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In late March, 15,000 gallons of beer were sloshing around in Peter Bulut’s tanks and barrels with nowhere to go. Bulut, the owner of Great Lakes Brewing Co., first started working in his father’s tiny craft brewery in Toronto almost 30 years ago, when he was 21. Since taking over five years ago, Bulut, now 50, had transformed it into a model small-scale brewer — quintupling its production capacity, opening an onsite restaurant and retail store, and building up a force of nine full-time salespeople who landed the company’s beer into bars, restaurants, and liquor stores all over Ontario.
3月下旬，啤酒15000加仑彼得·布鲁特的坦克和桶中左右晃动无处可去。 大湖啤酒酿造公司的所有者Bulut大约30年前在他父亲21岁的时候就开始在他父亲的小精酿啤酒厂工作。自从五年多以前，现年50岁的Bulut将其转变为模型。小型啤酒酿造商—将其生产能力提高五倍，开设一家现场餐厅和零售商店，并建立了一支由9名全职销售人员组成的队伍，这些人员将公司的啤酒投放到整个安大略省的酒吧，餐厅和酒类商店。
Back on March 13, when Covid-19 was creeping its way into Toronto, Bulut started taking small precautions, like suspending in-store beer tastings. Then the full weight of the calamity struck with stunning speed. Two days later he closed the restaurant and store. Most of the bars and restaurants he supplied beer to were closing, too. Five days after that, facing a 50% drop in business, he laid off a quarter of his 52 employees. “I didn’t sleep for two weeks after that,” recalls Bulut. “When you’re the owner, it’s your fault.”
b。在3月13日CK，当Covid-19爬行的方式进入多伦多，布鲁特开始服用少量预防措施，如悬挂在店内的啤酒品尝。 然后，灾难的全部重量以惊人的速度袭来。 两天后，他关闭了餐厅和商店。 他提供啤酒的大多数酒吧和餐馆也都关门了。 此后五天，面对业务下滑50％的情况，他解雇了52名员工中的四分之一。 “在那之后我两周没睡觉，”布卢特回忆道。 “当您是所有者时，这是您的错。”
He didn’t want to do more layoffs — but what was he going to do with the tens of thousands of gallons of beer piling up? Maybe he could sell it online and do home delivery? One of his employees had set up an online shop to sell T-shirts and caps with the company’s logo. Bulut had the employee call Shopify, the company powering the site, to find out what it would take to convert it into an online beer-sales-and-delivery store. Bulut was surprised by Shopify’s response. “They jumped all over it,” he says. “They wanted to help us hit big sales volumes.”
他不想做更多的裁员-但是他要堆积成千上万加仑的啤酒怎么办？ 也许他可以在线销售并送货上门？ 他的一名员工开设了一家网上商店，出售带有公司徽标的T恤和帽子。 Bulut让员工致电Shopify，该公司为该网站提供动力，以了解将其转换为在线啤酒销售和配送商店所需要的内容。 Bulut对Shopify的React感到惊讶。 他说：“他们跳过了它。” “他们想帮助我们实现大销量。”
Two days later Great Lakes transformed into a fully functioning e-commerce operation, taking home delivery orders on its website. They made a few dozen sales the first day. Within a week they were up to 500 orders daily. There was so much business that Bulut kept all of his nine salespeople busy full time delivering the beer to customers’ homes. Meanwhile, Shopify helped Great Lakes set up a contactless credit-card reader and a point-of-sales system that tied into the home delivery system, so it could also offer curbside delivery. Shopify told Bulut it was working on an app that could find the most efficient delivery routes, and let him use a pre-released version, too. Not only was Bulut able to hold onto his remaining staff, he has since rehired most of the people he laid off. “I feel guilty saying it,” he says, “but sales-wise we’re about 15% ahead of where we were before the pandemic.”
两天后，大湖区转变为功能全面的电子商务业务，并在其网站上接收送货上门订单。 他们第一天就卖了几十笔。 一周之内，他们每天有多达500个订单。 生意如此之多，以至于Bulut都让他的九名销售人员全职忙于将啤酒运送到客户家中。 同时，Shopify帮助Great Lakes建立了非接触式信用卡读取器和与家庭送货系统绑定的销售点系统，因此它还可以提供路边送货。 Shopify告诉Bulut，它正在开发一个应用程序，该应用程序可以找到最有效的交付途径，并允许他也使用预发布的版本。 Bulut不仅能够留住剩下的员工，而且还雇用了他解雇的大多数人。 他说：“我对此感到内，但在销售方面，我们比大流行前要高出约15％。”
Only Amazon takes in more money online, dollar-wise, than Shopify’s sites, which in aggregate brought in more than $60 billion in 2019, $20 billion more than the year before.
按美元计算，只有亚马逊在网上赚钱比Shopify的网站多，后者在2019年的总收入超过600亿美元，比上年增加200亿美元。
Bulut was just one of hundreds of thousands of small business owners desperate for a lifeline this spring when the pandemic hit. While offices everywhere were able to pivot en masse to Zoom, retailers on Main Streets all across the globe were getting crushed. Many had never before processed a single online transaction, now needing to somehow flip a digital switch in order to stay alive.
