Shopify Review —?Understanding its Key Pros and Cons
Style Factory
E-commerce, web design and digital marketing advice and resources for growing businesses.
At Style Factory, we’ve built a lot of Shopify stores for clients, so we have a deep understanding of how the platform works and what its key strengths and weaknesses are. So, in this Shopify review I’m going to spell out these pros and cons in a simple, jargon-free way—?and help you work out if it’s the right solution for your project.
Let’s kick things off with a look at the key reasons to use Shopify, and then I’ll move onto the key reasons you might want to avoid it.
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The advantages of using Shopify
1. It's great for selling internationally
If I had to single one thing out that Shopify does better than any competing solution we've tested, it's international ecommerce.
Its excellent ‘Shopify Markets’ feature makes it incredibly easy to sell using multiple currencies, multiple languages and?multiple domains. When set up correctly, Shopify Markets does a lot of this for you automatically.
These multi-currency features unlock a much bigger audience for merchants, and a more profitable one too (because stores that let users browse and check out in their own currency tend to generate more sales).
Even in 2024, many of Shopify’s key competitors don’t let you sell in more than one currency at a time — so this aspect of Shopify is worth flagging up as a key advantage of using the platform over rival ones.
In addition to giving you multi-currency features, Shopify also lets you translate your store into multiple languages without needing a translation app to facilitate this.
(Many competing solutions force you to use the Weglot service for this purpose, which can work out very expensive if you have a lot of text on your store.)
2. It’s a particularly good solution for dropshipping and print on demand
Dropshipping is a business model where you sell products without keeping any of them in stock. You simply take an order, send it to a supplier and they deliver the goods to your customer.
Shopify is arguably the best ecommerce platform for merchants who want to dropship, because there is an enormous range of dropshipping apps available for it. These let you sell a huge range of goods from a huge range of suppliers.
It’s also an excellent choice for print on demand applications, because it integrates very neatly with all the major print on demand services too. Printful, Printify, SPOD and Gooten all work extremely well with Shopify.
3. It’s great for point of sale
Point of sale features let you sell not just online but in physical locations too — retail outlets, market stalls, events and so on.
Not only does Shopify give you excellent point of sale features, but it bundles them with nearly all its plans, even its competitively-priced ‘Starter’ one.
A really wide range of point of sale hardware can be used with the platform too, all of which is easy to order via a dedicated POS hardware store.
You can learn more about Shopify POS here.
4. It gives you access to a huge range of apps and integrations
Of all the hosted store builders we’ve tested to date, we’ve found Shopify's library of apps and integrations to be the largest. These apps let you add more features to your store, or integrate it with well-known services (everything from QuickBooks to Mailchimp to TikTok is catered for).
In total, over 13,000 apps are available for the platform — many of which are free – letting you easily extend the functionality of your store in a huge number of ways.
5. It comes with generous email marketing features
Email marketing remains a vital way to generate sales of your products, boasting one of the highest ROIs of any marketing channel.
And helpfully, when you use Shopify, you get access to generous email marketing features, in the form of its 'Shopify Email' app. This lets you send 10,000 e-newsletters per month for free, and should you go over that limit, you'll find the fees applied very reasonable — you'll be charged just $1 for every additional 1,000 messages sent.
(You can also automate certain aspects of your email marketing using the app too.)
Although some competing platforms like Wix and Squarespace provide similar email marketing tools, the costs involved in using them are significantly higher than Shopify's.
6. It automates tax calculation really well
One of the key challenges of selling online is that you can end up making sales in places with different tax rates. This is something that you have to reflect in the pricing of your products.
Thankfully, Shopify applies the correct tax rates for a lot of countries automatically, and unlike competing ecommerce platforms is particularly good at meeting the EU’s complex requirements (its 'VAT MOSS' scheme) on applying VAT to digital products.
7. It’s easy to use
Shopify is in general an extremely easy-to-use, intuitive platform. No coding skills are required to use it, and its learning curve is gentle —?as long as you have basic computing skills, you should be able to create a store using the platform without difficulty.
And because Shopify is cloud-based, you won’t need to install any software to use the platform — if you have a web browser and access to WiFi, you’ll be able to build and manage your store from anywhere.
8. Its themes are attractive and 100% focussed on ecommerce
Shopify’s themes are professional in appearance, and unlike the templates provided by more ‘general’ website building tools like Wix, WordPress and Squarespace, place online selling firmly at the centre of proceedings.
Because of this singular focus on ecommerce, you can arguably expect more conversions from a Shopify theme than one from a competing platform.
You can view all the Shopify themes here.
