Shopify

Shopify is where it's at if you want to get involved in the whole Direct 2 Consumer craze! You could literally have a store, up and running and transactional in 10 minutes assuming you're computer / web literate, have a bank account, and a product to sell...For getting up and running with hundreds of attractive themes to choose from (not all on Shopify.com, there are online stores that sell themes...) you really can't beat the ease of Shopify – with just the right amount of freedom, and automation to make sure you can get your products and logo looking their best, and not accidentally break the whole thing. And if you know a little HTML/CSS, the sky is really the limit in terms of customizing the theme. Plus there's a Shopify "App Store" that offers every possible function you could imagine if you wanted something not natively offered such as pop-ups, rewards clubs, or wholesale pricing.

In the beginning, I found it a bit cumbersome to deal with large catalogs with lots of variants (color / size) per sku. But Shopify and their lightning-fast chat support are nothing if not good listeners and they've made editing part of, or your whole catalog, much easier than ever before, with tons of filters for tailoring your product selection on the back end, to making almost any variable from Title, to Inventory, to Weight, easily bulk editable. So the thing I'll say that still stinks, is that all the apps charge subscription fees, which is super annoying, especially if you rely on a bunch of them. I would much rather pay a one and done license fee as opposed to $3 a month for my mailing list manager app, $16 a month for my Wholesale price tiering app, and $5 for my abandoned cart retrieval system. It adds up to a big, never-ending headache.

It is easy to get a website up and running. Adding products is easy.

WHERE DO I BEGIN:
-inventory records only go back three months...I was horrified to find out I lost 4 months of inventory records.
-to print a receipt...you need to buy and download an app...it is awkward to use and takes a couple minutes for the receipt to upload before you can print it.
-to have employees log in you need to download and app and pay monthly
-you can not do a credit on someone’s account if they return something...You need to either return their money or give them a gift card it is awkward and difficult to use.
-if you mark an order pending payment you cannot take payment on the POS system.
-you cannot add any vender information that is not visible to your customers.
-the duplicate feature when adding products doesn’t work properly....to hard to explain what should be duplicated and what shouldn’t but trust me it wasn’t created by someone that understands business

I liked that Shopify’s platform is very easy to use, even for a web-developing beginner! You need absolutely no skills to build a Shopify store that will amaze your website visitors! Simply select a theme that fits well with your store’s niche and go from there. There are so many app add-ons that you can download to your Shopify store to make it POP. And the best part? You can utilize their free-trial to build your website with no restrictions so that possibly at the end of your trial (like me) you are already ready to launch your store with the $30/month subscription!

I definitely do not like that most app add-ons are additional fees. Once you realize there are other apps you want/need, the cost adds up to where you will find yourself needing nearly a $100/month budget (unless you select a higher costing Shopify subscription, that can run you up to nearly a $200/month budget). More free (not just free-trial) apps need to be available because not everyone can afford to keep paying monthly for everything, ESPECIALLY during this pandemic. A reduced monthly subscription fee during this pandemic would have been super considerate!