Shopify's midlife crisis: How a surprise pivot away from logistics capped the e-commerce giant's whirlwind year
"Investors are seeing them less as the next Amazon and potentially more as the next Salesforce," Oppenheimer analyst Ken Wong said.Shopify originally had high hopes for its logistics project and planned to compete with Amazon, two former employees said.
In September 2019, it announced it would acquire the collaborative-robotics firm 6 River Systems and build Shopify Fulfillment Network — mimicking a move its supposed rival Amazon made in its 2012 acquisition of Kiva Systems. Almost immediately, the team realized integrating Deliverr with Shopify would be tough, two team members said, and Shopify had"no idea" how, a former team member said. Shopify's existing software and Deliverr's were built in different coding languages for a start, and they never fully integrated.
In his letter about the most recent layoffs, CEO Tobias Lütke wrote that the balance of managers and crafters had grown"unhealthy" at Shopify. Some workers said that changed sometime between 2020 and 2021 as the company began asking volunteer"channel champions" to monitorThe company's town halls — formerly a forum for workers to ask leaders questions — changed to a prerecorded format.Employees pointed to differences in the language Lütke used to announce the company's two recent layoff rounds as another sign that things had changed.
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