Contents
- Intro
- Shopify Cons - Let’s be honest
- Probable Rising Costs of Shopify Apps
- SEO URL Limitation
- Shopify Fees - What’s Behind Them?
- Customizing a Shopify Store is Hard. Really?
- Shopify Pros
- A Reliable Solution
- Shopify is Super Easy to Use
- Shopify Themes - Build A Store For Your Customers
- Dedicated Support Team
- Shopify Apps
- Your turn. Trial Shopify for 14 Days - NO credit card required.
Intro
There are many Shopify reviews out there that mention Shopify pros and cons. There are a few reasons for that. The recent pandemic Covid-19 brought merchants from offline to online. Did you know that the recent Black Friday Cyber Monday even brought $5.1 billion in sales from the 1 million plus merchants based on Shopify? That’s a 76% increase in sales worldwide year-on-year. Insane numbers!
If you want to start your entrepreneurial journey, it's the right time to make the first move and start to consider whether Shopify is the right solution for you. In this in-depth Shopify review, we’ll cover all of Shopify’s pros and cons with clear video and image illustrations.
Wondering what business idea you should start with? Try this quiz.
This review is unlike other Shopify reviews and we’ll start with Shopify cons, so you’ll save the time to understand whether Shopify is right or not.
You can skip Shopify’s cons by clicking here, so you’ll jump right away to Shopify’s pro points.
Shopify Cons - Let’s be honest
Probable Rising Costs of Shopify Apps
You probably have heard that Shopify provides you the online store functionality to run the ecommerce store. If you have specific needs, you’ll need to hire a developer to build the custom feature or find the Shopify app and install it on your store.
For example, let’s say you want the holiday announcement on your Shopify store. Shopify doesn’t support this feature and you’ll have to find out the Shopify app to solve this problem then install it.
When your store is developing, you’ll want to add the review function. About a year ago, Shopify did some research and found out that the average number of apps installed on a Shopify store is around 12, including both free and paid ones.
Do you have to pay a lot of money for Shopify apps? Not at all. The investment starts with $5 per month and goes up to $150 on average. It all depends on your needs.
The alternative solution to the Vitals is https://www.automizely.com/marketing/
SEO URL Limitation
One of the SEO myths in the ecommerce world is about the URL structure on the web store. Some SEO gurus talk a lot about how it’s important to have a short URL structure, so it’ll have a bigger impact on the SEO game. Well, not really to be honest, and here is our proof.
Did you know that the blog post you’re reading right now is based on Shopify? The whole pagefly.io site is based on Shopify and we gain organic traffic. The SEO is simple, if your content provides value, Google will help your content find the right audience. Here is the proof of pagefly.io with Google Search Console.
Shopify Fees - What’s Behind Them?
There is a simple idea behind the Shopify fee system. The transaction fee means you’ll have to pay for using (or not using) the Shopify Payments gateway. Some merchants think the fee is not fair, but they don’t really understand what it means.
Let me give you an example. A customer purchased your product or service from your online store. Who will check whether the credit card is not fraudulent? Who will handle the receiving of the money from your customer, then the transfer to your bank account? It’s the job of the payment gateway. Shopify Payments or other payment gateways will cover this part. It's part of an ecommerce online store.
You actually build a store’s credibility if you use Shopify Payment gateway. Your customers will feel safe when they purchase goods from a Shopify-hosted store.
Let’s do some quick fee math:
Monthly subscription for Shopify starts from $29 per month (up to $299 with the highest plan) with 14 days free trial. Shopify apps, we mentioned earlier. Shopify transaction fee. How can you calculate it? Check this article: https://pagefly.io/blogs/shopify/shopify-pricing-calculator
Customizing A Shopify Store Is Hard. Really?
There is a myth that Shopify stores look quite similar to each other and it’s really hard to customize the storefront layout. Well, I’d agree with you if we lived in 2010. At that time, Shopify was not popular compared with other ecommerce solutions.
