Shopify

We Printify have been using the Shopify platform, It has great drag-and-drop tools, especially for designing a website. This makes the overall process very simple. For example, in Shopify, you can use various tools such as Polaris, which helps you create consistent experiences and articulate the best UX practices.

Shopify has great features like Theme-friendly design, easy customization, Media gallery.

Having launched 5 Shopify sites over the past few years, it's been a pleasurable experience every time. Easy to get up and running, yet powerful enough to host the most robust e-commerce offerings.

Cool thing about Shopify is that it allows you to integrate and customize any themes needed.

In the title I recommended Shopify to set as one of the true preference to run and manage the work flow in a decent way. Cool way to integrate all your payment, marketplace options for the executives and support team as well. In all, shopify looks balanced in compared to other cart product applications.

Pros: Multiple Filter and Inventory Management.

Cons: Not able to export bulk Shipping label.

Shopify has been an incredible platform to launch and grow our client’s businesses at Six Gun Digital Marketing Agency. The default features are solid, and its architecture makes it both flexible, yet simple, with the ability to make it more complicated and advanced as their company grows.

The pick and play and pay-as-you-go nature allow us to easily put every decision about adding functionality and features into an ROI calculation. Helping us make calculated business decisions. The customization capabilities of Shopify have allowed the companies to stitch together a mostly automated set of business and operational processes - which saves them money and time.

Being able to change the metadata on the site enables us to optimize it for the SERP results.

As a Senior Retail Analyst of Fit Small Business, I feel that Shopify is one of the best e-commerce platforms available. It is priced extremely competitively and packs a lot of sophisticated features into a user-friendly interface.

Shopify has a great order management system, integrated shipping solutions, and makes drop shipping super easy. It’s also highly customizable. Shopify makes it easy to have a true multi-channel retail business with online, social media, and in-person sales all through Shopify, with centralized inventory and customer data that syncs seamlessly.

On the downside, adding specific products details and variations isn’t as easy with Shopify as it is with other platforms such as Lightspeed. Shopify also has a lot of third-party apps and integrations, which is great. But, some features such as customer reviews and ratings, which should ideally be built into the platform, require a separate app.

Pros:

1. Themes are highly customizable

2. HTTPS support with a basic plan

3. Abandoned Checkout feature available with a basic plan

4. API support available if I only want to use the e-commerce feature. I can also use Shopify Buy button on any existing website

5. Support for multiple checkout options.

6. Auto-scales to handle burst of traffic with ease, even under the basic plan.

Cons:

1. Cannot add more than 3 options for variants via the admin dashboard.

2. No Way to accept partial payments, so I have designed a workaround way to accept deposit using variant options. An option to accept deposit payment exist in Shopify’s POS but not for an online e-commerce website. Customer cannot split payments too.

3. High learning curve if you want to build a theme or modify an existing Shopify theme.

4. Lacks multi-vendor support out of the box — I will not be able to use existing website setup, if I want my artists to login and manage their own listings. There are some apps that claim to add multi-vendor support but yet to be tested by me.

5. Cannot add more than 100 selected items for discount code, fails with error "Exceeded maximum number of selected items allowed (maximum is 100)“. So I have created multiple discount codes so that I can cover all my products.

6. The biggest issue right now is that there is no easy way/recommended way to have a multiple version of the website. There is no support for test or dev version. Most changes are being made on the live production version. I can’t test my code locally either, I have to push code to the live Shopify server to see changes. As I am Co-Founder of Koonchi, I have two versions of the website and also two literal copies of code. Right now it is easy to manage, as I am the only one working on it, but once I have multiple developers working on the same codebase it will get very difficult to manage changes, especially there is no way to test my code on my locally. 

7. Stores located outside of US and Canada can only add only one package size for shipping. Because painting sizes can vary I cannot add multiple package size, because my store location is India.

Overall: It is a good way to start and test out the MVP, but as soon as the company grows and especially if you are located outside of US or Canada, a lot of hurdles are in place.

