Shopify Review: Is Shopify the Best Ecommerce Platform? Shopify Pros and Cons

With several online store-building tools in the market, it is tough to find the best from the best for your business. Shopify is the best-known and all-in-one ecommerce solution. How much it works for you, is still a question. Here in the article let’s go through the detailed review of Shopify. 

What is Shopify?

Shopify is an application to access merchants to create their online stores. It features a wide array of ‘themes’ that can be customized to suit the brand requirements. And even let you sell products either digitally or physically. It aims to allow beginners to develop an online store even if they don’t know how to code. The platform caters to developers, as it offers full access to Liquid, HTML, and CSS. 

What are the Pros and Cons of Shopify? 

Pros Of Shopify:

• Shopify is simple to use. So you can focus to run the  business without spending more time on technical issues 
• Shopify offers many theme options to make the website look gorgeous and professional 
• Shopify App Store with more than 7000 plugins and bad apps, you can get anything done in Shopify website Features as abandoned cart saving functionality is cheap.
• The dedicated and friendly support team for  24/7 
• Shopify is an ideal choice in drop shipping with several external payment gateways.
• Shopify has SEO additions along with marketing tools to get more traffic to your site.

Cons Of Shopify: 

• Shopify comes with few limitations, additional features couldn’t be unlocked because of how the coding is made.
• Consumers can’t utilize multiple discounts; where only one discount is accessible by default per order
• Shopify doesn’t offer a free platform, based on the plan, its charges vary from 0.5% to the 2% 
• You should pay for a few apps and themes, and transaction fees to operate the business.
• Shopify’s editor is not intuitive 
• Shopify has few built-in features so you should use apps to boost store functionality 
• If you don’t use Shopify Payments, you need to pay hefty transaction fees. 

1. Shopify App Store

 Shopify’s plugins are powerful aspects. With more than  1,200 apps, Shopify can automate tasks, and access brands to focus on crucial aspects to empower sales. With several apps accessible that help with customer services, accounting, reporting, inventory, and more.

 Shopify offers core features and allows third-party app developers. They offer both paid and free theme options beyond the default Shopify template. Having this setup,  you don’t have to think about having a developer when you require a certain feature. 

 Shopify offers Shopify Expert and Shopify Partner programs to find help. You can also hire a Shopify agency to find support from setting up a Shopify account to building product pages, SEO, and designing a full website. It a quite confusing to sell any product but offers flexibility. The best thing is that they have a development team to develop new apps and solve problems. 

However,  you might need to pay fees while using Shopify apps. But, without these apps, you puff insert data into your software manually which takes time. Hiring someone, can cost around $50 to $300 or pay monthly app subscriptions. A Shopify agency can customize the services for your brand needs at affordable prices. 

2. Shopify Marketing Tools

 Shopify offers you marketing tools that boost SEO rankings. They let you share on social media & automate the tasks. Here’s what Shopify offers business through its marketing features: 

• Merchants can generate discount codes.
• You can sell the products on social media, Pinterest and Shopify, etc
• With its marketing features, you can improve SEO by adding relevant keywords to the website pages along with product descriptions.
• You can create blogs, as it comes with an inbuilt feature to impact SEO rankings 
• Utilize Accelerated Mobile Pages for maximizing content delivery speed to mobile shoppers, which improves the customer shopping experience and google’s SEO prioritization
• An automatic generated sitemap analyzes content on your website pages.

Its AMP feature isn’t possible if you installed a paid app. Extended SEO features are only utilized after paying for additional plugins. Your consumers can’t use multiple discounts, just one discount per order is accessible. Few extensions, such as Script Editor are accessible for numerous discount features, however, that is offered with the Shopify Plus plan.

3. Shopify Pricing

Ecommerce pricing is very confusing. In many ways, Shopify offers better than the competitors with overall value and transparent pricing. Let’s look at four different things to understand Shopify completely. 

• Monthly Price: Shopify offers different monthly prices every month for specific features.  Shopify’s basic plans begin at $9 monthly which can level up to $200. Price plans can be less compared to other Ecommerce platforms. 
• Add-on & plugin: You can buy these to make the store better. These one-time purchases, including both paid and free ones. Large budget for this category  
• Transaction fees: This is another additional fee that you should pay as a POS. Shopify charges a transaction fee for every plan. It doesn’t charge you if you choose Shopify as the payment processor. If you are using a 3rd party processor Shopify can be expensive. If you use Shopify Payments, it can be cheaper. 
• Credit card fees:  Shopify Payments operates on its POS and processing network. You don’t need a 3rd party processor. Fees go to Shopify Pay than a processor as PayPal can save more money. If you don’t have a processor, then it adds costs that you do.

Shopify’s apps are powerful but increase costs. 

Pricing is a big red flag for Shopify. However, the in-built credit cards and no transaction fees are good sides to look at. Still, add-ons and monthly price fees add up. 

 Shopify is pricier than Volusion & cheap than BigCommerce. Like every hosted platform, it’s a bit more expensive than the self-hosted store which you run on your own. If you own a smaller shop, Shopify can be expensive. Do you want to work with marketing and running your store Shopify’s pricing can be very valuable?  

4. Shopify Security and Web Hosting

The main challenge to run in an online store is one should need dual requirements from the hosting. It should be fast and secured enough. For every second that’s counting in loading your website or pages. your consumers can storm out of your business. Many researchers found that people will wait for four seconds to load the website. Similarly, the root of consumers’ credit cards should be secured with extra layers to process credit cards. 

Most stores process the payments through third-party vendors like Paypal, even that connection could not help if the store is not correctly set up.  A solution like Shopify helps you drive away all the difficulties that you see while hosting an online store. Whether it’s caching, hackers, or compliance, Shopify will help you with everything.

 Shopify features pay bounties to hack-proof systems that made this platform a legit and safe.  It is a public traded business with high investments in security and software engineering websites. They offer 100% SSL to scream websites and incorporated payment providers. To get paid and  consumers don’t need to wait for the page to load 

5. Shopify Payment & Shipping

After the consumer checks out, they pay for their order through any payment gateway that you enabled in the admin payment provided area. With more than 100 payment gateways that include Amazon pay, Paypal and Apple pay, etc. They charge a transaction fee. Shopify accepts payment in different currencies and it’s also a free payment gateway. 

This platform offers high flexibility in terms of shipping. You could configure shipping rates. With advanced Shopify plans you could even unlock third-party shipping rates. To offer orders to the consumers with fulfillment quickly, Shopify provides in-built service to the store. 

Shopify fulfillment and shipping support users to solve any shipping issues such as affordable rates, unlimited international shipping, delayed delivery, inventory levels, and customer data in one place. To optimize shipping rates or for custom shipping settings,  you should set Shopify Shipping Profiles. It access merchants sell on the platform to buy, track and print shipping labels.

 Final words

Apart from the pros and cons, the biggest benefit of Shopify is its flexibility to thrive in your business. Shopify is the most easy-to-use platform that is used by small to large eСommerce businesses.  Shopify is not the cheapest eСommerce platform. However, they offer cost transparency, 100 responsive theme templates,  extensions, Shopify POS, 24/7 support service, and the option to sell offline with Shopify POS, etc. These benefits outweigh the disadvantages that Shopify has. Consult a Shopify agency to overcome any issues or difficulties you face with Shopify.