This post contains Shopify Partner affiliate links; however, this remains our honest professional opinion of the Shopify platform, including the downsides.
Shopify is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms out there, and for good reasons. We’ve discussed before how Shopify is often considered the go-to platform for online sales. It makes it easy for businesses to sell online, manage inventory across locations and channels, and securely handle payments from a wide range of providers. However, like any platform, it has its strengths and weaknesses.
Before you jump in and sign up to Shopify, it’s worth weighing up the pros and cons to see if it’s the right fit for your business. Luckily that’s exactly what this post is about! We’ve worked on many Shopify sites, and are part of their Shopify Partner scheme, so we have plenty of experience with both the positives and negatives of Shopify.
Benefits of Shopify
If you are planning on using your website for online sales, here’s some of the main reasons to choose Shopify.
Payments made simple
Building payment systems from scratch is incredibly time-consuming and costly, and introduces a huge security risk as you then need to keep that financial information 100% safe, so it’s just not a viable option for most businesses.
One of the biggest selling points of Shopify is its ability to handle payments through the built-in payment integration and secure hosting. From your banking details to customer card transactions, Shopify manages the heavy lifting for you. This makes it a great option if you want peace of mind around customer security and a quick and easy setup.
On Shopify, you can set up a whole range of payment gateways that suit your customer base. Paypal is the default, but you can accept debit and credit cards, Klarna and other ‘buy now pay later’ systems, Apple and Google Pay, all with a couple of clicks. Shopify has integrations with most major banking systems across the globe, so you can easily pick ones that will feel familiar and reassuring for your customers, even if they are outside the UK. This also means you can accept payments in different currencies (as well as Bitcoin and other cryptos) and Shopify will handle the conversion for you.
Finally, you can set up Shopify to collect local taxes for you, such as VAT in the UK. This can make life a lot simpler, especially for sole traders or small businesses who might not always have the capacity to give this type of admin their full focus.
All Your Info in One Place
Shopify also offers cash on delivery and bank transfers as payment methods, but the real game-changer is the Shopify POS (Point of Sale). This is a till system you can use when selling face-to-face, either at a market or pop-up, or in a permanent location.
If you’re running both an online and physical store, Shopify makes inventory management much easier. Real-world sales are instantly reflected in your online store, meaning no embarrassing emails cancelling orders if you forget to mark something as “sold out” online. You can’t really log on to your website halfway through a busy market to update your inventory, so this is a really common problem for smaller businesses with limited or handmade stock. Shopify supports multiple locations, so it’s suitable if you are trying to track inventory across a chain of shops, or use a separate warehouse for web orders.
There are other benefits to having your real-world sales connected to your website too. You can email customers receipts, and then tempt them to shop online with a discount code. Tracking sales across your physical locations and online means you can make better decisions about future inventory; if some items sell best online, you don’t need to waste energy hauling all of them to the pop-up market, and can focus instead on the items that work best for face-to-face sales.
While Shopify POS integrates perfectly with your website and is simple to set up, Shopify has integrations with several other 3rd party POS systems such as Square. If you are already running a sales and inventory system in your physical shop, it’s worth investigating to see if there’s an integration app already in place. Alternatively, if your POS system has an API attached, then a Shopify Developer will be able to hook this into your website so the two systems sync. While the initial development costs might be a pain, if you are happy with your current POS and inventory system, it will save you the hassle of having to move to a new provider.
Designed to Convert
Another big positive of Shopify is that basic free themes are well designed and easy to customise. You can create a professional-looking site without too much technical know-how, as you just type in your content and upload your images into the preset layouts. The buying and checkout process is very user-friendly, and the Shopify default themes are all mobile responsive, meaning your customers will have a smooth and straightforward experience no matter what device they are using. The pages are well optimised for SEO, and can integrate with Google Shopping, giving more people the chance. to find your site.
If you want something more specialised, there are plenty of premium themes and apps you can buy. The Shopify app marketplace is well-stocked, so it’s pretty easy to add extra functionality. Whether you think a loyalty scheme, product visualiser or members-only exclusives will help your brand, you can install an app to make that happen in just a few clicks.
Connecting You to Your Customers
Shopify allows you to create more than just a shop. While it’s primarily designed to sell products, you can also add blogs and static pages, such as an “About Us” page. This gives you the flexibility to create content that supports your store and helps boost your SEO keywords as well.
Adding extra content is a great way to demonstrate your knowledge and authority to customers, and can be used as part of your marketing strategy. Shopify has a mailing list tool (and integrations with many other popular list managers if you already have a mailing list elsewhere), meaning you can easily share your latest recipe, style guide or “how-to” article with your customers. There’s also a Share button built into the product pages, so visitors can repost their favourite items.
As mentioned before, Shopify can convert currencies based on the location of the website visitor. Global markets and translations can be created as well, so shop visitors around the world will see the information in their own language and the pricing in their local currency. This is a bit of extra work to set up, but is well worth it if you have a lot of customers using a different language to that of your main market.
