Much of the eCommerce community considers Shopify to be the best online shopping cart available, to the point that many new merchants use it without considering other options. It’s true that Shopify is full of rich features for your eCommerce success and can be a great platform, but is it right for your business? Read on to find out!
Shopify offers a range of plans, all competitively priced and made to fit in the budget for a variety of businesses. Smaller-scale plans offer pared-down feature sets, as to be expected from any eCommerce platform, but even in the cheapest plans the necessities are included. Additional features are available in the Shopify App Store. However, if you find yourself needing to use multiple third-party apps to tailor your store more closely to your individual needs, you may end up paying quite a bit extra. Total additional charges for apps are hard to generalize because different stores will be using a different setup on a case-by-case basis. However, the apps tend to be reasonably priced and many are free. Also note that unless you use Shopify's built-in payment gateway (Shopify Payments), you will also be charged a small transaction fee for each sale.
Shopify is very intuitive and beginner-friendly, and the platform itself guides you through the necessary steps to get everything set up. You can sell any type of product through Shopify, although more specialized items may require an additional app installation. The backend is sleek and easy to work with, and there is plenty of instruction and tutorials available for the more complex settings and features.
Shopify offers a wide selection of attractive themes made to optimize conversions, and they're easy to customize on a surface level. Deeper customization will require knowledge of Shopify's proprietary coding language Liquid, which presents an obstacle to developers used to HTML and CSS. For the most part, however, the themes have been built well enough that they won't require too much tweaking, although occasional bugs do crop up. You should still be able to find a theme that is great for your store and get good results from it without the need for extensive code editing.
There are two main competing points of view when it comes to Shopify's features. Many current Shopify merchants are satisfied with the balance of built-in features versus additional apps. Others feel that more features should be included without needing to install (and sometimes pay for) additional functionality. It's true that Shopify relies a great deal on its app developers. The benefit of such an app-heavy system is that new users aren't overwhelmed with a ton of extra features that may be superfluous to their store's specific needs, and they are able to slowly expand their store's capabilities through apps as the need arises. In this way, users can have more control over their feature set. However, the drawback to this system is that the majority of Shopify apps are built by third-party developers and not always directly supported, as well as the extra cost incurred by many of them. Shopify merchants who dislike the platform's reliance on apps have stated that they would prefer more features to be built in, in order to achieve a smoother result. There have also been reports of unexpected missing features, and critics of Shopify have claimed they feel needed features are left out in order to force an app purchase. But remember, the need for apps is completely different for merchants everywhere and just as many are quite happy with the service as is.
Shopify offers a solid foundation to a beginning online seller, and works great right out of the box. In many cases it will be a good choice. There are lots of features, design is solid, and bugs and issues are pretty far between. However, if you do run into a problem, it may be hard to address without paying extra for an app or hiring a specialized Liquid developer. The best recommendation is to thoroughly plan out your store and its needs, and closely investigate Shopify on your own to make sure that you're aware at the very beginning if you're going to need features provided by apps with an additional cost. Shopify does offer a 14-day free trial to help you get a feel for the platform, so make sure to take advantage of that while making your decision!
