Shopify Store Review: The Best Ecommerce Solution?
What is Shopify?
Shopify is a complete ecommerce solution that allows you to set up an online store to sell your goods. It lets you organize your products, customize your storefront, accept credit card payments, track and respond to orders. Their mission is to build a hassle-free platform for setting up your e-commerce business.
How does shopify work?
Shopify is web based ecommerce software. This means there’s no installation required and it works with all operating systems (including Windows and MacOS). Shopify is self-hosted so you don’t have to worry about installing, upgrading or maintaining any software or web servers.
Shopify is fairly straightforward – which is sort of their whole selling point. The broad process is as follows –
Shopify is fairly straightforward – which is sort of their whole selling point. The broad process is as follows –
- Pick a Shopify plan that fits your budget and feature needs.
- “Point” your domain that you bought from a registrar like GoDaddy or NameCheap to your Shopify store. You also buy one via Shopify.
- Choose a design/template for your store. You can edit a free one via their drag/drop tool or buy a premium one or hire a designer.
- Add your products, page content, payment options, etc
- Go get customers! Here’s an eCommerce marketing strategy to get you started.
Make sense? Cool. Let’s dive into the actual Shopify review.
Shopify Review Scores
- Shopify Price - 9/10
- Shopify Ease of use - 10/10
- Shopify Support - 10/10
- Shopify Features - 9/10
Summary
To summarize this review, we think Shopify is a great, tailor-made platform for those of you who need an online store above all else, and treat all the other elements (such as a blog, additional pages) as an added bonus.
9.6/10
How many people use Shopify? And why does this matter?
According to Shopify the product has- been used to power 500,000 stores
- 1,000,000 users
- generated $46bn in sales.
Now without getting a mole into Shopify's accounts department, it's impossible to verify the accuracy of the above numbers, but it's fairly safe to say that Shopify is definitely one of the more established e-commerce platforms out there.
This is important because when you choose a hosted solution to build an online store with, you are placing a huge amount of trust in the company providing it. There have been instances in the past of similar services closing down in the past - Magento Go being a case in point - resulting in all manner of problems (and store migrations!) for their users.
Shopify's strong market position and extremely large userbase makes the prospect of financial difficulties for the company far less likely, which in turn makes the prospect of a store you host with them suddently disappearing far less likely.
We'll have a look at what you can do with Shopify shortly - but first, let's check out the pricing.
Shopify Pricing Plan?
There are five Shopify plans to choose from:
- 'Shopify Lite' - $9 per month
- 'Basic Shopify' - $29 per month
- 'Shopify' - $79 per month
- 'Advanced Shopify' - $299 per month
- 'Shopify Plus' - fees are negotiable
- Shopify represents one of the cheaper ways into selling online, with its starter plan, "Shopify Lite" costing $9 per month and allowing you to sell an unlimited number of goods.
However, it's important to note that this plan does not actually allow you to construct a fully-functional, standalone online store: rather, it
- lets you sell via your Facebook page
- allows you to use Shopify in a physical location to sell goods / manage inventory
- gives you access to Shopify's Buy Button, which allows you to sell goods on an existing website or blog.
The Buy Button works similar to a Paypal 'Buy Now' button but because it links back to Shopify, more sophisticated options regarding tracking orders and their fulfilment status are available.
Using the Shopify Buy Button allows you to integrate Shopify into a site built on another platform - for example Squarespace, Wix or Wordpress; this will come in handy for users who are otherwise happy with their existing website but wish to integrate some Shopify e-commerce features onto it.
As you move up the pricing scale, you encounter the ‘Basic Shopify’ plan for $29 per month; the 'Shopify' plan for $79 per month and the 'Advanced Shopify' plan for $299 per month. Unlike the 'Lite' plan, all of these plans do allow you to host a fully functional online store; unlimited file storage and bandwidth are also included.
Finally, there is is also a ‘Shopify Plus’ plan – an ‘enterprise grade’ solution which is designed more with big businesses in mind rather than the average user; it offers advanced features regarding security, APIs and fulfilment.
So what are the main differences between each plans?
Shopify Transaction Fee
The Shopify pricing plans are as follow: The 'Basic' package is $29 per month (and 2.9% + 30¢ for every transaction). The 'Shopify' plan costs $79 per month (plus 2.5% + 30¢ for each transaction).
Key differences between Shopify plans
Key features to watch out (and not miss by selecting the wrong plan!) are:- Reporting - professional reporting functionality is only available on the $79 'Shopify' plans and up
- Advanced reporting - custom reporting tools are only provided on the most expensive 'Advanced' Shopify plans
- Abandoned cart recovery – this allows you to automatically email users who nearly completed an order and see if you can persuade them to follow through, and is only available on the $79 'Shopify' plan and up
- Gift cards - these are only available on the $79 'Shopify' plans and up.
