Mom and pop might be using Shopify and Stripe to compete with Amazon, but Shopify runs on Google Cloud and Stripe on AWS. Big tech is still brewing everyone's potions.
Referring Ben Thompson's "Facebook Political Problems"; A company like FB can cause damage to Amazon eCommerce more than anything else:
"I am, given my career, biased in this regard, but the rise of platforms like Shopify, Etsy, Substack, and the App Store is evidence that new careers can be built and untold niches filled when the entire world is your addressable market. The challenge in a worldwide market, though, is finding the customers who are interested in the niche being filled; this is where Facebook’s ad offering is very much a platform in its own right.
Facebook, via its integration with a host of third party sites and apps, makes it possible for those sites and apps to collectively understand and target prospective customers with the same sort of proficiency that first-data powerhouses like Google and Amazon do , and they don’t need to hold or understand any third-party data to do so. It is difficult to overstate what a big deal this is: suddenly a Shopify merchant can compete with Amazon, a D2C startup with Unilever, or a blog with the New York Times."
Mom and pop might be using Shopify and Stripe to compete with Amazon, but Shopify runs on Google Cloud and Stripe on AWS. Big tech is still brewing everyone's potions.
Referring Ben Thompson's "Facebook Political Problems"; A company like FB can cause damage to Amazon eCommerce more than anything else:
"I am, given my career, biased in this regard, but the rise of platforms like Shopify, Etsy, Substack, and the App Store is evidence that new careers can be built and untold niches filled when the entire world is your addressable market. The challenge in a worldwide market, though, is finding the customers who are interested in the niche being filled; this is where Facebook’s ad offering is very much a platform in its own right.
Facebook, via its integration with a host of third party sites and apps, makes it possible for those sites and apps to collectively understand and target prospective customers with the same sort of proficiency that first-data powerhouses like Google and Amazon do , and they don’t need to hold or understand any third-party data to do so. It is difficult to overstate what a big deal this is: suddenly a Shopify merchant can compete with Amazon, a D2C startup with Unilever, or a blog with the New York Times."
source: https://stratechery.com/2021/facebook-political-problems/