What Are the Pros and Cons of Using Shopify?
As the world's largest ecommerce platform, Shopify offers strong advantages for anyone wanting to build an online store as well as a few limitations that are helpful to know. To assist entrepreneurs and businesses in making their decision on ecommerce platform of choice, we've laid out the pros and cons of Shopify along with a few insider tips for making the most of this versatile platform.
Why Use Shopify?
It's no accident that Shopify is the number one ecommerce platform on the web, with a 29% market share as of September 2021 in the United States and 1.7 million brands worldwide.
The top benefits of building your online store with Shopify include:
Flexible pricing options (including a free trial)
Intuitive backend dashboard / interface
Ability to sell just about anything
Built-in SEO & other marketing tools
Built-in security & protection
Built-in payment processing
Built-in shipping options
Hundreds of apps to customize store functionality
Excellent customer support infrastructure
Multichannel commerce capabilities
Shopify Offers Plans for Every Budget
Whether you're a hobby blogger or a multinational corporation, Shopify has plans and price points to cater to your possibilities and needs. As of this writing, there are five Shopify plans:
Starter - $5/month
Basic - $25/month
Shopify - $65/month
Advanced - $399/month
Shopify Plus - $2,000+
In addition to the regular Shopify plans, there is a modular option referred to as "Commerce Components," which is currently available only in the United States. Prices are fully customized, and quotes are available upon request.
What Is Included in Each Shopify Plan?
With the exception of the Starter plan—which enables users to add a Shopify button to an existing website—every other plan includes everything that a new or established ecommerce business needs:
A secure hosted online storefront
A free SSL certificate
Unlimited products
Unlimited storage
Unlimited bandwidth
Sales and performance reports (these range from basic to advanced as you move up the tiers)
In addition to these basics, the more advanced plans include things like custom report generation, multi-language websites, and lower transaction fees.
Free Trial Period and Discounted Rates
If you want to dip your toe in the water before committing financially, Shopify offers a free three-day trial period followed by three months on select plans at $1 per month if you sign up before the trial period ends. After that, you'll pay full Shopify pricing with discounts available for annual (rather than month-by-month) payments.
The Shopify Interface Is Very User-Friendly
In addition to offering multiple price points, Shopify is very easy to use. Using the Shopify Dashboard, even non-programmers can build a fully functional online store in as little as a few hours and start making sales.
To get started, new users will:
Choose from 11 free themes or buy paid themes in the Shopify Theme Store. All Shopify themes are modern, attractive, and fully responsive to mobile devices.
Use Shopify's drag-and-drop features to customize each page.
Add products to the Shopify store complete with pricing, images, and product descriptions.
Sort the products into collections automatically based on customized rules in the platform's automated collections feature.
Choose a payment processing solution.
While setting up a Shopify store doesn't require any knowledge of code, the source code can be modified if you want. This makes the Shopify platform ideal both for business owners without a coding background as well as large enterprises with a dedicated web development team.
Shopify Stores Can Sell Just About Anything
Shopify is hard to beat when it comes to the variety of products and services you can sell. Out of the box, business owners can sell physical products and digital products up to 5GB in size, which is the largest file size offered by any ecommerce platform. For digital product sales, you'll need to download the free Digital Downloads App to add a download button to customer purchases.
With the help of third-party apps, business owners can expand their offerings to other kinds of products, including:
Bundles
Subscriptions
Memberships
Event tickets
Rentals
Donations
...and much more
You Enjoy Built-in Site Security
Once you're starting to think about selling online through Shopify, you'll have no worries as far as site security. The Shopify ecommerce platform:
Is fully PCI-compliant
Issues a free SSL certificate to each merchant
Provides two-factor authentication to secure your account
Best of all, Shopify takes legal responsibility for site security and PCI compliance. That means you can focus on your core business without worrying that you'll be fined or lose your business due to a data breach or non-compliance with credit card processing data security laws.
You Also Get Built-In Payment Processing
To process payments, Shopify offers an extensive range of options. If you're located in one of the supported countries, you can simply use Shopify Payments as your payment processing solution.
If you prefer to use a different processor or you live in a country that's not supported, there are more than 100 third-party payment gateways from which to choose, all of which have plug-and-play apps for easy integration with Shopify.
Built-In Fulfillment Options Are Included
For shipping products to customers, Shopify also provides multiple options. If you choose to use the Shopify Fulfillment Network, Shopify will ship products located in the United States to customers around the world. The SFN can also provide real-time shipping rates and delivery times if you select this option in your settings. Plugins are available for alternative shipping providers if you prefer or if you're shipping from a different country.
Shopify Is Great for Dropshipping
If you're interested in a dropshipping fulfillment model, there are more than 400 apps available for this purpose—a larger range than any other ecommerce platform. Keep in mind that these providers aren't rated on ethics, so it will be up to you to research your chosen provider's sourcing and manufacturing practices.
Powerful Capabilities for Multichannel Commerce
One of the features that makes Shopify exceptionally popular with businesses is its multichannel offerings. In addition to your online store, you can set up a complete point-of-sale system with Shopify POS and view the sale and inventory data from all of your channels in real time.
Centralized Management for International Sales
Businesses that operate in multiple countries can streamline their ecommerce sales using Shopify Markets. This feature allows:
Multilingual selling in up to 20 languages (all except the Starter plan)
Multi-currency pricing that displays prices in each customer's local currency when they choose their country from the country selector (with Shopify Payments or a third-party app)
Additionally, duties, taxes, and VAT MOSS can be applied automatically with the Shopify Plus and Advanced plans.
