Shopify Review

Years ago, a German youngster living in Canada wanted to sell snowboards online. Little did he know that he would soon hit a gold mine and create Shopify (NYSE: SHOP), his brainchild, which now serves as a hub of commercial transactions on the internet. 

With an annual sales volume of $63 billion and about 3,000 employees, Shopify offers users optimum service. Read on to learn more about Shopify and why you should consider using it.

Shopify at a Glance

You can make profits with an online store hosted by Shopify. Let us review Shopify's user experience and how it ranks in comparison to competitors.

Selling on Shopify is easy because of its simple interface. The features you need to build an amazing online platform — such as templates, mail marketing tools, payment processing and a blog — are all at your fingertips.

Shopify also offers a 14-day trial for anyone interested. 

Rating: 8/10

Features:  

Shopify offers a stress-free approach to building and organizing your online store, thanks to its list of amazing features. With Shopify, you do not need to be an expert in web design to have an outstanding website.

Some of Shopify’s features include:

• Shopping cart
• Storefront
• A mobile app
• Products
• Web hosting

These features and many more can help you make your online store easier to shop with and accessible. 

Rating: 7/10 

Pricing:

Shopify has 5 pricing options to choose from. The pricing options are based on the plan you sign up for:  

• Shopify Lite 
• Basic Shopify 
• Shopify 
• Advanced Shopify 
• Shopify Plus 

Shopify Lite:

With the Lite plan, you can expect to pay $9 per month, which is the cheapest of all plans on the Shopify platform. Shopify Lite gives you the opportunity to start your online store at an affordable level. 

This plan doesn't permit you to run a fully functional store, but it does come with its benefits. A few features that you will be able to enjoy with a Shopify Lite plan include: 

• Finance reports
• Overview dashboard
• Customer profiles
• Order management
• Product management
• Abandoned cart emails 
• In-store inventory
• Gift cards
• Discount codes and custom discounts
• Adding a Shopify buy button to any website of your choice

Basic Shopify:

The Basic Shopify plan costs $29 per month. Basic Shopify provides you with an online store and 2 staff accounts. You’ll have access to 24/7 customer support, and you can sell an unlimited number of products. Some other features the plan offers include:

• Manual order creation
• Discount codes
• Free SSL certificate
• Abandoned cart recovery
• Gift cards
• A shipping discount up to 74% 
• Print shipping labels
• Fraud analysis

Shopify:

This plan charges $79 per month. With this Shopify plan, you will have access to an online store, up to 5 staff accounts, and the ability to assign inventory for up to 5 retail stores. It has all the features of the Basic Shopify plan in addition to the following: 

• Professional reports
• U.S. Postal Service Priority Mail Cubic® pricing
• International domains
• International pricing 

Advanced Shopify:

To subscribe to the Advanced Shopify pricing plan, you're required to make a monthly payment of $299. Under this plan, you will gain access to an online store and up to 15 staff accounts. 

You will also have the option to access 24/7 customer support, and you can assign inventory for up to 8 retail stores. In addition to the already-existing features of the Shopify pricing plan, the advanced Shopify plan also offers: 

• Advanced report builder
• 3rd-party calculated shipping rates
• A shipping discount up to 76%

Shopify Plus:

This is the most expensive Shopify plan. As such, it comes with custom pricing starting at $2,000 per month. With the Shopify plus package, you get:

• Conversion rates up to 18% faster 
• A 60% faster checkout process
• A fully customizable checkout page
• Fast integration with tech stack and other necessary tools
• Access to certified partners and apps to expand your store

Rating: 9/10

Overall:  

All in all, Shopify is an amazing site that gives you leverage to sell and market your products with ease. You also get to build a professional-looking website equipped with amazing payment methods and awesome customer service. 

Rating: 9/10 

The Good

• Ease of use: Every transaction can be completed in just a few clicks.
• Flexibility: You can customize your user experience.
• Scaling: It is easy to scale to any level for small and big online stores.
• Developer community: Independent developers are always available to help you.
• Support: Shopify has a round-the-clock tech support team.

The Bad

• URL: Shopify's URL structure is rigid, and you can only adjust the slug. 
• Pricing: Shopify charges a transaction fee as well as a payment processor fee.
• Rigidity: Customizing your noncommerce content to meet your taste is difficult. 
• Inconsistency: The multilanguage option is limited to certain plans.

Features

Let’s take a closer look at the features of Shopify so you have better insight into some of the platform’s greatest strengths as well as its weaknesses.

Shopify focuses on providing free rein to store owners so they can customize their e-commerce content, which is a major strength. If you're looking for a platform that also hosts content in addition to all-things e-commerce, then Shopify may not be the best fit. 

This is because Shopify is designed for e-commerce purposes, and the basic functionalities of the site as well as its available templates are geared more toward online shopping. If you're looking to create a general information website or a blog, there are better and cheaper options you can use. However, if you're only looking to sell online, you're fine.

