Shopify Delivers But With Some Drawbacks
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Pros
- It's base security and integration with trusted security partners (such as NoFraud) is a game-changer when it comes to reliability and a "hands off approach" for our IT department. The up-time is also very good.
- It offers a wide range of verified plugins that are (for the most part) easy to install and use for any specific scenario you're looking for.
- It's Analytics area in the admin is actually nice and offers a wide variety of reports that you can run.
Cons
- They nickel and dime you for everything. They also purposely do not add very "typical" features to their core because they want you to purchase plugins (which they get a cut of each month).
- Unless you're willing to pony up and pay for Shopify plus, they lock you out of the checkout page code (so, no installing apps there, either).
- Their UI sometimes will randomly freeze or not allow you to update something. The only thing we've figured out in those cases is just to wait 30 minutes.
- You can't get too "cute" with wanting complex functionalities (esp if there's not a plugin that does exactly what you're wanting to do).
Return on Investment
- Shopify has allowed us to easily make retail sales with normal customer operations while being pretty hands-off.
- Shopify has taught us that our more complex and custom integrations need to be done on a different system.
- Shopify makes you realize that the more "cute" you want to get with integrations, the more you'll pay monthly for everything.



