There's a famous Pieter Bruegel painting from 1562 called "The Triumph of Death" that someone contrasted with a "typical scene in a US department store on Black Friday" here[1].
It might take a few seconds to tell apart the painting from the Black Friday store. ;-)
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The original painting[2] has a gem[3] in the corner of it (that's not visible in[1]): where death is wreaking havoc, and a pair of lovers, oblivious to it, are playing guitar and singing. In that frame, you'll see death also playing guitar right behind them, in a neat visual rhyme, implying that their fate is sealed too.
Funny that the “typical scene in a US department store on Black Friday” is in a Brazilian store. Not sure if it’s a reasonable approximation of US stores on Black Friday or not.
Having worked in the bowels of a major online retailers networking team during black Friday sales, I can say that a lot of the patterns you see in this UI are real. People do indeed get out of bed at ungodly hours of the morning to get two bucks knocked off a stereo.
Of all the years where I worked in ecommerce, the first year with Black Friday was the only one that was any fun.
We where one the first webshop in the country to have a Black Friday campaign, mostly as an aftertought. The entire thing was just one guy in marketing, me, who hacked together a quick way to add the discounts and then our fantastic team of buyers who used to occasion to clean out old stock and mistaken purchases. We ran with anything from 20 - 90% discounts. As stuff sold out everyone just kept digging into old stock and adding insane discounts. It was so much fun to see items that normally didn't move just sell out in minutes.
The next year everything was more or less normalize, planned and just boring and stressful as expectations from customers where much higher and it became more a quest to keep the servers from crashing.
Such a strange trend. On the surface it feels like “we’re so interested in your curiosity that we want to offer you a job”, but in reality it’s more like a very subtle marketing campaign designed to boost brand awareness.
So curious how the internal conversations go when these are proposed, and why they are all so similar.
yeah but at their scale... Google says they might use Kafka. So idk personally as a non expert in that I would totally read a blog post about generally how they put it together, what the scale of people accessing the live map is
I thought the same thing. I'm from Michigan and so whenever I see a map or globe I compulsively find North America and look for the hand shape. Was very disappointed to see that it is not present here...
Gosh I've really enjoyed using the Shop Pay checkout experience on an increasingly large number of ecommerce sites this past few months. It didn't really click until recently that this was all Shopify backed!
Makes me think it might not be too late to figure out a sensible valuation for NYSE:SHOP and invest.
Every time I checked I thought they were over valued. $200B! But P/E is only 60, and they are still growing. This makes Tobi net worth higher than Jack Dorsey.
Then I looked at revenue was only ~4 billion. Something doesn't add up. Turns out they have ~$3B from Gain on Sale of Security.
They also have investments in a bunch of tech companies and are moving into a lot of different markets. Wallstreet likes to look at the GMV which is second only to Amazon for gross merchandise volume sold on a platform.
Judging by the globe there's a similar amount of traffic in the west coast US as there is in UK, which is a bit odd considering its 0715 here in the UK right now. I didn't know my neighbors got up to shop so early.
This reminds me of the time I worked for an ecommerce firm, and one of our customers used the same backend for physical and online shopping. Systems went down due to some bug causing cpu load. People in the store couldnt pay for their goods. Many angry phone calls were had, whilst I frantically searched through the logs to find the bug.
Today is also Buy Nothing Day for those with different values.
Our mainstream culture generally says growing the GDP helps everyone, that "a rising tide lifts all boats." Some of us see the evidence pointing the other way and avoiding needless shopping helping people more.
The dashboard has a tracker for carbon removal. If shopify really wanted to do something about that they'd close shop for 4 days (BF-CM), that'll have a much bigger impact than compensating for shipping.
Slightly off topic but I am always surprised Shopify hasn't every created something akin to the amazon homepage that allows you to browse and find items at shopify stores more seamlessly.
You can do this with the Shop mobile app (it's an official Shopify product). I think stores are defaulted to showing up but they have are able to opt out.
Unfortunately that will exclude any Shopify powered store that has a custom domain.
Didn’t Google use to have an “inhtml:” operator or something that let you search for matches in the html of pages? Shopify powered websites have commonalities in their html that can give away very quickly the fact to a crawler that it is powered by Shopify, just by looking at the html of the main landing page of the shop.
