Competition or cooperation? Amazon announces its latest interoperability initiative with Shopify

For a long time, the independent website building platform Shopify seems to have been regarded as a friendly competitor of the cross-border e-commerce platform Amazon. Recently, Amazon announced that Amazon logistics can be tracked on the Shopify website. This news has undoubtedly sparked widespread discussion.

On June 25, Amazon issued a short message stating that if Shopify independent site sellers choose Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment ( MCF) service for their orders , buyers of the order can view logistics tracking information directly on the Shopify website .

On the Shopify order confirmation page , buyers will see a track.amazon.com link and click on it to view the latest logistics tracking information. Sellers can also view Amazon logistics tracking information on Swiship .

In April this year , Shopify added the option to link an Amazon account. This new feature began to be highlighted at the top of the store's main page, allowing users to automatically extract new Amazon order information by linking their accounts, thereby enabling Amazon order tracking.

At the same time, users can link their Amazon accounts in the "Add orders automatically" section in Shopify's "Settings." Currently, users can link their Gmail, Outlook, and Amazon accounts in Shopify.

So, what are the similarities and differences between Amazon and Shopify?

To put it in a more popular way, the Amazon platform is similar to a large shopping mall in life, where sellers can rent or buy shops and operate them. The mall will provide unified property services such as security and cleaning, but sellers also need to abide by the mall's rules and regulations. If the mall is popular enough, all the shops in the mall will receive considerable customer traffic.

Amazon is such an "online mall". It has complete and strict platform policies that all sellers must abide by. Sellers have less freedom to operate, and their business data may be monitored by the platform. However, for many small and micro businesses and emerging brands, by entering Amazon, they have the opportunity to gain higher exposure and traffic for their stores.

In comparison, Shopify is an independent website building platform in the SaaS field , and a tool to help cross-border e-commerce companies build independent websites . Sellers can pay a certain fee to use various themes , templates , etc. to create their own independent websites online .

Independent website sellers have extremely high freedom and information security index. They can establish their own website rules without worrying about third parties monitoring business data.

Today, when the traffic dividends of large platforms are getting smaller and smaller , jumping out of third-party platforms, retaining one's own customers , and building one's own brand seem to be the next turning point opportunity for online e-commerce operations.

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