Rating: Fair

Automation is the conversion of simple tasks into automatic responses that fix and solve problems. This means that simple tasks that once were performed manually now are able to be intelligently executed by software whenever necessary.

Over 1.1 billion workflows have been automated thanks to Shopify. This has saved 9.2 million hours of work and counting. Efficiency is key, and Spotify certainly delivers with its automation features. 

Rating: Excellent

Shopify has staff members called Shopify Gurus who are on standby at all hours of the day, ready and willing to provide customer support. They can be contacted via email, phone or live chat. They are relatively fast and helpful, but their efficiency depends on how technical the problem is. 

The biggest upside to choosing Shopify as your platform of choice is the fact that you can call upon the advice and assistance of an expert if you need help with a situation. The truth is that no one likes to contact customer support for each and every transaction as that can be a hassle. 

So, to accommodate that, Shopify proactively provides tutorials and guidelines to help you with as many problems as possible. As a last resort or if you want to talk to someone instead of communicating via text, you can always call the Shopify Gurus at any time. 

In order to accept credit and debit card payments securely, whether online or in person, you will need a payment gateway. A payment gateway is an avenue for transaction information to be shared between merchants and customers. 

With other online platforms, you have to pay a fee if you want to integrate a payment gateway. But with Shopify, certain plans don’t require you to pay more for a simple payment gateway, which is where it shines the brightest. Check the details of your Shopify plan to figure out whether you will need to pay extra to integrate a payment gateway with Shopify. 

In other words, with most Spotify plans, it is free to implement Shopify’s built-in payment gateway. However, Shopify charges a fee of up to 2% when you use payment processors like PayPal or Stripe.

Rating: Excellent

In terms of bandwidth, product inventory and customer data, Shopify services are somewhat limited for users with the Basic Shopify plan. The features of lower-cost Spotify plans are limited, and you have to pay more for better features. 

Similarly, people who subscribe to the more expensive Shopify plans have access to more detailed and advanced features. If you pay for Shopify Plus, you get to explore all of the features of Shopify without any limitations.  

Shopify Plus is a dynamic, customizable and scalable plan that is the most ideal for e-commerce businesses in need of advanced features for their online sales. The Shopify Plus plan comes with unlimited bandwidth, meaning your business can handle traffic of up to 6,000 checkouts per minute. You’ll also unlock 200 terabytes of storage, which is perfect for big e-commerce sites that experience consistent sales. 

Many businesses are finding success and massive growth by selling and advertising across multiple platforms. Online stores now have the ability to successfully advertise on social media. Sales can now take place on marketplaces like eBay, Amazon and social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter. 

Integrating your social media channels and other platforms with your Shopify store will help your business greatly. However, this is a feature only available to Shopify Plus users. If you wish to upgrade as a Shopify Plus user, the basic plan starts at $2,000 per month.

Shopify Plus can integrate all of these platforms with ease, allowing you to manage multiple sales channels all from the back end of your Shopify website. It makes for a very efficient process when looking to spread your reach and broaden your audience.

Shopify makes it possible for customers to leave reviews for your products. Not only does this give customers an opportunity to engage with your products and website, it also creates credibility for your business.

When potential customers can see that other people are satisfied with purchases they have made from your online store, it will improve the likelihood of those potential customers transforming into loyal and frequent buyers. As such, customer reviews and positive feedback ultimately encourage sales. 

• Shopify is a highly secure software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform. It is way more secure than other e-commerce platforms as well. With many other ecommerce options, you have to host them on separate platforms. For instance, with WooCommerce Hosting, you must integrate the plugin on hosting platforms like Wix or WordPress. But with Shopify, the ecommerce option is already built in, making it easy because everything is in one place. Likewise, Shopify handles any and all breaches in security, allowing you to rest assured that your site is safe from hackers. 

Other ecommerce platforms are designed as plugins, whereas Shopify is a hosting platform and e-commerce option all in one. Shopify is also Payment Card Industry (PCI) Level 1 compliant, and the platform has a security team — a group of people who are dedicated to maintaining the security of every site hosted by the platform. 

Rating: Excellent

The Takeaway

As it currently stands, Shopify is one of the best e-commerce platforms. It is home to many online businesses like Kylie Jenner's highly successful lip kit business Kylie Cosmetics. Shopify offers a wide range of elite services, although most of them are restricted to Shopify Plus users only.

Advantages:

• Shopify blogs are integrated into the store and tags are easy to set. 
• The gateway support for payments is free. 
• It's relatively easy to manage shipping, payment and the overall order processing.
• Shopify can aid your content marketing as it comes with a blog.
• The 24/7 customer support is a major advantage.
• You can sell offline as well with their point-of-sale solution.

Drawbacks:

• There’s a lack of customization of the URL structures. 
• Shopify offers no real way to review the pricing system. 
• There are extra transaction fees. 
• All of the best features are incredibly expensive.

This review should help you decide whether Shopify is the right fit for your e-commerce business.