当今年春天大流行袭来时，Bulut只是成千上万渴望获得生命线的小企业主之一。 尽管各地的办公室都可以向Zoom集中转移，但遍布全球各主要大街的零售商却步履蹒跚。 许多人以前从未处理过一次在线交易，现在需要以某种方式翻转数字开关以保持生命。
Many of them ultimately discovered, like Bulut, that switch was Shopify, the e-commerce platform that has quietly mushroomed from a home-grown website into a publicly traded tech behemoth over the past 14 years. It now powers the online shopping carts for millions of companies, from buzzy startups like Allbirds and Bombas to big brands like Heinz and Nescafe. Only Amazon takes in more money online, dollar-wise, than Shopify’s sites, which in aggregate brought in more than $60 billion in 2019, $20 billion more than the year before. The company’s prospects have seemed limitless, with its own revenue increasing nearly 50% last year to $1.6 billion.
他们中的许多人最终发现了像Bulut这样的转变，这是Shopify，这是一个电子商务平台，在过去的14年中，该平台已从本地网站悄然发展成为公开交易的科技巨头。 现在，它为数以百万计的公司提供在线购物车，从像Allbirds和Bombas之类的蓬勃发展的初创公司到Heinz和Nescafe等大品牌。 按美元计算，只有亚马逊在网上赚钱比Shopify的网站多，后者在2019年的总收入超过600亿美元，比上年增加200亿美元。 该公司的前景似乎是无限的，其自身的收入去年增长了近50％，达到16亿美元。
The pandemic has accelerated that already rocket-ship growth, with analysts predicting an average 75% annual rise in the next five years. In early July, Shopify’s stock price surpassed $1,000 per share, more than triple its mid-March price. Aside from Zoom, arguably no other tech company in the pandemic has had such a massive groundswell — or an ideal marketing moment — than Shopify. Now, with an even more intense grip on the small-business landscape, the low-key Canadian company is plotting to go head-to-head with platforms from Amazon to Facebook.
这种流行病已经加速了已经飞速发展的火箭飞船的增长，分析人士预测，未来五年这种年平均增长率将达到75％。 7月初，Shopify的股价超过每股1,000美元，是3月中旬价格的三倍多。 除了Zoom之外，可以说流行病中没有其他技术公司比Shopify拥有如此巨大的成功或理想的营销时刻 。 如今，这家低调的加拿大公司对小型企业的发展有着更加强烈的掌控力，正计划与从亚马逊到Facebook的平台并驾齐驱。
At its center is an unlikely foil to the Silicon Valley tech titans — Shopify founder and CEO Tobi Lütke, a German coder who first started the business a decade and a half ago after trying to launch an online snowboard shop. If Lütke can continue toeing the line between friendly hero to small businesses, and viable threat to Big Tech platforms, Shopify could be on its way to becoming the most dominant retail engine powering the economy.
Shopify的创始人兼首席执行官TobiLütke是硅谷技术巨头的中心人物，这是一家不太可能的阻碍。这是一家德国编码器，十年半前首次尝试开设在线滑雪板店后就开始了这项业务。 如果Lütke能够继续站在友好英雄与小企业之间，以及对大型科技平台的切实威胁之间的界线，那么Shopify可能会成为推动经济发展的最主要零售引擎。
In early January, an unsettling agenda item popped up at a meeting of senior managers at Shopify’s headquarters in Ottawa, Canada: Its Hong Kong office was warning that the severe outbreak of a flu-like illness in China had the makings of a pandemic. Throughout the month, that concern rose higher and higher on the agendas at successive meetings. How big would this thing get? How badly would this affect businesses around the world?
其香港办公室警告说，的严重非典疫情的流感样在中国的这场病大流行的气质： 在一月初，一个令人不安的议程项目的高级管理人员在Shopify的总部设在加拿大渥太华会议上弹出。 在整个月中，这种担忧在连续的会议上的议程上越来越高。 这东西会变大多少？ 这将对世界各地的企业造成多严重的影响？
By March, hundreds of thousands of small business owners would realize that their only shot at staying alive during an indefinite, unprecedented shutdown would be e-commerce.
到三月，成千上万的小企业主将意识到，在无限期，史无前例的停工期间，他们唯一能维持生计的工作就是电子商务。
By the beginning of February — as President Trump was claiming the coronavirus would disappear by April — Shopify realized helping retailers move their operations online in the face of a possible shutdown had to become the company’s top priority. “We knew we had to be two steps ahead of this thing,” says Lynsey Thornton, Shopify’s vice-president of user experience and general manager of core product.
到2月初-特朗普总统声称冠状病毒将在4月消失-Shopify意识到在面临可能的停工的情况下，帮助零售商将其业务转移到网上必须成为公司的重中之重。 Shopify用户体验副总裁兼核心产品总经理Lynsey Thornton表示：“我们知道，我们必须走两步。”
They made the right calculation. By March, shoe stores, bakeries, boutiques, toy stores, cafes, card shops — basically any business that had never before sold a thing online — were faced with one option to stay alive: to sell anything they possibly could virtually.
