
Why Mailchimp is no longer in the Shopify App Store - blackdogie
https://community.shopify.com/c/Shopify-Apps/Here-s-why-Mailchimp-is-no-longer-in-the-Shopify-App-Store/td-p/493593
======
kweks
We run Shopify across a plurality of domains. Over the last 12 months,
especially with the release of "Shopify Payments" (Stripe Connect) - they have
become a lot more opaque, greedy and dangerous for merchants.

Anecdota: \- Their "Shopify Payments" onboarding is highly shady. They onboard
you _without_ performing KYC. Once you are committed to the platform, they
perform KYC. They refuse to perform KYC before moving to their platform.

\- Once you commit, you can't go back to Stripe - they remove Stripe from the
list of providers. In the past, support would reenable it upon request. Now
they refuse.

\- We have a high volume site that migrated to Shopify Payments, after 4 years
of Stripe without issue. Two weeks later, they sent an email stating we were
not eligible Shopify Payments, refused to let us return to Stripe (would not
reactivate it), and held the money collected for three months.

\- On another store, a competitor issued a trademark infringement email.
Shopify pulled all products immediately, without communication - and refused
to reinstate, despite letters from our legal team showing proof of
capitulation from the accusatory party.

The _platform_ is great. It out performs Magento, Presta, WooCommerce,
BigCommerce, etc etc with its interface, product management, raw performance
and core feature set.

However, it is most definitely the PayPal of the eCommerce world: they can,
have, and will happily kill accounts and clients based on their whims.

~~~
yuchi
May I point you to our own competing platform?
[https://en.storeden.com](https://en.storeden.com)

~~~
justinclift
Sounded interesting, but your team doesn't seem to be on the ball. :(

The HTTPS certificate for one of your main websites (submitting bug issues),
linked from your front page, expired last November.

[https://assistenza.storeden.com](https://assistenza.storeden.com)

For a lot of things, some forgiveness is in order.

But for an eCommerce place, it seems a bit much. :(

~~~
justinclift
And, 1 week later the certificate is still expired.

Clearly people should avoid storeden.com.

------
spectramax
I found Shopify app store excessively expensive and risky. Most plugins are
subscription based with poor support, no guarantee of future updates and just
reeks of poor quality. I am not a store owner so I can't comment on how useful
some of these plugins are but the whole idea of business critical services
(such as a store front) needs rock solid foundation and support, without it I
would get extremely nervous.

Imagine if I have 8 plugins that I pay anywhere from $10-30 a month, per
plugin. That's 8 things that can break when Shopify changes some API related
things and now I have 8 _different_ parties that I need to seek support from
to get my store up and running. God forbid if the developer ceases to exist
and bailed out of Shopify ecosystem. I am getting nervous just thinking about
this whole "app store" model for business critical infrastructure.

May be I am not well informed in this space, but there are also services that
help glue various other services such as IFTTT, and a few others that combine
GSuite, Asana, Dropbox, Slack, etc... I can't remember them but I wonder what
kind of nightmares I would have to rely on fragmented infrastructure that
consists of chained API calls managed by independent companies. Mind you, the
middle broker of API also wants the slice of the business so they're going to
either charge $/month or worse - ads. Then there is the whole privacy/security
aspect. Holycrap what a mess!

~~~
dmix
Sounds like Heroku's business model and that works fine for a certain type of
business/consumer. Of course you could spin up your own VPS or code your own
Rails ecommerce app. But that's not always economical - up to a certain scale.

API changes breaking sites is another matter entirely than their subscription
plugin model which could be solved while maintaining that structure.

This change by Spotify seems to be related to Mailchimp not providing a
certain standard of service that they demand from other plugin-services on
their platform. I could see that being a costly choice for any customer who
has to now migrate to other services, but the intentions were largely good and
pro-customer.

Hopefully there was some sort of data migration process in place and some
upfront warnings before your email marketing system gets cut-off.

~~~
spectramax
I think the problem I am describing goes deeper than just the API calls.

It is about support and accountability. As a business owner, I want as few
parties responsible for my infrastructure as possible with healthy portability
possibilities (to avoid lock-in).

With Shopify app store, the whole idea is insane to me - I have to now deal
with Shopify + plugin developers individually to fix issues. Things break all
the time, just go to Shopify forums for support. And then, there is the risk
of a developer leaving Shopify ecosystem with a dangling plugin never to be
maintained.

~~~
dmix
Sure but supporting your own infrastructure is exactly _why_ people choose to
use a service like this.

From my experience running your own services is far more fragile and subject
to maintenance-overhead due to API changes than a service like Shopify or
Heroku.

