What are Shopify’s 5 Pros & Cons?
Shopify is an excellent ecommerce platform for most businesses, but is it right for you? We explore the pros and cons of Shopify for your ecommerce store.
Key Takeaways
- Shopify is an excellent ecommerce platform for many businesses from SMEs to enterprise level, with many plugins from its marketplace, a range of customization options, and functionality to market and grow your online store. It works well out of the box for simple implementations.
- Complex installations or requirements requiring custom development and consultancy from Shopify experts. What’s more, users can find themselves ‘locked in’ to the Shopify ecosystem, finding it hard to move to an alternative platform in the future.
Top 3 Pros of Shopify
- Ease of Use: Intuitive platform ideal for quick setup and management.
- App Marketplace: Wide range of plugins for enhanced functionality.
- Scalability: Supports businesses of all sizes, including high-volume operations.
Top 3 Cons of Shopify
- Pricing: Costs can escalate with apps, themes, and transaction fees.
- Ecosystem Lock-in: Hard to migrate to other platforms due to proprietary systems.
- Customization Limits: Advanced features often need coding or developer help.
Shopify brings a ton of advantages for ecommerce businesses. Competitors like WooCommerce, Magento, and Wix Stores, it is one of the most popular ecommerce platforms in the US. Shopify is a flexible platform designed for businesses of all sizes, from small startups to large enterprises. It offers intuitive tools, scalable solutions, and extensive customization options to support diverse needs and drive growth effectively
Through our experience, we’ve seen firsthand how Shopify’s powerful features and flexibility can drive significant growth for online businesses. The platform’s rapid expansion speaks for itself: as of April 2024, there are over 4.6 million active Shopify stores, with a year-over-year GMV increase of 22%, reaching $67.2 billion in revenue for Shopify customers using the platform.
Shopify has pros and cons that must be considered before investing, especially if you’re a niche ecommerce business or one with specific requirements. This article explores the top 5 benefits of using Shopify for your ecommerce business and some of the drawbacks you need to consider.
The 5 Pros of Shopify
Ease of Use
One of the main advantages of Shopify is its ease of use for most people. It’s primarily an off-the-shelf solution that works right out of the box, and the simple interface and straightforward navigation make it easy to start and manage your ecommerce store.
Shopify offers impressive speed to market and significant cost efficiencies. The platform empowers brands to design and manage user experiences without the operational expenses of maintaining large in-house development teams. Additionally, Shopify’s robust product roadmap and the innovation within its app marketplace deliver core functionalities that rival enterprise ecommerce software at a fraction of the cost. In a Shopify-commissioned study across North America, the platform reported a total cost of ownership of up to 36% lower than that of its major competitors.
The drag-and-drop website builder is suitable for people of all expertise levels, and thousands of themes make it easy to give your site a modern, unique, and attractive feel. Usability is vital for 21st-century consumers, and you can make your site intuitive and responsive across various devices.
Multiple Payment Options With Shopify Payments
Successful ecommerce stores need to offer a wide range of payment options for customer convenience. And Shopify does just that. Business owners don’t have to use complicated third-party providers with separate accounts and transaction fees through Shopify Payments. Shopify accepts payments from around the globe, including Visa, MasterCard, AMEX, Discover, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, Klarna, Amazon Pay, Shop Pay Installments, HSA, FSA, and many more.
Shop Pay, Shopify’s accelerated checkout option, can boost conversions by up to 50% compared to guest checkouts, and just having Shop Pay available has been shown to increase conversion rates by 5%.
Shopify also offers POS systems to use in physical stores or events. Finally, if there are specific countries you want to do business in, you can install third-party plugins to take payments from them.
Scalability & Customization
Whether you’re a multinational ecommerce store or a small, local business, Shopify is incredibly scalable to suit your needs as you grow. For example, Shopify offers unlimited product inventory, multiple sales channels, and inventory tracking for up to 10 locations.
As your business expands, the level of customization offered ensures you can make your online store exactly as you want it, track and measure the metrics that matter to you, and introduce new functionality for your customers.
Shopify App Store
The Shopify App Store is another way to customize your site and offers over 8000 apps to improve functionality, usability, marketing, and almost anything else you can think of. For example, you can find apps for user-generated product reviews, social media integration, CRM features, pop-ups and banner management, landing page builders, inventory management, etc.
The overwhelming majority plug into your existing installation and don’t require much setup and maintenance. Finally, there are many official apps from other platforms and companies, such as Meta, TikTok, HubSpot, Xero, MailChimp, and countless others.