Also, the DNS entry for a Shopify hosted site, even if using a custom domain, will be either a CNAME pointing to shops.myshopify.com, or an A record pointing to an IP address owned by Shopify, like 23.227.38.65. https://who.is/whois-ip/ip-address/23.227.38.65
We still have a long ways to go, but you can search for items and filter based on things like category and distance (if you are trying to shop locally). We're doing things on a very tight budget at the moment, so sometimes the site goes down, but we're working on it :)
If you have any feedback, we would love to hear it.
Right now, we gather location data from the pages themselves. Some shops (not many) include an address. The process is very error-prone though, so our accuracy in this area is likely not where we want it to be. We are working on other ways to improve that.
Yep, amazon takes a lot of earned hate for all the scammers on the platform. The current setup has shopify as not a real consumer brand and just a piece of infrastructure like how your VPS host isn't part of the store.
They did/do this. One of the big problems is competing with customers. i.e. you go from being a platform (Windows, Unity, Shopify, etc) to an aggregator (Amazon, Spotify, Instagram, etc) and your relationship goes from the small store to Shopify. Similar to how you might browse Doordash for "food", rather than look specifically for "Chipotle".
Upside of an aggregator is discovery/distribution. Downside is you rely on the aggregator for that discovery/distribution.
Rare for billion dollar businesses to be built on aggregators, not so rare for them to be built on platforms.
Despite using the same platform, no two companies setup their product catalogs the same way, from how multiple products/colorways are grouped together to metafields are used to communicate more nuanced product features. There's simply no way Shopify could hope to present a unified catalog given those implementation nuances.
Yep, this is pretty much it. Amazon has the advantage that they are able to force their sellers to specify metadata about their products in very specific ways, which allows them to build on top of that consistency. With Shopify, as tomnipotent said, its all over the place, and it only gets worse as you cross languages.
I've seen both Amazon itself and sellers use wildly inconsistent ways listing products using the "multiple flavors of this item" functionality.
Probably hands-down the most irritating metadata issue with Amazon is when sellers don't include quantity information properly - or even include quantity in the title when selling just one size - which I'm sure they do on purpose to make price per unit shopping more difficult.
Sometimes the way the items are listed will be different between one product and another made by the same company, or between Amazon's listing and a third party's listing for the same general product...and they each have different types of the item available. Say, Amazon will sell Ken's Socks in purple and blue, all sizes in purple but only small in blue...while Blankenship E
Things seem to get especially messy when you have a matrix of two 'flavors' (such as a sub-model and color, or unit size), and not all combinations were manufactured or available.
Even the UI isn't consistent. Sometimes it's a drop-down list, sometimes it's the rectangles.
Oh, and often the model/part number isn't entered...
Wouldn’t it be a huge risk in some ways? People don’t know site xyz is Shopify until they’re on xyz and therefore probably have no qualms with Shopify hosting xyz. If it were a marketplace, someone “just browsing” would find something that offends their oh-so-delicate sensibilities and the next day some grotesque exaggeration like “Shopify supports terrorists” or “Shopify is pro/anti-abortion” leads the headline news.
It bugs me the Shopify engineering team are spending their time making gimmicks like this rather than improving their platform. (Which is lacking features, buggy and requires you to install about 15 different addons just to function…
One of the biggest inequalities being that Black Friday and Cyber Monday are American inventions aligned with a holiday that doesn’t exist in other countries.
I'm in South-East Asia/Japan and Black Friday/Cyber Monday is definitely a thing here, but Shopify isn't as prevelant here. All major eComm players are running BFCM campaigns.
Black Friday seems to be pretty widespread: many German retailers like https://www.galeria.de/ or https://www.mueller.de/ advertise "Black Shopping" today, and it seems common enough in the UK as well.
Heck, some British retailers are even co-opting the 4th of July as a sales holiday for local businesses: "Independents' Day."
Never underestimate the inexorable march of capitalism.
...or of how much or little "Black Friday" is a global thing. (It sure is being marketed in Europe now, even if my country-fellows in the Netherlands don't celebrate (American) Thanksgiving.)
Here in Norway the stores have been running Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals for years at least. And recently more and more of them have Black Week, which is like Black Friday but it lasts the whole week.
