features.
|
| Responding more to the parent than you now, but in most
| cases if a business claims to critically need some specific
| feature, I wonder if they are not just married to the
| specific solution they have in mind and not the underlying
| problem. But if they really do need a specific thing, then
| certainly looking for the platform that offers it makes
| sense.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| What are your favorite alternatives, particularly if there is
| one that allows for use of a pin pad for in-person sales?
| matiasfernandez wrote:
| This exact thing happened to us. We have a store located in
| Puerto Rico and Shopify would randomly stop payouts every 3-4
| months or so because they needed to re-verify our owner address
| information. Apparently, most of Puerto Rico is not verifiable by
| their shitty address verification API, so it triggers the freeze
| every time it retries the verification. It was one of the most
| frustrating experiences I've ever had and cost us thousands of
| dollars.
|
| Stripe also did the same exact thing for very similar reasons and
| at one point we had over $300,000 USD frozen with them, which was
| basically our entire monthly payroll expense. We had to explain
| to our bank why our accounts were suddenly drained. This one was
| worse than Shopify's since we actually never received any
| communications notifying that this was going to happen. At least
| we got an email from Shopify that we just hadn't noticed.
|
| They're all broken. And Know Your Customer needs to eat shit and
| die.
| theplumber wrote:
| Ohh so the old "paypal" issues are back. Fortunatrly there is a
| true peer to peer payment technology: "crypto". Unfortunately
| it's been hijacked by speculative "investors"
| jwolfe wrote:
| And requires centralized exchanges subject to Know Your
| Customer regulations to get your money out as fiat.
| thejosh wrote:
| Address validation is the biggest piece of automation that
| needs to stop.
|
| You're not going to stop people from misentering addresses, and
| many countries have terrible validation or streets that don't
| exist yet take forever to show. Or the system that suddenly
| decides to start doing validation doesn't actually accept valid
| addresses.
|
| Companies think automation can handle it, but it's an absolute
| nightmare.
| jessaustin wrote:
| _...many countries have terrible validation..._
|
| In "federal-style" countries like USA, it is possible for
| some jurisdictions to have adequate validation while other
| jurisdictions (e.g. the rural county where I live) do not.
| rexf wrote:
| Address validation is not 100% reliable, so systems should
| have an override "Yes, this is my address" option.
| Unfortunately many forms assume address validation is
| foolproof, so there is no mechanism for entering in your
| _actual_ address. It just gets rejected.
|
| As a customer, I wanted to buy something and the website
| wouldn't accept my address (since it wouldn't accept any "/"
| characters). Guess what? There are plenty of addresses in the
| US with "/", such as 50 1/2 Foobar Street. Address validation
| does not always work, so companies shouldn't act that way.
| curiousgal wrote:
| Try living in a newly built building. Every developer seems
| to be under the impression that if an address doesn't exist
| in the Google maps API, then it doesn't exist at all.
| nibbleshifter wrote:
| Or streets subdivided into clusters of houses with their
| own numbering systems for legacy reasons.
|
| "4 Blah Terrace", "4 Foo View", and "4 Bar Lawn" are all
| within 100m of each other, have the first half of the
| postcode the same, etc.
|
| Google Maps/etc can't handle this at all.
| thejosh wrote:
| Or subdivided houses are common here in Australia, where
| it's suddenly 11B Some Street.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > You're not going to stop people from misentering addresses,
| and many countries have terrible validation or streets that
| don't exist yet take forever to show.
|
| I live in a place where the official address changed: as in
| we got a letter (in 2016 I think) from the town hall saying
| _" your address is now ... and you have to ask everybody to
| mail you at that new address"_. Well... Most utility bills'
| systems have been programmed in a way that make it impossible
| to keep the same "installation ID" (as in the ID on our
| electrical install) while changing the address. Somehow "the
| street got a new name" is a case that had never been planned.
|
| The implications are _wild_ (for example the bank refusing to
| open an account because the official, legal, address doesn 't
| match the address on the utility bill and then the contry's
| IRS thinking there are shenanigans going on).
|
| That's in a civilized, western EU, country.
|
| It's Brazil (the movie).
| nibbleshifter wrote:
| > That's in a civilized, western EU, country
|
| This feels a lot like Germany (from experience).
| mrjin wrote:
| The problem was really why keeps validating an address if
| there was no change since marked as verified?
| urza wrote:
| Bitcoin literally fixes this. Bitcoin is the first public
| infrastructure for sending money online without intermediaries
| and trusted third parties. This is the problem it solves, yet
| any mention of this on HN gets downvoted.
|
| You can use something like https://btcpayserver.org/ and be
| your own payment processor with very little work.
|
| Kind of frustrating that HN hates bitcoin so much, that even
| under link/article about small merchant getting harassed by
| shopify/stripe, they would rather downvote any mention of real
| solution..
| theplumber wrote:
| The main issue with crypto is the exchange rate and
| volatility. The local ATM gives you a shitty rate on bitcoin
| and by the time you spend it its value may be lower or higher
| by a big margin. The merchant may experience a similar issue.
| urza wrote:
| There are some ways how you can solve this. You can convert
| to and from stablecoins. You can use hedging and use cfd or
| futures to keep your bitcoin on stable fiat value.
| Depending on what you need, this can be done on exchange,
| with some payment gateway or even trustlessly via smart
| contracts.
| theplumber wrote:
| I'm talking about the reality and in the real world the
| solution you propose does not exist. For some reasons
| stablecoins do not seem to be used outside few online
| exchangers.I can't find them available at the local atm.
| urza wrote:
| All the solutions I mentioned do exists and are used
| daily by thousands. And no, atms are indeed not the place
| to exchange bitcoin for stablecoins.
| oldprogrammer2 wrote:
| It may fix this particular problem, on one side of the
| transaction, but it creates new ones. What if I, as a
| purchaser, want to dispute my purchase? What if I was ripped
| off? What if the product was broken, not as advertised, etc.
| I like knowing there is recourse through chargebacks.
|
| For example, I rented a vacation home last year, on VRBO, and
| the highly unusual contract (that was not shared until after
| the purchase) made me very uncomfortable. As an aside, I was
| also surprised that I was billed directly by the rental
| company via Stripe, rather than through VRBO. I requested a
| refund within an hour of booking.
|
| For two weeks, I attempted to contact the rental company. I
| never received a single acknowledgement from them, and VRBO
| provided zero support. The only way I was able to get my
| money back was with a chargeback, showing my request for a
| refund within the cancellation window.
|
| I am 100% confident that if this had been a bitcoin
| transaction I would have lost that money. I would also expect
| a rise in bad actors abusing that lack of recourse if bitcoin
| did increase in popularity for payment. In my mind, that is
| the challenge that crypto needs to solve before it can become
| widely adopted as a payment option.
| theplumber wrote:
| Consider crypto payments as cash payments and the
| problem(your expectations from a payment provider) is
| "solved"
| throwsjdhsj1234 wrote:
| Or for services/goods that requires this kind of leeway,
| use an escrow.
|
| Yes it does introduce a third party, but the point is
| that compared to the current system there is no other
| option for the many cases in which you don't need don't
| want to use an escrow, the payment processor invariably
| act as such and can shutdown your business at will.
| urza wrote:
| I agree that this is still a challenge that needs to be
| solved in better ways. There are some solutions possible.
