Shopify doesn't care about you or me

Shopify is hard at work adding updates that at the end of the day don't add much for small brick and mortar retailers

Welcome. I’m Katherine Raz. I own a shop in Tacoma, Washington called The Fernseed and this is my newsletter about running an independent retail business in the age of Amazon, Covid, etc. If you’re a shop owner, or you sell products to small retail businesses, or you’re just curious what this whole business is about, you’re in the right place. (And if this email was forwarded to you, you can sign up to receive it yourself right here. It’s free!)

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Let me start out by saying that I wouldn't have been able to quickly build and scale my business if it weren't for Shopify. It's the back-end e-commerce platform that powers our website. It's also our point of sale software. Twenty years ago there was no out-of-the-box software that did all the things Shopify does. If you wanted to sell things online or manage inventory across several retail locations in 2002, you had to spend thousands of dollars on custom software and database development. Shopify has leveled the playing field for thousands of entrepreneurs. Like WordPress did for website development and blog creation, they've given regular people an easy-to-use platform to create extraordinary, far-reaching things. I love them for that.

But three years in to running my business, Shopify is failing me. I'm handcuffed to the platform—at this point it would be arduous to switch to a different software, train my staff on a new point of sale, or migrate our data—so I exist at their whim, as do thousands of small business owners, and that's a real liability. When Shopify doesn't function the way we need it to, and it often doesn’t, giant gaps form in our process. We have to piece together our own tools and hacks to get the software to support the jobs we need it to do.

I have a background in website design and software development. I've worked for several startups (including Indiegogo, let me just drop that in there), a boutique web design agency specializing in Wordpress websites for nonprofits, and I also freelanced for Aeolidia, another boutique firm that builds custom Shopify sites for small e-commerce brands. I understand this space. I know how Shopify works. I know how software is designed and built. I know it takes years to spec out features, add them to a roadmap, and release them.

I'm not naive about how software businesses are funded. I know, for example, that my little business—which generates tens of thousands of dollars each year for Shopify through software subscription, merchant processing fees, and loan interest—isn't Shopify's target customer. I'm not their primary concern. They know I'm entrenched, handcuffed, monopolized into customer-for-life status. They can ignore me as I request feature updates and I have to put up with it.

Shopify's obligations are to their investors, not their small business customers. As such, Shopify must continually pursue growth. Growth means adding features that position them as indispensable financial partners to other software giants, like Facebook, and banks. To do this, they'll focus on unveiling big, flashy new capabilities for users on their Shopify Plus plan, new tools for developers, and features that drive revenue for their financial partners and investors through lending and advanced advertising capabilities (Shopify Balance, Shopify Capital, and Shopify Audiences). They'll spend more time making it easy for small businesses to use Shopify to spend money with Facebook, or borrow money from their financial partners, than they will making their software easier for day-to-day small business operations.

They'll also invest more in expanding their developer community (software designers who act as barnacles to the Shopify platform, developing tools and apps that support the feature development Shopify customers like me are seeking), because to Shopify, those freelance developers are free labor, doing the work of user research and software development that requires zero upfront investment from Shopify, while generating revenue through the sale of additional apps and tools developed by the community and sold to customers like me for anywhere from $9.99 to $129.99 per month—subscriptions Shopify of course takes a cut of.

I realize I'm nothing more than a gnat buzzing at Shopify's ear, asking them to do better. The financial reality is that they don't give a shit about me, and don't have to. My reality is: that sucks.

I finally had some time to dig into Shopify's most recent suite of updates, and I was disappointed to find that basic features—things that would make running our business so much easier and features we've been requesting for years—still haven't been included.

Meanwhile the most recent update to Shopify's POS system is terrible. The new user interface is awkward. It's frustrating for my retail staff to use, and frustrating to our customers who have to wait minutes longer to check out because, for example, searching for a second item to add to the cart after adding the first item is a clunky experience that requires swiping away an "added to cart" pop-up bar to return to the search menu. This is basic user experience (UX) design, and it feels as though no one in the Shopify UX team spent any time in the field watching how their customers use the interface.

It’s not like this is something we can't expect software companies to do. I took part in a UX design boot camp a decade ago just to brush up on skills and my teacher was a UX lead at GrubHub who had spent weeks observing how staff at restaurants flowed through physical space so they could better understand how to design an iPad app for online food order processing.

Do Shopify designers spend any time in the field like this? Who knows.

There are a few things Shopify got right with this latest release, so let's start with those.