The main drawback is a lack of flexibility and customization - not so much the
lack of stability in service.

~~~
spectramax
I agree and I can see why supporting your own service would probably be more
of a headache.

What about stores such as Squarespace? They don't have a market place of apps
and everything they do is in their control. Ofcourse, now there is a risk of
lock-in and unable to extend/scale your store if needed.

------
blackdogie
This of course is one side of the story. Looking forward to hear the
Mailchimps side of things.

Edit: here we are [https://mailchimp.com/shopify-
statement/](https://mailchimp.com/shopify-statement/)

~~~
aboutruby
Shopify:

> Shopify has had growing concerns about Mailchimp’s app because of the poor
> merchant experience and their refusal to respect our Partner Program
> Agreement. Our terms require app partners to share all important data back
> to the merchant using Shopify’s API to help them run their businesses.

Mailchimp:

> Throughout these negotiations, we refused to agree to terms that jeopardize
> our users’ privacy and require us to hand over customer data acquired
> outside of Shopify. From our perspective, that's not our data to share.

~~~
jonstaab
I had been working on an integration between our product and Shopify via an
app for just about a week when their updated ToU came out. It is a pain in the
butt. I side with MailChimp here, that customer data isn't ours to share with
Shopify, especially since it concerns a whole different segment of our
merchants' customers (brick and mortar vs ecommerce).

What's not mentioned here is that they also updated the terms to prohibit
selling anything on behalf of a merchant without using their checkout api, if
your software is integrated with Shopify. But we make a special-purpose POS,
that's our value-add. It appears that they just want their cut - of customer
data and of fees.

Edit: a link to the ToU discussion on the Shopify forums.
[https://community.shopify.com/c/Shopify-APIs-SDKs/We-ve-
upda...](https://community.shopify.com/c/Shopify-APIs-SDKs/We-ve-updated-our-
API-ToU-and-Partner-Program-Agreement/td-p/490397/highlight/false)

~~~
kartickv
Exactly what data is this dispute about? The article says "customer
information captured on merchants’ online stores" but what exactly does that
mean?

~~~
jonstaab
The definitions are frustratingly vague. "Any customer data excluding
sensitive personal data", which doesn't exclude stuff that isn't relevant to
them, or things that don't fit in the API.

Also, it states that apps "not use an alternative to Shopify Checkout for web
checkout or payment processing, or register any transactions through the
Shopify API, without Shopify’s express written authorization".

That's from 2.3.17-18 of the api terms of use:
[https://www.shopify.com/legal/api-terms](https://www.shopify.com/legal/api-
terms)

------
navs
So Shopify is mad that Mailchimp isn’t sharing data with them?

I’m no fan of mailchimp (for e-commerce customers I recommend Klaviyo) but
Shopify+ is hell to work with. I haven’t had as much grief with a platform as
I’ve had building e-commerce stores on Shopify (and I come from Magento). For
the price of plus, you get practically nothing. Clients ask me incredulously
why they don’t have something as basic as Wishlist support or access to custom
fields inside their product pages. Shopify’s own sync tool for dealing with
multiple stores doesn’t sync much and their answer to the admin hell of
managing multiple stores is to give us a single login and a store selector.
For everything else well there’s an app for that.

Yes there’s an API. Yes you can build apps. But that’s an investment and at
that point you might as well build something on Woocommerce or Magento. Yes
you have to maintain a server and updates on the other platforms but you’ll
need that for Shopify anyway. If you want to roll your own Wishlist app
(you’ll want to when you see what’s on offer from the shopify store) you’ll
need a server, a database - the architecture that Shopify says you don’t need
to begin with.

~~~
steve-benjamins
Shopify does include Wishlist and Custom Field features. They're available as
apps— not in the core.

The whole point of the app store is to avoid the mistakes of Magento: building
a confusing, monolithic mess because they tried to shoehorn too many features
into the core.

~~~
navs
They’re available by third parties. You can argue that customfields are
supported by Shopify but wishlists aren’t. If you need a Wishlist you need a
database externally storing customer and product data.

So no, Shopify doesn’t have a Wishlist feature. Shopify lists other Saas’ that
offer to fill in the many gaps.

That may work for some retailers. As with Magento, some will like that
approach and some won’t.

But if you’re telling a retailer that Shopify offers a Wishlist feature you
need to be sure to mention that it will cost them $x/month/store and that the
app isn’t built nor supported by Shopify.

------
hrdwdmrbl
Shopify's Plus offering is also really shady. If you ever choose to try it
out, they will not let you return to your previous payment processing rates
(credit-card fees). We had been grandfathered in to their old (good) rates.
But after trying Plus they gave us their new (much worse) rate and refused to
give us the old ones. And this was after they lied about the rate we'd be
getting with Plus. And after they gave us a low teaser rate to try out Plus.