| For example OpenBazaar used 2-of-3 multisig escrow. Bisq is
| using security deposits, limits and reputation. For some
| large transactions there are legal escrow services. But for
| small regular transactions with most merchants, there is no
| good standardized solution so far. You just have to do your
| research about about the counterparty and trust the
| merchant as far as transaction goes.
| HorizonXP wrote:
| I don't know if BTC fully fixes this, but I agree that crypto
| in general is heading down the path that will likely fix
| this. And agreed, HN continues to hate crypto due to 99% of
| it being garbage, and ignoring the 1% that is actually
| revolutionary.
| ecopoesis wrote:
| "'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman
| who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party."
|
| It doesn't matter if 1% of cryptocurrency useful and not a
| scam: because 99% of it is, if you use crypto you're going
| to get scammed.
| urza wrote:
| That's why I say bitcoin and not crypto.
| theplumber wrote:
| If you use money you're going to get scammed
| anonymousab wrote:
| The key is that the vast supermajority of your
| interactions with fiat won't be at high risk of being a
| scam.
| theplumber wrote:
| Because you are familiar with fiat/cash and its risks and
| you use crypto only for "crypto" stuff not to buy your
| groceries.
|
| You won't send cash to someone you don't really trust,
| would you? How is crypto different? With paypal you get
| some "security" with the tradeoff that sometimes you
| won't get it(i.e you get scammed either as buyer or
| seller) and many times it just pissesoff both the sender
| and receiver using "fraud detection" and treating both as
| criminals.
| adventured wrote:
| Nortel syndrome takes over another would-be Canadian giant (what
| do I mean by that? read up on the crazy behavior of the bubble
| era Nortel; for Shopify there will be a pre bubble valuation
| crash era and a post valuation crash era).
| cardy31 wrote:
| Just because they're Canadian doesn't mean they'll be Nortel.
| Nortel had one money making division and a bunch of money
| losing ones. Gross mismanagement ended them. Shopify looks very
| different than Nortel (or Blackberry) did.
| [deleted]
| pikelet wrote:
| It's not just merchants (until reading this I actually had the
| impression that Shopify's intention was to protect merchants at
| all costs). I've heard many horror stories from other developers
| in the Shopify Partners Slack Community. For developers this is
| potentially even worse than it is for merchants, as many Shopify
| apps simply cannot be migrated to another platform (and your
| customers can't follow even if you are able to).
|
| The stories I've seen appear to come under two scenarios.
|
| 1. A new developer builds their first app (significant up front
| time investment). Upon submitting their app, Shopify bans their
| account giving some vague reason such as 'developer's name
| matches that of a known terrorist' (are names globally unique
| now?) or 'we believe your business presents a level of risk that
| we will be unable to support'. Shopify doesn't explain beyond
| that, and further communication is impossible. All the
| developer's hard work and trust in the platform comes to nothing,
| and Shopify doesn't care.
|
| 2. Existing developers with successful apps are suddenly delisted
| from the app store or even shut down entirely. New installs are
| not possible. Shopify refuses to explain the reasoning. Months
| pass without any resolution as the developers lose users and
| revenue.
|
| In the latter case, many partners suspected that these apps were
| being delisted due to competitors paying for services to flood
| their app with fake positive reviews, knowing that it would lead
| to the app being delisted. I don't what came of this situation;
| whether the matter was finally resolved or those affected just
| moved on; as I've seen nothing since (this was about 3 months
| ago). Shopify gave a few vague acknowledgements in Slack along
| the lines of 'we are taking this seriously, but can't offer
| details', but nothing more. The casual and/or secretive way
| Shopify dealt with these cases (where a developer's livelihood is
| at stake) makes me very worried that I could find myself in a
| similar situation at any time.
|
| It's not even act first, ask questions later. It's simply act,
| case closed.
|
| Shopify wasn't always like this. It's a recent trend.
| sekl wrote:
| "developer's name matches that of a known terrorist"
|
| Happened to my wife, who has an extremely common name, when
| ordering something online and the shipping company blocked her
| package. infuriating...
| jstgord wrote:
| oh.. I had assumed this referred to the _technical_ dark side ..
|
| Was just toying around with porting a friends very successful
| shopify store to another platform .. noticed the main home page
| weighed in at 89MB .. wowza. [ To be fair a lot of that was large
| pngs which are much smaller as jpg or webp ]
|
| Scrolling thru the endless html/css/js page sources injected
| plethora of 'liquid' inclusions, I can only describe as
| otherworldly.
| SquareWheel wrote:
| It would take some very large images to add up to 89MB, even if
| they were png. I'm guessing they were not sized correctly for
| the web.
| jstgord wrote:
| indeed ..
|
| Top offenders were essentially 2048 pixel wide png photos
| which should have been 1024 wide jpgs at max - weighing 6MB
| instead of 250k for a difference the human eye probably cant
| detect : )
|
| but.. more than that, just an endless stream of js html css
| inclusions .. I suspect 85% of which is dormant, 20% actually
| repeated, if I were to guess.
|
| hehe
| raihansaputra wrote:
| I'd hazard it's mostly images and/or the plugins the store
| has installed to track conversions and / or extend the
| Shopify store. I do admit plain Shopify stores/themes are
| quick and lightweight, and the plugins are to blame, but I
| also point at Shopify for blocking some easy features to be
| supplanted by plugins.
| savrajsingh wrote:
| Fun fact: Shopify user accounts are a disaster. Customers
| cannot stay logged in to your site for more than 24 hrs.
| SenHeng wrote:
| Maybe the shops you're using have done that on purpose? I
| worked on a shopify storefront for the past year and our
| users stay logged in for an indeterminate amount of time.
|
| We actually have a problem figuring out the exact amount of
| time their access token stays valid as it seems random, from
| a week to a month to 3 days.
| CptFribble wrote:
| It's easy to shoot yourself in the foot with Shopify dev,
| especially since many merchants are non-technical and there are
| an unlimited number of _very_ cheap Shopify "dev" shops that
| will paste anything you want into your theme with no regard for
| bloat.
|
| Many people running brands, either professional digital
| marketers or small business owners, have absolutely no concept
| of page weight. I continually fight battles about this with the
| various ecomm brands my employer owns, and yet when a marketer
| updates the home page content somehow we still wind up with 20
| MB above-the-fold autoplay movie files.
| soared wrote:
| Why the hell would you continue using Shopify if they are
| freezing your accs/etc?
|
| Put a banner up on your site saying the shop is down temporarily,
| rebuild a barebones version of the site just for ecom, etc.
|
| Shopify needs to do better, but I can't help but question the
| business decisions made by op.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The thread talks about preorders already sold via Shopify.
| Switching away doesn't help with those.
| LegitShady wrote:
| they did switch - the issue were sales already made within
| shopify, and two charges to their account from shopify that
| shopify did not identify why they were taken such that the
| small business' bank considered them to be suspicious.
| fallat wrote:
| Still surprised to this day there isn't some installer that just
| handles everything once you give it a webhost and the payment
| processor you want.
| adrr wrote:
| You can bring your own merchant account to any saas e-commerce
| site and not have to worry about getting your money frozen.
| Most banks offer merchant accounts and you just pay for a
| gateway like authorized.net. It's going to be $30/m gateway and
| $30/m merchant account + setup fees.
| ratww wrote:
| Yeah, that's how I used to do, and it was quite simple. I
| actually had much much more trouble with things like Recurly
| (whose API and packages are absolute garbage, IMO) and even
| Stripe than with the simpler gateways.
