1. Home
  2. eCommerce Platforms
  3. Shopify Reviews
  4. User Review of Shopify
Would suggest anyone against it!
June 07, 2014

Would suggest anyone against it!

Vincent Stark | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Basic

Overall Satisfaction with Shopify

Shopify's platform was chosen to become a core of our online grocery delivery business. It allows our customers to select their groceries and liquor from a big catalog, and then pay for their orders online. We consider this system to be one of the biggest assets our business currently has.
  • Speed. It's blazingly fast without a need to manually optimize anything.
  • Works out of the box, BUT only if you have a very simple ship-dropping business.
  • Relatively easy to use, and you can get your store up and running in like 10-15 minutes.
  • The system is very inflexible, especially when it comes to the checkout screen and analytics. Just a simple example: it's impossible to properly implement time-based deliveries in Shopify. Their tech support says that then "our product is not for you." That's a great answer, especially given time and money already invested in their platform.
  • It's impossible to properly use Google Analytics to track orders through Shopify. It was done on purpose, so users purchase their higher-end plans with "built-in" analytics, which is way less powerful compared to what Google provides.
  • Shopify doesn't care about their merchants. For example, when we got hit by fraudulent orders, they offered no help, but pointed us to a very vague and irrelevant FAQ. Later, when we got chargebacks, they offered no help or advice whatsoever. I also mentioned that they are not very eager to help with technical problems, saying "no" to many things that are important for Merchant's business to grow.
  • The system is buggy, and they roll out changes that can potentially break your store without any warnings. Also we had multiple problems when our store didn't work for 5+ hours, because Shopify's infrastructure was down.
  • Shopify hindered our progress a lot, because we had to fight our way through the very inflexible Liquid templating engine Shopify had in order to implement the kind of (basic) functionality we needed for our store.
  • We didn't have client acquisition analytics we needed so much, because Shopify didn't work properly with Google Analytics. It prevented us from making informed business decisions.
  • We got stuck with Shopify platform, because we invested too much time and money into it, unable to move our business forward because of Shopify's limitations and at the same time unable to easily make a switch to something different.
  • WordPress,Custom Rails-based Portal
Shopify is certainly limited in many aspects. It provides the convenience of fast and easy start, for which you pay in the long term by inability to grow.
Custom platforms, such as WordPress + WooCommerce, or even something custom-built, such as Ruby on Rails-based system, would provide much better ROI and freedom to drive the business in the direction it needs to go, and not what Shopify thinks you must stick to.
Unfortunately, we're stuck with this platform for a while. We cannot just stop using it, because it's a core of our business.
Of course, we're trying to build something else at the moment, but for a small business like ours, with small margins, it's a very difficult task.
Generally, it's a very dangerous situation when you're, as a small startup business, putting yourself into when you start using Shopify. You don't know in advance what you will need from the platform, and it might seem just a right fit for you. When you start growing, though, you inevitably face the limitations Shopify has. Unfortunately, it's usually too late/too expensive by then to switch to a different platform, and you find yourself stuck with them, even though it's hurting your business in a big way.

I would recommend using something more flexible and configurable, such as WordPress + WooCommerce.