Shopify’s Multi-Tenant SaaS Advantage
Shopify reported 2020 earnings. You already know they crushed it.
A few callouts from the Q&A:
They are not entering the restaurant vertical anytime soon. They did add a theme for this recently to help restaurants build a store, but it's not something they are focused on.
That's good, how would you pick the winners at this stage?
I couldn't help but chuckle when Tobi said they don't compete (directly) with Amazon and they are "fellow travelers in a world of technology."
Sounds so peaceful and nice. Yes, it's true, but to a point. Personally, I think Amazon is less able to compete with Shopify than the other way around.
From Tobi: "We are learning how businesses are best growing..."
This statement caught my eye. They know this from reporting and usage data. Data that Adobe Magento generally doesn't have, at least not in one place.
Shopify knows everything about its own admin - your system is theirs. They run it. Multi-tenant SaaS. As a result, if they want to aggregate trends across all their merchants - what's working, what apps, integrations, and channels were installed at various stages in their growth - they can.
This gives them a tremendous advantage over all non-cloud platform providers - and over their ecosystem partners!
Another statement I thought was interesting: "We want to help merchants surface their own data..." which indicates to me there is quite a robust reporting roadmap that will continue to be worked on. Outside of canned reports, there is quite a bit that the average merchant has to do in order to run their business. This means pulling together all the disparate cloud apps used behind the scenes to run a Shopify business.
How to unify and run your business on that data is an exercise left to the reader. There are plenty of people innovating in this space that could be threatened by Shopify as things go along. Many people are using Amazon Redshift, Google Data Studio, and other more expensive solutions like Tableau and Looker to unify this kind of data.
If Shopify could create a generic reporting framework that worked with all of its ecosystem partners, it could eliminate another whole category, except in the most complex setups.
Sean Pruett added that “the power an SMB can gain from leveraging even the most basic Google Analytics reports can be game-changing for them. If Shopify can integrate equivalent functionality with a clean interface, it’s one more chip away at Google’s hegemony.” Agreed - this would be interesting for sure.
Thiago Doherty Garcia talked a bit about Solution as a Service rather than Software as a Service, as his company VTEX predicts will be the next wave for SaaS. “Customer centricity at the heart of a platform provider. The next-level shift is going from Software as a Service to Solution as a Service…as Software becomes commoditized and talent continues to be absorbed into tech companies and become more scarce, customers will need that SaaS companies offer the entire solution - not just software or storage, but professional services and business consulting. That's our bet - Platforms as business partners - consulting teams from Customer Experience that will enable and augment key accounts as part of the differentiated services model. That's Solution as a Service in our view.” Food for thought on what comes next.