Shopify Partners
And last but not least, Shopify makes it easy to collaborate with website experts or designers. Shopify Partners can access your site securely through their own accounts, thus not being counted towards the staff accounts limit of your plan. This means you can get professional support without sharing sensitive logins, and while keeping full control over who has access to sensitive business information.
Shopify gives you full access to the back-end code of your store, meaning with the help of a designer or developer, you can create a unique website that brings your brand to life. The solid UX design of the Shopify journey and checkout, combined with a completely customisable front end and developer access to back-end code, allows small businesses to create a high-performing website that can compete with their much larger rivals.
The Downsides of Shopify
So, plenty of good reasons to choose Shopify – but what about the cons?
High (and Higher) Costs
To be blunt, while Shopify is great value, it isn’t cheap. You’ll pay a monthly subscription just to have the site live, plus transaction fees on any sales, which can be slightly higher than other payment processors. To put it in perspective, one month of Shopify could buy a year of WordPress hosting.
Therefore, you have to be confident that you’ll sell a lot. Don’t build a Shopify site to sell some merch as a nice add-on to your main business. With the cheapest plan starting at £19 per month, you’ll have to sell a ton of stickers and t-shirts to make it worthwhile. Shopify’s real value comes from the time savings and efficiency it gives you on high sales volumes, so if online sales aren’t your main income stream, it’s just not worth the extra cost.
Another bugbear I have with Shopify is that extra functionality usually costs more. Many seemingly basic features require either paid apps or coding know-how. For example, the standard mega menu design is horrible, so you’ll need to buy an app to fine-tune the design, or get someone who knows code to override it. There are plenty of apps out there, but most Shopify apps are subscription-based and few offer genuinely usable free plans. Add a couple of apps to your site and suddenly you’re paying a lot more than you originally planned. As before, this isn’t always bad value, but you need to have the sales volumes to justify it. As a result, we rarely recommend Shopify for side-hustles, micro-businesses or anyone on a very tight budget; if the thought of adding £300+ per year to your overheads makes you wince, Shopify probably isn’t for you.
Clunky or Non-Existent Integrations
If you already use a different POS or inventory system, Shopify might not integrate smoothly. Some systems don’t provide any kind of external API, so you’ll have no choice but to manually update them to keep things matching. Even if there is a way to connect your existing systems to Shopify, we’ve found these can be buggy. It’s extremely frustrating to have everything synced up, only to receive an order for something you know is out of stock, as the connection between your physical inventory system and Shopify failed momentarily and now is completely out of alignment.
Running two systems side by side can make inventory management a headache. In this case, it’s easier to pick the web platform that is designed to work with your existing till, or suck up the costs of moving to a compatible system.
The same can be said for any other business systems you already use. You might find there is no way to integrate Shopify with your mailing list provider or your online membership community. Adding a website shouldn’t mean you need to overhaul all of your existing processes, so it’s worth considering if the benefits of Shopify outweigh the wider disruption.
Limited Options for Non-Sales Pages
While the product pages and checkout on Shopify are excellent straight out of the box, it’s much harder to create interesting pages elsewhere on the site. In the default themes, pages only have one content area, with no option to set even a featured image directly from the page editor. While you can write code directly into the editor for more control, an easier option is to create a bespoke template for each page using the theme customiser. This is not too bad if you have a handful of pages, but if you want to make a lot of static content for your site it will get tiresome quickly.
You can also use metafields and metaobjects to make your pages more variable while limiting the number of templates you need to create. It’s very simple to add metafields to allow for a featured image or a unique CTA on each page, but setting these up correctly and linking them in to the templates can be tricky. If you chose Shopify because you didn’t want to mess about with code, then advanced features like this might feel a bit too much.
Tiered Pricing = Tiered Features
And finally, there are limitations on cheaper plans. This can be really frustrating if you’ve worked out Shopify can do what you need it to do, only to find out that this feature isn’t available on all plans.
A common example is that entry-level plans restrict the number of staff accounts you get. The basic plan only allows a single till user or five staff logins for the website. If you need more, you’ll be forced to share passwords (a security risk) or upgrade to a pricier plan – annoying if you have several part-time or seasonal staff.
Many of the local market features that make Shopify appealing to businesses hoping to sell in several countries are limited on the lower plans. Cheaper plans also have API usage limits and less powerful hosting, which may cause your store to crash if a large number of customers check out at the same time (for example, during a sale).
Lower-tier plans also incur higher transaction fees. Again, the sales volumes need to be fairly high to make upgrading worth it for this alone.
Is Shopify Right For You?
Overall, Shopify is a great platform if you’re running a serious online store and expect solid sales volumes. It’s secure, scalable, and designed to convert visitors to sales. As a developer, it’s easy to tweak the existing themes and boost functionality. However, if you only need a simple shop as a side-hustle or bonus extra income for another business, the costs may outweigh the benefits. A cheaper platform like WooCommerce might do the same job for a lot less outlay.
Not sure whether Shopify is the right platform for you? We can help you compare your options, weigh up costs, and choose the best system for your goals. Send us a message or book a free call to get started.