1. They finally added the ability to add metafields to products. Finally, admins are able to add custom fields to individual products, so we can add notes, visible to both admins and POS users, with back-end information about each product. We use these fields for notes like, "we only order these stands in teak but can special order them in darkened teak and black."

2. They streamlined the bulk editor tool in the admin, making it easier to edit more than 50 items at once.

3. They added the ability for customers to combine discounts at checkout.

As far as I can tell after reading hours of Shopify Editions '22 information, those are the only updates that actually apply to our shop.

A recent Shopify blog post outlines some of these basic admin changes and quotes Charles and Ray Eames:

The details aren’t the details, they’re the product.

The post goes on to say:

With that in mind, we made many improvements to make the Shopify admin much easier, powerful and enjoyable to use. From the way assets are uploaded on a product page, to the spacing of icons across the admin, we’ve made many discreet improvements that will most likely go unnoticed by users, but to Shopify, these contribute to a larger story—making the best merchant experience possible.

Here's a term I learned from my partner, who as it happens, works in software development: bikeshedding

"Bikeshedding" is used to describe design and development where time is spent on trivial details rather than on core functionality.

From Wikipedia:

The term was coined as a metaphor to illuminate Parkinson’s Law of Triviality. Parkinson observed that a committee whose job is to approve plans for a nuclear power plant may spend the majority of its time on relatively unimportant but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bikeshed, while neglecting the design of the power plant itself, which is far more important but also far more difficult to criticize constructively.

Instead of designing the core functionality of the Shopify product itself, you've been spending the last six months working on "the spacing of icons"?

In an exit interview I conducted with one of my staff (who is leaving to move to another city), I asked: is there anything that makes your job harder?

Her answer? "Sometimes Shopify is really confusing and I'm not sure I've got everything." Shopify, while functional at its core, does not provide my staff or me with the basic confidence that everything is happening the way it should.

I even started a channel in our Slack team communication called #tech-support where I can track failures and (eventually hope to) fix them. The channel is all Shopify, all the time.

What is it that I'm asking Shopify to do, exactly?

Here are some core product features we've been requesting.

We'd like to see the ability to add a line-item discount code at the product-level, not just the entire cart level.

If we run a promotion on a particular product, such as our 50% off plant discount when you fill up a punch card, we currently have no way to track how many times that discount code was applied. Discount CODES (trackable) are only applicable at the cart-level (to all items in a cart), not to specific products. Specific products can only be discounted by percentage, dollars off, or price override, with no ability to track. This hinders the success of tracking some of our most basic marketing efforts.

We'd like the ability to use more than one automatic discount at a time.

We regularly offer bulk discounts on air plants, and 2-inch cacti and succulents. They're normally $6, but when you buy 3 or more, they're $1 off. This discount is applied automatically at the register; our staff doesn't have to remember to enter it. Yay! However if we also run a promotion where all pottery in the shop is 20% off, as long as the initial automatic discount is active, we can't add another one, even if the discounts are not in conflict with one another.

If we run these sales, as we often do, I either have to cancel the initial automatic discount and remind my 8 staff members across two locations (some of whom have only been with us a few months) to apply it, or I have to inform everyone of the new discount and remind them to apply that. It's exhausting to me and my staff, and it results in errors that frustrate our customers. So I avoid using effective marketing discounts altogether just to reduce the headache.

We'd like the ability to add discounts in bulk to products in a cart.

Every Monday, we offer 40% off all 4-inch plants in our shop. Currently, our staff has to click into each item to which this discount applies and apply the discount individually, sometimes to 6-8 items within a cart. This takes minutes and is prone to error. A bulk edit discount application would work wonders here.

We'd like return receipts to be more understandable.

Both our staff and customers are confused by our return receipts, which do display the total amount of a refund, but don't itemize it to include item-specific discounts or sales tax calculations. If a customer asks, "Am I being refunded the sale price of the item or the full price?" we can't accurately answer.

We'd like the “free gift” discount to automatically add the free gift SKU to the customer cart when used or when the free gift criteria are met.

Currently when we offer a free gift with purchase, we have to instruct our online customers to add that item to their cart (at full price), then use the discount code to get it for free. No one ever uses this discount code because that process is confusing to the customer, and this is a discount we would love to use repeatedly.

We'd like the ability to view products on the admin side that do not meet certain criteria.

Currently we can create reports and lists of products that match a criteria, such as all products tagged with a particular product tag. However we cannot create a list of products where those fields are blank. This is important when you have data entry errors, such as products that do not have a wholesale cost entered. There is no way to run or sort a report in Shopify on products with no cost entered into the data field. We know we have products in our system with no cost, but we can't find them, which means we can't fix the errors and track margins correctly.

