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07.04.2026
The Verb Problem
Read Time: 8 Minutes
Hello
What Shopify Teaches Every Founder About Positioning
I spent several weeks studying Shopify. Not the product. Not the stock price. The language.
How the company describes itself. How customers describe it. And the distance between those two descriptions.
That distance turns out to be the most useful thing I found.
The pattern on the company side
Tobias Lütke explains Shopify through software. A frustrated snowboarder who couldn’t find decent e-commerce tools, so he built his own. The platform worked better than the snowboard business. They pivoted. Simple origin. Accidental empire.
Harley Finkelstein frames it as a war: “Amazon is trying to build an empire, and Shopify is trying to arm the rebels.”
Ask either of them what Shopify sells, and you’ll hear verbs.
We enable merchants.
We democratize commerce.
We simplify selling.
We arm rebels.
We make commerce better for everyone.
Every statement is an action. A benefit delivered. An outcome promised.
Not one of them is a noun.
This matters more than it sounds like it should. Verbs describe what you do. Nouns describe what you mean. These are not the same thing, and confusing them is the single most common positioning error in business.
Volvo doesn’t say “we make safe cars.” Volvo means safety. The noun lives in your head without the company saying a word. Tesla doesn’t say “we build electric vehicles.” Tesla means future. The noun precedes the verb. The concept precedes the execution.
Shopify says, “We make commerce better for everyone.” That is a verb modifying someone else’s noun. They’re describing their execution against a category they don’t own. They’re perfecting the articulation of what they do while missing entirely what they mean.
The pattern on the customer side
Now look at how the people paying for Shopify describe it.
“Shopify helped me become an entrepreneur.”
“I’m becoming a real business owner.”
“I quit my 9-5 because of Shopify.”
The possessive “my own” appears constantly in customer language. My own store. My own brand. My own customers. Liberation language dominates: don’t have to give Amazon 15-30% anymore, finally have my own thing, can focus on product instead of tech.
The linguistic shift from “can’t” to “can,” from impossibility to possibility, reveals what Shopify actually provides. Customers don’t describe a software platform. They describe a transformation.
This is not a subtle difference. This is the entire game.
The company talks about what it does. The customer talks about who they became. The company articulates execution. The customer experiences identity.
Why this gap exists
Most companies fall into the verb trap for an understandable reason: verbs are measurable. You can prove you enabled something. You can count how many merchants you onboarded. You can show the GMV processed, the checkout conversion rate, and the number of stores launched.
Nouns are harder. You can’t easily measure whether you made someone feel sovereign. You can’t A/B test whether a merchant became a different version of themselves. So the measurement infrastructure pushes companies toward verbs, and the verbs become the story, and the story replaces the position.
Shopify measures commerce execution: $292 billion in gross merchandise volume, 4.8 million merchants, 30% of U.S. e-commerce. These numbers prove the volume of their verb. They don’t prove the power of their noun.
The noun that customers experience, the one Shopify hasn’t named, is becoming.
Not sovereignty, which is a state you achieve. Not existence, which is a threshold you cross. Becoming: the continuous transformation from a person with an idea to a founder to a business owner to an established operator. The journey that never finishes. The process of becoming more, becoming better, becoming the next version of yourself and your business.
It shows up in the pricing architecture without Shopify realizing it. The $29 Basic plan isn’t software pricing. It’s identity subscription pricing. Paying that fee each month reinforces “I am a business owner” in a way that free tools cannot. The graduated tiers ($29, $299, $2,000+ Plus) mirror the identity journey from starter to scaler to established. Each upgrade says, “You’ve become more.” Shopify built sovereignty economics while thinking they were pricing features.
What the data reveals about the gap
I ran a full perception gap analysis on Shopify, studying customer language across G2, Trustpilot, Reddit, YouTube, Capterra, and industry forums. The data confirms the gap and quantifies it.
Shopify’s Claim-Experience Alignment scored 1.0 out of 5. That’s one of the lowest scores the framework produces. It means the distance between what the company promises and what customers actually experience is close to maximum.
Three specific gaps emerged.
The first is the “partner in growth” versus “arbitrary financial executioner” gap. Shopify says, “We have your back.” Their Trustpilot score is 1.6 out of 5. The dominant complaint is not bugs or bad design. Its account freezes. Merchants describe having their stores shut down without warning, funds held for months, and support that responds with nothing but “the risk team is reviewing it.” No timeline. No appeal. No human being to talk to.
One merchant on Trustpilot: “Shopify shut down my store without warning and is holding my funds. Support just tells me the risk team is reviewing and I haven’t heard anything for weeks.”
This is not a product problem. It is an identity betrayal. The platform that granted you permission to become a business owner just revoked that permission without explanation. The entity that made you feel sovereign revealed that you were a subject all along. One merchant put it plainly: “I thought I owned my business, but Shopify owns me.”
This explains the bimodal response pattern. Die-hard advocates on one side, furious detractors on the other, very little in between. It’s not about product satisfaction. It’s about whether the identity promise was kept or broken. Kept: you love them. Broken: you feel betrayed at a level that transcends a vendor relationship.
The second gap is “all-in-one” versus “death by a thousand apps.” The homepage says “the one commerce platform behind it all.” Customers discover they need paid third-party apps for subscriptions, advanced reporting, loyalty programs, and better upsells. Shopify’s app marketplace has 13,000+ paid apps. They exist because the core product doesn’t cover what merchants actually need. “Shopify is cheap until you actually start selling,” one Reddit user wrote. “Then the app tax hits hard.”
