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Shopify live dashboard

aquova
29 replies
1d2h

What is their basis for the "Carbon Removed" stat?

olivier_martel
16 replies
1d2h

Hilarious, should be carbon added by all this unnecessary consumption made easy by them.

toomuchtodo
12 replies
1d2h

Define necessary consumption. You cannot, because everyone's wants, needs, and desires are different. People will consume. If they do, behaviorally nudge them in ways to offset the harm (verified carbon offsets; not junk ones of course). Similarly to how certain cohorts loudly complain that EVs are not a component of a climate change mitigation plan. Almost 90M cars a year are sold globally; no one cares if they don't think they're the answer, they're going to get sold, so make sure the units that move are EVs.

TLDR Provide solutions not opinions, opinions are like startup ideas without executive behind them: worthless. Direct air capture is the gold standard for carbon offsets. It is expensive, hopefully it will get cheaper, but we must start somewhere until the entire supply chain electrifies.

rTX5CMRXIfFG
6 replies
1d2h

Well you dismissed the idea of defining it before the commenter had a chance, so are you really making an honest argument here? If a policymaker wanted to ban “unnecessary consumption” they would come up with a list of what that is and whether your purchase would be banned or not would depend on whether you’re buying something from that list, which they can also incrementally grow over time.

toomuchtodo
3 replies
1d2h

I encourage someone to try it to speed run their political career to provide us the natural experiment we can observe.

Constituents will accept taxes and other disincentives (see alcohol), they will not tolerate some political rep telling them what is unnecessary consumption and banning their desired products (broadly speaking, there are always exceptions and nuance).

Walk the pavement like you would for a day running for office, ask your potential voters if they would like this policy. I’ve canvassed multiple times for US political reps, so I have an idea what this looks like.

A small amount of fiat to offset harm is far more palatable. Look at this dashboard spin. Don’t yell at humanity, provide it better options.

rTX5CMRXIfFG
0 replies
1d2h

The politician’s career is irrelevant. We’re just talking about whether it is possible to define and you’ve been given a rational response suggesting it might be. Heck, it might be possible to ask AI to generate a list of items or criteria.

fijiaarone
0 replies
1d

If you had two chickens, should you give you neighbor one?

Symbiote
0 replies
1d2h

Many EU governments and the UK have defined lists of untaxed goods, mostly staple foods.

The UK:

Food and drink for human consumption is usually zero-rated but some items are always standard-rated. These include catering, alcoholic drinks, confectionery, crisps and savoury snacks, hot food, sports drinks, hot takeaways, ice cream, soft drinks and mineral water.

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/rates-of-vat-on-different-goods-...

judge2020
1 replies
1d2h

Can you define it then? Are Kitchen appliances unnecessary spending? What about designer clothes? VR Headsets? Video Game Consoles?

rTX5CMRXIfFG
0 replies
1d1h

Sure. You can start by making unnecessary consumption mean “net pollutant” products where the cost of producing them and the waste they create exceed the value that customers pay for or gain from the product, so easy suspects are the types of inventory which are always left over and unsold even during huge sales and promo periods.

hombre_fatal
3 replies
1d1h

They are just pointing out how funny it is to have any sort of environmental savings metric for a sales event known for impulse FOMO purchases.

toomuchtodo
2 replies
1d1h

But that’s the entire point. It isn’t funny, it is legitimate effort to offset the harm caused by consumer demand that won’t go away. My problem is that it is flippant, ignores the nuance, and is borderline ignorant. It has no place here, whereas the math around the topic does. Curiosity and discovery over shitposting.

lm28469
0 replies
22h3m

consumer demand that won’t go away

We created it, it didn't exist even 100 years ago... let's not act like this is some sort of universal law we have to abide to

hombre_fatal
0 replies
1d1h

I agree, but there's another side of the coin that's perhaps best demonstrated by "Climate-friendly" burger patties. We'll do anything to roleplay that we care instead of the hard things.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/9/8/23863100/tyson-c...

