Posted by tobi — 03:14 PM Aug 22
Shopify got profiled last week in Practical E-Commerce as cart of the week . According to them they found 300 different Shopping cart packages, I know our market was big but that’s pretty insane.
Anyways, their Cart of the Week feature pits one Cart against another by asking a competitor to comment on the software, CNN style. In our case they asked Rick Wilson of Miva Merchant to comment on Shopify. Here is what he dislikes:
The obvious weaknesses I saw were the limits on what they called ‘enterprise’ level offering of only 10,000 SKUs. The other major weakness is the product is built using Ruby On Rails. Ruby On Rails seems to be a development environment with a lot of future possibilities, but as a general rule you don’t want your revenue-generating product to be based on cutting edge technology. There’s a lot of unforeseeable pitfalls in that area.
(emphasis mine).
So to deconstruct the first part of this argument let me just say that we have millions of products in Shopify right now and it’s a pure business decision to limit SKUs to 10k and has nothing to do with the software. There are millions of products in the database. In fact i’d buy Rick lunch if Shopify isn’t right now handling twice the traffic any given Miva Merchant store has ever sustained.
What’s left is the advice that you shouldn’t run a revenue-generating web site based on cutting edge technology. I don’t think I have to point out how ridiculous that statement is. First of all I presume that perl was pretty cutting edge ( definitely more than ruby is today ) in 1998 when Miva was written and also we are talking about bloody Miva Merchant here, the e-commerce system that runs on a proprietary closed source database that is known for corruption issues after several hundred products. Not only that, it seems to be one of their main sources of revenue: For 129$ setup + 20$ a month you can get some support and basic database recovery. Unfortunately:
** Due to the nature of database problems not all database corruption can be covered under this package
Isn’t it nice that you never have to worry about such tactics with hosted systems and SaaS packages like Shopify?
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Carsten 22 Aug 17:11
Haha, I remember reading this and just shaking my head. WTF, Rick, database corruption is part of your product offering and you’re telling us how not to fail?
Aydin Mirzaee 22 Aug 17:13
Cutting Edge does not equal Unreliable!
Silverlight is pretty new and the US Olympics website is relying on it quite a bit (and its done an amazing job). I just find that the statement in bold is completely inaccurate.
Aydin.
Koz 23 Aug 07:23
That’s purely awesome. It reminds me of Joel Spolsky (who wrote his own programming language) suggesting that ruby wasn’t widely deployed enough to use.
Good times…
NetBlazon 23 Aug 21:37
Tobias, as a Miva Merchant developer, I just want to point out that Miva Merchant uses a proprietary scripting language, but not a database. Older versions of Miva Merchant had to use DBF files, the same database format used by FoxPro, along with a proprietary set of index files. However, the current version of the software runs on MySQL. (DBF support is still offered for backwards compatibility, but not recommended.)
I can’t argue all of your points here, unfortunately. But I did want to correct this error in your post.
Thanks, Susan