behind the scenes at Shopify. They are dealing with whistleblowers, lawsuits, deceptive marketing allegations, pyramid scheme allegations, even executives dumping shares like crazy. There's a lot going on inside this company, but you wouldn't know it because they spend over $115 million a month on YouTube sponsorships and other ads. Drop shipping is one of the things that I'll be working a lot more on, hopefully going to make series on my YouTube channel, you know, as I scale my store, how to go to 100 bucks a day, 200, 300, 500,000, whatever it is. My personal goal is to get to about 5,000 a day total sales, of course, with that, within about 2 months or so. So, I'd like within about 2 months or so. So, okay, so I want to start this part of the video by talking about the marketing scheme of Shopify, and if I do say so, this is genius marketing 101 in every possible way. Chances are, if you're watching this video right now, you think

Shopify is a blue-chip stock. It's a great company. It's very trustworthy. There's nothing wrong with it, and that is because of the marketing. I will show you just in their report. This is their most recent stock report from June 30th of 2024. That they spent $353 million this quarter in marketing. That's mostly on YouTube sponsorships, other ads, and you know this is a consistent thing over the past 6 months. It's been $714 million. So that is why you have this perception of Shopify that it is this over-the-table company because they spend so much on marketing, and they're making a lot of money too. My point is not that they're not making money. My point is that they are essentially a scam. Now we're going to get more into that later in this video, but I wanted to start by showing you why you probably have such a positive perception of the company right now. And part of this is achieved through high-level, tier sponsorships like Mr. Beast. Whether you have 100 million or

100 subscribers turn your audience into customers with Shopify's social selling tools. In the next 30 seconds, I'm going to show you how to start a business on Shopify within about 2 months or so. Now, I hate to burst your bubble, but if you have 100 subscribers, you should probably be focusing on growing your audience more, not on trying to start an e-commerce brand with 100 subscribers. That's just kind of ridiculous. Shopify knows that's ridiculous. You should know that's ridiculous. And yet, they're marketing that as if it is a real legitimate possibility. And that is what they are almost famous for. They're famous for saying stuff that could happen but is very, very unlikely to happen. Now, this has always been the case with Shopify. This is not something new. They have always had a huge market for YouTubers and other self-help gurus to talk about them in a way that is very sensational, very misleading in my opinion. Now, the reason this marketing was so popular was because Shopify

actually used to pay these marketers $50 per free trial that they signed up. So even if somebody didn't buy Shopify, become an official member, just signing up to a free trial, they would pay the YouTuber $150. I mean, Shopify used to pay like $150 for free trials. That's when D Silva was doing it. Like D Silva, like did he drop something and like barely anyone heard about it, and then he like bought a Richard Millie like right after, and everyone was like, What the heck? Like 'cause Shopify was paying, bro. If I got $50 for every free trial I sent Shopify, I would have made like $50 million. It's insane, like from affiliate marketing. Now this referral marketing program is still enacted today, so it's a little bit more strict these days, but it's still an extremely lucrative business to pump Shopify to your audience because you'll get about $150 per member that signs up and becomes a subscriber. And like I said, it used to be $150 just if somebody was a

free trial member, which is just crazy money, but that's not really even what this is about. I essentially just wanted to lay the groundwork on what Shopify has done for their marketing campaign, and then I wanted to get into some of the actual dirt itself because the scams are where I really take issue with Shopify. If they were just amazing marketers, that would be one thing; I could live with that. However, they're also scammers, and we're going to be getting into that here now. So, if we hop over to the Better Business Bureau, we see that they have a really solid rating of 1.06 stars out of five. That's with 130 customer reviews, so it's a well-reviewed platform, but the reviews are not very promising. But there's a lot of issues with people not getting their money, with issues with the banking side of things, issues with just general store shutting down, you know, just the common issues that you're going to run into with this platform. I understand that. I'm not necessarily faulting them.