|
| The only problems I had were solved with a few phone calls,
| as I had a bank manager very interested in doing business
| with the company I was working for.
|
| But I was not in the USA/EU when I did this stuff, so I have
| no idea if Stripe and co. have improved things or not. For me
| (I later moved to Europe) it was a massive regression.
| chris_wot wrote:
| Holy crap... they made them take down a "Star Wars" section of
| their site? Why?!?
| whatisweb3 wrote:
| An option for a crypto payment system could make a difference for
| this seller and shift some of the power away from Shopify. They
| would have no way to block access to funds or restrict a willing
| customer from paying the seller for an item.
|
| There should be an option for a payment provider that is a
| credibly neutral protocol.
| urza wrote:
| aaand get downvoted by HN crowd in 3, 2, 1.. :)
| xmodem wrote:
| That entirely depends on if shopify is still an intermediary in
| that scenario or not.
| nibbleshifter wrote:
| Unfortunately the "default" crypto payment acceptance providers
| people use are user hostile (Bitpay, Coinbase Commerce).
|
| Other options (BTCPayServer) are available, but they need more
| work to integrate.
| dperot wrote:
| AinderS wrote:
| It's time to legally compel platforms above a certain (modest)
| size to treat their customers and users "fairly", transparently,
| and without discrimination. Because giving a competitive
| advantage (from economies of scale) to actors willing to sell
| their independence to some giant corporation is rapidly leading
| us to where we are at the mercy of those corporations for even
| the smallest commercial activities, such as buying or selling a
| book.
|
| Such a state is incompatible with a free society, unless you
| redefine restrictions on freedom as only what is done by the
| government. A definition that is little comfort to businesses
| bankrupted by unaccountable corporations.
| kache_ wrote:
| Doesn't scale :P
| majormajor wrote:
| "Transparently" has major issues for dealing with bad actors,
| which needs to be taken into account when crafting any
| regulation.
|
| I would probably try to start with just making fairer appeals
| processes and such (some sort of third party arbitration
| system, in this case, is probably better than just companies
| getting to set their own individual and opaque and hard-to-
| comply-with policies).
| rtsil wrote:
| And yet transparency is a major element when dealing with bad
| actors in the physical world in democratic countries. If a
| suspected murderer is brought to the courts, they have the
| right to be informed what charges are brought against them,
| and the right to request all relevant documents from the
| accusing party to defend themselves.
|
| Why are Internet platforms unable to do that, other than it's
| too much of a hassle and makes our business unsustainable?
| Which may be a legitimate reasons for the platforms, but are
| not legitimate at all for society as a whole.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| AinderS wrote:
| > "Transparently" has major issues for dealing with bad
| actors
|
| So I've been told. What I _haven 't_ been told is how telling
| a spammer that they were banned for spamming (instead of the
| opaque "breaking terms of service") helps them evade
| detection in the future. They _already know_ they were
| spamming, and can be 99% sure that 's what they were banned
| for. It's only the innocent that don't know what they did
| wrong.
| hiptobecubic wrote:
| Because people want to know _why_ they were considered to
| be spamming. Then next time they will make sure not to do
| it that way.
| AinderS wrote:
| > Because people want to know why they were considered to
| be spamming.
|
| You're arguing against a suggestion no-one has made. I'm
| proposing to tell them what they did wrong, not how they
| were caught.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Presumably the point is that the spammer operates many
| identities and can systematically determine details about
| the spam detection system by observing which of their
| identities get banned.
| viraptor wrote:
| I've dealt with moderation before. The immediate response
| is something like "I wasn't spamming." or "Prove it."
| Basically, just saying "you're banned for spamming" is
| the same as saying "you're banned" - both spammers and
| unfairly banned people will follow the same path from
| there.
| semanticist wrote:
| To really do anything, you'd need to know which specific
| emails/interactions broke the rules, which would give
| people trying to find the very edge of acceptability useful
| information.
|
| "You're being TOS'd because your email titled 'Foo' on the
| 3rd of July breaks our spamming rules" tells you that your
| email titled 'Bar' on the 2nd didn't, and you know what you
| did differently between them and now you know how far you
| can push before being caught.
|
| It's a bad situation - ideally good actors could get useful
| feedback to help avoid accidentally crossing a line, but
| bad actors will absolutely abuse any kind of margin thy can
| find.
| bel_marinaio wrote:
| I wish everyone could wrap their mind around one thing.
|
| * _THE SYSTEM WORKS AS INTENDED*_
|
| Anytime someone suggests a good idea like this or says "we
| should" you need to go back to the root of the problem. The
| system is designed to give all the breaks and funnel all $ to
| the top. That is the way corporations want it and they own the
| politicians.
|
| This isn't government incompetence or some idea that you came
| up with. This idea will not be implemented because it would
| benefit the 99.5% to the detriment of the 0.5%
| crmd wrote:
| It makes perfect sense that as a firm's market power grows,
| it's regulatory burden scales appropriately.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Until it turns into regulatory capture, whereby the
| regulatory burden prevents others from growing their business
| beyond a certain point.
| treeman79 wrote:
| Bingo
| [deleted]
| throw_nbvc1234 wrote:
| > It's time to legally compel platforms above a certain
| (modest) size
|
| I personally don't agree with "modest" but having two (or more)
| classes of corporations to divide laws and regulations between
| seems like an obvious step in the right direction. Right now
| there seems to be "monopolies" and everything else. Obviously
| Amazon or Shopify are not the same as a family owned business;
| treating them as such should be the exception not the norm.
| bawolff wrote:
| This isn't facebook. Shopify is B2B. I assume there are
| contracts involved. If shopify is not holding up its end, there
| are already legal avenues to compel them.
| indymike wrote:
| > If shopify is not holding up its end, there are already
| legal avenues to compel them.
|
| The issue is that you can't use the standard, low cost venue
| for small b2b disputes (this one was over $7,000): the local
| small claims court. Most contracts will stipulate a
| convenient venue to the author of the contract (which may
| cost more than $7k to litigate if you are out of town).
| Federal court requires a bigger injury and won't hear your
| case. In many jurisdictions, business cannot self-represent
| in small claims, so even if it is available, it's expensive.
| You end up hiring outside counsel, even if you have lawyers
| as employees which raises costs a lot, and opens up the
| possibility of a suit where the awarded legal fees dwarf the
| amount in dispute.
| abigail95 wrote:
| don't most of these sites, like Shopify, require
| arbitration for disputes?
|
| or do you worry about actually enforcing an arbitration
| decision?
| indymike wrote:
| Enforcing arbitration is usually pretty easy - most of
| the time the company will honor the decision. It's when
| they don't that is the problem, or where the situation is
| not a contractual dispute that can be arbitrated.
| AinderS wrote:
| If a platform is big enough, it will write one-sided
| contracts permitting their abuse.
| tomrod wrote:
| > I assume there are contracts involved. If shopify is not
| holding up its end, there are already legal avenues to compel
| them.
|
| The answer to consistent bad behavior can't be "well, just
| sue!" because the US court systems are already underfunded
| and jam packed as is. It just doesn't work to (only) have
| breach of contract lawsuits in David v. Goliath (202X) suits.
| [deleted]
| black_puppydog wrote:
| so, I get that shopify brings more to the table than just payment
| processing. but I'm surprised that nobody here has brought up
| regular SEPA payments and SEPA direct debits.