That said, I don't think responsibility falls on Shopify here. But I did find myself nodding along with them as I find myself scrolling Amazon for "deals" on things I don't even want!

wenebego
0 replies
1d

Id define it as people's needs and not their wants and desires

nosefurhairdo
1 replies
23h10m

Blaming a reduction in transaction costs for increased consumption is seriously missing the mark. I don't know if there's data for this, but I can imagine that by improving the online shopping experience Shopify could have reduced the amount of unnecessary physical shopping trips thereby indirectly reducing carbon emissions.

This analysis out of MIT would support that theory: https://ctl.mit.edu/pub/thesis/environmental-analysis-us-onl...

Fortunately, you are not the dictator of "necessary" consumption.

abdullahkhalids
0 replies
21h45m

Looking at Fig 2 in the Executive Summary pdf, most of the CO2e emissions for physical shopping is from customer transportation to store - between 50-80% for the various scenarios they considered. For online shopping about 50% of the emissions are from packaging.

The main lessons I see are

- If you drive, then switching to online will reduce emissions by about 30%.

- If you don't drive, and instead bus or walk to shopping stores, then your emissions will be about 10-20% of the car-drivers or online shoppers.

kevin_thibedeau
0 replies
23h49m

The site needs to be hosted without TLS at the very least.

toomuchtodo
5 replies
1d2h

https://www.shopify.com/climate/bfcm (From the link on the dashboard when you click that stat)

All orders made through our platform over the Black Friday Cyber Monday shopping weekend will ship carbon neutral.

Here's how it works: A rigorous formula built by Shopify data scientists calculates the estimated carbon emissions for each Black Friday Cyber Monday shipment. We then team up with Shopify Sustainability Fund partners to remove CO2 emissions equal to the BFCM shipping footprint.

The result? You can ensure carbon-neutral shipping on all of your BFCM orders.
tallanvor
4 replies
1d2h

Which is BS, of course. There's no way to really measure this.

tacker2000
1 replies
1d1h

Well you can somewhat calculate the CO2 emitted by a parcel shipped from X to Y. Of course it will depend on loads of factors, like did they use a plane, a truck, a barge with one guy sitting inside rowing gently down the stream, etc… so im not sure how exact their numbers will be.

Basically it means nothing anyway, but companies love to tout how “green” they are, dont they?

theduder99
0 replies
21h9m

I get that its virtue signaling but who is the intended audience who would actually believe it and appreciate it?

toomuchtodo
0 replies
1d2h

Would you mind sharing your credentials and domain expertise on the topic?

burke
0 replies
15h26m

Good point, better not try.

gravitronic
2 replies
1d

I see lots of criticism in this thread and elsewhere about that carbon removed stat. I would love to see more productive criticism, where people make suggestions on how they could do it better, instead of just criticizing a company of this scale at least doing something. Or examples of companies that are doing a better job of it.

Personally I'd prefer if they didn't call it carbon removed unless they were actually doubling the shipping carbon removal, and they should call it offsets unless it's all coming from some of their direct capture partners (which iirc Shopify does buy from).

xkekjrktllss
1 replies
21h30m

I would love to see more productive criticism, where people make suggestions on how they could do it better

Not do it at all, because it's obviously bullshit. Even in the best of cases, it's a speculative con. The only purpose is to make people feel good about consuming more, which they do to distract from their miserable and alienated existence in late-capitalist society.

nozzlegear
0 replies
21h26m

which they do to distract from their miserable and alienated existence in late-capitalist society.

Is that so?

tacker2000
1 replies
1d1h

They basically pay someone else to “remove carbon” and can the throw this magic number in there. So yea…

fijiaarone
0 replies
1d

Why pay someone else when you have your own “carbon removal” program and just pocket the profits?