Built-In SEO Tools & Accommodations
Shopify is designed with search engine optimization in mind, making it easier for Shopify businesses to rank well in search engine results pages (SERPs).
For every new website, Shopify creates a sitemap and XML sitemap automatically.
Using the built-in features offered by Shopify, site owners can:
Add optimized metadata, URL addresses, and file names
View how each page looks in search results
Add canonical tags
Add structured data
Optimize the site for mobile devices
With the help of third-party apps, site owners can:
Create an AMP format for mobile devices (this is a stripped-down version with quicker loading times)
Analyze the strength of on-page SEO
Meet Google's new Core Web Vitals requirements for preferential treatment in SERPs
While the Shopify dashboard and third-party apps provide tools to optimize each webpage, business owners will still need to invest in Shopify SEO services for things like keyword research, optimized content creation, competitor analysis, and backlink building. It's also important to use Google Analytics and Shopify Analytics to track key performance indicators and determine how effective your strategies are. If you're new to search engine optimization, our Shopify SEO checklist is a great place to start.
Additional Built-In Marketing Tools
Once your Shopify store is up and running, this ecommerce platform offers built-in marketing tools that make it easy to reach your target audience and build a customer base. In addition to social media marketing—which you can manage from your Shopify account—this ecommerce platform facilitates fully customizable email marketing with up to 10,000 emails per month for free and $1 per 1,000 emails thereafter.
Pro tip: Before you launch your store, be sure to familiarize yourself with the most effective Shopify marketing strategies.
Benefit From Abandoned Cart Recovery
According to data compiled by Baymard Institute, an average of 69.99% of ecommerce carts are abandoned, representing a $4 trillion loss for ecommerce merchants. Research from Moosend in 2021indicates that more than 20% of these carts can be recovered with a reminder email that offers customers free shipping with their purchases.
Another great thing about Shopify is that the platform includes fully editable abandoned cart recovery emails with all of its plans—helping you increase your Shopify conversion rate with no additional work.
Leverage the Largest App Store of All Ecommerce Platforms
It may be obvious by now, but there is an extensive range of Shopify apps. In fact, by the last count, the Shopify App Store had more than 8,000 free and paid apps—more than any other platform. Business owners looking for a good place to start can begin with Form Builder, an app with free and paid plans that allows you to build forms with customized fields for any page in your store.
Excellent Customer Support
When you need help setting up your online store or fixing an issue, it's good to know that you'll be able to reach a live person quickly and get the issue resolved. Currently, Shopify offers live messaging, email support, a developer forum, and phone support. If you're an English speaker, you can enjoy the benefit of 24/7 live customer service. Shopify users in other countries can find contact information on Shopify’s contact page.
The Limitations of Shopify
Every ecommerce platform has its limitations, and Shopify is no exception. The good news is that most of this platform's issues and limitations are either things you get used to, that can be worked around, or that are more than made up for by the benefits this platform offers.
Costs Can Add Up Fast
Compared to other platforms, users find that they can end up spending a lot more on their Shopify store than the base monthly pricing plan. For example:
The Shopify software is made available via a subscription pricing model and can't be purchased and owned outright.
If you want a theme other than the free ones, you will need to pay an average of $300 to $350 up-front.
Shopify relies heavily on apps, many of which come at an additional cost.
Shopify charges additional transaction fees on purchases made with third-party payment gateways.
Some features, such as advanced reports and multi-currency selling, are only available with the Shopify Plus or Advanced plan.
To reduce costs, business owners can often avoid the need for purchasing third-party apps by adding sections of code themselves or having a programmer add these sections of code for them. They can also add Google Analytics to gather a lot of useful data without upgrading to a higher pricing tier. The good news is that—even if the costs add up—the powerful tools and market share of Shopify are likely to generate far more in revenue than you spend.
There Are Some Technical Limitations & Inconveniences
The second limitation of Shopify is that there are technical limitations compared to the corresponding features provided by other platforms. For example:
Shopify doesn't crop product photos automatically to a uniform size (you need to crop each photo manually before uploading it).
Their blog editor is extremely outdated and limited.
Their URL structure is rigid, as evidenced by the mandatory inclusion of /collections/ for the category pages.
Some standard features, such as customer cookie configuration tools, require the installation of a third-party app.
To get around most of these technical issues, there is usually an app (or three) that you can use to add the features you need. Your Shopify SEO provider may also be familiar with common front-end and back-end issues and be able to fix these for you.
It’s Hard to Leave
The third limitation of Shopify is that it's hard to migrate your shop to a different ecommerce platform if you want to change providers at some point in the future. While you can export your orders and products as CSV files, you'll generally need to copy and paste everything else to your new website manually. This can be time-consuming, so it's just something to keep in mind if you might want to change platforms in the future.
Shopify Pros and Cons: The Verdict
In our Shopify review, we've covered numerous Shopify pros and cons so that you can walk away with a better idea of what this ecommerce platform has to offer in terms of creating and running online stores.
As far as our experience with Shopify—and the experiences of thousands of other users—this ecommerce platform is hard to beat in terms of the features offered, user-friendly setup, variety of available apps, and multichannel sales capabilities.
And as long as you're happy to commit to the monthly pricing plan and learn the workarounds for the few technical challenges (most Shopify users get used to them pretty quickly), Shopify is a great choice for businesses of every size.