他们进行了正确的计算。 到3月，鞋店，面包店，精品店，玩具店，咖啡厅，卡店-基本上以前从未在网上出售过东西的任何企业-都面临着生存的选择：卖出几乎所有可能的东西。
These businesses had alternatives to Shopify, of course. There were sites like Squarespace and Wix, which make it relatively easy to whip up a website, but don’t specialize in e-commerce. And there were thriving marketplaces like Etsy and eBay that offered a large built-in customer base but less control of the shopping experience. But by removing all the barriers to setting up a slick-looking website with all the e-commerce trimmings — from site design to tracking inventory to taking payments to capturing customer data to promotion to customer service — Shopify was by far the most comprehensive and streamlined.
当然，这些企业可以选择Shopify。 诸如Squarespace和Wix之类的网站可以相对轻松地创建网站，但并不专门从事电子商务。 此外，还有像Etsy和eBay这样繁荣的市场，这些市场提供了庞大的内置客户群，但对购物体验的控制较少。 但是，通过消除所有带有电子商务修饰的光滑外观网站的所有障碍(从网站设计到跟踪库存，付款到捕获客户数据再到推广到客户服务)，Shopify是迄今为止最全面，最简化的。
Shopify doesn’t push merchants to mention its name anywhere on the site; the branding is all the customer’s, at a cost of as little as $29 a month for the most basic Shopify plans, plus a 2.9% cut of sales. It’s why the company has managed to power retailers that account for about 6% of all online sales in the U.S. — ahead of all other e-commerce channels, like eBay and Etsy, though trailing behind Amazon’s staggering two-thirds share.
Shopify不会敦促商家在网站上的任何地方提及其名称； 品牌是所有客户的品牌，最基本的Shopify计划每月只需$ 29，加上销售量的2.9％削减。 这就是为什么该公司设法为占美国在线销售总额约6％的零售商提供动力的原因–领先于eBay和Etsy等所有其他电子商务渠道，尽管落后于亚马逊惊人的三分之二的份额。
With the number of new Shopify customers growing between March 13 and April 24, spiking 62% above the previous six weeks, managers throughout the company — most of them working from their homes in Canada — put their regular day jobs aside to personally handle calls from small businesses. The conversations were wrenching, recalls Thornton, with many business owners left reeling after letting most of their employees go. One owner simply sobbed into the phone. “We wanted to be in the trenches with the entrepreneurs, to feel what they were feeling firsthand,” says Thornton.
随着3月13日至4月24日新Shopify客户数量的增长，比之前的六周增长了62％，整个公司的经理们-其中大部分是在加拿大的家中工作-搁置了日常工作来亲自处理来自小型企业。 桑顿回忆说，对话令人痛苦，许多企业主在放开大多数员工后离开了工作。 一位房主简单地抽泣到电话里。 桑顿说：“我们希望与企业家保持联系，感受他们的第一手感受。”
Shopify quickly rolled out a series of changes. The free trial it normally offered for two weeks was extended to three months. It added $200 million to its Shopify Capital service, which loans money to customer businesses that can be repaid out of online sales. As local sales among Shopify merchants doubled over the next six weeks, it beefed up features that support local pickup and delivery, such as online tipping, and connecting to local delivery services that could stand in for overburdened postal, UPS, and Fedex facilities. The excess server capacity it typically reserved for flash surges in sales like Black Friday and Cyber Monday would help it handle the rapidly climbing volume of e-commerce transactions.
ShopifySwift推出了一系列更改。 它通常提供两个星期的免费试用期延长到三个月。 它为其Shopify Capital服务增加了2亿美元，该服务将贷款借给客户企业，可以从在线销售中偿还。 随着Shopify商家之间的本地销售在接下来的六周内翻了一番，它增强了支持本地取货和递送的功能，例如在线小费，以及连接到可能成为负担过重的邮政，UPS和Fedex设施的本地递送服务。 它通常为黑色星期五和网络星期一之类的销售激增预留的多余服务器容量将帮助它处理Swift增长的电子商务交易量。
Employees throughout the company — from sales to product development — helped onboard the deluge of new business customers. Shopify merchants that had previously or entirely relied on brick-and-mortar sales would later report they were able revive nearly 95% of that revenue online. For now, at least, Main Streets all across America had a decent shot at stopping the bleeding.
从销售到产品开发，整个公司的员工都为大量的新业务客户提供了帮助。 以前或完全依靠实体销售的Shopify商家后来报告说，他们能够在线恢复近95％的收入。 至少到目前为止，全美各主要大街都在阻止出血方面做得不错。
Shopify has become the de facto e-commerce platform for small businesses, but with massive corporate retail customers including Nestle, Unilever, and Pepsi, it’s also now in the crosshairs of the e-commerce marketplace giants, from Amazon to Facebook.
