Thread by @sh0p1fyj03

1. In the first quarter of 2022 Shopify promised staff that their jobs were safe over a town hall video link. But then in July of 2022, Tobi sent an email to all staff telling them that in the next few minutes some of them would find out whether they still had a job or not:

2. "Placing this bet was my call to make and I got this wrong. Now, we have to adjust. As a consequence, we have to say goodbye to some of you today and I’m deeply sorry for that.”

3. Thousands of people have lost their jobs since that day, and it is becoming increasingly clear that this has rather less to do with a “bet” by the CEO, and rather more to do with an executive desire to replace full time staff with cheap contract work and AI support.

4. Everything in Shopify is turning to AI, from product descriptions to virtual sidekicks to a new help center AI agent (that is still in beta testing and yet to be released).

5. Tobi has hardly been discreet about his plans, sharing a graph on Twitter that illustrated how, over the years, companies required fewer workers to make $1 million in revenue:

https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1628749905920462851

6. The problem is that Tobi's desire to costs to please shareholders comes at the additional expense of customer satisfaction. The decrease in staff and the increase in outsourced, cheap contract labor, has had a deleterious effect on the service we now provide to our customers.

7. A merchant wanting to speak to Shopify’s support (which was once one of Shopify’s major selling points) may now wait hours to speak to an agent. And if they do finally get through to a human being, they will either be speaking to someone who is overworked and burnt out, or

8. to someone who doesn’t fully understand the product and doesn't need to (that worker is clocking in for their poorly-paid shift and then clocking out again).

9. Similarly a lot of the teams tasked with monitoring fraudulent stores are struggling to keep up, such that you would almost certainly need to revise the number of scam businesses upwards of 21% of all stores using the platform. bbc.com/news/business-…

10. Elsewhere angry, frustrated merchants wonder why it has taken weeks or months to receive their payouts, while others can’t understand why it’s nigh on impossible to get straight answers from anyone.

11. The quality of @ShopifySupport is now so abysmal that in March a "Code Yellow" was called in order to assess the situation. In what seemed like a rare moment of transparency, Shopify support staff were asked to voice their opinion as to what was going wrong.

12. But leadership made it crystal clear: this has nothing to do with reduced staff numbers. That cannot possibly be the reason. To admit that would be to admit that leadership are flying by the seat of their pants.

13. Even as staff explained that since the layoffs they are working harder and longer without a proportionate increase in compensation or benefits, leadership were dismissive.

14. The fact that staff are having to take more personal time, or are being prescribed anti-anxiety medication and stress leave by their doctors has been ignored.

15. Instead, CRO Bobby Morrison chalked it all up to a problem with “the system”, and said that Shopify would increase its use of AI so that it can "quickly provide co-pilot assistance to our Advisors and merchants."

16. “Once we know how to fix the system, we will invest heavily in tooling, including tooling to help Support folks do their jobs better and tooling to help our merchants get answers to questions more quickly without having to talk to a human being”.

17. Again: Shopify's customer service, with real, invested human beings, was one of its massive selling points.

18. The truth is dawning on staff and customers alike that Tobi Lutke does not think of them as human beings, but as a resource to be used or sacrificed to the market. His blind faith in market forces of supply and demand is to the exclusion of basic humanity.

19. Staff have listened to Shopify president Harley Finkelstein promise there would be no more layoffs, while watching in horror as Shopify continues to quietly let people go , under a veil of NDAs. We can all see that the writing is on the wall for us.irishtimes.com/technology/big…

20. Meanwhile customers know from the woeful support they receive that Shopify’s focus is no longer small mom-and-pop stores. This, as pointed out by popular analyst @rickwatson, is because Shopify’s revenue no longer comes from subscriptions. It comes from payments:

21.

22. In other words, Shopify is not “making commerce better for everyone”.
Shopify’s focus is now on the bigger players who make more sales because Shopify takes a cut from every sale a store makes.

23. There was once a time when you could believe that Shopify was supporting small businesses. “Arming the rebels”, as its founder @tobi put it, against all-consuming monsters like Amazon, who drowned small businesses & bought out anything remotely resembling a competitor.

24. Shopify has become the very thing it professed not to be: the giant crushing the rebels. And its integrity, both structural and ethical, is too severely compromised to sustain for long. If you’re a Shopify shareholder, you’re making a very bad investment.

CC: @nandoodles CC: @atRachelGilmore