We'd like the ability to view detailed vendor/supplier information.

We now have the ability to add metafields to products, so we can finally add vendor ordering information and important product information into Shopify. But there is no place to access information by vendor or supplier unless we use the Stocky add-on. This means when we need to re-order a product, our team has to access a separate database of information with notes on how to contact suppliers for re-ordering (wholesale portal link, vendor email address, etc.). Frustratingly, this information exists in Shopify in the form of “transfers,” where detailed supplier information can be entered. But it can only be accessed by locating a Transfer (purchase order) from that vendor through Products > Transfers, then clicking on the vendor name which takes you to pop-up window where you can edit the fields. There is no notes or comments field within the vendor information, no place to add a URL or product notes, re-ordering notes, or general supplier notes.

We'd like the ability to generate a report or product view that shows us the total number of products we have in inventory across both of our locations side-by-side.

This is potentially the most frustrating thing about using Shopify to manage inventory across a business with multiple locations. We cannot view products in bulk and see how many of each we have at both locations at once. If I want to filter our products by a tag ("best sellers," for example) or by vendor, I can view those items in bulk and include inventory quantities, but only for one location at a time. I would like to see a column for each location so I can easily assess which products should be moved from one location to another. I need to see what best sellers, or products from a particular vendor, are low in stock at one location but whee we might have extra inventory at the the other location.

This is impossible. In fact I called Shopify support, baffled that this wasn't a core feature, and do you know what they suggested? "Get a bigger computer screen, or two computer screens, and use multiple tabs."

Either that, or I can subscribe to an app with more robust reporting and pay an additional monthly fee.

Most of the updates that were included in the latest Shopify release are only available to Shopify Plus customers. Even at nearly a million dollars in sales each year, we can’t afford a Shopify Plus subscription.

Most of the other updates were tools that no small business owner I know has time to investigate and/or use, or can’t afford.

Among them:

• Shopify Audiences, a tool that allows you to, among other buzz phrases, “supercharge top of funnel acquisition,” by tapping into Shopify's database of customers to build custom audiences for Facebook and Instagram targeting. Only available to Shopify Plus subscribers.

• Shop Cash Rewards, a tool with benefits I find hard to comprehend, and that is only available to you if your customers are using Shop Pay. We have Shop Pay enabled and people use it to finance purchases, but The New York Times has written about potential problematic aspects of these financing tools. According to Shopify, Shop Cash Boosts "get your brand discovered" to new buyers on the Shop app. But what is the Shop app? Do my customers use it? Additionally, “All you have to do is aactivate Shop Pay and sell on Shop to reap the benefits.’" But the benefits aren't outlined? What is the benefit to my shop? And how does one “sell on Shop”?

• Twitter shopping, something I can’t imagine ever using since I've been actively avoiding Twitter since 2016. As a small business, I’d much rather have the ability to apply a discount code at the line-item level at my checkout than acquire customers through Twitter. I can’t think of a single small, brick and mortar business that uses Twitter as a marketing tool?

• Dovetale, a tool to help you find influencers and manage influencer affiliate revenue campaigns. Shopify says:

  Building relationships with creators and influencers is key to growing your business, finding new audiences, and driving sales. Dovetale is Shopify’s all-in-one creator management tool that helps you find new creators, build authentic communities, better manage relationships, and track affiliate sales.

  Are you serious right now?

• Linkpop, which is essentially a shoppable link for your Instagram bio. But we already have that by connecting our store to Facebook products and just linking from our Stories and grid posts? And also Linktree exists. Not really sure what the benefit of Linkpop is, but the Shopify support team are pushing it hard.

• Marketplace Kit: It would be lovely to manage our Google Shopping efforts or get key acquisition metrics from Google Shopping within Shopify, but the entire process is opaque and written for developers. Example: “Build shopping experiences into any platform with our flexible APIs." I mean, I know what an API is because I worked in software for 5 years. But is this a product that’s intended for small business users or the Shopify developer community? I suspect the latter.

• New B2B platform updates, so you can sell wholesale products alongside your direct-to-consumer products, which is of course super useful to businesses that market a wholesale line of products in addition to direct-to-consumer sales—lots of small businesses do this! But this is only available to Shopify Plus subscribers. (Sad trombone.)

All in all, a discouraging set of releases that continue to communicate to small business owner like me that Shopify, for all the money they suck out of your bottom line, doesn’t ultimately care whether you succeed or fail using their platform.

I wish we mattered more. I wish we could expect better and hope for solutions, but I know better.

Thanks, Shopify.