- Real time carrier shipping, which is only available on the most expensive 'Advanced Shopify' plan
- Staff accounts - these allow you to give different members of your team different permissions (which is useful for restricting access to sensitive data); you are allowed 2 staff accounts on the 'Basic Shopify' plan; 5 on the 'Shopify' plan and 15 on the 'Advanced Shopify' plan
It's worth mentioning that you don’t have to pay for plans on a monthly basis – you can pay on an annual or biennial basis - Shopify offer a 10% discount on an annual and a 20% discount on a biennial plans, when they are paid upfront.
Overall Shopify’s pricing structure is fairly consistent with key competing products like Bigcommerce, Squarespace and Volusion; the main difference involves the 'Lite' plan really, which whilst not giving you a fully hosted online store, does allow you to make use of many key Shopify features for a very low monthly fee.
If I had a criticism of Shopify's pricing structure it would be that some features which you might expect to find on entry level plans - like gift cards and professional reporting - only become available when you opt for a more expensive one, or make use of an app. Other solutions, notably Bigcommerce, can be a bit more generous with the entry-level feature set, offering a more 'all-in-one' approach.
Let's take a look at how Shopify actually lets you accept payments for your goods - this is where some key advantages of using the platform can be found.
Shopify Review Overview
In simple terms, Shopify is an online platform for all forms of e-commerce. It allows you to set up your online store and sell whatever you wish (goods and services). You can organize your products, customize the way your store looks, accept payments (online and credit cards), track and respond to orders, and you can do it all within Shopify’s interface.
Shopify is a fully integrated e-commerce solution, providing ready-made online shops that you can tweak and customise til your heart’s content. Shopify has the capacity to be feature heavy out of the box, but that doesn’t drag load times or the slickness of using a Shopify site. Payment plans are based on monthly billing, but for anyone running a profitable store, these should quickly become negligible costs.
Using Shopify is quite intuitive and easy to grasp right from the get-go. You just have to sign up, and then you’re taken by the hand through the whole process.
To start with, you get to choose from over 100 optimized online store designs – so you don’t need to either have design skills yourself or hire a designer. The designs that Shopify offers are really top-notch and optimized to generate good conversion rates from your visitors.
SHOPIFY REVIEW – PROS AND CONS
| Pros About Shopify | |
|---|---|
| #1 | Over 100 beautiful, professional looking, mobile ready storefront themes
Shopify offers you over 100 beautiful and professional templates (themes), so your online shop can look great. If you have an online shop, your shop has to look good. Why? It builds credibility and trust right off the bat. It’s the same idea as a brick-and-mortar store – it has to look clean and professional to encourage visitors to stay and have a look around.
Shopify provides you with a Theme Store where you can pick and choose from their collection of premium themes (either free or paid) across different industries (clothing, jewelry, furniture, art, etc), so you can dress up your website accordingly. One thing we appreciate is that Shopify invites professional theme designers to create themes for Shopify. These themes are quality-checked by Shopify, so they are fully compatible with Shopify. This allows you to choose from a broad range of professional designs so your website will look good.
|
| #2 | Comprehensive, flexible ecommerce builder with a large App Store to extend the functionality of your online store
Shopify is very flexible and has all sorts of tools (Apps) to meet your needs and to extend the functionality of your online store. They offer you a large App Store where you can choose from over 1,200 different Apps (free and paid) for you to plug into your store. The tools include accounting, customer service, inventory management, marketing, reporting, shipping, social media, fulfillment, etc and these apps can help automate a lot of your business processes.
This is really one of the biggest strengths about Shopify –not only do they give you a way to build an online store and handle payments, they also offer you helpful tools you need for other important aspects of running a successful business. You probably won’t need all of them, so you can pick and choose the apps that you need. These apps are fully integrated into Shopify, so you don’t have to mess around with different systems and try to make them “talk” to each other. Just plug and play – which will save you a lot of time and work.
|
| #3 | Shopify offers you a true 24/7 anytime support
You can reach them at any time through phone support, online live chat or email. They even provide you with 5 international phone numbers so you can choose the number that fits your region. If you’re running a business, you need immediate access to support when you need technology troubleshooting – Shopify provides this for you. [More details on Shopify’s Support below]
|
Cons About Shopify | |
|---|---|
| #1 | Shopify charges a transaction fee for every sale (unless you use Shopify Payment)
In addition to a monthly service fee, Shopify charges its customers a 0.5% – 2% transaction fee for their plans (unless you are using Shopify Payments to power your payment transactions – in which case all transaction fees are removed). What this means for you, is that Shopify will charge you 2% of the sales value if you are using the “Basic Shopify” plan, 1% of the sales value if you are using the “Shopify” plan, and 0.5% of the sales value if you are using the “Advanced Shopify” plan (more details about their monthly plans below).
