Shopify is a great option for both existing e-commerce businesses and for those of us who are looking to create an online shop. Shopify is an excellent platform, but it’s important to weigh the pros and the cons of Shopify before you decide if this is the best option for you.
This review will present information from multiple perspectives about Shopify’s main benefits and disadvantages.
- Simplicity of use
Pros: Business owners want to increase sales without getting bogged down in technology or other administrative tasks. Shopify has significant advantages that other e-commerce platforms do not offer. Shopify gives you access to several useful tools, an easy interface and assistance with managing your store’s technological requirements. Shopify is an extremely powerful platform that will take care of the transaction processing.
The cons: Shopify can be a good platform for those who don’t have the technical skills. Shopify may not be the right platform for you. Magento and WordPress have more functionality.
- A wide range of themes for storefronts available
Pros: Shopify has many advantages, including the stunning storefront themes that they offer. You can make your website look professional and beautiful, which helps to retain customers. Shopify gives merchants many themes to choose from when designing their stores. There are several themes available for each industry. These include Art & Photography (Jewelry & Accessories), Food & Beverage (Food & Beverage), Furniture and many more. You can filter them by industry and select whether they are responsive or mobile-only.
Cons: There are only 10 free templates. To use the other themes, you’ll need to pay an additional fee if you don’t have any of those free templates. Shopify’s Liquid codes can be complicated and you should hire an expert to help you understand it.
- Shopify app store
Pros: Shopify plugins are one their most powerful features. Shopify provides over 1,200 apps to automate your tasks. This lets you focus on more important things like marketing and sales. You can use many apps to help you with customer service, accounting, inventory, reporting and shipping. These apps can simplify your life and give you the technology you need to scale your business.
Let’s take an in-depth look at Shopify apps. Shopify apps simplify the accounting process, which is an integral part of managing a growing business. You’ll need to first export your sales figures, transaction details and manually import them into your accounting software.
Shopify invites other tool providers like accountant software developers and integrates their software with Shopify. All sales and figures are automatically transferred to the accounting software, saving you money on hiring an accountant.
Shopify also offers apps that can be used to help e-commerce sites in specific countries. Cash on Delivery, a great example, was created specifically for shops located in India.
Cons: These apps may require fees to use. You will have to manually insert your data in your own software without these apps. This can be time-consuming. The cost of hiring someone can be anywhere from $50 to $300 per month. Or you can opt to pay monthly subscriptions.
- 24/7 Support
Pros: Shopify is a highly dedicated support team. They can be reached via email and live chat. You can also contact them via 4 different numbers depending on your location.
Cons: You may not be able receive technical support from the general staff. To get a response from a developer, you might need to post your question on a forum. The only countries that have phone numbers for support are the United States, Canada, New Zealand, New Zealand, Australia, and Australia.
- Marketing and Discounts
Pros: Shopify gives you marketing tools to increase your SEO rankings, social sharing, and automate all other tasks.
Shopify makes it easy to do the following:
Generate discount codes.
Shopify, Pinterest and other social media platforms allow you to sell products.
Increase SEO by adding keywords to your site pages and product descriptions.
Blogs are a great idea. Blogs are an integral part of SEO and can also impact your rankings.
Accelerated Mobile Pages, also known as AMP, is a way to improve the mobile shopping experience and optimize your SEO for Google.
Google will automatically generate a sitemap for you, which can be used by Google to analyze all of your pages.
Cons:
The AMP feature can only be used if your store has a paid app. Additional SEO features such as customer reviews and ratings can only be used if you have paid for the plugins.
It can be difficult to export blog posts.
Customers cannot get multiple discounts. By default, there is only one discount per order. Some extensions, such a Script Editor may be used for multiple discount features, but only with Shopify Plus.
Comparison of the advantages and disadvantages offered by Shopify: Pricing
The last Shopify aspect that we will be reviewing is pricing. Shopify users are often unhappy about transaction and subscription fees. Shopify plans start as low as $29 and can go up to $299 with advanced plans. Transaction fees and subscription fees are additional expenses for selling online.
Shopify Payments is free of transaction fees. But, it’s limited to a few countries. Third-party payment gateways are used by stores located in countries other than the United States (e.g. PayPal, Amazon Pay and 2Checkout). There is an additional 0.5%-2.2% transaction fee. Merchants with a high level of success who make more than $10,000 per month will find the $200 bandwidth or infrastructure transaction fee reasonable as it allows them to generate more profit at a lower cost.
Shopify has ShopifyPOS, which is a platform that allows merchants to sell products in brick and mortar stores. Shopify Retail Package is recommended to improve physical management. For an additional $49., this package includes staff management features and all the hardware.
UK Shopify lets you see the exact amount you are paying. There are also no hidden charges such as bandwidth fees. You can calculate your monthly fees based on the amount of sales you have processed.
Shopify’s advantages and disadvantages: last words
Shopify has many benefits, including the cons and pros we’ve already discussed. Shopify also allows you to grow with your company. Shopify is a platform that merchants have access to all the tools and resources they need to create stunning e-commerce websites.
Shopify may not be the cheapest e-commerce Platform, but they provide cost transparency and 100 responsive theme templates. They also offer several extensions in the app market.