"$20k for 3 years" instead of 3 years of custom development costs is nothing... sure it's expensive but that's positioned in a marketplace where the alternatives are far more expensive for the average non-technical e-commerce store owner.
If $6k per year is a big expense for you then obviously this isn't the service for you, but enough people are willing to pay that where they are a billion dollar per yr in revenue company.
If some half-baked open-source PHP ecommerce platform with a p/t solo developer over a couple yrs is sufficient to run your business, that's fine. But that was always an option before Shopify existed too and they probably found they weren't interested in that subsection of the market.
half baked open source thingy costs $50 a month, im talking about fully custom solution that actually can handle business cases that Shopify can not. such as this product is shipped by itself in a box. that product is actually a combination of the other 3 products. and give accurate shipping quote for an order is 3 boxes 37 pounds each not 1 big 111 pound box. you will need 17 different apps plugged into shopify to get this to work. and yeah you are right, there is a million generic stores that ship apparell and other random crap doesn't have specific inventory and shipping needs and thats Shopify's market. for anything more advanced you need to shell out $2000 per month for Shopify Plus. And let me guess your response to that will be "any serious business can afford that". its like businesses have hand over their cash to Shopify so that can claim to be a serious business. Shopify is a rip-off and clearly abuses their market dominance in the cases like with MailChimp
I'm sure there are plenty of cheaper options. That's not really the point. I was only comparing it to custom development combined with a high quality service. You usually have to pay more for quality in the SaaS world, even more so than PaaS which is more of a commodity product than an ecommerce platform.
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"$20k for 3 years" instead of 3 years of custom development costs is nothing... sure it's expensive but that's positioned in a marketplace where the alternatives are far more expensive for the average non-technical e-commerce store owner.
If $6k per year is a big expense for you then obviously this isn't the service for you, but enough people are willing to pay that where they are a billion dollar per yr in revenue company.
If some half-baked open-source PHP ecommerce platform with a p/t solo developer over a couple yrs is sufficient to run your business, that's fine. But that was always an option before Shopify existed too and they probably found they weren't interested in that subsection of the market.
half baked open source thingy costs $50 a month, im talking about fully custom solution that actually can handle business cases that Shopify can not. such as this product is shipped by itself in a box. that product is actually a combination of the other 3 products. and give accurate shipping quote for an order is 3 boxes 37 pounds each not 1 big 111 pound box. you will need 17 different apps plugged into shopify to get this to work. and yeah you are right, there is a million generic stores that ship apparell and other random crap doesn't have specific inventory and shipping needs and thats Shopify's market. for anything more advanced you need to shell out $2000 per month for Shopify Plus. And let me guess your response to that will be "any serious business can afford that". its like businesses have hand over their cash to Shopify so that can claim to be a serious business. Shopify is a rip-off and clearly abuses their market dominance in the cases like with MailChimp
What outbound shipping system are you using that you’re happy with?
www.CartSpark.com
Nice sales pitch. Should probably just be explicit that this is your business.
this particular comment didn't ask for that but I have mentioned that I am developing CartSpark in multiple comments on this thread
What about woocommerce? It's not terrible, and seems like it's very flexible, plus a lot of the stuff is free.
I'm sure there are plenty of cheaper options. That's not really the point. I was only comparing it to custom development combined with a high quality service. You usually have to pay more for quality in the SaaS world, even more so than PaaS which is more of a commodity product than an ecommerce platform.