Shopify Review 2024 What’s all the hype about?

Videos

• Shopify Video Review
• User Story
• Shopify vs Wix
• Shopify vs Squarespace

Test out Shopify's online store for 3 days for free here (and pay just $1/month for 3 months to continue)

Screenshots

Shopify Pricing

We are showing costs for monthly subscriptions. You can save 10% on yearly plans and 20% on bi-yearly ones. Shopify are currently offering a free 3-day trial, plus $1/month for the first 3 months.

Try our Smart Quiz to find the best Shopify plan quickly and easily:

Additional plans: The Starter plan gives you access to an embeddable ‘Buy Button’ and also a POS app (for in-person selling). It can be purchased for about $5 a month. Shopify also offers an enterprise plan (Plus) for gigantic online stores – it’s not cheap though, as it starts at $2,000 a month.

A domain name costs extra (starting at $14 per year for a .com), but can be added through Shopify or any external registrar. If you can, we’d recommend using Shopify’s own payment gateway as this will save you additional charges. However, it’s currently only available in several countries. Transaction fees won’t be charged for manual payment methods (cash on delivery, bank transfer etc).

Check our Shopify pricing comparison for full details.

Pro and Cons of Shopify

Rating Details

Shopify Features Review

Let me dive into Shopify’s functionalities and tell you a bit more of what I think of it. Hopefully, this will help clarify some questions you may still have.

It’ll be long, so skip to the conclusions if you are in a rush.

Shopify ease of use

I don’t want you to get the wrong impression, Shopify is easy to use and powerful. You can set up your store in a weekend, but you can also spend days customizing it. Shopify is more efficient than Volusion or BigCommerce and way easier to use than WordPress or Magento.

I also find their backend intuitive and straightforward to navigate. Whenever I got stuck, all I had to do was check their tutorials or ask support on their live chat – most of the time support was helpful and quick to answer.

Add and manage products

Products can be added easily using Shopify’s interface or you can even import your products via a CSV file – this last option is pretty useful for large online stores.

Sidenote: It’s also possible to import and export other pieces of data like customer lists, orders or even reviews using CSV files. For Big Cartel, BigCommerce, Etsy, PrestaShop and Squarespace there’s also a drag and drop importing tool.

If you need to sell several variants of the same product, be aware that Shopify will let you add a maximum of-  3 variants (e.g. size, color and material).

The system will then generate all the necessary combinations, and individual inventory tracking can be set up. The cap is at 100 combinations (unless you use a paid app or edit your theme’s source files). BigCommerce, on the other hand, supports up to 600 combinations.

This could be limiting for projects with complex products but will be enough for most store owners.

To sell digital products on Shopify, you’ll need to use a free app by Shopify. Sadly, to sell subscriptions or recurring payments (e.g. courses) will require additional apps or tweaking the code, this feels a bit limited. BigCommerce makes this process simple with just a few clicks.

AI-generated product descriptions

Shopify has an AI text generator, called Shopify Magic. For writing product descriptions, it offers assistance in multiple languages like English, German, Spanish, and French, among others.

Just give product details and some keywords for Shopify Magic to automatically generate a description for your products (usingPT-4). This is an effective way to maintain tone consistency across your products.

Shopify categories

Categories (or collections as Shopify calls them) can be manually assigned to products to group them. For example, let’s say you sell pet food, you could have a collection for dogs, cats or snakes.

Then Shopify will automatically generate a page for each collection showing all the included products. You won’t be able to create subcategories – e.g. Dogs > Large | Medium | Small.

Payment processors and transaction fees

As far as I know, Shopify has more online payment processors than any other alternative – over 250 providers. As you can imagine, big names like Stripe, 2Checkout, PayPal or Authorize are included.

And yes, they also have their own system, Shopify Payments (powered by Stripe).

One of my biggest issues with Shopify is that they will charge extra transaction fees if you don’t use Shopify Payments  – 2%, 1% or 0.5% depending on your plan. Sadly, Shopify Payments is not available in every country. So if you can, do use it.

On top of that, manual payment methods can be enabled too, e.g. cash on delivery, bank deposits or money order. Remember, on these orders you won’t have to pay any commissions to Shopify.

Shipping with Shopify

Setting shipping rules up can be done quickly from the admin panel (for example, flat rate, free shipping, rates based on country or region) for each of your products, entire collections, or your whole store; pretty standard stuff so far.

It’s possible to connect with carriers (like USPS, FedEx, UPS, etc.) and assigns accurate shipping costs at the time of payment.

Although technically only available in the more expensive plans (Advanced Shopify and Shopify Plus), you can also add this functionality to other plans for around $20 a, just have to ask support.Or you can use third-party apps. Keep in mind that you’ll need to have your own account with each carrier to be able to offer calculated rates.

Note: Real-time calculated rates are only available in some countries.