While this might sound high initially, let’s put this in perspective. To illustrate, the cost to you is $0.5 to $2 for every $100 in sales that you make, or $50 or $200 for every $10,000 in sales. This fee is intended to cover the technology it takes for Shopify to power your sales. More sales usually mean more visitors, and more visitors use up a lot of bandwidth (think of it as the power it takes for Shopify to allow your visitors to look around the store).
While this transaction fee is in addition to the monthly plan fee, we would still be very excited if we sold $10,000 per month in products and would gladly pay $50 or $200 to Shopify to power and manage the transactions for us.
One thing you should appreciate about Shopify is that they are very transparent in their fee structures. A lot of other large online shop builders are well known for charging hidden fees, so you get a big, surprising bill that you can’t calculate at the end of the month. With Shopify, you can actually calculate how much you owe them based on the agreed upon monthly plan, and also based on how many sales you’ve made (which you know).
|
| #2 | Monthly cost may add up if you integrate multiple Apps
Although Shopify offers you over 1,200 apps to extend the functionality of your online shop, a lot of the apps are not free and they charge you a monthly fee for you to use them. Naturally, this might be concerning due to increased monthly costs. For example, integrating Freshbooks (a leading accounting / booking software) to your Shopify store is $31.99 per month.
However, consider it this way. If you need to manage accounting, this means that you are making a good number of sales, so you’re going to need to manage your accounting anyway. You can either sign up for an accounting software elsewhere, and manually export your sales information and import them into your accounting software (you know there will be a few glitches along the way, and in most cases, nobody will step up to help you because it’s “not their problem”), or you can hire a bookkeeper for a lot more than $31.99 per month. Or, you can use one of Shopify’s apps to make your life easier – because the apps are fully integrated with Shopify, so there is no manual work to make the different systems communicate properly. Everything is integrated and you don’t have to lift a finger to deal with bookkeeping.
Will the cost add up if you need several paid apps to extend your online shop’s functions? Yes. Will it save you time, headaches and money over time? Yes. We’ve all tried to pinch dollars when running businesses. But don’t be “penny wise, pound foolish”. The apps are here to make your life easier, so you can focus on other important aspects of your business. Also, keep in mind that apps are completely optional.
|
| #3 | You need to know “Liquid” if you want to customize your theme extensively
If you know code (HTML and CSS) and want to customize your website (or hire a programmer), it’s not as straightforward as in addition to editing through HTML and CSS (the basic codes), Shopify also uses their own coding language called “Liquid”.
What this means is that if you want to hire someone to quickly make modifications, you might have to hire a Shopify Expert who knows Liquid to help, which won’t be as cheap as a normal programmer. Of course, this assumes that you want to make customizations. What you can do is keep with the basic premium themes first, and as you start to make more sales, then consider making customizations.
|
Shopify’s App Review
In addition to Shopify’s core functionality, there is also an app store which you can visit to obtain apps (free and paid) that beef up what your store can do.
There is a huge number of apps available - over 2000, more than any other e-commerce platform that I've come across. These apps either add specific functionality to your store or alternatively make it talk to another tool (like Xero or Zendesk).
This wide range of apps is one of the strongest arguments for using the product - it means that you have a huge range of options not only when it comes to adding functionality to your store but when it comes to integrating it with other tools and platforms too.
Examples of available apps include:
- data capture apps
- accounting apps
- abandoned cart saver apps (that are more sophisticated that Shopify’s out-of-the box cart saver)
- advanced reporting apps.
Key third party apps that are supported via integrations include Xero, Freshbooks, Mailchimp, Zendesk and Aweber.
What methods of payment can my customers use?
Most Shopify store owners accept credit card payments but you can offer more options like Cash on Demand, Money Orders, etc. Shopify integrates with many different payment processing services, and more are being added all the time. Just give Shopify the details once you’ve set up an account with one of them.
What is a “third-party payment processor”?
A third-party processor such as PayPal lets you accept online payments without a merchant account of your own. Instead, they let you use their merchant account under their own terms of service, usually with very little setup required.
Following is a list of all the supported payment gateways in Shopify.
Supported Payment methods
Shopify themes
Shopify provides 10 free templates (or 'themes') that you can use – each of these comes in two or three different variants, so these templates actually translate to quite a lot of fairly different designs.
These are all attractive templates, and they are responsive too, meaning they will display nicely across all devices.
