I have always promised a short review of Shopify so I thought I would start the year by actually delivering it.
Prepare to spend a little more than other carts to use Shopify. That will probably be your only complaint though. It is the designer and developers choice of shopping cart software because of how easy it is to customise and how simple it is to train end users.
While it does not have the feature set of the other major carts by default most every piece of functionality can be added (sometimes at a small cost) from the Shopify AppStore. There are many free Shopify themes to help you minimise the upfront costs but given how wonderful it is to work with you can feel confident letting your imagination go wild, everything is possible with Shopify.
The bullet points
PRO Super simple to use and manage. No bloated features. Very clean, very attractive screens [insert image]
PRO Some very beautiful free themes.Better than the premium themes of most shopping carts
CON A small per transaction fee that can build up quickly on busy carts
CON No newsletter support or integration, although there is a MailChimp app in the app store that allows you to connect your store to your MailChimp lists.
CON SEO doesn’t exist, to get META tags (keywords and descriptions) you need to pay an extra $6 a month in the AppStore. There is integration with Google Product Search and Google Website Optimizer. No rich snippet support but you can find a tutorial and code snippet here.
PRO Very well organized backend that makes it simple to see how you store is performing and what needs your attention.
What does Shopify do better than every other cart?
It is very easy to use, looks great and let’s you get on with the business of selling and fulfilling orders. If you just want to sell online this could be your best option.
It is the most visually customizable shopping cart on the market. There is nothing you can not make a Shopify theme look like. There are no visual restrictions or generated markup and code to deal with, the liquid template engine is a developer and designers dream.
What is the downside of using Shopify?
Out of the box it does the bare minimum. No gift certifictaes, no wish list, no SEO. Probably not a downside if you just want to sell products and make money. Almost every feaure you could possible need is available via the Appstore for a usually minimum sum.
No default facebook store (although you can purchase an addon from the AppStore)
What payments methods are supported by Shopify?
All the major credit card gateways, Paypal, Google Checkout and several cusotm methods like Money Order, Bank Deposit and Cash on Delivery.
What shipping methods does Shopify support?
FedEx, UPS, USPS are the only shipping providers supported at the moment. Shopify does support various fulfilment services including Amazon, Shipwire and Webgistix.
Would I recommend Shopify?
Yes. It does cost more than carts like BigCommerce or CoreCommerce but it is worth every single cent if you want a wonderful looking site that is very easy to manage and use.
This Shopify review last updated January 2012
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Tags: Shopify
I loved Shopify, but did end up on BC and V because Shopify has no way to enter phone orders other than going through the site just like a customer would.
This means you cannot zero out the price of something small to “close the sale”. This lack of admin order entry area was, unfortunately, a deal breaker for us. Love the looks of their themes and the easy to use interface though.
Hi Andrew. I’m a bit confused. Wouldn’t Shopify be cheaper since they have unlimited bandwidth? Or is there some other reason or issue that is causing them to be more expensive than the other solutions in your 2012 top 5?
I’ve been researching different commerce solutions and the unlimited bandwidth that Shopify offers in exchange for small transaction fees really eases my mind! The typical 45 to 55 GB the other solutions offer doesn’t seem like enough for traffic and I keep imagining huge bandwidth overage bills as a result.
Thanks for your input.
Hi Maribel,
The reason Shopify comes out a little more expensive than the other solutions is that they charge either a 1% or 2% per transaction fee as well as the monthly fee.
Since this only occurs if you make sales most people are not bothered by it especially since it is so small, but I forgot to tell someone once and they got the bill at the end of there first month with Shopify and were shocked that is was higher than the $24 they were expecting.
If you are planning for 45gb of traffic then a cart like Shopify is probably your safest bet
But doesn’t everyone want lots of traffic that may result in more than 45gb? I’m a bit surprised that more of these solutions do not offer an unlimited bandwidth plan!
You’d be surprised how little a bandwidth a lot of stores use. I have never had a BigCommerce or CoreCommerce customer get an over use bill.
Ideally everyone would love to be so busy they require 45gb of bandwidth but the truth is the majority of them will probably never pass 5Gb
Bandwidth (given you can always very easily buy more or take steps to minimize it’s use) is probably the last thing to check for when selecting an ecommerce platform.
Features, suitability, support, stability, ease of use and ability to customise are all far more important and unlike bandwidth can not be rectified with a phone call if you make the wrong decisions early on.
Thanks for your input and for helping to clarify the bandwidth issue.
I do have another thing I’m unsure of. The App Store. I was looking through it and it seems that many of the apps for add-on features are Free. I did come across some that indicate a small fee such as $2 to $6 and some are more expensive but otherwise many seem to be free.
Are they truly free or is there a fee such as to upgrade the add-on feature to work at optimal level or some other catch?
