Bookseller Details How Shopify Is Destroying The Business
Shopify is an e-commerce platform that allows anyone to set up an online store and sell their products. Merchants, as well as regular individuals, can sell their products online easily using Shopify.
It lets you build and customize an online store and sell in multiple places; including the web, pop-up shops, and online marketplaces. It is considered to be one of the most user-friendly platforms and a great place for beginners and small business owners to set up their first online store.
However, As good as it sounds, there is a particularly dark side to Shopify. The company has been accused of ruining the businesses of merchants by using its platform and stealing money from its customers.
What did Shopify do?
A Twitter user Matt Zollar Seitz tweeted on the matter, accusing Shopify of ruining his business. He said Shopify has a dark side: “it began destroying our family book store and stealing money from our customers one day after our first independently published work.”
The user is talking about their first published book, The deadwood Bible which was three years in the making. The book was funded through Kickstarter in 2019 and was assisted by 12 people to finish. Despite losing members of his family, including his father, mother, and wife, he finished the book at a significant loss in production costs.
According to him, the Bibles arrived on June 15, and Shopify froze them on June 16. Shopify continued to take money from the customers but refused to deposit it in Matt’s company account. “For reasons that to this day they have never explained,” he wrote.
Firstly Shopify froze Matt’s payments account, depleting the company of its funds. When they talked to the customer service, they told him that “financial services” had frozen the account and gave no particular reason for it.
After multiple email exchanges, a banner appeared on Shopify stating Mark had to produce bills of sale for all 50 titles in his Star Wars section. Mark and his team complied with Shopify as they didn’t want to get into an infringement issue.
Has the problem been solved?
However, this compliance resulted in absolutely nothing. “Basically, Shopify wanted us to produce a non-existent license to sell books while cleaning the demand was about branded products,” he wrote. Even after submitting his vendor and driver’s licenses as proof, the company gave no resolution to Mark.
As of now, Shopify has collected about $7000 from Mark’s customers without depositing it into his company account. “We’re in a tough spot now because of the platform’s behavior,” he wrote.
Despite this blow, Mark and his partner have continued to work in order to fulfill the original Kickstarter orders. Mark also his company to a new website and hopes to power through.
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