Shopify has been an incredible platform to launch and grow Credit Parent. The core features are solid, and its extensible architecture makes it both flexible, yet simple, with the ability to make it more complex and advanced as you grow. The a la carte and pay-as-you-go nature of the app ecosystem allows us to easily put every decision about adding functionality and features into the context of a return on investment calculation. That really helps us make sound business decisions and ensures we are exercising disciplined financial management every step of the way. The customization capabilities of Shopify have allowed us to stitch together a mostly automated set of business and operational processes that not only save us time and cost but also help the business scale sales volume without putting too much pressure on the operation.

In less than a week, my company - DigiLocal had the client website up and running. We did not have to worry about broken links, slow loading times, any UI / UX hassle, any coding issues with additional integrations like Facebook Pixel, Conversion Tags, etc. 

The only downside to Shopify is the cost, not only of the platform but mainly of the apps which is a recurring expense. Clients are still okay with paying a monthly fee for the website platform, but paying a recurring fee for an app which adds some functionality is somehow not justified. We feel a flat one-time fee or even a yearly fee is reasonable. Also, the themes offered in the Shopify Web store are really expensive. You get similar themes, with the same or even better functionality on Themeforest.

It makes launching an e-commerce site easily accessible to small businesses and the non-technical, but Shopify Plus, it's enterprise version, provides the tools and scale that a large retailer is looking for, for a fraction of the cost of other enterprise products. It eliminates the need to host your own servers, there is no need for lengthy and expensive development and programming projects, and it has out-of-the-box features that many other platforms don't, such as SSL, CDN for images and files, built-in CMS, vetted and supported app store, multi-location inventory management, free POS, built-in payment options and integrations, and easy-to-use integrations with Facebook, Pinterest, Google Shopping, Instagram, etc. 

To-date, Shopify has proven to be one of the most flexible and feature-rich tools that we've used. Here's an example: Our company - Apotheca worked with on multi-million dollar implementations of IBM Websphere and Magento, that didn't have nearly the features that a new, $30/month Shopify site has. Want product reviews? That can cost thousands of dollars to implement on Websphere using a third party vendor (Shopify offers a free app with the same features), which can cost as much as $1K to $2K per month. Want blogging features? Yeah, that'll cost you too, but is free on Shopify. How about integrated inventory management? Sure, other platforms can do that, but not without investing in tens of thousands of dollars in programming and systems integrations. The investment and barrier to entry for small to medium-sized businesses are much smaller, particularly when compared to platforms like Magento, where you're essentially forced to engage a developer to develop and launch a site. 

Shopify has a diverse and well-supported app store that helps to affordably expand and enhance its capabilities.

As with any e-commerce platform, there are definitely some drawbacks. One example just happened this weekend, when the entire Shopify platform went down because of Google's Cloud outage. Since it's a hosted, proprietary platform, you don't have the flexibility to host your own site on servers of your choosing. This is typically a perk for many retailers, however, since they also don't have to purchase or manage servers, combat security issues, or worry about scale as traffic spikes or increases. 

Another drawback is that Shopify (separate from Shopify Plus), while giving you some flexibility to customize your site using its proprietary markup (Liquid), doesn't give you access to the shopping cart code, and you don't have access to things like sitemaps, robots.txt, and other common files that allow you to tweak your SEO and site performance.

Shopify is a solid choice if you’re looking for a platform to sell your goods online, but it’s nothing out of the ordinary. With different themes to choose from, ways to reduce transaction fees, helpful tips and 24/7 support, As a CMO of my company - Maple Holistics, I feel that Shopify makes it easy for you to grow your business. And with their flexible payment options, businesses of any size can benefit from their services. But there are plenty of ways to sell online, so feel free to shop around for other alternatives.

Shopify is simply fantastic. It's slightly more expensive than setting up an e-commerce shop through free options like WordPress, and the transaction fees are a bit costly as well. Everything simply works. The dashboard is intuitive and makes sense. Managing your shop is simple and the analytics it delivers is also extremely useful. If you have a retail location, there's also Shopify PoS. Basically, Shopify enables your online and offline growth. 

One other con is the URL structure. It's not too flexible. Funnily enough, I actually just wrote a review regarding the same - feel free to check it out at https://hostinspection.com/reviews/ 

Shopify is the best CMS for e-commerce. A robust backend that can handle any programming and design feature you want to build. A fast CDN and default settings that align with the highest online business standards. As a Co-Founder of Vivio Life Sciences, Shopify is the answer to starting and operating an e-commerce company.