OK, so those are some of the key reasons that you might want to use Shopify. But what could it do better?
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Disadvantages of using Shopify
1.?Its user limits are really ungenerous
One of the most annoying thing about Shopify is the limited number of user accounts (or 'seats') that you get with each plan. On its its 'Basic,' 'Shopify' and 'Advanced' plans, you get just 1, 5 and 15 seats respectively.
These limits are extremely ungenerous by comparison to key competing tools (many of which offer unlimited user accounts on affordable plans) and can force store owners working with a small team into paying for a more expensive plan than they might otherwise need.
The 'Basic' plan's one-seat limit is particularly significant here, as many people start their Shopify journey with this affordable $39-per month plan. But as soon as you need to add even one admin user or blog contributor to your setup, you'll have to upgrade to the $105-per month 'Shopify' plan, nearly tripling your costs in the process.
(You can view the latest Shopify pricing details here.)
2. By default, you can only use 3 product options
Shopify is a lot more restrictive than other platforms when it comes to product options (size, color, material etc.) — you are currently limited to using just 3.
So if your products come in lots of shapes and sizes, you'll encounter a headache — one that can only be solved by paying extra for a Shopify app that lets you create more options.
3. You can’t always avoid transaction fees
You can avoid transaction fees with Shopify if you use its built-in payment gateway, Shopify Payments?— but this isn’t available in all countries.
And although there are lots of third-party payment gateways available that you can use with the platform, doing so typically means a fee of between 0.6% and 2% being applied to each of your sales.
4. The app costs can mount up
Shopify’s wide range of apps is one of the key reasons you might want to use the platform over its rivals — but it’s also an argument against doing so.
On the plus side, it means that you have a fantastic range of options for adding functionality to your store and integrating it with other tools.
But it also leads to a lot of situations where getting the features you need involves installing a paid-for app.
With Shopify, getting your hands on even basic features like product reviews, GDPR cookie consent banners, additional product options and file upload fields will often require the purchase of an app. This will in turn increase your monthly costs.
5. Its range of free themes is quite small
Although the free templates that are on offer from Shopify are very good, and very ecommerce focussed, there aren’t that many of them — just 13, in fact.
This compares negatively with the huge ranges of free themes bundled with other platforms (for context, Wix currently offers 800+ and Squarespace 160+).
And, although you can extend your theme choices in Shopify by paying for a premium theme, these are expensive (they typically cost between $100 and $400).
6. The drag and drop editor could be better
Although Shopify is in general a user-friendly tool, letting you create and manage product catalogs with ease, its drag and drop editor for designing pages could be better.
Rather than letting you edit individual pages and posts, it lets you design templates which then house content that you enter into an old fashioned ‘what you see is what you get’ (WYSIWYG) editor.?
This is a bit confusing and other solutions, notably Squarespace and Wix, give you drag-and-drop tools that are considerably easier to use.?
7. You have to be careful with product images
An odd quirk of Shopify is that when uploading product images to the platform, you have to ensure that they all have the exact same aspect ratio. If you don’t, your site can look really messy, and you'll have to edit each image manually to sort this problem out.
Other tools let you simply pick an image ratio for your products and apply it automatically.
8. Multi-currency selling can get expensive
Although Shopify's multi-currency features are great, to get the most out of them you may find yourself needing to pay extra.
For example, if you want to estimate and collect duties and import taxes at checkout, you'll need to be on a $299+ 'Shopify Advanced' plan.
If you need to apply custom pricing to your products in individual countries (or groups of countries), this can end up costing a lot of money each month too. By default, Shopify lets you create three custom pricing 'markets' — but if you want to create more, you'll need to be on a $299 'Shopify Advanced' plan AND pay an additional $59 per market.
Shopify review conclusion
Ultimately, Shopify is one of the best online store builders on the market, and arguably the best for anyone who wants to use one solution to sell online AND in a physical location. In particular, it's great for dropshipping, running a print-on-demand business or selling products in multiple currencies.
There are some significant downsides to consider, however —?watch out for Shopify's very ungenerous user account limits; the transaction fees for using third party gateways; its limited product options; and the small range of free themes it provides.
And that’s that! We hope you’ve enjoyed our Shopify review, but there are lots more pros and cons of the platform to discover. So do make sure you read our 'deep dive' Shopify review, which you’ll find on the Style Factory website.
If you'd like to try the platform out yourself, you can do so here.
Alternatives to Shopify
There are lots of alternatives to Shopify available, with key competitors including Wix, WordPress and Squarespace. You can check out the below posts for more information about how they compare to Shopify:
Shopify video review
This article was written by Chris Singleton. Additional research by Matt Walsh.