Of course, you’ll still need to purchase the Certified Genuine Carbon Credit Approved Organic Green Sticker (R) (TM) (501c3) (NGO) (LLC) to prove you are worthy to sequester other people’s consumption sins.

lebean
0 replies
1d2h

It's a cool thing to add to your company website.

tiberriver256
13 replies
1d2h

Amazing how concentrated the wealth of the world is.

iforgotpassword
4 replies
1d2h

I think first and foremost it shows in which countries Shopify is the most present.

andsoitis
3 replies
1d2h

Other measures indicate similar concentration in roughly the same places (excl. maybe China), such as a light pollution (indicator of energy usage): https://www.lightpollutionmap.info/

iforgotpassword
2 replies
1d2h

China obviously, there's not much they wouldn't just buy on domestic platforms using domestic payment services, but almost all of Asia is pretty dark on Shopify, compared to your map. I guess they're just not a thing there, plus maybe black friday itself. Also, the UK is disproportionately brighter on the Shopify map compared to the rest of Europe. Interestingly, light pollution seems pretty low in Germany compared to the Netherlands, but in Shopify it seems to almost be the inverse.

Symbiote
1 replies
23h16m

It was either night or very late evening in most of Asia when you wrote that comment.

iforgotpassword
0 replies
23h7m

Definitely a factor, but Japan and Hong Kong were going pretty strong compared to the rest, so there's at least that. Would've expected Taiwan to show up in a similar fashion, but also almost nothing there.

entropie
4 replies
23h23m

I find it interesting that of as I look (around 18:00 GMT) that there is so much traffic in GB but not the other parts in europe.

Image reference: https://i.imgur.com/2Les0QX.png

Is it safe to assume that brexit is the reason?

GamerAlias
1 replies
23h17m

Probably the fact that Black Friday is an American phenomenon that is successfully exported to mainly Anglo countries. Doesn't impact mainland Europe as much.

entropie
0 replies
23h14m

Black friday is not small in europe. We (germany) have BF ads all around.

alphaddx
0 replies
15h19m

There should be a something similar to Godwin's law but for any discussion about UK. The longer the thread the more likely someone will mention Brexit.

Symbiote
0 replies
23h17m

I don't see how Brexit could be part of the reason. Unless the economy is so bad more people are determined to find a bargain.

There's more Black Friday marketing in Britain than some other European countries, and maybe more use of an American credit card based shopping platform.

varispeed
0 replies
21h40m

You can flip the argument and say how corrupt and anti-capitalism are other parts of the world.

Despots don't want people they rule to unleash their potential, because that would challenge the status quo and their position.

tenpies
0 replies
1d2h

Time zones may also be a factor. And Black Friday began as an American phenomena, which has been exported.

I was surprised how much it has been adopted up in LatAm. For example, you can pick any country on Mercado Libre's list[0] and they'll have Black Friday going. Not "Viernes Negro" either, but the actual words "Black Friday".

---

[0] https://mercadolibre.com/

0xDEF
0 replies
1d2h

Black Friday is mostly an American thing that American companies have attempted to export to Europe.

obiefernandez
13 replies
1d2h

But, but... Rails doesn't scale!!!!!

ndriscoll
8 replies
1d1h

The dashboard shows 25k orders per minute right now (~400/s). A modern server shouldn't even be close to 1% utilization to handle that.

qiller
1 replies
23h53m

While 400 TPS might not be huge, there is still a lot of processing that goes into placing each order, and it's easy to underestimate the necessary capacity. Latencies add up (a call to a tax service, a call to a shipping service, etc), state adds up, and suddenly it's way over 1%.

ndriscoll
0 replies
19h51m

Latency doesn't affect throughput. As soon as you fire off a call to an external vendor, your server can work on processing the next request. It doesn't matter if that call takes 10 ms or 5 seconds. Even if it took 30 seconds, that means you need to be able to handle 12k concurrent requests (almost all of which are asleep), which is nothing.

onion2k
1 replies
22h28m

Are you assuming that 1 order is one inbound request, one database transaction, and one outbound response? Because it isn't that. You need to integrate with address verification services, fraud detection, payment services, stock management, communications like email and alerting, telemetry, and more. It's all manageable and a lot of it can be queued, but it's still hard.

ndriscoll
0 replies
21h35m

I'm not, otherwise something like 0.1% would be a reasonable upper bound. Even if you figure each order involves 20 async steps, that would be ~8k steps per second, which is nothing for a modern server. My old i5 can do 70k simple requests/second (the first type you describe) on the JVM with the app and database on the same computer (so contending for CPU time). A modern server CPU is ~15x more capable than mine without getting into multi-socket.

