Last updated - December 5, 2022
Whether you have an established eCommerce presence or are looking to build a new online store, Shopify is a well-known and well-established online presence. As well as being intuitive and easy to use, Shopify has several strategic partners with whom they integrate to provide a seamless eCommerce experience.
Yet, before committing to Shopify, it’s worth researching whether or not it’s for you. To help, these are the key pros and cons of Shopify in 2023.
What is Shopify?
Shopify is an eCommerce platform that allows individuals to set up an online store and sell products across multiple channels. These channels have Shopify-friendly plug-ins that make it a straightforward exercise to integrate and sell.
Shopify is effectively a website builder with several templates that can be chosen and adapted to the user’s taste. The sites built within Shopify are hosted on Shopify servers, meaning the vendor doesn’t need to meet additional hosting costs.
Pros of Shopify
There are several advantages of using Shopify to host your eCommerce store. They include:
Ease of Use
Shopify users will aim for a single goal: increasing business and revenue. They want to be able to dedicate time to growing their business and not get bogged down with complicated technology and coding problems on their website.
Shopify’s power comes from its easy-to-use interface and versatility in interacting seamlessly with several add-ons. In addition, there’s assistance on-hand to help set up a store if required. Its platform also allows for quick and easy transaction processing.
Range of Store Themes
One of the significant advantages of Shopify’s platform is the wide range of store themes vendors can choose from when setting their store up.
Themes are available free of charge or under a paid subscription and are broken down by product or niche theme. For example, some themes will fit that niche if you’re selling art canvases, likewise as furniture, arts and crafts, jewelry, and stationery.
In addition, you can make your site mobile-only or responsive on laptops, tablets, and desktop computers.
Shopify App Store
The range of apps and plug-ins available from the Shopify app store is immense. More than 1200 apps and plug-ins are available, each tailored to automate processes and interact with other programs to make the vendor’s life easier.
They free up time that can be used more profitably and efficiently and apps for customer service, inventory, data analytics, and monitoring shipping.
For example, Artoh is a strategic Shopify partner with whom they work to provide effortless invoicing, sales, and financial management. At the same time, the orders roll in through the Shopify front end. All sales are automatically transferred to Artoh, allowing you to manage your finances much more efficiently without spending hundreds of dollars on an accountant.
Marketing Tools
Once you sign up for a Shopify account, you can access many marketing tools. These tools are designed to help you with SEO ranking improvement, social media tips, and automation of some marketing processes.
Shopify helps you to generate discount codes as introductory offers and to reward loyalty. In addition, you can improve SEO by adding trending keywords to product descriptions and your website landing pages. Blogging is another excellent way of helping your site rank on search engines through SEO.
Finally, you can use Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to increase the speed of content delivery on your mobile site to shoppers using their phones. This improves the customer experience significantly. Meanwhile, Shopify also allows for a specified sitemap. You can use this with Google Analytics to determine which parts of your site are working well and which you need to focus on.
No Hidden Charges
Many tech providers charge incremental bolt-on fees not just in eCommerce stores but around the web as a whole.
There’s none of that with Shopify. Different subscription amounts depend on the level of expertise and automation you will receive. However, there are no hidden extras. The price you see is the price you pay.
In addition, while Shopify Payments allows transaction processing without any fees, this is only available in a few countries. However, those stores that use a third-party payment gateway, such as PayPal or Amazon, will have a fixed transaction fee. This fee is usually between 0.5 and 2%, making it easy to calculate monthly transaction fees on your sales.
Cons of Shopify
Of course, no platform is wholly perfect. For all of Shopify’s many benefits, some users may find some drawbacks which make other platforms a better option.
Limited Store Functionality
While Shopify is an excellent platform for less tech-savvy individuals, others may find it restrictive. Those that know their way around the back end of a website and can code may benefit from using platforms offered by competitors such as WordPress and Magento.
These other providers, which are self-hosted, are more flexible and have a more comprehensive range of themes to choose from. In addition, they’re used to managing larger online stores.
In addition, hosting your eCommerce store on Shopify only allows one discount code to be used per transaction as standard. At the same time, the AMP feature is only available with a paid app on your store.
Similarly, some features that help your SEO improve on search engines are only available with specific plug-ins. These include customer reviews and ratings, which are only available on apps that require payment.
Limited Fange of Free Themes and Apps
Part of the limited functionality offered by Shopify is the small range of free store themes available. Only ten are free-to-use, far fewer than competitors such as WordPress.
When choosing a paid theme, there is a one-off fee to pay for something that provides a little more uniqueness. However, extensive customization to your Shopify store will require knowledge of Shopify’s Liquid code, which drives the platform’s back end, or hiring someone in.
Similarly, most apps and plug-ins that Shopify connects with are paid. However, they are designed to make your life easier and reduce the manual input you must do, which may make them worth the money.
In Summary
Shopify is the ideal platform for anyone looking to set up a new eCommerce store, run a small existing store online or augment their bricks-and-mortar shop with an online presence.
You’ll likely need to pay for a paid theme and some of the associated apps and plug-ins to be able to use the platform to its full potential.
Any financial investment will be returned in the short-term, however, through being able to direct your time more efficiently and profitably rather than being bogged down with unnecessary and time-consuming manual tasks.