S Hopify已成为小型企业事实上的电子商务平台，但是拥有庞大的企业零售客户(包括雀巢，联合利华和百事可乐)，现在它也从电子商务市场巨头到亚马逊(Amazon)到Facebook的十字准线。
Shopify doesn’t compete directly with these marketplaces; in fact, its platform works well with all of them, including via recent partnerships with Facebook and Walmart. But to continue to grow, Shopify needs consumers to buy directly from its merchant-customers’ websites where it provides a full range of services, rather than buying on Amazon or Facebook and letting Shopify merely track inventory and do the accounting. That means Shopify is now locked in a battle with the big platforms not so much to be the primary choice of merchants, but to attract more consumers to its online-shopping ecosystem.
Shopify不会直接与这些市场竞争。 实际上，它的平台可以与所有这些平台很好地协同工作，包括最近与Facebook和沃尔玛的合作。 但是要继续发展，Shopify要求消费者直接从其提供全面服务的商户网站上购买商品，而不是在Amazon或Facebook上购买商品，而让Shopify仅跟踪库存并进行会计核算。 这意味着Shopify现在正与大型平台展开争夺战，而不仅仅是将其作为商人的主要选择，而是吸引更多的消费者加入其在线购物生态系统。
“Big companies think, ‘How hard could what Shopify does be?’ Then when they try to do it, they find out.”
“大公司认为，'Shopify到底有多难？” 然后，当他们尝试这样做时，他们就会发现。”
The driving force behind Shopify’s massive ambitions is its enigmatic founder, 40-year-old German-born Tobias Lütke — or Tobi, as he goes by. For a company holed up in what by Silicon Valley standards is a backwater, and that is run by someone who seems to have little in common with his tech-giant counterparts, Shopify’s success has been a fairly quiet phenomenon. Virtually no one seems to say a critical word about either Lütke or Shopify. “It’s a genuinely brilliant company with a great culture and a great product,” says Ruslan Fazlyev, CEO of Ecwid — a direct competitor to Shopify. (Lütke, who declined to speak to Marker, also rarely grants interviews and has seemingly managed to inhibit almost anyone who knows him from talking to the press about him.)
Shopify雄心勃勃的雄心壮志背后的推动力是其神秘的创始人，现年40岁的德国出生的TobiasLütke(也就是Tobi)。 对于一家在硅谷标准下陷入困境的公司来说，这是一个死水，而这家公司似乎与高科技巨头的公司几乎没有什么共同之处，因此Shopify的成功是一个相当安静的现象。 实际上，似乎没有人对Lütke或Shopify提出批评。 Shopify的直接竞争对手Ecwid首席执行官Ruslan Fazlyev说：“这是一家真正优秀的公司，拥有出色的文化和出色的产品。” (拒绝与Marker交谈的吕特克也很少接受采访，而且似乎设法抑制了几乎所有认识他的人向媒体谈论他。)
In Shopify’s early years, Lütke, a world-class coder, tried hard to duck the CEO job, until his backers insisted on it. He first became interested in computers in 1986, when, at age six, he received a bare-bones hobbyist computer as a gift from his parents in Koblenz, Germany. He was diagnosed with a learning disorder, which included signs of ADHD and dyslexia. A doctor prescribed medication, but Lütke instead found liberation at the keyboard, particularly through video games. By the time he was 12, he was coding his own games. At 16, he dropped out of school to become an apprentice programmer for high-tech giant Siemens.
在Shopify的早期，世界一流的编码器Lütke努力回避CEO的工作，直到他的支持者坚持要求。 他于1986年对计算机产生了浓厚的兴趣，当时他六岁的时候，他从德国科布伦茨的父母那里收到了礼物，赠予一架准业余计算机。 他被诊断患有学习障碍，其中包括注意力缺陷多动障碍和阅读障碍的迹象。 一名医生开了药，但吕特克却发现键盘可以解放自己，特别是通过视频游戏。 到他12岁时，他正在编写自己的游戏。 16岁那年，他辍学，成为高科技巨头西门子的学徒程序员。
On a snowboarding trip to Canada in 2000 he met the woman he would soon marry; two years later at the age of 22, he left Germany and moved to his wife-to-be’s home town of Ottawa. Unable to get a job without a work visa, he teamed up with Scott Lake, a friend of his wife’s family, to start that online snowboard company. But Lütke was appalled by the services available for setting up e-commerce and spent two months writing his own software. Soon Lütke and Lake were getting as many inquiries about the software behind their site as they were about snowboards, and realized they were in the wrong business.
在2000年的加拿大单板滑雪旅行中，他遇到了一个即将结婚的女人。 两年后，他22岁时离开了德国，搬到了待妻之乡渥太华。 没有工作签证就无法找到工作，他与妻子的家人的朋友斯科特·莱克(Scott Lake)组成了一家在线滑雪公司。 但是，吕特克对建立电子商务的服务感到震惊，并花了两个月的时间编写自己的软件。 很快，吕克(Lütke)和莱克(Lake)就收到有关其网站背后的软件的询问，而不仅仅是有关滑雪板的询问，并意识到他们做错了事。
Shopify was born in 2006. Friends and family staked the cofounders $200,000, though Lake left in 2008. As the company grew, Lütke headed to Silicon Valley in 2010 to hit up VCs. He biked to meetings, using his time before each appointment to Google the unfamiliar financial terms that were thrown at him at the last one. He ultimately raised $7 million. It’s been nothing but crazy growth since.