Thanks again so very much.
No if they are free then they will not cost you anything. Most will have a premium version that adds extra functionality but if it is listed as free it will provide whatever features it claims to for nothing
Hi andrew!
Is it possible to use shopify templates on the other plataforms?
Hi Luis,
You can not use Shopify templates with other platforms but becaus ethey are usually so well created they can be converted from say Shopify to BigCommerce or WordPress without too much hassle.
Andrew, really, thanks SO MUCH for these hugely informative articles.
You’re a guru of sorts so I hope you can help:
We need a store in English and Chinese.
I hate the look and feel of BC and Volusion. Sorry, but their templating engines are lacklustre too.
Shopify is really nice looking, but what really puts me off is the Liquid theming language (really? what’s wrong with plain standard HTML?) and an app for every feature like Facebook, MailChimp, eBay integration. So the price adds up.
I like CoreCommerce a lot in terms of features, but I haven’t seen detailed comparisons here.
Our site will have a blog magazine apart from the store too. So it’s vital that it doesn’t look just like a store.
We need an English store on MYSITE.COM and a Chinese store on CN.MYSITE.COM, so subdomains with DNS are important.
I want to:
- Fully customize the minified JS and HTML
- Serve images and static assets from our CDN, ideally
- Have a “wishlist” of products that people can add to, even if they don’t buy
- NOT pay transaction fee, unless it also includes my PayPal fee
- And have our domain shown to the user from start to end (Shopify goes “shopify.com” at the end stage during checkout…so our shoppers will wonder if it’s reliable!)
My battle is actually between CoreCommerce, Shopify and our own WordPress based CMS site with JigoShop.
Naturally WordPress gives us a lot more control, but the features etc are great to have without any additional programming too.
What’re your thoughts?
Many thanks in advance!
Sounds like Shopify is out because it will charge you a transaction fee (unless you get the $180/month plan) there is no know way to use your own domain right through the checkout process though.
CoreCommerce will not give you complete access to the HTML so there will be sections or HTML and many images you can not optimize, you can optimize a great deal of it and minify a lot of the JS and CSS (there are a few javascript snippets that are injected into the middle of the page you will not be able to optimize)
Have you looked at licensed shopping cart that you can install on your own server you would have complete control over DNS and optimisation that way
I’m curious what you mean by “no SEO”. Can you specify file names, title tags, and meta descriptions? What can you do and what can’t you do? I don’t particularly care about meta tags but I do want to manage my own title tags and file names for SEO purposes. Thanks.
A recent update added the ability to alter the page title on pages, products and collections – prior to that you have to do it with a mess of code in the template which put it beyond the reach of most people. I used to add it as theme options to help customers manage it themselves, but it required constantly updating themes for them.
There is a basic URL redirector but URL’s need to be added one at a time which make migrations a lengthy process.
You can customise some of the URL – Products must exist under http://www.domain.com/products/ but you can customise the rest of the URL
Neither of these options is available when you create a product so you need to save it and then go back in and edit it – a bizarre two step that is hopefully fixed in the next update.
You can not readily modify meta tags and you need to manually craft rich snippets into your themes.
What’s missing is more a function of your ability to edit the template files. There is really no meta, canonical, title or alt data by default but if you have the technical skills you can add it without too much trouble.
Where as many of the newer shopping carts actively take steps to inject head tags into your document for a basic search optimisation, Shopify just provide template developers with rich API that allows them to do it themselves.
I just got an email with this URL that you might find useful if you are planning to edit your own Shopify templates to get a little more search engine love.
http://wiki.shopify.com/Search_Engine_Optimization_%28SEO%29_101
Hey–just stumbled on your site while searching Shopify reviews. Great stuff!
I currently have an etsy shop and am looking to open a stand alone shop. Really leaning toward Shopify, but that’s still a few months down the road while I build inventory.
SEO, fb integration, coupons/gift certificates–all good thinking points. Thanks for your insight!
My pleasure Karen, best of luck with the new venture
hi andrew. i’ll be opening up a simple page where i sell prints (photos that i have take) and will have quotes printed on each. nothing real complicated, maybe a couple different size prints will be available, but i’m really torn between Big Cartel & Shopify. do you have any suggestions? i’m not good with understanding all this html and code talk. all i know is i will be having a friend design a logo for my business that i would like to have on the page as a header or background, as well as my own website name. any info you have would be greatly appreciated. thank you!
Either would be fine. BigCartel would be the simplest and cheapest but Shopify has extra features you will need once your build your shop up. Perhaps start with BigCartel for now and upgrade down the track when you out grow it.
MAHALO! thanks Andrew, i appreciate it. you’ve made me feel a lot more comfortable with taking this next step.