Shopify Review: Features, Benefits, Drawbacks

Shopify is a user-friendly e-commerce platform that enables small firms to come to the store and shop for stuff from a single dashboard. Shopify merchants can create a modern online store and sell via social media, seller marketplaces, other blogs, and websites, email, text, and chat. With its built-in point-of-sale (POS) for retail stores, pop-up shops, market sales, and more, Shopify also makes in-person selling a breeze.

What is Shopify?

Shopify is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) sales platform that requires a subscription. Shopify offers four standard store subscription plans, with monthly fees beginning at USD 29. All standard plans include a branded online store as well as a comprehensive set of in-person and online selling tools.

Shopify also has a "Lite" plan that costs $9 per month. It lacks an online store, but it does support mobile POS sales and a Buy button for selling on other websites, blogs, and via email. All plans include a comprehensive set of business management tools. Every Shopify plan includes essentials such as product sourcing, sales, and inventory tracking, payment processing, shipping, customer accounts, marketing, and reporting. Furthermore, you can easily expand your Shopify toolkit with hundreds of Shopify apps. Learn more about Shopify in our review.

Companies must understand the capabilities of their Content Management Systems to grow an online business. Shopify offers its customers a variety of features that assist them in creating visually appealing eCommerce websites as well as tracking the performance of their business. Also, it contains a slew of data analysis tools to help users achieve business goals for expanding sales and website efficiency. Here are some features of Shopify:

Pros and Cons Of Shopify

Benefits of Shopify

Simple for non-Technical People

A business owner's primary goal is to increase sales without being bogged down by technology and other time-consuming administrative tasks. Significant advantages that other eCommerce platforms do not provide assistance with are managing the store's technological needs, a simple interface, or access to a variety of useful ones. Shopify is a robustly hosted platform that also handles process transactions.

Shopify App Store

One of Shopify's most vital points is its plugins. Shopify has over 1,200 different apps that can help you automate your tasks, allowing you to focus on other important things like marketing and sales growth. Accounting, customer service, inventory, reporting, shipping, and other tasks can all be aided by apps. These tools will make your life easier by providing you with the technology you need to scale your store.

Design

Shopify includes high-quality designs as well as responsive and mobile-friendly features. There are approximately 170 free themes available, and you can still create your own themes using the Liquid template engine.

The themes are compatible with smartphones and tablets, and you can choose from a variety of categories such as electronics, fashion, art, food, and so on. You can also purchase additional custom-built themes for your dropshipping business from the Shopify Marketplace.

If you have a web designer or developer, they can create your desired eCommerce store using the free, customizable themes. Startups can use free themes and drag-and-drop features for their Shopify store, then upgrade as needed.

Drawbacks of Shopify

Less Functionality

Shopify is an effective opportunity for those with limited technical knowledge. If you want more functionality for your store, consider Shopify's competitors, such as Magento or WordPress, because they're self-hosted platforms that are more difficult to work with, but also more flexible with theme customization and managing larger stores.

Inflexible Exit Strategy

Like other hosted eCommerce platforms like Volusion and BigCommerce, Shopify has a lock-in feature that makes it hard to move your store to a different platform. If you have to close your eCommerce store for any reason, Shopify will make it difficult for you to move on. You could only consider taking a CSV report containing your product details with you.

So, if you're thinking about the long term, you should weigh the many benefits of Shopify against how you plan to leave.

Limited SEO

Shopify's best feature is that you don't need to be a developer to use it. However, there is a downside: the platform makes it harder to make some custom technical SEO changes.

Shopify, for example, limits your ability to edit the robots.txt file, even though its default settings are ideal for most users. This can make it difficult for your team to implement changes to indexed and unindexed pages and will frequently necessitate the assistance of a developer.

Shopify's filtering/faceted navigation capabilities are also limited. By default, the platform's robots.txt file prevents the crawling of second-level filter URLs and canonicalizes them to the main category page. This can make it difficult for large sites to rank for long-tail keywords.

Tax Collection

One of the most significant disadvantages of using Shopify for eCommerce sites is that it does not collect state sales taxes. Unlike other major platforms, Shopify's payments only use the platform's default sales tax rates, and the platform does not file or pay these taxes on your behalf.

Depending on your state's tax laws, this can be a minor annoyance or a major impediment. We suggest looking at Shopify's sales tax resources and talking to a tax lawyer in your area to find out where your business falls on the sales tax spectrum.

Final Thoughts

Shopify's CMS platform is jam-packed with dynamic and useful features to assist users in creating and managing their online eCommerce websites. Its advanced security features, extensive third-party integrations, insightful analytics, and user-friendly interface make it one of the market's top choices. Customers who want to take their business online can easily choose Shopify because of the significant benefits that give it a competitive advantage. If you are thinking of hiring a developer for your Shopify business, then now is the right time to connect with Amplifyre’s experts for guidance. Contact us now and get started!