TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #023

Shopify Was Down (and we know why), Keeping Our eCommerce Villains Straight, Amazon Purge, and more.

June 04, 2019

Yo - 

Geeze … this is getting confusing. I need to keep all my eCommerce villains straight. Let’s see, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke is Dr. Evil (tell me you didn’t think the same thing), Jeff Bezos is the Billionaire-Monopolist-Philanderer (until I think of something better), Google is Sauron, and … oh, right! Mark-the-Snark Zuckerberg is Emperor Palpatine.

Now that we have all that straight, here are this week’s top stories.

1.  Let’s Start with a 2-for … Shopify Was Down Thanks to Both Dr. Evil and Sauron

I don’t know if you know it, but ALL of Shopify was 

down for more than five hours 

on Sunday. That’s right, ALL of Shopify. The Shopify headquarters is 380 miles east of the TaskHusky offices and I could hear the screams of their network admin galley-slaves from here. It wasn’t good. But the issue both was AND wasn’t Shopify’s fault because last year they migrated the entire infrastructure to the Google Cloud, and it was the Google Cloud that went down – also affecting Snap, Nest, and most of YouTube, which means it was also a very bad day for cat videos.

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2.  PayPal Breaks from the Empire and Supports the Rebel Alliance … sort of

Remember how last week I went all “Star Wars Wonky Reference” when talking about The Zucks? Got to admit that I’ve re-read that one a few times since and it still makes me giggle. Any-who … did you know that both Facebook Marketplace AND Instagram Checkout use PayPal’s backend eCommerce payments magic for fraud protection, compliance, and authentication? Well, PayPal is going to open that system up to small businesses. Now, this is still going to be too technical and expensive for a start-up online merchant to deploy. But it is a STELLAR opportunity for someone to build a service on top of it for us little guys.

3.  Duh! Have You Even Been Paying Attention to Us at All?

If you are a regular reader of these emails (and who isn’t) or of our blog … or a client who has had us to one of those amazing website teardowns that we do, then you ALREADY know about page speed and why eCommerce sites can live or die in the number of seconds it takes a page to load. But … if you can’t read or are so hurtful that you would ignore any portion of our content, here is an infographic-like object to remind you about the importance of page speed.

(by the way, tell us if you need a high-quality page speed test)

4.  Financing Infidelity Ain’t Cheap – Amazon to Purge Many Small Suppliers

Do you know what I LOVE about evil corporate PR flacks? They are so … darn … predictable! In response to a leaked report in Bloomberg about Amazon purging smaller suppliers from its wholesale program, an Amazon spokesperson slithered out of a dank hole in the ground, finished swallowing a rat, and said, “We review our selling partner relationships on an individual basis as part of our normal course of business, and any speculation of a large scale reduction of vendors is incorrect.” Which of course means they are DEFINITELY doing that. I’ll bet Jeff Bezos-Dirty-Pants paid a Harvard Lawyer a couple grand to write that sentence.

(this guy on ZeroHedge breaks a lot of good news).

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5.  Betting on Big, Empty Buildings

You know, this is just interesting to me. We – you and me – we make our living doing eCommerce stuff. Most of us own small online shops—some of us own larger ones. Others on this list make apps, do development, and make products to sell online. We are on the forefront of the digital commerce wave that has disrupted a lot of physical retail space. And that makes for some big empty buildings that used to be big-box retail stores. But that is also opportunity. I read that some of those old retail stores have become datacenters and call centers. Here’s something else they are becoming … warehouses for us.

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Wow … another AWESOME email blast is done and in the can! We so rock at this. 

Do you know what you rock at? I do … sharing. You’re a VERY generous and giving person which is why you are going to share this email with everyone you know – not just the eCommerce folks. Because you care.

Happy Selling,

Zachary