Shopify is a simple, easy to use, eCommerce solution. Just don't try to customize it much
December 11, 2018
Shopify is a simple, easy to use, eCommerce solution. Just don't try to customize it much
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Professional
Overall Satisfaction with Shopify
After comparing eComm solutions for a client, we went with Shopify as the preferred solution when building their site. They were a startup and the ease of management of products, lack of hassle of site maintenance, and built-in integration w/ Amazon were the major factors that made us go w/ Shopify.
- Product details and listings is simple and straightforward
- Inventory Management is robust and easy to grasp
- integration with the most common payment processors and Amazon listing are great
- Site/Store customization is difficult - it's page templates are based on an XML-like markup that you have to learn to do any page design edits
- There is a store/library of premium site themes to purchase, but the offerings are limited when compared to the comparable ocean of themes for something like WordPress
- Since custom development for Shopify is less popular - it's difficult to find help if have customization q's or get stuck. There isn't a very active Shopify dev community
- Using Shopify allowed our client to maintain a small team for marketing and fulfillment while ramping up their business in terms of manufacturing and logistics
- The difficulty in customization lead to us running over budget and timeline - so the client did not get their site at the promised date
- Once the site was up and running, sales started streaming in - having such an automated self service sales process saved on overhead resources
Magento, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce for WordPress were the main alternatives we considered.
- Magento - we had a negative experience with the complexity involved in maintaining the site backend and product catalog with a previous client and decided it wasn't suitable for the client in question's site
- BigCommerce - based on our investigation, BigCommerce's customization options were even more limited than Shopify's and their subscription model was more expensive
- We have had positive experiences with WordPress and WooCommerce but the client's non-technical nature and desire to have the site basically run itself w/o support steered us in favor of Shopify