~~~
YeahSureWhyNot
hey we are a small team that developed a multitenant ecommmerce system geared
towards B2B type businesses. I would love to get your feedback about the
solution that we built. please shoot me an email at hello@cartspark.com if you
have 10 minutes to chat.

------
lugg
> The data captured on behalf of our merchants belongs to those merchants,
> it’s as simple as that.

No, it doesn't. It's the end users data.

> and this isn’t possible when Mailchimp locks in their data

Complaints about lock-in from you is pretty rich.

> Mailchimp refuses to synchronize customer information captured on merchants’
> online stores and email opt-out preferences.

You're intentionally misleading the reader here. This isn't about opt out
preferences. That's just a useful excuse.

Any idiot can see you're trying to build up a complete picture about user's
spanning across stores.

This isn't about your customers, this is about you wanting to push mailchimp
out.

~~~
bigbadgoose
Wait, when you supply your data to vendors … do they own rights to that
supplication, ergo the data?

------
mancuso5
Well, Mailchimp is starting their own “ecommerce platform” after hiring people
from the now defunct LemonStand. How about that for the real reason for
pulling them off the Shopify app store? :)

------
nickjj
I used to use Shopify about 5 years ago and remember thinking they were one of
the good ones (company wise). Good platform, easy to work with API, etc.. I
even created a few custom apps for a client's site that ended up doing 100k+
through Shopify's POS hardware in a month.

But from all of the comments here it sounds like they've gone down hill. I
haven't used Shopify since then mainly because I haven't tried to pick up new
work where I manage an ecommerce store for people but is it really that bad
now?

How many of you are really going to use an alternative solution for an
ecommerce site?

~~~
calibas
I was kind of shocked that they discontinued their WordPress integration. I
get the feeling they want their customers to be completely dependent upon
Shopify, which is part of why I avoid them when possible.

------
YeahSureWhyNot
as a small wholesale business owner I was shocked that I have to pay $300 a
month to Shopify system that lacks a million things and then I need to pay
30-50 dollars a month for each plugin and it was my job to figure out how they
will work with each other. I am not even talking about support and where I
should get it from after spending around $500/month on the whole 'solution'.
Instead of paying $6k per year or close to $20k for 3 years I got my own
ecommerce system custom built.

~~~
dmix
"$20k for 3 years" instead of 3 years of custom development costs is
nothing... sure it's expensive but that's positioned in a marketplace where
the alternatives are far more expensive for the average non-technical
e-commerce store owner.

If $6k per year is a big expense for you then obviously this isn't the service
for you, but enough people are willing to pay that where they are a billion
dollar per yr in revenue company.

If some half-baked open-source PHP ecommerce platform with a p/t solo
developer over a couple yrs is sufficient to run your business, that's fine.
But that was always an option before Shopify existed too and they probably
found they weren't interested in that subsection of the market.

~~~
YeahSureWhyNot
half baked open source thingy costs $50 a month, im talking about fully custom
solution that actually can handle business cases that Shopify can not. such as
this product is shipped by itself in a box. that product is actually a
combination of the other 3 products. and give accurate shipping quote for an
order is 3 boxes 37 pounds each not 1 big 111 pound box. you will need 17
different apps plugged into shopify to get this to work. and yeah you are
right, there is a million generic stores that ship apparell and other random
crap doesn't have specific inventory and shipping needs and thats Shopify's
market. for anything more advanced you need to shell out $2000 per month for
Shopify Plus. And let me guess your response to that will be "any serious
business can afford that". its like businesses have hand over their cash to
Shopify so that can claim to be a serious business. Shopify is a rip-off and
clearly abuses their market dominance in the cases like with MailChimp

~~~
sokoloff
What outbound shipping system are you using that you’re happy with?

~~~
YeahSureWhyNot
www.CartSpark.com

~~~
throwaway413
Nice sales pitch. Should probably just be explicit that this is your business.

~~~
YeahSureWhyNot
this particular comment didn't ask for that but I have mentioned that I am
developing CartSpark in multiple comments on this thread

------
system2
Shopify and all other service providers MUST stop letting people comment
announcements like this. No one is adding anything valuable but advertising
their own product. This announcement just looks like Quora spams.

------
system2
Last week was about Apple VS Spotify, now Shopify VS Mailchimp. I just can't
understand why big companies can't get along while there is so much money to
make or lose.

I tend to support opensource apps like Magento or WooCommerce. Shopify is
extremely easy but I don't get how they can complain when they actually hold
all the ropes of their clients and say something about another services' data
collection. What's the logic behind it exactly? Users want to use Mailchimp,
and it is not always e-commerce related.

~~~
kokey
I suspect since easy investment money with no questions asked is slowing down
and there's increasing IPO activity, companies are starting to care about
their bottom line more and along comes with it strategic fights with potential
competitors over a share of a smaller pie.