Shopify出生于2006年。朋友和家人向联合创始人投资了20万美元，尽管Lake于2008年离开。随着公司的发展，Lütke于2010年前往硅谷寻求风投。 在参加每次与Google的约会之前，他都花时间参加了会议，这是他上次参加会议时不熟悉的财务条款。 他最终筹集了700万美元。 从那以后，无非是疯狂的增长。
Based on the few interviews Lütke has done over the last decade, you can piece together a picture of his management style, and how it has shaped Shopify’s culture. His approach was influenced in large part by video games and poker playing, domains that, he points out, call for situational awareness, a need to read other players, and a willingness to take risks. It’s their repetitive nature — letting you try your hand at these skills hundreds of times in a single evening — that enable immediate feedback with direct results. The rest of his entrepreneurial philosophy, he says, he picked up from reading business books. A particular favorite, High Output Management, by legendary former Intel CEO Andy Grove, frames all the challenges that a manager faces, including dealing with people, as problems that can be solved with the right analytics and algorithms.
根据过去十年来Lütke进行的几次采访，您可以整理出一张有关他的管理风格的图片，以及它如何塑造Shopify的文化。 他的方法在很大程度上受到了视频游戏和扑克游戏的影响，他指出，这些领域要求人们对态势有所了解，需要阅读其他玩家，并且愿意冒险。 这是他们的重复性-让您在一个晚上里数百次尝试使用这些技能-可以立即获得反馈并获得直接结果。 他说，他其余的企业家哲学是从阅读商业书籍中挑选出来的。 传奇的前英特尔首席执行官安迪·格鲁夫(Andy Grove)特别喜欢的高输出管理 ( High Output Management)将经理所面临的所有挑战(包括与人打交道)归纳为可以通过正确的分析和算法解决的问题。
Having chafed at authority, expectations, and routine since childhood, Lütke seems to have cultivated a culture that downplays them, at least to hear Thornton tell it. “It’s gloriously different here from any experience I’ve ever had,” she says. When she joined the company in 2013 as a market researcher, she immediately bailed — with her boss’s blessing — from her first assigned project in back-end software, and instead started researching how merchants were using Shopify’s various products, because she thought it would be more helpful. (She was right.) The company has repeatedly made Glassdoor’s 25 Best Places to Work in Canada list, based on employee input, including the 2019 list.
自小以来就对权威，期望和日常习惯感到cha恼，吕特克似乎已经培养了一种淡化他们的文化，至少是在桑顿说出来的时候。 她说：“这里的经历与我曾经经历的经历完全不同。” 当她于2013年以市场研究员的身份加入该公司时，在老板的祝福下，她立即从她在后端软件中的第一个分配项目中获得了保释，而开始研究商人如何使用Shopify的各种产品，因为她认为这样做会更有帮助。 (她是对的。)公司根据员工的意见，包括2019年的清单，反复将Glassdoor列入加拿大25个最佳工作场所清单。
None of this is to say that Lütke is all soft edges. He had to learn to stop routinely telling people their work was “shit” when it didn’t meet the sort of high standards he sets for his own work, he admitted in an interview last year. Many employees have learned not to take his harsh criticism to heart, and they’ve come to respect Lütke’s instincts — because he so often turns out to be implausibly right. He built the company’s original software in a then-obscure programming language called Ruby on Rails, which ended up becoming a huge favorite of programmers everywhere, giving the company a significant edge. By 2009 he was steering the company to a mobile-first position, years before most companies recognized how dominant phone-based shopping would be.
这并不是说Lütke都是软边缘。 去年他在一次采访中承认，当他的工作不符合他为自己的工作设定的那种高标准时，他必须学会停止常规地告诉人们他们的工作是“烂摊子”。 许多员工学会了不要将他的严厉批评放在心上，他们开始尊重吕特克的直觉-因为他常常被证明是极不正确的。 他使用当时不为人知的编程语言Ruby on Rails来构建公司的原始软件，最终成为世界各地程序员的最爱，这给公司带来了巨大的优势。 到2009年，在大多数公司认识到基于电话的购物将成为主导地位的几年之前，他就把公司领导到了移动设备第一的位置。
Lütke’s tendency to downplay his accomplishments may be one reason why competitors tend to underestimate what he has managed to pull off with Shopify. “Big companies think, ‘How hard could what Shopify does be?’” says Ken Wong, technology analyst at Guggenheim Partners, a financial services advisory firm. “Then when they try to do it, they find out. All the bits and pieces behind the scenes from payment to fulfillment are complex, but Shopify does it seamlessly and packages it in a way that’s simple for users. They’re the Apple of e-commerce website builders.”