Put another way, a dual socket Xeon platinum can give you 120 cores. To do 400 orders/second on such a machine, you need to do less than 300 ms of core-time per order, which is an insanely large number. The things you mentioned spend almost all of their time waiting.

Scarbutt
1 replies
22h20m

I can build that in a weekend!

maronato
0 replies
12h13m

Why even have a whole system for it? Just expose an FTP server and let users edit an “orders.txt” file

quadrature
0 replies
30m

1) Orders are complex and require many steps to process correctly.

2) Orders are only the writes, we have to serve many magnitudes more read traffic and not all of it is cached (invalidations, inventory counts).

ZephyrBlu
0 replies
23h40m

Creating an order isn't a stateless process.

Scarbutt
1 replies
22h21m

It also could be that something like Java/Go/Rust is doing the hard work.

burke
0 replies
15h28m

I’m not sure what the globe is written but I’m pretty sure the comment is referring to the shopify core platform scaling to that many dollars of throughput, and while, yes, certainly there are peripheral bits in a variety of languages, the core is still very much a rails project.

hschne
0 replies
1d2h

You beat me to it.

In all seriousness though, I'd love to know more about Shopify's infrastructure. Pretty marvelous how they handle such an enormous influx of load.

charcircuit
0 replies
23h35m

This page doesn't answer that question because it doesn't include how many servers are being used to handle it.

xal
11 replies
1d2h

We have been doing BFCM dashboards for the past 10 years now. It's always one of the most fun projects at Shopify and a great tradition now.

You know, it's pretty abstract to run internet software companies. Seeing a visualization like this makes it a lot more relateable even for the folks that work here.

This year we packed it with lots of fun details ( https://twitter.com/Shopify/status/1728040379163771020 ). Like you might see fireworks when a store has their first ever sale, and there are lots of fun city stats which are part generated by GPT4. On desktop you can also open the nerd menu and play around with the settings and share the link to your creation.

halvo
4 replies
1d1h

Is BFCM a well known acronym? I get that it’s about Black Friday but can’t figure out the CM and don’t see it written out anywhere

klausjensen
1 replies
1d1h

Cyber Monday :)

fijiaarone
0 replies
1d

Only Cyber Monday started in July, on a Wednesday.

wkjagt
0 replies
1d1h

Cyber Monday

ChrisArchitect
0 replies
18h52m

that acronym use became steadily more common/popular with marketers / social media in the past 5 years

cloudking
3 replies
1d2h

Awesome work! You should break down the development in a blog post

rickitan
0 replies
1d

There's some interesting tech details on this thread: https://twitter.com/gilgNYC/status/1728066825013866543

adhi01
0 replies
21h24m
JLCarveth
0 replies
1d2h

+1, it's especially cool how it breaks down different statistics by city. Really great work.

purple_ferret
1 replies
1d1h

why is looking up Jerusalem, Israel blocked?

JLCarveth
0 replies
1d1h

It doesn't seem blocked, it says "Not enough data" when you select it.

xkekjrktllss
7 replies
1d

The 'carbon removed' figure is so extremely cringe

JLCarveth
6 replies
1d

Do you have any better criticism than that something is "cringe"? Otherwise this reads like something a teenager would write.

xkekjrktllss
4 replies
23h12m

It's obviously utter nonsense. No serious and/or somewhat intelligent person could interpret said figure to have any useful meaning or need this explained to them. It's just plain bullshit.

JLCarveth
2 replies
22h39m

So I take it you're not a serious or intelligent person if you can't describe what you find "cringe" about a "carbon removed" statistic. Perhaps you should ask yourself why such a simple statistic bothers you so much.

xkekjrktllss
1 replies
22h17m

No carbon has been removed from anywhere. It's just made up. It's as simple as that.

nozzlegear
0 replies
21h19m

Shopify will quite literally remove the carbon from the air via the Direct Air Capture plants that they've purchased [1]. They're not saying "hey buy from us and we won't knock down a tree," they're literally pulling carbon from the air via DACs.

