Shopify Delivers But With Some Drawbacks
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Shopify as one of our main e-commerce platforms for our supplements. We chose to use this platform because of it's variety of (semi) easy to use features, connectivity, and trusted partners (such as ReCharge and NoFraud). Shopify allows us to easily sell to our retail customers without the hassle getting too complex with backend code, especially security related. It's admin user interface is simplistic and easy to use for our CSR's on everyday orders.
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.
Usability
Alternatives Considered
WooCommerce, WooCommerce Subscriptions and Adobe Commerce
Other Software Used
Adobe Stock, Adobe PhotoShop, Adobe Illustrator CC, Adobe InDesign



