Braintree, a PayPal service vs. Shopify

Braintree is a lower cost alternative to many of the options business owners have through their bank. However, they will need to be techy or be working with a developer to set up. The setup and backend isn't as user friendly as alternatives. Braintree is a great option if you'll need to manually type in credit card details. Banks will sometimes charge a lot more for that option. The manual option is nice if your clients aren't as tech savvy and prefer to pay over the phone than to pay on your website.

Incentivized

Shopify scales well for businesses of all sizes and types, especially when you factor in external app support. It's hard to imagine an a business that sells products or services online not being able to get value out of Shopify's platform.

• Braintree has excellent integration with the BigCommerce platform. The switch of our previous payment processing gateway to Braintree was very easy and only required a few clicks.
• Tying into Braintree's BigCommerce integration, for company's like ours that are on the BigCommerce enterprise plan, Braintree's rates for BigCommerce enterprise customers are extremely competitive and saved us money.
• Braintree has a pretty easy to use portal that can be accessed through the same login we use for PayPal which we are using in conjunction with Braintree with ease.
• I've only had to call Braintree twice and my customer service issues were handled extremely quickly and easily.

Incentivized

• Managing products and Sales using a very user friendly platform.
• Apps that make marketing really easy and effective.
• Directly linking platforms like Instagram and Titkok and managing content that is posted on the sites.
• Fast customer service.
• Customer Analytics, allows me to see what type of products should I sell more.

• Not a very good subscription management platform for a Saas business, but they make up for it on the API with others that are
• Doesn't have a lot of additional features, but that's what you'd expect out of a payment processor
• Very expensive per transaction, but the reality is that any processor who helps early stage companies accept online payments are expensive.

Incentivized

• Basic requests for store management are not out of the box. Shopify puts a lot of stock in their apps and app partners to bring some of the features that I expected to be out of the box. I've used Shopify for multiple clients and ran into roadblocks for each when we were unable to do basic things. Sometimes the apps are free and it's no big deal. Other times you have to pay for another service to do something as basic as set up stock out reports and notifications.
• Their support/team communication is poor. Again, working on multiple stores with license on all their levels and the support was consistently unresponsive or unhelpful.
• If you're a partner managing multiple stores, the log-in between the partner dashboard and your individual stores is confusing. I'm often found in a loop searching for the right place to log in because you can't access the stores you are a partner on in the same way as the other Shopify stores. Seems minor, but it's a frustrating thing I encounter often.

Incentivized

There's a huge cost in migrating payment providers, and we're very happy with Braintree so far.

Incentivized

Nothing we have used in the past or have seen thus far even comes close to offering what we get with Shopify Plus, especially for the price. You cannot even come close to getting what we are getting at the price we pay. We are beyond thrilled and Shopify Plus meets and exceeds all of our needs and expectations. We love it!

Incentivized

As a product, functionality has been fine for us. In our experience, some issues during On Boarding but because we had a dedicated Account Manager assigned to us, these issues were dealt with. Now we are a customer, it feels like they have stopped caring about us or aren't interested in working with us to resolve any issues we have.

I think most people are able to suer Shopify that have used a computer. There are some features that take a bit longer to learn. If you are not a creative person it may be a bit more difficult to learn the website customization, but with a help guide or tutorial it will only take a few tries to understand how to work the interface

Incentivized

Their support is a joke. There's nothing "supportive" about them. Every time I call in with an issue no one has an answer or even a recommendation. I am put on hold and no one ever comes back. It's time to find another processor.

Incentivized

In terms of support I give Shopify a 9 out of 10 because they're always very friendly and thorough, and they personally can't solve my problem for me they always point me in the proper direction with the proper information I need to move forward

Incentivized

It is simple for a developer to do.

Incentivized

Just start now and make the switch, the sooner the better. You will love it and it is really a simple process

Incentivized

Braintree is better at handling international payments and supporting a variety of payment methods that can all be configured from the same dashboard. Braintree supports PayPal, Venmo, Apple Pay, Google Pay, etc. in addition to simply credit cards like Stripe. Braintree has a vault of existing user payment methods so the user doesn't have to re-enter their information each time.

Incentivized

The old platform that I used could not help us to meet our requirements. It was not helping us properly, then I got to know about Shopify and started using it. After 1 month [of] usage of Shopify we could understand that this is the best platform [for E-commerce] to make better sales and goodwill. Shopify helped us to get a proper idea of the analytics of the website. Shopify [supports] most of the [applications] and helps us to make better results.

• Simplified billing so we spend less time on it
• Saved $20 a month or more when compared to alternatives that have a monthly charge.
• It gives peace of mind because we know that any service we use in the future will likely integrate with Braintree

Incentivized

• It got the store up quickly so the client could start selling. She was previously selling products on Etsy and Facebook and wanted to consolidate everything onto one website, so the main thing Shopify solved was to reduce the store owner's time in managing all her products on multiple sites. Also, we had previously built a website on Wix with all the custom functionality and branding she needed - a truly great, high-end website - but it performed so slowly that it was unusable. So the speed at which Shopify can be set up and then works on the page is appreciable.
• The website was manageable by the client - she could figure the system out herself after a while so she saved money on costs for hiring developers. She did have to hire developers to customize some of the plug-ins but costs are all relative; it wasn't a high investment compared to building a full e-commerce website. With the complexity and size of her product base and the functionality and branding she wanted to have in a website, and the potential of her business, she would have needed to invest well over $10,000 to get to where she really needs to be. In the end she kept the budget under $5000.00.
• Costs kept climbing with plug-ins having to be added with everything. My client became more involved in building the website and began to try multiple plugins, and she did not have the skill base to evaluate the plugins functionalities so she chose plugins that did not do everything she needed, and then ended up paying the plugin developers to customize the plugins. So on one hand, it's pretty amazing to be able to bring up an e-commerce website as quickly as a week or so, but on the other hand if you need anything customized or deeper functionality in regards to product searching and filtering on the web page, and management on the backend, it quickly goes beyond the skills of the average person to manage, and above their expected budget as well. In the end my client really did not get anything close to the functionality for the website we had originally envisioned.
• Shopify was the easiest way we could find to bring the client's products to a global market. We evaluated several other platforms and the functionality simple did not seem to be adequate, so Shopify seemed like the only solution that could do enough of what we needed and still stay within this client's budget. Really the problem in this project was not platform per se but that the budget wasn't large enough. Shopify managed to provide a solution for an ecommerce store with thousands of products on a tiny budget, so in the sense of pure functionality it provided the best value of all the platforms we evaluated. The solution still isn't big enough for this client's business though so, without having insights into this client's post-build sales results, my guess is that because her new website did not make her products easier to sort through, and she likely didn't have much more budget left to invest in SEO and other marketing of the website, her sales probably didn't increase substantially as a result of having built the website. So I think this project all in all did not likely have a high ROI.

Incentivized