Who Killed E-Commerce ?
Courtesy of Howard Lindzon
This chart Charlie shared re e-commerce growth really caught my attention:
Back in 2008 and 2009 it was not Apple and Facebook hurting e-commerce sales it was the ‘Great Financial Crisis’.
Post crisis, Apple launched the iPhone, Shopify became the home of small e-commerce business and Facebook launched ad products that helped create an explosion of e-commerce and e-commerce companies. Etsy was also an important platform.
In the last year, While America yelled at Facebook for the newsfeed and politics, Apple figured out how a lot of America would opt out of being tracked by Facebook and opt out they did.
I talk to a lot of e-commerce founders and they can’t use Facebook to grow anymore, nor do the small teams have the expertise to grow their e-commerce startups like they did on [Facebook’s back]. The scrappy ones will survive, invest in people and learn the new tricks, but for now I think it is mayhem.
It seems like we let Apple put a stranglehold on the type of marketing that let small e-commerce business thrive, and Zuckerberg and Shopify underestimated the impact and are way behind the curve on solving for it and explaining to the politicians how dangerous an overlord Apple has been to SMB’s trying to grow their business.