SEO, Marketing & Measurement
Search is still one of the main ways people find ecommerce websites, and Shopify has a wide range of tools built into it to optimize content and ensure the site meets SEO best practices. From simple copy editors and metadata tools to internal linking, redirect, and crawlability functionality, you get complete control over how your site appears in the SERPs.
The popular Yoast SEO tool is included, which helps to keep an overview of SEO performance. Additional features such as the (albeit essential) Shopify Blog, Forms, and Email Marketing allow you to attract and re-engage users at various funnel stages.
Finally, as well as Google Analytics integration, it also boasts native performance and revenue analytics tools to review your store’s performance, identify areas for growth, and generate reports for stakeholders.
Honorable Mentions
The hosting and security features built into Shopify are excellent, and the 24/7 customer support helps you resolve problems quickly. Whether via email, live chat, or telephone, there’s always somebody available to deal with your requests.
The 5 Cons of Shopify
As we’ve discussed, Shopify isn’t perfect, and you might find it doesn’t quite do what you need it to. Let’s delve deeper.
Pricing
A common complaint about Shopify is the pricing model:
- Shopify ($105 per month) + transaction fees
- Shopify Plus ($2500 per month) + transaction fees
Many people find that the Shopify standard plan doesn’t offer enough for their needs, and Shopify Plus is a significant increase. In addition, many themes, apps, and additional features come with up-front or ongoing costs, which can take this even higher.
If you’re unsure what you need from your Shopify investment, we recommend engaging with a Shopify specialist like Commerce Sense before making a decision. We can advise you on the likely functionality you’ll need to achieve your business objectives and provide guidance on how much this may cost.
What may seem like a reasonable initial investment in Shopify can suddenly become significantly higher when you start customizing and adding functionality to your installation. Alongside this, and as we’ll see later, much of the enterprise-level functionality that large businesses require also comes with expensive development costs.
Finally, Shopify also has some limitations when it comes to data security, specifically HIPAA compliance.
Lack of Native HIPAA Compliance
We work with clients who must adhere to HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) legislation regarding their customers’ sensitive data. Unfortunately, Shopify doesn’t have native HIPAA compliance to safely and legally store and process this data.
For medical ecommerce stores, this meant that they missed out on the vast benefits of using Shopify. However, we’ve developed a range of HIPAA-compliant Shopify solutions that change everything. Known as HIPAAGuard, it offers secure prescription management, post-order notifications, embedded order history, and end-to-end encryption in one groundbreaking plugin.
Customization Options
While Shopify offers immense customization and functionality options via their app store, you will need custom development to customize your themes, provide an enterprise-level usability experience for your customers, or enhance reporting and ecommerce functionality. Similarly, various integrations, such as Smart Search can be difficult and time-consuming.
Furthermore, the platform uses Shopify’s proprietary coding language, Liquid. This means that if you want any level of customization outside the basics provided by the platform, you’ll need a proficient developer who knows the language. Not only are these less common, but they may also charge more.
Simple updates and improvements may prove difficult or expensive to implement. You’ll need to engage and employ proven Shopify development experts to get it right.
This leads us to our next point…
Reliance on Shopify
Once set up and functioning on the Shopify platform, migrating elsewhere can become complicated, expensive, and time-consuming. While this isn’t unique to Shopify, you must consider your long-term investment decision carefully.
For example, if you decide to move to another platform, it’s impossible to download your design files and other assets to be taken elsewhere. You can download a .csv file with all your product information, but that’s it. In effect, a decision to leave Shopify likely means you’ll have to rebuild your ecommerce store completely.
Limited Content Marketing Functionality
While Shopify does have a blog, it’s considered rudimentary by modern standards. Any business that wants to undertake anything besides the most basic blog articles and social media posts will find they can’t do what is needed to attract and retain customers.
For example, the Shopify Blog cannot create categories (content must be grouped by tags), there is a very limited range of inflexible page layouts, the editor itself is very basic, and you can’t link to related posts, among other things. Other platforms like WordPress have a significant advantage here.
However, while it’s simple to add Shopify to a WordPress site, adding a WordPress blog to your Shopify site is not so easily done.
Summarizing Shopify Pros and Cons
As we’ve seen, Shopify is an incredible ecommerce platform for most people, but it lacks functionality around content marketing and HIPAA compliance and also forces you to commit to their whole ecosystem. For some businesses, this isn’t an issue but others may find they need something more easily customizable.
If you’re looking into Shopify for your ecommerce business, contact Commerce Sense. We’re the Shopify experts who can work with you to understand your needs and provide all the guidance you need.