~~~
YeahSureWhyNot
could be. reminds me of the times when Twitter/Facebook and all others first
acted like a platform to build upon and after watching some companies become
successful these 'platforms' tightened data access for the the apps/clients
and pushed them out of business

------
bobjordan
I use MailChimp with my Shopify store and it's pretty irritating to be
impacted and have to plan to deal with this. I put quite a few hours into
getting everything set up as it is now with our MailChimp followup emails
(products left in the shopping cart, etc). From my view, I don't care at all
to have my MailChimp account more connected with the Shopify API. Shopify has
plenty of data on me why do they need more? And, I don't need or want to
control my followup emails from within Shopify. I obviously like MailChimp
enough to chose them, independently. So, I smell BS in reading this Shopify
post.

------
chuckgreenman
Sorry Shopify, I think I buy MailChimp's side of the story more. I wonder what
percentage of Shopify stores are just drop shipping fronts. I can see that
hurting MailChimp's deliverability.

~~~
briandear
How are drop shipping companies harming email deliverability?

~~~
chuckgreenman
There are a bunch of Shopify plugins that just let people sell Alibaba express
items with no intermediate work. These kinds of drop shippers engage in
shadier marketing campaigns. If email coming from MailChimp starts getting
reported for spam, other legitimate mail coming from their ips will see
delivery suffer.

------
so_tired
Off Topic: recommendation for a payment processer for a market place?

So this is a market place for virtual goods. Maybe 10K users, with
$10-$1000/month/user paying into OUR ACCOUNT, and about 100-1000 users are
sellers, pulling in about $10K/month from OUR SHARED ACCOUNT.

Our biggest concern is not commission or speed. It is simply not being
arbitrarily black listed !!

------
apple4ever
Very interesting. Our company just announced switching to Shopify from Magento
(against my advice). We don’t use Mailchimp but this doesn’t sound good from
the Shopify side.

And from some of the comments here, given that we have a highly customized
Magento site (with deep integration to our ERP system) and 100K+ SKUs, I’m
very worried what this will do to our site. I wouldn’t be surprised if our
company will be shocked at the how limiting and expensive it will be.

~~~
navs
I’d be very interested in hearing more about the switch. I’m a Magento dev
that’s recently done a Shopify+ store and would love to hear from people in
the trenches rather than marketing blog posts

------
wdr1
Reading this & Mailchimp's response, the crux of the debate is sharing things
like the user's opt-out status?

------
point78
So they are both saying it's the other ones fault. And both saying because the
other one is sharing private data....

~~~
detaro
> And both saying because the other one is sharing private data....

No, they aren't. Shopify is saying that Mailchimp isn't sharing data Shopify
insists be shared, Mailchimp says sharing that data is not acceptable, because
it's private.

------
4FNET7
If you are larger merchant, we recommend Hubspot.

------
danielfoster
I'm curious what good alternatives to Mailchimp exist? My experience working
with them is that they're a solid but outdated option.

For example I went to import some contacts today and was surprised that
Mailchimp was unable to automatically correct basic syntax errors such as
"usergmail.com", "user@gmail" or even "user@gmail.com <FirstName LastName>"

The fact that their product management team never thought it was a priority to
include such an easy time-saving feature makes me think they have a rather
hard-headed culture that is missing the boat on a lot of things. I can see why
they would be difficult for Shopify to work with.

~~~
kaslai
You say they are basic syntax errors but fixing them is not the place of the
application. "usergmail.com" could have the @ at basically any spot before the
I and be a totally believable email address. Sure, statistically speaking,
"user@gmail.com" is the most likely option, but "usergm@ail.com" would be a
perfectly believable email for a game master that manages ail.com.

Given that mailchimp is a bulk email delivery service, I would hate to get
spam at user@gmail.com just because someone forgot the @ on their
"u@sergmail.com" entry.

~~~
danielfoster
That's a good point. I guess I'm looking at this from a UI / usability
standpoint. I feel it is Mailchimp's job to speed up my email marketing--
that's the job I've hired it to do. If I just wanted to send email I would use
a leaner service at a lower cost.

Mailchimp already filters out bad email addresses (nospam@gmail.com, etc.).
Most addresses have a format like "sallysanders11" or "michael.smith." The
chances of there being another user on the same domain are scarce and indeed
at least on my mailing list, 70% of the people signed up are on Gmail.

There's no reason why a good piece of software should not be able to use a
little bit of intelligence and ask me if I want to auto-correct my addresses--
within reason, of course.