I'll never respect Shopify. I gave them my CV with decent experience and the recruiter never even spoke to me on the phone. They told me that I would need more of a social media presence or maybe open-source work. It was completely baffling but I'm glad I never encountered another company like them.
I mean, sounds like they didn't think you were good enough for the job and gave you some nice tips on how to shortcut not having the required experience.
I'd agree the fact that they even gave you any feedback is a benefit - things that can improve your candidacy. Outside of knowing anything about your job application/experience - most places I know just don't get back to you and leave you wondering if you are still in the running or not.
You don't mention what sort of role you applied for. If it was any kind of developer relations position then looking for someone with a recognised presence in the community isn't unreasonable. Even for an ordinary dev role, looking for someone who has demonstrated their ability to be sociable and work with other devs is understandable even if it sucks.
Plus you don't say when this was. Looking at social media profiles in job applications was a bit of a (silly) trend 5 or 6 years ago.
Very large org with no doubt limitless job applications being submitted are particularly picky with the ones they choose to interview? Colour me shocked.
Perhaps this is off topic, but it's always strange to see writing thousands of kilometers. If we're gonna use the meric system let's commit to it: either write megameters or millions of meters.
Not strange at all. Kilometers is a unit of distance that we are familiar with.
I have literally never heard the term “megameter” used in conversation and I’m pretty sure if you said it in any metric country you would get blank stares.
My lab scale shows me grams to the thousandth (the accuracy is only to the hundredths). Would you have it show me 7000mg instead? What about 17000mg?
I think it’s much better to pick a unit that makes the most sense for the bulk of your readings and abuse it instead of changing units on me. Imagine if it went from 999mg to 1g, now imagine it trying to settle between them. Or you are weighing a dozen items that are all expected to have a weight of about 1g and need to log the results - think of the unnecessary cognitive overhead the changing units would cause.
I think you just gave a compelling case for why there should be multiple units. It's much simpler to just write a small number and a whatever unit identifier, than have to read large or unwieldy numbers.
I just cooked a recipe where it asked me for 100 grams of a paste, 90 grams of a liquid, 70 grams of a powder, 30 grams of a spice, 15 grams of another liquid. Do people in other countries have measuring spoons in gram size? And do you always tell people whether you meant by volume or weight? Tablespoons, teaspoons, cups and ounces just seems easier than having to measure a fraction of some large number.
> Do people in other countries have measuring spoons in gram size? And do you always tell people whether you meant by volume or weight?
Grams are a mass measure. A recipe calling for X grams of Y requires a scale to be accurately followed. Volumetric measurements, e.g. teaspoons and ounces, are easier to follow, but they're less accurate. (Canonical example is salt. Ask for a mass measurement of salt, and you'll always get the same amount of it. Ask for a volumetric quantity, and your mileage [hehe] will vary based on what type of salt is used.)
Kilometres is the 'native' unit for normal people thinking about driving, flying or shipping in most metric countries (obviously pilots and sailors use different units, like nautical miles, but for regular passengers it's km).
All road signs, the distance indicator on the entertainment system in planes, etc. are always set out like that (e.g. 1617 km to Cairns, or 11,980 km to Dubai).
From my point of view (whole life in a country that is exclusively metric), it would be really strange to see this kind of distance written in millions of metres or megametres. Would feel totally unintuitive.
I think for large monetary units, newspapers and reporters should always use millions. Ask a guy off the street, what's larger, $500 million or $2 billion? I bet most get it wrong. That infrastructure bill that just passed? 1.2 million millions. How rich is Jeff Bezos? 200 thousand millions. The total US national debt? 29 million millions. Say it that way and it actually sounds like a large number.
Why should there be consistency/commitment? Other than for the sake of itself? Genuinely curious where this desire for things being the way they 'should' be comes from
It might take a few seconds to tell apart the painting from the Black Friday store. ;-)
The original painting[2] has a gem[3] in the corner of it (that's not visible in[1]): where death is wreaking havoc, and a pair of lovers, oblivious to it, are playing guitar and singing. In that frame, you'll see death also playing guitar right behind them, in a neat visual rhyme, implying that their fate is sealed too.[1] https://www.devblog.no/sites/devblog.no/files/styles/800px_w...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triumph_of_Death
[3] You have to zoom into the lower right corner to see it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triumph_of_Death#/media/Fi...