It's as simple as that.

[1] https://news.shopify.com/shopify-purchases-more-direct-air-c...

CodeWriter23
0 replies
19h17m

Maybe they could seriously claim carbon reduction if they had an optimized logistics network like Amazon. Otherwise they don't really know how merchants handle and deliver their wares.

1970-01-01
4 replies
1d2h

The airplanes are doing .001c

_joel
3 replies
1d2h

Plane or I.S.S.?

1970-01-01
2 replies
1d2h

Planes on this map.

_joel
1 replies
1d2h

That arkward moment when sarcasm doesn't convey... Sorry, I am British.

dazc
0 replies
1d1h

'Sorry, I am British'

Are you trying to be funny mate?

Sorry, couldn't help it.

Omnipresent
3 replies
1d2h

What library is used to make the frontend globe rendering? Its pretty fast and not laggy on my chrome browser.

pushmatrix
1 replies
1d

We built it from scratch with React Three Fiber, a React library on top of three.js. Super powerful framework.

We'll be doing a full technical breakdown in a few weeks :)

entropie
0 replies
23h19m

Are the obvious reasons that there is so much more activity in GB and RU than other parts in europe others than one can assume (brexit, sanctions)?

I would love to read about changing patterns because of real life events. (Like the rumour that american water plants have problems during superbowl commercials because of toilet flushing but in a larger scale)

romainsimon
0 replies
1d2h

three.js Probably something like that https://github.com/vasturiano/three-globe

FredPret
2 replies
1d

The US economy is something else. Look at all that activity!

notdang
1 replies
22h34m

Black Friday is a mostly local to US.

pests
0 replies
17h19m

Comments in this thread seems otherwise

slavoingilizov
1 replies
22h57m

GBP and EUR volumes are pretty similar (just north of 500K atm). I find this interesting. How can one country equal sales of the whole Eurozone? Is that more showing of commerce activity or the popularity of Black Friday in those countries?

SSLy
0 replies
22h47m

I'd guess a lot of shops in the Eurozone don't use shopify but locally-supplied competition.

wkjagt
0 replies
23h56m

Apart from the actual thing being impressive, I think I’m even more impressed that this runs smoothly on my 2016 iPhone SE.

who-shot-jr
0 replies
1d2h

Stunning! I wonder how they did the globe animation with real time data.

vachina
0 replies
1d2h

All I see is all your base belongs to me (Shopify)

trizoza
0 replies
1d3h

Love the city facts. Well executed.

rossdavidh
0 replies
1d2h

I like it, but a comparison to last year's Black Friday (at this time of day) is what I would really like to see. But, still, cool.

polyterative
0 replies
1d1h

2 fps on my machine

oritsnile
0 replies
1d2h

Wow, these customizations are crazy. Flying in airplane mode makes it look like a war zone.

mparnisari
0 replies
1d2h

Love this. Cool to see how the west coast is still mostly asleep :D

jorams
0 replies
1d2h

This is really cool, and (unlike the Stripe one) doesn't crash my browser nor does it lag on my devices.

The city facts are a nice addition, but most of the cities I search for don't have enough data despite showing up in the suggestions, which is annoying. The customization options are fun to play around with though, and especially airplane mode is a nice touch.

gardenhedge
0 replies
22h47m

How do you find shopify shops?

ewpratten
0 replies
1d2h

According to my rough math, they've charged $100M worth of transaction fees at this point

adhi01
0 replies
21h23m

Some insight on this by one of the devs: https://youtu.be/T1kkr8VMVqc?si=qq6JvEX2-kBL6jjL

59nadir
0 replies
1d2h

This somehow crashed my browser. Cool interface, though. I liked the Stripe one a bit more in terms of actual stats and overall I would've liked to see more stats from both. Maybe they'll do reports after.

0xDEF
0 replies
1d2h

Shopify has been able to scale to this using a Ruby on Rails monolith and a few Go/Rust services.

Impressive.