Alternatively you can use a paid-for template - a 'premium' theme - of which there are are around 50 (and again, each theme comes in a few variants). These range in price from $140 to $180 (and are all responsive too).
In the theme store, you can browse all the free and paid templates using a wide range of filters - for example, you can view templates by industry, home page type, layout style and so on. This means that you should be able to find a suitable theme for your store fairly easily.
In terms of the aesthetics, the templates are all professional in appearance, easy on the eye, and very slick in nature - no complaints at all here.
Some themes allow you to make use of contemporary design features such as parallax scrolling and video backgrounds; all in all, Shopify's template offering is one of the highest-quality in the e-commerce marketplace.
Adding products as well as setting up payment and shipping options works absolutely painlessly: no important service is missing. That makes both ordering and paying easy for your clients. Their layouts can be modified to a large degree without any programming knowledge.
But Shopify is not only an online store. You can also use it to do content marketing via a blog and also add content pages. And that’s what we find so fascinating: Shopify can be handled by an absolute beginner while at the same time providing a great looking, cutting-edge online store.
Just in case you’re missing a function or want to change the layout, most of the time you are only one click away. New templates and apps can be installed with one simple click via their app store. If you should need a function that doesn’t exist, it’s possible to create it since Shopify has a powerful template language called “Liquid.”
No matter how fast your business and requirements grow, with Shopify you don’t have to be afraid of moving to another platform and restarting everything from scratch (unless you become another Amazon, that is).
Of course, quality has its price. Shopify is not the cheapest solution, and even in their “Shopify” plan ($79/month) they charge you a 1% transaction fee. But you can bypass this fee by signing up for Shopify payments, which is their own payment gateway.
In their “Basic” plan ($29/month), they offer telephone support and the ability to modify your entire template. Find our full analysis of Shopify’s pricing plans here.
Still looking for flaws in Shopify? We’ll give you one: you won’t be able to set up a multilingual store out of the gate. However, we found an app priced at (a relatively steep) $17.50 per month that can help you create a multilingual store.
If that’s not an issue for you, Shopify might be THE answer to all your ecommerce questions!
These are all attractive templates, and they are responsive too, meaning they will display nicely across all devices.
Alternatively you can use a paid-for template - a 'premium' theme - of which there are are around 50 (and again, each theme comes in a few variants). These range in price from $140 to $180 (and are all responsive too).
In the theme store, you can browse all the free and paid templates using a wide range of filters - for example, you can view templates by industry, home page type, layout style and so on. This means that you should be able to find a suitable theme for your store fairly easily.
In terms of the aesthetics, the templates are all professional in appearance, easy on the eye, and very slick in nature - no complaints at all here.
Some themes allow you to make use of contemporary design features such as parallax scrolling and video backgrounds; all in all, Shopify's template offering is one of the highest-quality in the e-commerce marketplace.
Conclusion
Shopify Top Choice EcommerceAfter having tested Shopify for a whole week, we have to admit that we are quite impressed. To compare it with small-scale online stores like Weebly or Squarespace almost seems unfair as they easily beat them in every single category – except price.Adding products as well as setting up payment and shipping options works absolutely painlessly: no important service is missing. That makes both ordering and paying easy for your clients. Their layouts can be modified to a large degree without any programming knowledge.
But Shopify is not only an online store. You can also use it to do content marketing via a blog and also add content pages. And that’s what we find so fascinating: Shopify can be handled by an absolute beginner while at the same time providing a great looking, cutting-edge online store.
Just in case you’re missing a function or want to change the layout, most of the time you are only one click away. New templates and apps can be installed with one simple click via their app store. If you should need a function that doesn’t exist, it’s possible to create it since Shopify has a powerful template language called “Liquid.”
No matter how fast your business and requirements grow, with Shopify you don’t have to be afraid of moving to another platform and restarting everything from scratch (unless you become another Amazon, that is).
Of course, quality has its price. Shopify is not the cheapest solution, and even in their “Shopify” plan ($79/month) they charge you a 1% transaction fee. But you can bypass this fee by signing up for Shopify payments, which is their own payment gateway.
In their “Basic” plan ($29/month), they offer telephone support and the ability to modify your entire template. Find our full analysis of Shopify’s pricing plans here.
Still looking for flaws in Shopify? We’ll give you one: you won’t be able to set up a multilingual store out of the gate. However, we found an app priced at (a relatively steep) $17.50 per month that can help you create a multilingual store.
If that’s not an issue for you, Shopify might be THE answer to all your ecommerce questions!
Shopify Store Review: The Best Ecommerce Solution?
Reviewed by Yassine
on
December 21, 2017
Rating: 5
Reviewed by Yassine
on
December 21, 2017
Rating: 5
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