I enjoyed today’s WSJ article about stores teaming up to take on Amazon. Since Bridge has collectivized 800 indie shops to push back against Amazon, we can relate to efforts to help stores team up and boost their communities.
The article mentions Shopify and its popularity among indie shops. Shopify, along with BigComerce, Big Cartel, Wix, and Magento, are platforms that have helped indies to grow online independent of Amazon.
While we appreciate any platform that helps indies, we kindly note Shopify is dependent on collecting revenue for each little feature a store adds to its website—so a store’s apps and costs quickly balloon. We support platforms that help indie stores reduce complexity and costs. (Retailers often tell us that Bridge is quicker, less complex, and less costly for many brick-and-mortar stores than Shopify. Support for this: Bridge’s annual customer retention rate is 92%, and Shopify’s is estimated to be 19%.)
Fighting Amazon isn’t cheap. Before going public in 2020, Shopify received $100m+ from venture capitalists starting in 2010. Yet, the upside is notable: Shopify is now valued at $160b. Fighting for small shops can equate to big money.
PS-Bridge hosted a series of "Your Store vs. Amazon" seminars at the Atlanta and Dallas trade shows. In the seminars, we encouraged stores and brands to team up and share resources. A poster from one of those events is shown here.