Shopify

Pros

When I first signed up for Shopify 4-5 years ago I thought it was the best thing to happen to ecommerce. Gurus were knowledgeable and accessible (via phone!), the product worked beautifully and it met my needs. Now that my business has grown and I'm finding that Shopify is not set up to handle a business of high growth. Shopify has grown so fast that the average conversation with a Guru has dropped from outstanding to barely acceptable. Most of the time, the I know more than the Gurus. Follow up from the gurus is also terrible. You can still reach them by phone but if you need to speak to someome in the company with more experience, you can only access them via email and they take FOREVER to get to you. So you can forget about getting any help from someone with real knowledge of the product. The native functionality is also only good for very basic businesses. For example, if you need to ship a single item in multiple boxes, you can forget about doing that natively in the app or taking advantage of their discounted shipping rates. If you want to get a custom app built, you can forget about getting any support on the API from the gurus because they don't know anything about API. Again, there is no escalation point for customers who have a higher level of needs. Want help from the Shopify Expert community? You can forget about being called and speaking to someone local. Most won't do it, I've tried. If you get a response, the best you'll get is an email that reads something alo

Cons

ng the lines of "I can do this for you." and it's from someone on the other side of the world that has no clue about you, your business, your country or it's customs. I could go on and on but in summary, I am HIGHLY disappointed with the level of support and in 4 years have gone from a loyal, enthusiastic customer to a highly disgruntled customer looking for new options.

Pros

Shopify is very easy to get started with. It practically holds your hand with simple shops and the plugins make for a robust software that almost anyone can make use of. I use it primarily for selling eLearning courses. Shopify has plugins available for most LMS software. Simply connect the LMS to Shopify with a plugin, input the course identifier, with my LMS it is a string of numbers and letters that is unique to each course, then set the price and start selling. When you sell a course through Shopify, the purchaser automatically gets login information for the LMS and is automatically assigned the course they purchased. Shopify has a couple of options for setting up a shop. The first option, which is the easiest, is to create a storefront within Shopify that is like a website, just for your store. It is very easy to pick a theme and then just type in the information. The storefront through Shopify looks very professional and is worth it if you just need a simple storefront. The second option is the buy button, which I use for my companies website. This way, if you already have a website, you can just use Shopify to generate a code that will give you a button to place on your website. There are other options I rarely use such as generating a code for email which is similar to the buy button but I am sure it would be very useful for those wishing to email out their products. There are so many plugins to sell different ways that there would be too much to post in this review. The customer service is top-notch. They respond quickly and when I needed something, they worked with me until it was resolved. The last customer service need I had took a few tries to get everything going but they kept at it until it was fixed.

Cons

The only con I have is for a lot of the advanced usage, you will need plugins for anything beyond selling simple items, like I said before, this is a pro but it can be a con at the same time. Some of the plugins are simple and free but a lot have an extra cost to either purchase the plugin or a monthly fee to use the plugin. The creators of the plugins do need the pay, that is understandable, but most are out of small businesses', like my company's, budget.

Pros

If you want to stick to just basics and you need a clean, responsive E-commerce site, then Shopify is for you. No programming knowledge is required and there are many fine templates to choose from, and you can always find more. If you are interested in starting online, Shopify is a good choice because it offers a PCI compliant and secure shopping cart and payment gateway solution. Adding products to Shopify is surprisingly fast and easy but you are limited to 100 Variants. Shipping integration with USPS, UPS and Fedex is included and integrates with many popular software via Add ons. Things like email marketing, product feeds, and popups are easy to find and setup. And you can export your products to Google, and setup customer reviews with some other add ons. Having all these extra with add ons is both good and bad, and customers should be aware of the small downsides to Shopify.

Cons

Most things come included, however any extra customization requires some kind of add-on with monthly charge. Thankfully they have a good amount of add-ons to choose from, but most have fake reviews. Shopify much like other modern shopping carts is unable to store credit cards, out of the box. If your business needs to charge a customer for re-shipping, you have to create an invoice each time using an addon or creating a new order. Customer support is responsive but very general, but the basic Shopify will suit most small business owners. I am however not like most people, and like more customization. You cannot customize things too much other than what templates and add ons offer. Development on Shopify is highly difficult and goes above and beyond html / css however you can make some small changes like adding an image, or a link, a variable, or a tracking script with a look in their help center.

Pros

If you want to build an ecommerce website and you have little to no experience with web development, then Shopify is your place to go. Anybody can easily get something set up in less than a day and begin selling immediately. I have created multiple websites on Shopify for myself and it is a very user-friendly platform with a lot of basic functionality that you will need in your business. Shopify can automate many steps in the process of selling products, and it will also act as a central hub for all your customer and product information. If I wanted to set up a website from scratch or piecing together other applications, it would take a lot of time and proabably cost me a lot more than the monthly cost of Shopify.

Cons

Shopify is perfect for getting you going and it's great if you have a pretty standard and straightforward product line. If, however, you need to have some kind of a custom made function on your website, it's possible you can run into some hurdles. Shopify is in a tricky situation where they are trying to cater to those with little tech skills, but also needs to be able to work well with those that DO have the tech skills and want to customize things. One thing that is frustrating with Shopify is you're limited in certain ways when it comes to customizing website themes. You also are not allowed to upload your own theme. You must purchase the theme through Shopify. You are limited in your ability to customize the checkout page on your website.

Pros

Good UI but some of the simple options available with other ecommerce products are unavailable or cost extra. For example, if you want to calculate shipping for each item (as opposed to a flat shipping charge) you have to pay extra monthly. Also, you cannot adjust image sizes. If you want a different size image for the category page and the product page, you have to upload 2 images.

Cons

This may be a good platform to start your online experience with, despite the high fees.However, I've run into an unexpected hurdle that I can not seem to resolve. I have had a chargeback (stolen credit card) from an order. It was settled, I had to pay out of my pocket. After I covered the chargeback willingly to keep my store operating, they froze my orders and would not let my money out of my account. They have started a fraud investigation on me, and requested my re-seller agreements and shipping and tracking information for my latest orders, which I produced promptly. This is not the frustrating part. I understand the importance of security and fraud prevention and would assist in any way I can to resolve the issue. It has now been two weeks since I submitted all the required information for review, and I have not heard anything back. No, we've received it and it's in review no we need more information. NOTHING. I have been calling back and they would not let me talk to the person who requested the information from me, because he is either out of the office, or we are unable to transfer your call directly to him. I have sent many emails directly to the investigator, starting off with nice and progressively more frustrated, but still professional and non-offensive.