Shopify is a great solution for both your existing e-commerce company and those who want to start an online shop. Shopify is a great option but you need to consider the pros and cons to determine if it is the right platform for your online shop.
This review will provide information on Shopify’s major advantages and drawbacks from a variety of perspectives.
- Simplicity in usage
Pros: A business owner’s main goal is to increase sales without being bogged down with technology or other tedious administrative tasks. Shopify offers significant advantages over other e-commerce platforms. Shopify includes assistance in managing the store’s technology needs, a clear interface and access to many useful ones. Shopify is a highly-hosted platform that can also manage your transaction processing.
Pros: Shopify is a great platform for people who are less tech-savvy. Shopify is not the best platform for you if you need more functionality. Magento and WordPress are better options. They’re self-hosted platforms, which can be more difficult to use, but they offer more flexibility with theme customization, as well as the ability to manage larger stores.
- There are many storefront themes to choose from
Pros: Shopify’s greatest advantage is its beautiful storefront themes. These themes make your website look professional and attractive, which will help you retain customers. UK Shopify offers merchants many theme options to choose from for their store. You can choose from a variety of themes, including Art & Photography and Jewelry & Accessories. You can filter them to choose whether they’re mobile-only, responsive, or free for use.
Cons: Only ten templates are available for free. You will have to pay a one time fee to access any other templates if you don’t already have any of these free templates. You will need to learn Shopify’s Liquid Code if you are looking for extensive customization.
- Shopify app store
Pros: Shopify’s plugins have been a strong feature. Shopify offers over 1,200 apps that will automate your tasks. This allows you to concentrate on other things such as marketing and increasing sales. Many apps are available for accounting, customer service and inventory management, as well as shipping and reporting. These apps will make your life easier by giving you the technology to scale up your store.
Let’s look at the Shopify apps. Shopify apps make it easy to manage your accounting. This is an essential part of growing a business. You will need to export sales figures and transaction details from your website before you can import them into an accounting software. Or, give the information to your accountant.
Shopify allows you to invite other software providers such as accountants and then integrates the software into Shopify. All sales and figures will be automatically transferred to the accounting program, which saves money that you would have spent hiring an accountant.
Shopify also creates apps to support e-commerce websites with specific needs in relation to the countries they operate in. Cash on Delivery is an excellent example. It was specifically designed for Indian-based shops.
Cons: These apps will require you to pay fees. Using these apps will require you to manually enter your data into your software, which can take time. You have two options: you can hire someone for $50-300 per month or you can subscribe to an app monthly.
- Support available 24/7
The pros: Shopify’s support team is extremely dedicated. You can reach them via email, live chat or by phone. Depending on where you live, you can also call them 24 hours a day via four different numbers.
Cons: Technical issues may not always be addressed by the general support. You may have to ask your question in a forum to get an answer from a developer. Only the US, UK and New Zealand have support service numbers.
- Marketing and Discounts
Pros: Shopify offers marketing tools that increase SEO rankings, share on social media and automate other tasks.
Shopify allows you to do these things:
Generate discount codes.
Shopify and Pinterest allow you to sell your products.
Optimize SEO by including relevant keywords on your website pages and product descriptions.
Make blogs. Your SEO rankings will be affected by blogging.
Accelerated mobile pages (AMP) can be used to speed up content delivery to mobile shoppers. This will improve the shopping experience for your customers and help with SEO prioritization by Google.
Google automatically generates a sitemap. This is used to analyze the content of all your web pages.
Cons:
Only paid apps can be used to enable the AMP feature. You can’t use other extended SEO features, such as adding customer ratings and reviews, unless you purchase additional plugins.
It is not easy to export blog posts.
Customers can’t use multiple discounts. Only one discount per order is allowed by default. Some extensions, such as the Script Editor can be used to multiple discounts, but this is only possible with Shopify Plus.
Advantages and disadvantages of Shopify: Pricing
We’ll be focusing on pricing, the last Shopify feature we will review. Shopify customers often complain about the transaction and subscription fees. Shopify plans start from $29 for basic plans, and go up to $299 for advanced plans. Additional expenses include transaction fees for selling online and subscription fees to access the apps you require.
Shopify Payments stores do not charge transaction fees. However, this option is only available in a limited number of countries. Shops that are located in foreign countries use a third party payment gateway (like PayPal or Amazon Pay, 2Checkout etc.). This adds 0.5% to 2% per transaction. The $200 bandwidth and infrastructure transaction fee is reasonable for merchants making more than $10,000 per month.
Shopify offers Shopify POS to merchants who sell products in brick-and-mortar stores. The Shopify retail package can be purchased to enhance the management of physical products. The package also includes staff management and all hardware. It costs $49.
Shopify allows you to see exactly what you’re paying. There are no hidden fees, such bandwidth fees. Your monthly fees will be calculated based on how many sales you make.
Shopify Advantages and Disadvantages: Final words
Shopify’s flexibility to grow your business is one of its greatest advantages. Shopify is the easiest platform to use for small and large e-commerce companies. It gives merchants all the tools they need in order to create beautiful e-commerce sites.
Shopify isn’t the cheapest e-commerce platform. However, they offer cost transparency, 100 responsive template templates, many other extensions in the app marketplace, 24/7 support service and the option of selling offline with Shopify POS. These benefits far outweigh any cons Shopify might have.