|
| Of course they will only currently work in the EU, but fast,
| reliable, cheap direct transfer systems might be a model other
| countries could implement. The benefit is that banks (at least in
| Europe) are quite a bit more regulated than e.g. shopify and
| random lock-outs like this shouldn't be as common, or at the very
| least should have clearly defined escalation mechanisms.
|
| In terms of customer protection as well, direct debits are super
| nice here in EU.
| ojkelly wrote:
| This problem seems endemic to big tech platforms, particularly
| when money is involved. I remember hearing similar stories about
| PayPal a decade ago (still do for what it's worth).
|
| While I can understand the desire to not interact with a user of
| the platform (shopify, google, PayPal, etc), because of the cost,
| and because many are likely to be bots or actually fraudulent.
| It's precisely at these edge cases when computers and automated
| performs the worst.
|
| These are the situations where the scenario is imperfectly
| modelled in the system. Maybe the engineers didn't think of the
| edge case, or an ML model never had training data to cover it.
|
| Point is, it doesn't matter. People problems need people
| solutions. Remediating edge cases involving people's livelihoods
| strikes me as most likely a people problem.
|
| When you're asking a person or company to trust them in a
| business relationship into the future, such as by being their
| shopfront, there's only so many you can destroy before word gets
| around. I haven't used or recommended businesses to use PayPal
| for a decade, because I saw them time and again inflict pain and
| financial stress with no recourse.
|
| As another example, look at the general sentiment around Google
| Cloud. Would you build a business on top of it? Does that include
| an exit strategy to multi-cloud, because you're unsure if they'll
| support the service you use?
|
| If you can't scale to provide a human to help other humans caught
| in the edge cases of your own system, then you need to
| acknowledge you're causing harm.
|
| A dog food company that kills a puppy every week, is really a
| puppy killing company that sells dog food.
|
| It's a matter of perspective yes, but if you got into it to help
| feed dogs, surely the last thing you would want to do is harm
| them?
|
| And if you became aware your killing puppies, would it not be the
| top priority to ensure it never happens again?
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| You talk about automation, but a lot of these bad decisions are
| made by humans! Overworked and underpaid ones.
| imachine1980_ wrote:
| What alternative for PayPal?, and what for cloud?( I know
| things like linode, but I mean big cloud).
| tluyben2 wrote:
| There are many alternatives for PayPal; stripe being one but
| there are many others as well that won't totally screw you as
| merchant like PayPal does. I use a local one who actually
| defend me when there are chargebacks and I can visit and talk
| to a human in case of other issues.
| wawjgreen wrote:
| local Stripe? local "one" means what?
| tluyben2 wrote:
| A local provider/company of processing payments online.
| Local meaning near me.
| [deleted]
| franga2000 wrote:
| +1 for using local providers for critical infrastructure,
| especially financial stuff. If something like this happens
| to me and I can't achieve anything through support channels
| (which is already unlikely), I can get on a train and go
| bang on the provider's door within 3 hours.
| [deleted]
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| Paypal lies and tells you you can take money out of a US
| account without linking, instead taking funds out via mailed
| check. But in fact it does not allow for this. The UX has a
| dark pattern that will lead you to think this option exists,
| but it will fail. Any mailed check attempt will end as an
| error.
|
| Customer service escalation confirms its not possible to take
| funds out without bank link.
|
| Instead of refunding 5k to customers and asking them to
| inconvenience themselves by paying again via ACH, we had to
| open a new bank account.
|
| I repeat.
|
| I went as far as opening a new bank account with a new banking
| institution that would be solely used to link to PayPal.
|
| Do not link paypal to any core business accounts. You really
| should segregate your core business accounts from any linking,
| stripe etc or yodlee-type service, if you can help it.
|
| Let the payment relationship be between your bank and your
| customer bank only.
|
| No middle man. No surprises
| 42365767567 wrote:
| What's the "general sentiment" around Google Cloud?
| johnywalks wrote:
| Not just Google Cloud, any google service in general. If you
| have a problem or one of their "AI" systems locks you out,
| then you're out. No way to resolve the issue.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| HN seems to think it's impossible to get access to a human,
| but I've had Google engineers fix my Python code that
| inexplicably didn't work in a cloud function.
| Cederfjard wrote:
| What tier support was this, and how long did you have to
| wait?
| memorable wrote:
| Alternative front-end version:
|
| https://nitter.net/mattzollerseitz/status/154199435652101324...
| ornornor wrote:
| Thanks, so much better than twitter.
| hackernewds wrote:
| Why doesn't Twitter look like this? Now that Jack departed
| and the Musk dilemma, perhaps they can start disassociating
| from their troubled pasts
| skybrian wrote:
| I don't see the improvement? Nitter has smaller text and is
| in dark mode. It seems slightly harder to read.
|
| Maybe it's what you're used to.
| valvar wrote:
| The main difference is the amount of JS bloat. Twitter
| takes many seconds to load and navigation is sluggish.
| ornornor wrote:
| Try both twitter and nitter on a mobile without the
| twitter app.
| the_only_human wrote:
| run by comitte
| chaostheory wrote:
| What Shopify did wrong was that it wasn't fast enough to respond
| with transparency. However, I do agree with them in requiring
| proof that 3rd party sellers have a legal right to sell
| "trademarked" or "branded" products especially for books. Amazon
| is so rife with fake products that it's no better than eBay now.
| I can no longer impulse buy on Amazon. Depending on the product,
| I will check if there are 3rd party sellers using Amazon
| warehousing. If there's any evidence of commingling, I just buy
| it elsewhere. We've been slowly using Target more and more since
| they have limits on inventory commingling.
| potamic wrote:
| Even if there are no 3rd party sellers currently, it's possible
| they were active before and the current stock is still
| commingled. The only thing I use Amazon these days is for
| white-labeled Chinese goods. For everything else I prefer
| retailers with an end to end supply chain.
| philliphaydon wrote:
| Buying from Amazon can be really frustrating to buy from. I
| was looking for wool the other day. 100% Australian wool. But
| it's spun in China. 100% Canadian cotton yarn!!! Spun in
| China... it's hard to find something not made in China even
| if you're willing to pay for it.
| LaundroMat wrote:
| I'm afraid the EU Digital Services Act (which states that
| platforms are not "liable for hosting content unless they know
| it is illegal") will lead to more problems like this.
|
| Platforms will want to be safe, and will content block up-
| front, meaning it's the user who has to prove the legality of
| what they are selling. Good luck with that (as the Twitter
| thread demonstrates).
| LegitShady wrote:
| >I do agree with them in requiring proof that 3rd party sellers
| have a legal right to sell "trademarked" or "branded" products
| especially for books.
|
| lets say a bookstore goes out of business and I buy their stock
| and sell it in my own store. Do I need proof that I have legal
| right to sell those books? First sale doctrine is established
| law - your discomfort with 'fake' books has nothing to do with
| anything - no one said anything about counterfeit goods.
| They're asking them to get some 'proof' they can sell
| merchandise they bought to sell.
| tzs wrote:
| The first sale doctrine (both the copyright first sale
| doctrine and the trademark first sale doctrine) doesn't apply
| to counterfeits.
| askafriend wrote:
| As a customer, yes I will require proof before buying
| anything from your hypothetical store.
|
| If Shopify can provide that assurance to me - I will transact
| on Shopify-hosted stores more with confidence.
| chaostheory wrote:
| Shopify doesn't want potential fakes, and many customers like
| myself are sick of them. My discomfort with shady 3rd party
| sellers has a lot to do with it because I will take my
| business elsewhere, or eat up customer support hours and ramp
| up costs related to returns and exchanges.
