Amazon launched Storefront, a retail hub for small businesses, today. But Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke, whose software powers storefronts for 600,000 companies — including many small retailers — says it “feels like a trap to me.”
Amazon’s new small-business product ‘feels like a trap,’ says Shopify’s CEO
Tobi Lütke thinks giving your business data to Amazon might not be a good idea.
Rani Molla was a senior correspondent at Vox and has been focusing her reporting on the future of work. She has covered business and technology for more than a decade — often in charts — including at Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal.
“In a couple of years, if merchants decided that giving all their business’s data to Amazon, then starting to compete on buy buttons with every factory in the world, didn’t work out as that good of an idea, then I would not be surprised,” Lütke said, speaking at Code Commerce in New York.
Lütke drew a comparison between his business, which he said prizes merchants, and Amazon’s.
“Amazon’s worldview is that merchants don’t matter. Factories and consumers matter,” he said. “Everything in between is Jeff’s opportunity,” referring to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
Earlier in the interview, Lütke referred to his competitors — and peers — in the tech industry as “frenemies.”
Watch the full interview here:
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