By default, you can connect your Shopify store to several dropshipping providers like Rakuten, Amazon Fulfillment or Shipwire. Other services can be manually connected (via email) if you need to.

Exploring other sales channels with Shopify

Having your own online store is a first step. But if you are an ambitious marketer, you probably want to explore different ways to sell your products.

Shopify has a couple of tricks for you here:

• Sell your products directly on Facebook – Shopify will create a shop section on your Facebook page.
• Sell your products on Instagram by tagging your products.
• Selling on Pinterest is also an option for Shopify store owners with a Pinterest business account.
• Similarly, you can connect your Shopify store with marketplaces like Amazon and eBay – this is available for US and Canada only
• And many more

The biggest perk of all this? You maintain and manage your sales from one place (your Shopify backend).

I have to say that some channels work smoother than others. For example, with the Instagram integration, many users have had issues getting their store validated.

Abandoned cart recovery

In the world of online shopping, the average abandoned cart rate seems to be well above 60%. In other words, 2 out of every 3 users won’t actually finish their purchase  – sobering, isn’t it?

Source Statista

That’s where the abandoned cart recovery tool can help you. This is a feature that allows you to interact with those who never placed the order, in an effort to gain them back.

For example, you can set Shopify to send automated emails with a discount code to those users that never finished the purchase process – assuming you know their email addresses.

I have to say that whilst the system is easy to set up, I find it a bit limited. Other options like popups or banners would be nice to have.

Sell face-to-face with Shopify – PoS

With Shopify, store owners can also sell the old way, face-to-face.

If you want to sell offline, it’s possible to integrate Shopify’s PoS (point of sale) with your physical sales channel – even if you are on the go. It syncs with your Shopify admin panel, so you can keep track of your sales from one spot.

You can start small, by selling items using the Shopify PoS app (e.g. using your smartphone or tablet) and accepting payments.

But if you are planning to sell offline a lot, you may want to look into buying PoS hardware to make your life easier. For example, Shopify offers a couple of card readers that you can connect to your smartphone or tablet, starting from $29.

Other accessories such as barcode scanners, receipt printers and cash drawers are also available.

Shopify blog and content generation

Sure, Shopify comes with a blog you can use for your content marketing strategy. It even has a lot of blogging features you’ll need. However, it can feel limited – especially when compared to platforms like Weebly or WordPress.

From their blog I like that:

But I’d like to see them improve on the following:

But of course you could always put your blog on a subdomain and let it run through an external platform. But that comes with its own set of challenges.

In the past Shopify’s page editor felt limited, but now it’s possible to add many different page elements. Each theme will vary, but even free themes allow you to add content like featured products, slideshows, contact forms and more.

Shopify App Store

Shopify has an app market where you can find extensions (for adding extra functionality) for your online store. These are similar to the ones you can add to your smartphone.

Many ecommerce solutions (e.g. BigCommerce, Wix, Weebly) have their own version of this Shopify App Store. But the main difference is that Shopify has an insane amount of apps. From email marketing integrations to dropshipping connections, you name it – Shopify will most likely have it.

These can certainly save you a lot of money and time – especially compared to custom-developed solutions.

There are a bunch of free apps (over a thousand), but many others are paid apps. And the app quality… well, it really depends on the app. Luckily, you can read reviews before installing them.

The not so cool thing is that it can get expensive. For example, if you need 2 or 3 paid apps, you might need to pay $50 or $60 extra a month – not every store owner can afford this.

Security and backups

It’s not fun to get hacked; it can compromise your business. The good thing is that Shopify handles updates and security, preventing problems like those on WordPress.

Shopify’s system runs on Level 1 PCI compliant servers – mandatory for accepting credit card payments. SSL encryption (at 256-bit) is enabled for every Shopify store too – to keep your visitors’ data safe.

At Shopify, they do have a backup system in place. In desperate times, they can restore your online shop. But this is not an official service, they advise you to keep regular backups of your site by exporting a series of CSV files – I don’t like this solution as it’s time-consuming.

That’s why adding a more advanced backup solution from the Shopify App Store (e.g. Rewind) may be wise – it’s a lifesaver if you delete content (e.g. products) by mistake.

Shopify Review Conclusion: Is this tool for you?

Shopify is one of my favorite solutions to create online stores with.

It has many cool features and advantages, but also a couple of downsides you should consider before deciding. Keep on reading to find out.

What I like about Shopify

Shopify has many advantages and cool features, but here are my favorite ones:

Shopify’s flaws

But yes, there are also some things that could bother you. Let’s list them:

Our recommendation: before going “big,” consider picking the “Basic” plan ($29/month). If you need more features you can always upgrade. WordPress users can integrate Shopify Starter for only $5/month.

Try Shopify 3 days for free (no credit card needed)

Is Shopify the right choice for you?

Shopify User Reviews

Shopify Alternatives

Read review

Read review

Read review