|
| It's a free market. There are plenty of other online
| platforms to choose from that don't care whether or not they
| sell fake garbage. You can also create your own online store
| if needed.
|
| Apt username
| ffguuficc wrote:
| I just was about to buy P100 filters on Amazon but all the
| listings say they are fake. Amazon combines the inventory of
| all the "same" product together and it lets fakes get through.
| For me, it's not worth the risk of getting a faulty filter so
| I'm just going to Ace. As you said Amazon needs to crack down
| on these counterfeits.
| amluto wrote:
| I'm not entirely convinced that Shopify should be involved in
| IP enforcement. Amazon, despite all their claims to the
| contrary, acts as a retailer. When shopping at Amazon, Amazon
| is helping you find products and even makes it look like
| _Amazon_ is selling them.
|
| Shopify, in contrast, stays in the background. For the most
| part, unless I recognize the checkout flow or see the shoppay
| option, I, as a customer, don't even know that Shopify is
| involved in a transaction. I'm not buying, in any material
| sense, from Shopify.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| It's MC/Visa that's forcing Stripe and therefore Shopify to
| "police" for trademarked goods. MC/Visa are effectively
| determining what people can and cannot sell online. If the US
| accused you of selling trademarked goods, the burden of proof
| is on them. With MC/Visa, good luck getting a chance to even
| provide proof.
| tebbers wrote:
| Exactly this. The Financial Times just had a good expose on
| this recently about Visa and MC and the adult industry. The
| processors shut a huge amount of sites down because they
| refused to process their payments any more because some
| hedge fund bro who was anti-porn knew the MC CEO. They
| completely control commerce online.
|
| https://www.ft.com/content/cff23e36-b507-4717-8830-8b06741c
| 8...
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The unholy duopoly MC/Visa has _absurd_ amounts of power.
| Just look at how bad anything in the adult sector has it
| with them - instead of the card networks requiring multi-
| factor authentication to combat PII theft and "post-nut
| regret" fraud, they rather raised fees on merchants or cut
| them off entirely. Or how they acted as police, jury and
| executioner in the Pornhub case - the allegations were
| indeed severe, but they should have been dealt with by the
| courts and not a payment processor.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| That's an even bigger antitrust issue, because processors
| shouldn't be policing Shopify without doing it to Amazon.
| amluto wrote:
| It's not antitrust because it's not (as far as I know)
| against the law. That being said, I think that VISA and
| MasterCard should be required to act as common carriers
| and to serve any lawful business (where lawfulness is
| determined by courts, not by VISA and MC).
| mchusma wrote:
| I agree here. Dealing with visa/Mastercard is the worst.
| matt_s wrote:
| I wanna bet Shopify's legal department, and their budget for
| lawsuits, may disagree with your opinion. I have to imagine
| running a huge online store backend or payment processing
| system has huge fraud departments. If their platform allows
| fraudulent activity to run rampant (i.e. no checks on
| intellectual property, etc.) then many companies will go
| after them for diluting their brand and other types of legal
| matters. They can get money out of Shopify but they're not
| going to get anything out of someone selling fraudulent
| product.
|
| I agree with others in this thread - they should provide a
| layer of actual humans to help shop owners. And have a
| process for dealing with AI/ML gone rogue - like the address
| verification system in this example - where a set of humans
| can override and make sure a shop owner can continue to
| operate. Heck send someone to PR to help validate addresses
| every month.
| amluto wrote:
| An actual sensible legal regime could be a bit like the CDA
| safe harbor, or at least more like what CDA safe harbor
| should be. If an intermediary like Shopify provides
| services to its clients, does not help users choose which
| of its clients to work with, declines to exercise
| discretion as to which clients to work with, and cooperates
| with court orders, then it should be immune to claims that
| it chose the wrong clients.
| adrr wrote:
| I don't understand how shopify is predatory. Shopify isn't a
| merchant processor, they don't hold merchant funds. Stripe is the
| merchant processor for shopify payments. They are the ones that
| froze the payments. Freezing money has no benefit for Shopify.
| Brystephor wrote:
| I don't know how Shop Pay is engineered, but Shop Pay is
| Shopifys payment processing platform. I don't know if they're
| using another provider such as Stripe on the backend though or
| if they've gone through the PCI compliants.
|
| With that said, just because you're not the one processing
| payments doesn't mean you're not the one holding it.
| tehwebguy wrote:
| Shopify has operated as their own payment processor for a few
| years.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Shopify Payments is a Stripe wrapper.
| cardy31 wrote:
| Untrue. They use Stripe.
| sarora27 wrote:
| Note: I work in the payments space.
|
| Shopify is one of Stripe's largest customers and a very heavy
| influencer of their roadmap (example: Stripe Treasury,
| BillPay (coming soon!), and more!)
| adrr wrote:
| Not yet. Still stripe. I assume their eventually do it as
| they seek larger merchants that will require interchange plus
| billing and not blended.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| ShopPay is 100% a thing.
| beeandapenguin wrote:
| Shop Pay by is powered by Stripe
| adrr wrote:
| Still uses stripe.
| cheriot wrote:
| Hazard of white labelling. If shopify brands the product and
| sells the product, they own the outcome.
| Spivak wrote:
| Yeah but some things pierce the white label veil.
|
| Grocery stores have been out of all sorts of products this
| year and the normal response isn't "this is an outrageous
| failing of Kroger" it's "Kroger isn't able to source Wheat
| Thins because of various supply chain issues." Same story
| with everything in the tech sector.
|
| If you went to McDonald's and they couldn't process your
| order because Visa banned you then that's not really on them.
| Or in a more individual level you probably don't get told
| "well you should have picked a better car supplier" when you
| call off work because your car breaks down. Customers are
| also pretty understanding when shows or channels get yanked
| due to contract disputes.
|
| The bigger issue seems to be that it wouldn't have mattered
| who they went with and any financial institution would have
| yanked them after getting a chargeback from their bank.
| cheriot wrote:
| Kroger is clearly selling someone else's product in wheat
| thins. Visa is not McDonaldsPay.
|
| These examples are different from white labelling.
|
| On the other hand, this book store hired Shopify, via
| ShopPay, to handle payments. The good and the bad now
| belong to Shopify. (I'm not claiming to judge fault)
| Brystephor wrote:
| > Grocery stores have been out of all sorts of products
| this year and the normal response isn't "this is an
| outrageous failing of Kroger" it's "Kroger isn't able to
| source Wheat Thins because of various supply chain issues."
|
| There's a level of trust that you have to have with a
| service provider over something like a grocery store.
|
| If you're at a grocery store, and your card is declined due
| to Visa blocking you, you did not lose out on money. If
| you're selling things on Shopify, and have shipped orders
| that you're expecting Shopify to pay you for and they do
| not pay you, there is now a loss involved.
| tehwebguy wrote:
| > I responded with an email restating that the First Sale
| Doctrine makes such a request both nonsensical and illegal, and
| asked a few more questions.
|
| The rest of the thread notwithstanding, this is not what First
| Sale Doctrine does, at all!
| rhester wrote:
| Instead of above, if replying (for the benefit of this
| community) why not explain how or why you disagree?
| bawolff wrote:
| I don't even see the above in the tweet thread, but i think
| its pretty obviously true that the first sale doctrine
| doesn't make it illegal for shopify to ask more about your
| business and where you are getting your products from. They
| don't need any excuse to ask that, they are allowed to ask
| their customers anything they want.