for having the bad reviews. However, what I am saying is that they do not deal with their customer issues appropriately at all. Now, if you take a look at their payment plans, you'll see there's one for $2,300 a month on a three-year term. So, don't forget, you're locked into this for 3 years. And then there's some more reasonable ones that are billed yearly for $29 a month, etc., etc. However, there's one little problem. The only one that has phone support is the $2,300 a month one. Everything else has a little chatbot support, but none of them are phone support except for the biggest tier. And this is something that has been complained a lot about on Reddit, and I consider it a downright scam because they have so many issues with the payment processing, websites crashing, glitches, etc. If you're going to have glitches and crashes on your platform, I understand, but don't charge people $2,300 a month just to get on the phone with customer support. You should

be giving free customer support if you have a one-star rating on the Better Business Bureau. And it's not like they can't afford this. This company is worth, as of today, $87 billion, so I think they can afford a little tech support on the phone. But instead, you got to deal with a chatbot while they take your money because they crashed your website or they shut down your payment processor. But it's also kind of worse than that because Shopify as a raw platform is kind of unusable. You need a lot of extension apps. You need apps that do your returns, your email marketing, your text marketing. You need probably a custom platform, which you're going to have to buy from the App Store as well. And this is also confirmed in their earnings report. If we take a look at their revenue, we see that in the past quarter, the subscriptions have only made about $563 million, while Merchant Solutions have made $1.48 billion. Now Merchant Solutions are things like the extra apps you need to buy, the website design, the

customization. Whatever you need to actually get your store up and running. It also includes the fees from the payment processing side of the store. Now, unfortunately, the issue goes even deeper. There are additional issues to the Drop Shipping model in general, starting with the fact that the quality of these items is just terrible. If you drop ship an item from China directly to the customer and you don't even see the item, it's going to be a terrible process, and a lot of people get scammed. There is a report from the BBC that states nearly 21% of Shopify stores pose a risk to their consumers through either being inauthentic, low quality, or just straight-up scams where they take your money and run with it. Now, it's not just this. We also have AliExpress themselves talking about this exact issue, how low quality and downright illegal some of their products are. They state in their annual 2024 shareholder report, which I will link below, We are regularly subject to allegations, investigations, lawsuits, liabilities, and negative publicity claiming that items listed and content

available infringe intellectual property rights of third parties or are illegal, and this is not something that is a surprise to me whatsoever. I am very familiar with the counterfeit industry here on AliExpress, Alibaba, DHgate, all of these Chinese manufacturers, and this is the same stuff that gets drop-shipped on Shopify. They are letting this stuff go. If a fifth of your customers, if over a fifth of your customers, are doing illegal activity on your platform, you got to do something about it. You have to have better protections in place for the consumers who are shopping on your sites. Now, it's not just me, though. There are also employees who are quite frustrated with Shopify. We see recently there was a $130 million lawsuit after Shopify laid off about 20% of their workforce and then didn't pay them the severance that they were allegedly entitled to. We have another major breach here where Shopify was alleged in a class action lawsuit that they have illegally leaked customer information after a Shopify website was hacked and

Overall, this just continues to paint the picture of very poor management at Shopify, very little care for the employees, for the users, the consumers, everybody involved, except for AliExpress and the wholesalers are getting the short end of the stick here. And it's just one of those things where eventually people are going to start to realize that this company is essentially just taking advantage of them, and many of the employees already know this. They have a pretty rough rating on Glassdoor, especially for Senior Management. The Senior Management seems to be lacking in a lot of ways, and I don't even think the Senior Management believes in the company, to be honest with you. I'm going to pull up the stock trades that the Senior Management have been involved in recently. This is over the past 12 months. All of the red bars are the Senior Management selling their stocks, and then the green bars are actually not even them buying the stock. The green bars are them getting awarded stock for free from stock options for their work. But the uninformed buys and unformed cells don't.

really matter. What we really just see is a whole ocean of red text here, as we see just a bunch of sales of the stock, no purchases whatsoever. Now, the reason this reminds me so much of FTX is because FTX was the Golden Boy of the internet before it initially popped. Everybody loved FTX, everybody was sponsored by FTX, everybody supported FTX, everybody loves Sam Bankman-Fried. They called him the most generous billionaire in history, and it was all great until it wasn't. Once people started to realize that it was a predatory platform that was taking advantage of the users, everything started to flip. And my concern with Shopify is that if people start to realize that it's so predatory and essentially a scam, and if there's a mass withdrawal and the platform or the company shuts down, that could actually lead to a lot of real-life businesses being shut down as well. The people who use Shopify consistently, maybe for a brick-and-mortar store or mom-and-pop or their Mr. Beast, they might actually lose

access to the platform if the platform crashes and goes bankrupt.

Shopify is the next FTX

Shopify is the next FTX

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