吕特克(Lütke)轻描淡写自己的成就的趋势可能是竞争对手低估了他在Shopify上成功取得的成就的原因之一。 金融服务咨询公司古根海姆合伙人(Guggenheim Partners)的技术分析师Ken Wong说：“大公司认为，'Shopify到底有多难？” “然后，当他们尝试这样做时，他们就会发现。 从付款到实现的所有幕后细节都是复杂的，但是Shopify可以无缝地进行处理并以对用户来说简单的方式对其进行打包。 他们是电子商务网站建设者的苹果。”
When Ralph Montemurro and his wife decided to start a business making and selling nursery room furniture in 2005, they immediately considered selling on Amazon. Montemurro observed that half of all online purchases start with an Amazon search, yet Amazon didn’t feel right for his high-end furniture, including his rocking chairs that can cost well over $1,000. “On Amazon all the product listings are in the same cluttered format, with the same low-quality photographs,” he says. “We wouldn’t be able to differentiate ourselves there, or have any control over our placement in searches.”
当拉尔夫·蒙特穆罗(Ralph Montemurro)和他的妻子于2005年决定开始做生意并销售婴儿房家具时，他们立即考虑在亚马逊上出售。 蒙特穆罗(Montemurro)观察到，所有在线购买中有一半是从亚马逊搜索开始的，但亚马逊并不满意他的高端家具，包括价格超过1000美元的摇椅。 他说：“在亚马逊上，所有产品清单的格式都杂乱无章，照片质量也不高。” “我们将无法在这里脱颖而出，也无法控制我们在搜索中的位置。”
Shopify’s efforts to keep its customers in the limelight stands in stark contrast to Amazon’s rigid domination of the shopping experience.
Shopify努力使客户成为众人瞩目的努力与亚马逊对购物体验的严格控制形成鲜明对比。
Nor, Montemurro adds, would they be able to get much data on their customers, including their email addresses, because Amazon’s system is designed to keep customers loyal to Amazon, not to any of the individual third-party vendors who sell there. Indeed, Amazon often seeks to siphon away its successful merchants’ sales by bringing out and promoting its own versions of popular products under the AmazonBasics brand. Montemurro’s Toronto-based company, Monte Design, eventually went with a Shopify website, and hasn’t looked back.
Montemurro补充说，他们也无法获得有关客户的大量数据，包括其电子邮件地址，因为Amazon的系统旨在让客户忠于Amazon，而不是忠于在此销售的任何第三方供应商。 确实，亚马逊经常试图通过推出并推广自己的以AmazonBasics为品牌的流行产品版本来吸引成功商人的销售。 Montemurro的多伦多公司Monte Design最终拥有Shopify网站，并且没有回头。
Shopify’s efforts to keep its customers in the limelight stands in stark contrast to Amazon’s rigid domination of the shopping experience. “There’s distrust among third-party vendors toward Amazon,” says Guggenheim’s Wong. “Amazon promotes its own value at the expense of merchants.” Add on the typical 15% cut that Amazon takes from sales, he notes, and it’s no wonder that merchants are increasingly driven to try to sell directly to consumers instead of going through Amazon or other platforms, including eBay and Etsy.
Shopify努力使客户成为众人瞩目的努力与亚马逊对购物体验的严格控制形成鲜明对比。 Guggenheim的Wong说：“第三方供应商对亚马逊不信任。” “亚马逊以牺牲商家为代价来提升自身价值。” 他指出，再加上亚马逊通常从销售中获得的15％的削减，这也就不足为奇了，越来越多的商人驱使他们尝试直接向消费者销售，而不是通过亚马逊或其他平台(包括eBay和Etsy)进行销售。
The advantage to merchants of controlling customer communications and data, as opposed to ceding that control to a marketplace platform like Amazon’s, has been telling during the pandemic. Shopify merchants are able to email customers about what products and services are or aren’t available in the face of disrupted supply chains, what sort of delivery delays might be involved, and what they’re doing to try to keep running smoothly — challenges that most people can relate to these days.
在大流行期间，控制客户通信和数据对商人的好处，而不是将控制权转让给像亚马逊这样的市场平台，是很明显的。 Shopify商家能够通过电子邮件向客户发送有关在供应链中断的情况下哪些产品和服务可用或不可用，可能涉及哪种交付延迟以及他们为保持平稳运行而正在做的工作的挑战。如今，大多数人都可以与之建立联系。
Many Amazon merchants, in contrast, are losing ground with their customers, notes George John, a professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota who studies e-commerce. “Merchant customer ratings have been plummeting to historic lows over the last three months, as out-of-stocks have increased and delivery times have lagged,” he says. And those merchants have no way to tell their story on Amazon. In fact, when in March Amazon increased delivery times on non-essential items shipped from its warehouses, it didn’t show shoppers that in many cases other merchants who sold through Amazon could ship those same items faster. (The company later claimed that was an accidental oversight.) These problems may partly be why the pandemic has seen Amazon’s share of the online commerce market fall from 42% to 34%.