| LegitShady wrote:
| If you buy goods from an authorized place and sell them, you do
| not require any authorization or proof to sell those 'branded'
| goods, because first sale doctrine means that the original
| seller has exhausted their legal rights to control the sale and
| distribution of those items.
|
| So it sort of is what first sale doctrine does. shopify is
| asking them to produce proof they have authorization to sell
| something they've already purchased and need no special rights
| to sell, regardless of whether they're branded or not.
| Thorrez wrote:
| Shopify banning you for not producing documentation is not a
| violation of first sale doctrine.
|
| Just like a web forum banning you for posting something
| annoying is not a violation of your constitutional freedom of
| speech.
|
| The current law and constitution don't protect you from these
| actions.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| You're assuming his use of copyrighted and trademarked
| material is authorized.
|
| They're selling books and even soaps with "deadwood" in the
| name, and they / the publisher (sounds like they're both run
| by him?) appear to have directly lifted the photo for the
| cover of one of the books:
|
| https://mzs.press/The-Last-Western-Deadwood-and-the-End-
| of-A...
|
| ...from here: https://deadwood.fandom.com/wiki/Deadwood_(epis
| ode)?file=Sea...
|
| My guess is that Seitz got nailed by trademark and copyright
| infringement claims and is now spinning a story about how his
| poor poor book shop is getting screwed over by the Big Evil
| Corporation, as witnessed by the very histrionic language he
| uses in his tweets.
| teh_klev wrote:
| Try reading the twitter thread:
|
| https://twitter.com/mattzollerseitz/status/1541994429405331
| 4...
|
| https://twitter.com/mattzollerseitz/status/1541994429405331
| 4...
| ipaddr wrote:
| Trademark cannot stop someone from using that word on an
| unrelated product like soap. Nor can it stop someone from
| using a word in a book title.. Is Amazon killing the book
| industry? is a valid book title.
| Thorrez wrote:
| > Nominative fair use generally is permissible as long
| as:
|
| > ...
|
| > (3) use of the mark does not suggest sponsorship or
| endorsement by the trademark owner
|
| https://www.inta.org/fact-sheets/fair-use-of-trademarks-
| inte...
|
| I'm not a lawyer, but "Deadwood Soap with a Prize Inside:
| Dirt" sounds like it could suggest sponsorship or
| endorsement to me.
|
| Of course, as teh_klev pointed out, this most likely
| isn't the cause of the store's Shopify problems since HBO
| says they're OK with what the store does.
| tehwebguy wrote:
| > If you buy goods from an authorized place and sell them,
| you do not require any authorization or proof to sell those
| 'branded' goods, because first sale doctrine means that the
| original seller has exhausted their legal rights to control
| the sale and distribution of those items.
|
| Right, but it doesn't make it _illegal_ , as stated by the
| seller, for Shopify to have these requirements.
|
| I'm giving the seller full benefit of the doubt that they
| were not selling anything that violates copyright / trademark
| law. The point is the doctrine still doesn't make Shopify's
| request or requirements illegal.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Shopify nickels and dimes you at every chance.
| WheatM wrote:
| nickjj wrote:
| The author mentioned they didn't like that transaction fees are
| not given back during refunds but unfortunately both Stripe and
| PayPal do the same thing. They started doing this a few years
| ago.
|
| If someone buys your product for $100 and Stripe's fee is $3.20
| and you issue a refund to someone you will refund the user $100
| and Stripe keeps the $3.20 so that refund really cost you $3.20.
| jeromegv wrote:
| Yep. It's very sad for the owner. And I empathize. But a lot of
| things they blame shopify for is actually the exact same across
| the ecommerce spectrum.
| tzs wrote:
| To the processor and other entities such as the credit card
| companies and banks that are involved with processing the
| transaction there isn't much difference between a refund and
| charge. Both use most of the same resources on the same
| infrastructure the same way in the same amount.
|
| If you had a deal where you were directly exposed to all the
| fees involved, what I'd expect is that you net fee on a
| transaction would be composed of fees from three different
| categories.
|
| 1. Per transaction fees that apply to both charges and refunds.
|
| 2. Fees proportional to the charge amount that apply to both
| charges and refunds.
|
| 3. Fees proportional to the charge amount that only apply to
| charges.
|
| On a charge you'd pay the fees from all three categories. On a
| refund you might get back the fees from category #3 you paid on
| the charge, but you'd again pay the fees from category #1 and
| #2.
|
| For example if you sell an item for price P and the fees from
| the three categories are F1, F2, and F3, your net gain on that
| transaction is P - F1 - F2 - F3. A refund transaction has a net
| gain of -P - F1 - F2 + F3. That would bring your total net for
| the combined charge/refund to -2 F1 - 2 F2.
|
| This we should expect some net fee for a charge followed by a
| refund. For small transactions that net fee could be up to
| almost twice what the fee was for the charge alone.
|
| Most processors though don't directly expose you to all the
| fees. That's because there are a bazillion different possible
| fees with each different subsets applicable to any particular
| transaction. So most processors expose a simplified structure
| based on averages over a large number of transactions across
| similar merchants. Most merchants prefer that.
|
| When doing such a simplified fee structure, they could set
| charge fees based on the average for F1 + F2 + F3 and refund
| fees based on the average F1 + F2 - F3. But refunds should be
| much less frequent than charges, so it seems find to me when
| doing a simplified fee structure to just average the refunds in
| too, and just deal with fees on the charge side of things.
| nickjj wrote:
| Yeah, I wonder what provoked both Stripe and PayPal to start
| doing this after not doing it for like 10 years. They both
| did it pretty close to each other from what I remember.
| voiper1 wrote:
| I understand that it's common practice, but here Shopify froze
| their ability to withdraw but still took orders.
| kitsune_ wrote:
| I just read the entire Twitter thread. What a Kafkaesque
| nightmare.
| [deleted]
| baskethead wrote:
| Companies need to spend more money on customer service. Period.
| End of story. But it's expensive so they would rather risk
| fucking over a percentage of their customers in hopes that they
| can contain any problems.
|
| At some point, governments need to step in and regulate this once
| their customer support to customer ratio drops below a certain
| percentage. Otherwise it's a form of tax that creates extreme
| victims and its usually the small customers because big customers
| can always pick up the phone and call someone.
| qwertyuiop_ wrote:
| Does Shopify have a marketplace like Amazon ? Ie discovering the
| products and stores ? I'm struggling to understand the face of
| it.
| hoten wrote:
| Isn't this what lawyers are for? Seems like he's just spinning
| his wheels trying to get through at the customer support level.
| webmobdev wrote:
| I don't get this logic - why shouldn't he express his anger,
| frustration and annoyances with shopify publicly? If I was in
| his position I would do the same too, whether it gets me some
| response from Shopify or not. Even if I hired lawyers, I would
| still prefer to tell the public about shitty customer service,
| especially if it costs me money and time.
| hoten wrote:
| I think we both agree that complaining in public is
| cathartic. However, it isn't always the most productive nor
| protective (of your own emotional state) option available. If
| that is realized at all, it typically is only with hindsight.
| SZJX wrote:
| From several cases we've seen here on HN so far, it seems
| to be a quite effective strategy for finally getting
| through to somebody at that tech behemoth and having your
| problem swiftly resolved (even if you may say that
| "theoretically" this shouldn't be how it works in a society
| perfectly based on contracts and on the rule of law,
| depending on your viewpoint). Much better than directly
| starting a lawsuit, no?