The third gap is “for everyone” versus “ideal for a niche.” Shopify markets to every segment from solopreneurs to Fortune 500. Customer feedback says the sweet spot is specific: a non-technical founder running a serious direct-to-consumer brand. Too expensive for hobbyists. Too restrictive for complex custom builds. The broad marketing attracts poor-fit customers who churn, wasting acquisition spend and generating negative word of mouth on exit.
The structural insight
Here’s where the analysis stops being about Shopify and starts being about every company reading this.
The three perception gaps are not random failures. There are structural consequences of the same root cause: Shopify optimizes for verb execution without recognizing the noun it owns.
When you don’t know you own “becoming,” you can’t evaluate decisions against it. Support automation makes sense if you’re optimizing “simplify operations” (a verb). It violates becoming, because a merchant stuck in a support loop is stuck in their transformation. Their journey has stopped, and the platform that promised continuous progress is the thing blocking it.
The “all-in-one” claim makes sense if you’re optimizing “provide a complete solution” (a verb). It violates becoming, because the 13,000 third-party apps mean the journey requires assembling your own infrastructure at increasing cost. The becoming isn’t supported by the platform. It’s happening despite the platform.
Broad marketing makes sense if you’re optimizing “grow the addressable market” (a verb). It violates becoming, because attracting merchants who can’t actually become on your platform creates a churn factory that damages the brand for the merchants who can.
Every verb optimization creates a noun violation. This is the pattern. And it’s not unique to Shopify. It’s operating inside most companies that have achieved product-market fit but can’t figure out why their positioning feels off.
Why merchants stay anyway
If the experience gaps are this severe, why does Shopify retain 4.8 million merchants?
The conventional explanation is switching costs. Migration is painful, integrations break, and custom themes don’t transfer. This is real but insufficient. Switching costs explain inertia. They explain why people don’t leave. They don’t explain why people brag about being on Shopify. They don’t explain the emotional intensity of the betrayal when an account gets frozen. You don’t feel existential rage about a vendor. You feel it about your identity.
The real retention mechanism is accumulated, becoming. A merchant who’s been on Shopify for three years has a narrative. They remember launching their store. Their first sale. The month they quit their day job. The first time revenue crossed a threshold they’d been chasing. That narrative is built on the platform. It’s inseparable from it.
Leaving Shopify doesn’t feel like switching vendors. It feels like severing the story of who you became.
This is the moat. Not features. Not the app ecosystem. Not the checkout conversion rate (though that is legitimately excellent; one merchant reported switching from WooCommerce and watching conversion jump from 1.4% to 2.1% on the same traffic). The moat is that the longer you stay, the more you’ve become, and the more you’ve become, the less conceivable it is to start over somewhere else.
Becoming accumulates. And accumulated becoming can’t be copied by a competitor. BigCommerce can match features. WooCommerce can offer more flexibility. Wix can undercut on price. None of them can give you back the three years of becoming you built on Shopify.
The vulnerability nobody is exploiting
But Shopify should worry about this: they can’t defend what they haven’t named.
Right now, no competitor is positioning against Shopify’s actual territory. They’re all attacking verbs: “we’re more flexible,” “we’re cheaper,” “we have more built-in features.” These attacks bounce off because they’re aimed at the wrong thing. Merchants aren’t staying for features. They’re staying for identity.
If a competitor recognized that Shopify owns becoming but doesn’t defend it, they could position explicitly against the journey. “The platform for your next stage of becoming.” “Where businesses become what Shopify won’t let them become.” They could attack the exact points where Shopify breaks the becoming promise: the account freezes, the support black holes, and the app tax that makes the journey unnecessarily expensive.
The territory is unguarded because it’s unnamed. And it’s unnamed because Shopify is too busy describing what it does (verbs) to recognize what it means (noun).
The question for you
This is the diagnostic I’d run on any company, including yours.
Step one: write down the five sentences your company uses most often to describe what it does. Count the verbs. Count the nouns. If you’re describing actions (enable, simplify, accelerate, optimize) rather than concepts (safety, becoming, certainty, control), you’re in verb territory. You’re competing on execution. You’re describing how well you do things without claiming what you mean.
Step two: go read what your customers say about you when they’re not talking to you. Reviews, forums, Reddit threads, customer interviews. Look for the language they use that you would never use. That’s where the noun lives. The concept they associate with you that you’ve never named, never claimed, never defended.
Step three: check the distance between those two things. Between what you say you do and what they say you mean. The wider that gap, the more vulnerable your position.
Shopify’s gap scored 1.0 out of 5. The widest it can get. They own the most powerful noun in entrepreneurship and don’t recognize it. They’re building features while their customers are building identities. They’re optimizing verbs while the noun does the real work, unprotected, unnamed, and one smart competitor away from being contested.
This isn’t about what you sell. It’s about what you mean in the customer’s mind. If you can’t name that noun today, you can’t defend it tomorrow.
What verb is your company using to describe itself that’s actually hiding a more powerful noun your customers already associate with you?
Paul Syng
P.S. If this resonated, the Clarity Kit walks you through the same framework for your own company. kit.ceo
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