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Comment by harrouet

7 hours ago

Plus they have an Amazon-scale infrastructure to manage...

I think Amazon is very much on another level in terms of scale. Not trying to be negative about Shopify — they have a very large system to maintain - but Amazon is just on another level.

  • Amazon don't seem release any figures but I've seen estimates of 50,000 to 100,000 engineers. They do have 1.576 million employees worldwide (2025 figure).

    • Yes but “Amazon-scale infra” as the grandparent mentions should absolutely include AWS, and Shopify is nowhere near that size.

  • Combined Shopify sales are ~half of Amazon's but growing quicker. Shopify probably supports more sales per engineer than Amazon's retail stack team.

  • Shopify is not far behind Amazon (the e-com business). It's network sees as many unique visitors as Amazon, though I imagine Amazon has more sessions per visitor, but the GMV across Shopify is just shy of half of Amazon. It's still in the same ball park.