| xmodem wrote:
| Just from personal experience, on more than one occasion,
| I've spent hours on hold with a company getting nowhere,
| fired off a couple of quick tweets, and the issue has been
| fixed in 10 minutes. I have about 300 followers.
|
| Is it a guarantee? Absolutely not. But it can work, and if
| the amount of money involved is too small to make involving
| lawyers worthwhile, it's often your only remaining option.
|
| How else would you suggest handling the situation of
| needing to recover $7000 that a company owes you but they
| refuse to acknowledge your existence?
| lin83 wrote:
| Hiring lawyers is probably going to cost more than the 7000
| dollars taken from him. Large companies probably spend that
| much on their legal teams per hour.
| ShakataGaNai wrote:
| 100% this is the problem with our current legal system. The
| little guy is going to have to pay, by the hour, for a
| lawyer. Where as shopify has, I'm sure, an entire team on the
| payroll. It costs shopify, in effect, nothing to battle this
| until the heat death of the universe (or the little guy runs
| out of money, which ever comes first)
| bawolff wrote:
| IANAL, but shopify is a canadian company not american, so if
| the seller wins wouldn't they also get legal fees - which
| makes it harder to bury them under legal fees?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_rule_(attorney%27s_f.
| ..
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Idk.
|
| I got scammed buying a NAS from a smb electronics shop recently.
| No one will ever know. No one cares.
|
| Logically I think it's far more likely that big companies are
| compliant because they operate so much in the open and are under
| constant scrutiny. Every disgruntled customer has the potential
| to go viral and do enormous damage.
|
| With the most empathic sigh: Shit happens. At big corps most of
| it. Relatively, probably not.
| bawolff wrote:
| Honestly, i strongly suspect there is more to this story.
|
| If there wasn't, seems like it would be a slam dunk lawsuit.
|
| I also dont understand why they continued to use shopify if
| shopify was keeping their money.
| boringg wrote:
| Yeah I feel the same way. I read his comment thread but it
| didn't really add up and seemed written in an over the top way.
| Too me that means there is more to the store than this one
| side. We will never know the full account for sure.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| The incredible histrionics are pretty solid indicator that
| there's more to the story.
|
| My guess is copyright/trademark infringement. HBO probably
| doesn't like him selling "Deadwood" soap, or books with covers
| using frames from the show.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| From the linked tweet thread:
|
| > But all of our Deadwood items are critical, journalistic,
| or transformative & HBO legal told me they're fine with them
| existing.
|
| If this is actually true - and that's a big if - then the
| problem is that HBO doesn't think the work in question is
| infringing, but Shopify _does_. This is a huge problem with
| _any_ kind of intermediary liability, because intermediaries
| do not have the capability to fairly adjudicate copyright
| cases. If you 're selling, say, a review of copyrighted
| material, that's fair use. However, the _problem_ with fair
| use is that it makes even the most basic copyright inquiry
| that much more complicated. Publishers and copyright owners
| don 't want to have to consider fair use for _every_
| strikingly-similar infringement out there. They want platform
| owners to have to fix the problems they created, and they
| know that they will do so in the most half-assed way
| possible. That means fair use goes out the window - why risk
| six-figures-per-infringement judgements at all when we can
| just ignore it and refuse to host fair use content?
|
| That being said there's still problems with the original
| tweet's argument here. There is a huge gulf between "we don't
| think this is infringing" and an actual licensing agreement.
| At _best_ , HBO _might_ be estopped from suing over past
| infringements, but they have nothing else to mitigate the
| risk of their store 's existence and no promise that HBO
| doesn't change their mind tomorrow. Copyright owners like
| this kind of strategic ambiguity - licensing agreements have
| rather high transaction costs, and every one you sign means
| another exclusive license[0] _you can 't sell anymore_. They
| don't want to _have_ to go after every infringement either.
| They want to be able to grant and revoke their largesse at
| will.
|
| [0] i.e. the lucrative ones. There are entire categories of
| licensing where nonexclusive licenses are basically worthless
| and nobody will accept such terms.
| LordAtlas wrote:
| > If this is actually true - and that's a big if - then the
| problem is that HBO doesn't think the work in question is
| infringing, but Shopify does.
|
| Let us take this on face value and assume this is the case.
|
| If so, they should have given him notice and suspended the
| site, yet according to this thread, they kept allowing
| orders and taking money from his customers to the tune of
| $7000, but not transferring it to him. That's pretty shady
| and definitely does not absolve them of any potential
| liability.
| SZJX wrote:
| Not sure if the "histrionics" is that over the top or any
| indicator that they have something to hide. Might simply be
| the style this person tweets, which can be understandable
| given how frustrating this situation seems to be. (People
| easily lose all their calm in such situations and I find the
| tweets mild tbh.) If anything, the explanation he provided
| about Shopify being afraid of being sued by textbook
| copyright holders and even Star Wars copyright holders might
| make sense.
| philliphaydon wrote:
| Matt apparently authored books on The Sopranos and Mad Men.
| And according to him in the twitter thread, HBO helped setup
| interviews and such for the book. If it has access to HBO
| like that to write the book, if they didn't like him selling
| soap they would probably raise it with him directly. Not go
| to shopify.
| hklgny wrote:
| I suspect this is more of a stripe problem than a Shopify one.
| Having dealt with them shutting down our customer accounts on
| several occasions with no information as to why and ambiguous
| documentation requests that seem to go on forever, it seems
| perfectly plausible to me that this was just as frustrating for
| Shopify as it was the customer. Doesn't mean they couldn't have
| handled it better, but I've definitely experienced the other side
| of this story and it's awful.
| canucklady wrote:
| Nope, it's de rigeur for every ecommerce company. Shopify legal
| gets some BS email from some big corp, and they slap some vague
| technological solution on it ("flag anything thay says Star
| Wars"). Then they get a bunch of overworked, underpaid people
| to try and enforce their nonsense policy based on the results
| of the tool. Ultimately they get what they want, because they
| frustrate these problematic small customers into leaving the
| platform. Meanwhile they continue to bend over backwards for
| Jeffree Star or whoever because he'll have a hissy fit on
| Youtube if his flash sale doesn't happen at the right time.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| Almost like tech solutions don't always scale to handle
| international growth. That can't possibly be right though...
| Growth is the only thing I've ever known. What will I do now?
| Nobody's going to let me play with hundreds of millions of
| dollars if I merely make something that "works correctly".
|
| (Dead inside and being sarcastic, btw)
| datavirtue wrote:
| No, they just can't scale to handle people because the
| founders are rubbing themselves just thinking about all the
| automated money. Anything that gets in the way of the money
| printer gets crushed.
| ShakataGaNai wrote:
| Shopify _should_ be scrambling to do a public post-mortem right
| now. They "Fixed" the situation within a few hours of the
| tweetstorm, showing that they know they f'd up. Shit happens -
| but how does shopify assuage small businesses that this won't
| happen to them next? A public apology, post-mortem and steps to
| make sure this never happens again.
| nathanvanfleet wrote:
| I think their plan is to not acknowledge it so it doesn't blow
| up any further. Fix the problem and let this person tell their
| story until they run out of steam.
| hackernewds wrote:
| "sorry because we got caught"
| nerdponx wrote:
| Unless this ends up being widely reported in the media, most of
| their customers and potential customers won't even hear about
| it, and it will only change the behavior of a small fraction
| thereof. Shopify doesn't have to do anything, and they know it.