However, nowadays Shopify is different. It grew up significantly and grew huge customization capabilities. The proof? 70+ free and paid Shopify themes on the official Shopify themes store and thousands of Shopify themes from other marketplaces and 3rd party independent developers.
Click here to scroll to the Shopify themes section.
Shopify Pros
A Reliable Solution
Over 2,000,000 merchants from 175+ countries around the world build their businesses on Shopify. This number Shopify reached by Oct 2019, and that’s because Shopify works right out of the box.
You are the business owner, not a developer, and your job is to focus on the business side. Shopify works just as advertised and you don’t need to worry about the security and stability of the system. No matter if 1 merchant or 10,000+ merchants visit your shop daily, your store will load fast.
That’s thanks to the Shopify CDN feature. Here is the short explanation of CDN (Content Delivery Network).
“A CDN is a large network of servers placed across the world to ensure your customers can load your website store quickly, no matter where they are. Our CDN is operated by Fastly, one of the most reputable CDN companies.“ Shopify.
If you want to check what stores are built on Shopify, check our blog about 100 Shopify Store Examples to Inspire You to Launch a New Business.
Shopify Is Super Easy To Use
Let’s take a walk through using Shopify for the first time. Ok, so you finish the registration, what do you see?
The Storefront Dashboard
The 3 most important ingredients of the ecommerce business: products, customers, orders. The access to these reports are available in the left navigation menu area. Moreover, you can find the ‘analytics’ and ‘marketing’ functions available there as well. The center dashboard area is designed to show key business insights such as orders needed to fulfill, daily ecommerce tips, understanding better how to use Shopify and others.
Next, let’s add the products. By clicking on the ‘products’ menu item, I can add my products. Here you manage the inventory part of your business.
Let’s add the product. I click on the “Add product” button in the top right and this is what I see. The standard title, description, media (images) and more options are available here to fill in the product information.
You can add the products’ variants here as well as the SEO title, product description and the URL handle.
After filling in some information about my t-shirt product, in my case it’s the t-shirt for my print on demand store.
The management part seems to be easy, but you might be wondering how to control the layout of your product page, or the storefront in general? To answer this question, let’s move to the next pro point.
Or learn more about the storefront feature here.
Shopify Themes - Build A Store For Your Customers
The storefront is an important part of your online store and Shopify provides 70+ free and premium Shopify themes in the Shopify Themes store. Does that sound like a small number? Well, outside of the Shopify theme store, there are additional, independent Shopify theme developers providing themes for Shopify.
If you’re familiar with the ThemeForest marketplace, for example, there are over 1,200 Shopify themes there. Our recommendation, if you buy from that marketplace, is to make sure that you trust the author’s reputation and reviews.
Here’s Shopify explaining the Shopify theme editor:
Learn more about Shopify themes here https://www.shopify.com/online/themes
Dedicated Support Team
Regardless of whether you are based in America, Europe, or Asia, the chat support is available in any time zone. We tested Shopify support by asking questions, for which they responded immediately and resolved our concern regarding Shopify efficiently.
We were curious to know what other merchants think about Shopify, and we found some positive reviews from the Capterra review website.
Shopify Apps
Over 4,000 free and paid Shopify apps are available on the Shopify App Store. For each problem, you’ll find at least 10+ solutions based on your needs and budget. You don’t have to worry much about the functional part of your ecommerce store.
In the case that you have very specific needs, you can hire a Shopify expert from https://experts.shopify.com/
If you prefer to look outside of Shopify services, there is a huge volume of freelancers available at Upwork.
Or a platform dedicated to Shopify - Hey Carson.
Your Turn. Trial Shopify for 14 Days - NO Credit Card Required.
As much as this Shopify pros and cons review has tried to help, it’s better for you to invest about 3 - 4 weeks in Shopify to understand whether it fits your needs. So, we recommend starting with the 14-day free trial and deciding in the 3rd week whether or not to continue with Shopify. Shopify is really simple to use and 24/7 support is available no matter what time zone you are in.
We hope this Shopify review gave you additional insight into making this important business decision.