明尼苏达大学(University of Minnesota)市场学教授，研究电子商务的乔治·约翰(George John)指出，相比之下，许多亚马逊商人正在与他们的顾客失去竞争。 他说：“由于缺货的增加和交货时间的滞后，过去三个月，商家的客户评级已跌至历史最低点。” 而且这些商人无法在亚马逊上讲述他们的故事。 实际上，当亚马逊在三月份增加从其仓库中运送的非必需品的交货时间时，它并未向购物者显示，在许多情况下，通过亚马逊销售的其他商人可以更快地运送相同的物品。 (该公司后来声称这是一个偶然的疏忽 。)这些问题可能部分是大流行导致亚马逊在在线商务市场中所占份额从42％下降到34％的原因。
Of course, retailers don’t have to choose between Amazon and Shopify; they can do both, with Shopify neatly integrating the Amazon inventory and sales data into the software, as it does for most e-commerce platforms. But many companies find that making goods available on Amazon can end up steering customers away from their own website, making the customers less profitable and anonymous.
当然，零售商不必在Amazon和Shopify之间进行选择。 与Shopify一样，Shopify可以将Amazon库存和销售数据整齐地集成到该软件中，这与大多数电子商务平台一样。 但是许多公司发现，在亚马逊上提供商品最终会导致客户离开他们自己的网站，从而使客户的利润和匿名性降低。
That was the case for Manuel de la Cruz, whose toothbrush company, Boie USA, sold $2 million worth of products on Shopify last year. He set up his business on Amazon, too, but after two months he pulled the plug on that, even though it was accounting for a fifth of his sales. “I wanted to know who my customers were, and you can’t do that on Amazon,” he says. Still, Amazon remains by far and away the leader in where Americans go to buy online, with the company’s Prime membership hitting 112 million households last year.
曼努埃尔·德拉克鲁斯就是这样，他的牙刷公司Boie USA去年在Shopify上销售了价值200万美元的产品。 他也在亚马逊上建立了自己的业务，但是两个月后，尽管这占了他销售额的五分之一，但他还是放弃了。 他说：“我想知道我的客户是谁，而你不能在亚马逊上做到这一点。” 尽管如此，亚马逊仍然遥遥领先于美国人在网上购买商品的领导者，去年该公司的Prime会员数量达到1.12亿家庭。
“Shopify has come out for the little guy trying to fight against Amazon’s domination. Tobi has given entrepreneurs voices and power.”
“ Shopify已经出来了，是为试图与亚马逊的统治作斗争的小家伙。 Tobi赋予了企业家声音和力量。”
Shopify merchants’ relationship with Facebook, on the other hand, has long been more mutually beneficial. Advertising on Facebook to its 2.6 billion active monthly users, as well as on its subsidiary Instagram, has been the leading way to bring customers to Shopify merchants’ sites. But in May, Facebook announced its own Shopify-like service, called “Shops,” which enables merchants to build their own online stores within the Facebook platform, complete with payment capabilities. As with Amazon, Shops integrates smoothly with Shopify’s software, but the prospect of consumers staying on the Facebook platform through the entire purchase cycle is an ominous one, threatening to cut Shopify out of some of the most important and lucrative elements of the business, including payment processing.
另一方面，Shopify商家与Facebook的关系长期以来更加互惠互利。 在Facebook上向每月26亿活跃用户以及在其子公司Instagram上投放广告一直是将客户吸引到Shopify商家网站的主要方式。 但是在五月份，Facebook宣布了自己的类似于Shopify的服务，称为“商店”，该服务使商家可以在Facebook平台上建立自己的在线商店，并具有支付功能。 与Amazon一样，Shops可以与Shopify的软件顺利集成，但是在整个购买周期中，仍停留在Facebook平台上的消费者的前景是不祥的，有可能使Shopify脱离业务的某些最重要和有利可图的要素，包括交付过程。
Shopify is now striking back at its giant rivals by adding a range of new services, including small-business bank accounts, its loan business, and email marketing tools — as well its own logistics network that will allow the company to provide Amazon-Prime-like two-day delivery, potentially erasing to some extent a key Amazon advantage.
Shopify现在通过添加一系列新服务，包括小型企业银行账户，其贷款业务和电子邮件营销工具，以及其自己的物流网络(将允许该公司提供Amazon-Prime-例如两天送达，可能会在某种程度上消除亚马逊的一项重要优势。
Though there was little fanfare around it, three weeks before Facebook’s “Shops” reveal, Shopify also rolled out a new app called “Shop,” which lets you find, “follow,” and make purchases from businesses that use Shopify to power their e-commerce. Shop is not quite a marketplace like Amazon or Etsy (you can search for a specific business but not for specific items like “jewelry”). For now, Shop’s main function is tracking packages from any vendor — it scans the user’s email (with permission, of course) to get the tracking info. But the app has the potential to deliver something much bigger, and something Shopify’s merchants need more than anything else: new customers. Funneling consumers to third-party merchants is where Amazon and Facebook shine, and Shopify whiffs. The Shop app could narrow the gap.
