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Shopify

Score9.1 out of 10

630 Reviews and Ratings

What is Shopify?

Shopify is a commerce platform designed for both online stores and retail locations. Shopify offers a professional online storefront, a payment solution to accept credit cards, and the Shopify POS application to power retail sales.

Top Performing Features

  • Order processing

    Includes tools or integrations for order processing.

    Category average: 8.2

  • eCommerce security

    Security measures are in place to prevent a breach of sensitive payment information.

    Category average: 8.2

  • Product catalog & listings

    Products are easy to browse; listings include descriptions, photos, 360-degree views, and/or videos.

    Category average: 8.3

Areas for Improvement

  • Shipping

    Includes tools or integrations for order fulfillment of physical products.

    Category average: 7.7

  • SEO

    The platform & templates help users create the right website infrastructure (pagination, page headers, titles, meta tags, url structure, etc.) to increase the site’s visibility in search engine results.

    Category average: 7.6

  • Multi-site management

    Administrators can manage multiple storefronts or websites under one umbrella.

    Category average: 8

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

Best website builder for eCommerce brands

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Shopify helped us to create a website for our brand. As an ecommerce brand, it was essential for us to have a website through which we could sell our products online to our target customers.

Pros

  • Shopify helps brands create high converting ecommerce websites.
  • It is quite affordable.
  • It is SEO friendly meaning there are higher chances to rank on Google with a Shopify website.
  • They have the best support team ever.

Cons

  • I would love it if Shopify built an in house app which helped us post UGCs and social proof from platforms such as Instagram, Youtube etc. more seamlessly on our website. Right now, we are able to do it through third party apps but the look and feel is just okay.

Return on Investment

  • Making a website on Shopify helped us build a strong brand identity not just locally but also globally.
  • We were able to get so many orders even without paid marketing because our website was SEO responsive.
  • We are able to keep track of all our inventory easily because of our Shopify store.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

GoDaddy

Other Software Used

Google Search Console, Google Business Profile

Not ideal for digital download variants

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I manage an online store and used Shopify to sell products.

Pros

  • Marketing
  • Online store appearance

Cons

  • Digital downloads
  • Multiple digital download options

Return on Investment

  • Neutral to negative

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Squarespace and Wix

Other Software Used

Squarespace, SketchUp, Adobe PhotoShop

My experience using Shopify

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Shopify to process all of our order, refunds, payments and inventory. This helps our business sell our devices and process orders in a timely manner.

Pros

  • Process orders
  • Maintain a good record of processes
  • Inventory Management

Cons

  • Support could be faster
  • Integration with more systems
  • Dark Theme

Return on Investment

  • We've managed to increase our productivity by 75%
  • During Peak season we managed to sell more than 20,000 units with Shopify
  • Due to our increase in revenue, we been able to hire more employees

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Wix

Other Software Used

CRM and Deals for Zendesk, Linear App, Amazon Web Services

Is Shopify right for you? It may just be.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Shopify as our ecommerce store. The reason we switched was Shopify's ability to handle the syncing of our customers and companies properly. It also was able to sync the attribute fields in Acumatica without any third-party tools or customizations. Shopify allowed us to more easily handle b2b customers alongside individual customers.

Pros

  • Customer and Company syncing
  • The ability to sync almost any field from Acumatica
  • Price catalogs for different customers

Cons

  • The cost can be a factor
  • Add-on apps are needed
  • certain fields wont sync when making them blank in Acumatica

Return on Investment

  • Since using Shopify we noticed an increase in web sales of 20%
  • The ability to properly list and tag our items has made our site easier to navigate and items easier to find. Which has driven up web sales.
  • The ability to customize most of what we need in Shopify ourselves has saved us a lot of third party vendor fees.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

BigCommerce

Other Software Used

Acumatica, StarShip, Algolia