| runnerup wrote:
| Even if people read enough of these that Shopify stops seeing
| new merchant signups...I don't think Shopify would understand
| WHY they're not getting any new customers. They'd probably
| blame it on SEO or something.
| Kiro wrote:
| You're overestimating the impact. This is just one of thousands
| of similar stories, none of which has gotten a public apology
| or post-mortem.
| krmboya wrote:
| It seems to me companies beyond a certain size become so
| dysfunctional that no one person can handle a situation like
| this coherently. It's all different factions internally each
| pursuing their own objectives, protecting their turf or
| fighting for survival. It's likely there's not so much the
| customer service team could have done.
|
| It's not like a small business where the owner themselves can
| guarantee high quality services
| LegitShady wrote:
| it does not sound fixed to me. It sounds like they're still
| threatening this small business because the business' own bank
| flagged payments shopify took from their account, and were
| reversed, and shopify can't justify the charges, and is again
| threatening them. I don't see anywhere its resolved, just that
| they sent a reply.
| kamranjon wrote:
| This seems pretty damning and I had considered Shopify to start
| my own online store selling products that I make in the future.
|
| I am curious if anybody has suggestions for good alternatives to
| Shopify for building an online store?
| urza wrote:
| Bitcoin fixes this. Ditch the intermediaries and 3rd parties.
|
| https://btcpayserver.org
|
| EDIT: aand get downvoted by HN crowd, how unexpected :)
| xmodem wrote:
| "0% fees" (apart from the transaction costs, which are
| significant, and never mind how long it takes the transaction
| to go through)
| urza wrote:
| First of all, nowadays you should be using Lightning Network,
| where fees are negligible and the payment is finalized and
| settled in order of seconds. BtcPay server has first class
| integration of Lightning Network.
|
| And second, even if you want to accept onchain payments,
| current onchain fees are something $0.2 for confirmation
| within an hour. Which seems reasonable for having final
| settlement without any intermediary of your funds this fast.
| Compare this with traditional payment options like credit
| cards where you are waiting often times 30 days or even more
| for settlement and as the OP illustrates, you are at mercy of
| intermediaries.
| nibbleshifter wrote:
| BTC fees are basically fuck all these days, and you can just
| use LN.
| jeromegv wrote:
| Stop playing the victims on how the angry HN crowd has
| downvoted you.
|
| You're being downvoted because it's a bookstore that sells to
| the general public. Less than 1% of their customers would know
| how to pay with bitcoin, and even for those who do, they would
| likely keep their bitcoin and hold them right now since it's at
| a 1-year-low instead of using it as a currency.
|
| It's just not helpful to the situation. That's why you're being
| downvoted.
| urza wrote:
| Those are valid concerns, the "hodl only" mentality, the
| volatility.. but you do you see discussion about this on HN?
| No, just downvotes. I kind of doubnt that what you say is the
| motivation for the downvotes. I think if you are being
| honest, for some reason the HN users just hate bitcoin.
| mk81 wrote:
| kweks wrote:
| Sorry to hear about your situation. A lot of people have been
| pointing to the "roll your own" versions of e-commerce stacks.
|
| We've been running e-commerce for the last six years, and have
| tried everything (woocommerce, open commerce, bigcommerce,
| magento, prestashop).
|
| They are all light-years behind Shopify.
|
| We've had bumps along the way with Shopify as well (similar
| problems to yours).
|
| A few thoughts:
|
| - Know who you are in bed with : Shopify Payments is actually
| Stripe Platform in most locations, and PayPal in Europe. We
| refuse to work with PayPal because of their predatory behaviour,
| so we choose not to use Shopify Payments in the EU.
|
| - The Shopify Payments platform is for better or for worse a
| "start without friction, KYC later" experience. Be aware of what
| this entails.
|
| - Get on RocketReach, find key people in Shopify relevant to your
| problem and send a succinct email asking for assistance. It's
| unblocked every problem we ever had
|
| - Do the same with your merchant processors : Edwin from stripe
| actively reads HN, and can often provide assistance on Stripe
| related issues.
|
| - Get lawyers. Not the Go-Sue-the-Pants-off-everyone lawyers, but
| business / commercial lawyers. Not only can they provide
| excellent advice for your business, they often specialise in
| these types of situations to have conversations and results that
| you can't access individually.
|
| At the end of the day, know your business partners and establish
| a relationship with them.
|
| Using a combination of the above, we've survived competitors
| using fake C&Ds against our processors and platforms, amongst
| other things.
| uxcolumbo wrote:
| Do you have more details why Shopfiy is light years ahead of
| the other ecommerce platforms you mentioned?
|
| When you say you're running ecommerce - you mean your own shop
| or building ecommerce solutions for others?
| jeromegv wrote:
| Shopify surely has the highest amount of retailers for
| ecommerce. There might be more websites selling with magento,
| but when it comes to actual retailers being active right now,
| it's the best and most popular option. Retailers don't have
| the tech knowledge to roll out their own tech so it won't be
| an open source DIY platform so most will start with shopify.
|
| Their App Store is the biggest, which as we know from apple,
| it is quite important for your ecosystem. You want an
| advanced inventory tool? A 3pL? A new packing slip app? A new
| discount app? Any of the best apps out there that are
| actively developed are integrating with... shopify.
| omnimus wrote:
| Are you sure about the paypal in europe? AFAIK you can set it
| up Stripe only if your country supports Stripe which most of EU
| does.
| kweks wrote:
| We use Stripe as our primary, when Shopify Payments became
| available in our region (France) it routed through Paypal.
|
| I couldn't see any backend option to select the preferred
| Shopify Payments backend processor, but would be interested
| if you have insight into how to achieve this.
|
| In what gives weight to the GP, we enabled Shopify Payments,
| confirmed it went through PayPal and switched back to Stripe
| to avoid the "process with PP for a week and then have them
| freeze your funds for 6 months" grind.
| jollybean wrote:
| EBay, Paypal the same.
|
| Admittedly, it's hard to be an intermediary, because the sheer
| amount of fraud you there. These companies become, due to
| liability etc. a kind of 'financial police' which isn't their
| role.
|
| And then have to do that for every little jurisdiction.
|
| I suggest that there needs to be way more transparency about
| their own terms, and paths to redress grievances.
|
| But probably we need to change regulations a bit as well for
| e-commerce.
| system2 wrote:
| WordPress / Magento / OpenCart + Stripe / Authorize.net /
| BrainTree / Paypal. Why use Shopify and depend on it? Host your
| own stuff for nearly free ($2-5) and pay very little for the
| payment gateways.
|
| Shopify charges additional 1% per transaction for 3rd party
| payment integrations. Weird.
| Brystephor wrote:
| I work in payments. I'd guess the 1% on top of 3rd party
| integrations is to encourage folks to go through Shop Pay,
| which is owned by Shopify.
|
| As for why people don't self host, it's likely just easier not
| to. You start off on an easy platform because who knows if your
| business is gonna work, then the business grows and you're
| already on there so why self host when it's working right now?
| And you continue down that path until it doesn't anymore.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| For most Shopify sellers, that 1% is still less than it would
| cost to pay the person to setup what you're suggesting. Really
| not weird at all.
| inflam52 wrote:
| Shameless plug: this is exactly why I built SimpleStore. An easy
| way to manage a small store without worrying about the platform
| changing the rules on you.
| https://chrisdiana.github.io/simplestore/
| [deleted]
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