尽管周围并没有大张旗鼓，但在Facebook的“商店”揭晓前三周，Shopify还推出了一个名为“商店”的新应用，该应用可让您“跟踪”并向使用Shopify来为其电子商务提供支持的企业进行购买-商业。 商店不是像Amazon或Etsy这样的市场(您可以搜索特定业务，但不能搜索“珠宝”之类的特定商品)。 目前，Shop的主要功能是跟踪任何供应商的软件包-它扫描用户的电子邮件(当然是经过许可)以获取跟踪信息。 但是该应用程序有可能提供更大的功能，而Shopify的商人更需要的是：新客户。 将消费者吸引到第三方商家是Amazon和Facebook大放异彩，以及Shopify疯狂的地方。 Shop应用程序可以缩小差距。
It’s a critical move, because more than anything, Shopify’s customers look to it to provide an alternative to Amazon’s powerful marketplace. “Shopify has come out for the little guy trying to fight against Amazon’s domination,” says de la Cruz. “Tobi has given entrepreneurs voices and power.”
这是至关重要的举动，因为Shopify的客户最希望的是为亚马逊强大的市场提供替代方案。 德拉克鲁兹说：“ Shopify是为试图与亚马逊的统治作斗争的小家伙而出现的。” “ Tobi赋予了企业家声音和力量。”
The Shop app could in theory bring in millions of consumers to the Shopify ecosystem of networks to funnel them to its merchants’ websites. In other words, it could eventually create an online marketplace, which would go a long way toward leveling the playing field with Amazon — as well as reducing its merchants’ current dependence on Facebook ads and Google search results. “The vision is that Shop can provide a list of Shopify stores that right now many consumers have no way to discover,” says Thornton. The ability to highlight local stores will be a special strength of the app, she adds.
从理论上讲，Shop应用程序可以将数百万的消费者带入Shopify网络生态系统，以将其集中到其商人的网站。 换句话说，它最终可能会创建一个在线市场，这将为与亚马逊建立公平的竞争环境走很长一段路，并且将减少其商人当前对Facebook广告和Google搜索结果的依赖。 桑顿说：“愿景是Shop可以提供Shopify商店列表，而现在许多消费者都无法发现。” 她补充说，突出本地商店的能力将是该应用程序的一项特殊优势。
For now, however, the company is officially downplaying that grander vision. After Thornton’s comments, a Shopify spokesperson wrote to say that “at this time, there’s no plans today to add product search to Shop.” The hesitation to promote Shop as a marketplace is understandable. For all the extra business a Shopify marketplace might be able to funnel to its merchant sites, the move would set Shopify up for complaints from merchants over search placement. And it would start establishing Shopify as a visible brand in its own right among consumers, something the company has bent over backwards to avoid since its birth. “Shopify has always been the Switzerland of online commerce,” notes Wong. Gaining the power to steer consumers toward one merchant over another would undercut that reputation.
但是，到目前为止，该公司正式否定了这一宏伟的愿景。 在桑顿发表评论后，Shopify发言人写道：“目前，尚无计划在Shop中添加产品搜索。” 毫不犹豫地将Shop推广为市场是可以理解的。 对于Shopify市场可能能够转移到其商家站点的所有额外业务，此举将使Shopify能够应对商家对搜索位置的投诉。 并且它将开始将Shopify本身建立为在消费者中可见的品牌，自公司诞生以来，该公司一直在努力避免这种情况。 Wong说：“ Shopify一直是在线商务的瑞士。” 拥有将消费者引向一个商人而不是另一个商人的权力，将会削弱这种声誉。
There is currently no end in sight to the pandemic’s devastation of indie retailers. Hopes of smoothly reopening millions of U.S. businesses were dashed in June and into July by soaring infection rates that have been leading to more and more about-faces in state and local policies. All of this also suggests there is also no end in sight for the continued Shopify surge.
大流行对独立零售商的破坏目前还没有结束。 随着感染率的飙升，在六月和七月间，顺利重新开放数百万美国企业的希望破灭了，这导致州和地方政策的面目全非。 所有这些还表明，Shopify的持续增长也没有尽头。
To support this—and what comes next—will require Lütke to hold onto and attract the best talent. In May, he tweeted that Shopify “will keep our offices closed until 2021 so that we can rework them for this new reality. And after that, most will permanently work remotely.” And in June, immediately after Trump signed an executive order suspending foreign work visas, Lütke tweeted with a wink, “If this affects your plans, consider coming to Canada instead,” along with a link to Shopify’s career pages.
为支持这一目标以及接下来的目标，将要求吕特克坚持并吸引最优秀的人才。 今年5月，他在Twitter上发布了一条消息，“ Shopify将关闭我们的办公室，直到2021年，以便我们针对新的现实对其进行重新设计。 之后，大多数将永久地在远程工作。” 六月，在特朗普签署了一项暂停外国工作签证的行政命令后，吕特克眨眨眼说：“如果这影响了您的计划，请考虑去加拿大，”以及指向Shopify的职业页面的链接。
There’s no way of knowing if Bezos or Zuckerberg saw those tweets. But it’s quite possible that many of their employees, always on the lookout for the next great tech company to work for, took note.
无法知道贝索斯或扎克伯格是否看到了这些推文。 但是，很可能他们的许多员工总是在寻找下一家要工作的伟大科技公司，因此备受关注。
翻译自: https://marker.medium.com/first-shopify-saved-main-street-next-stop-taking-on-amazon-7035620d19b8
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