Shopify Review 2024 What’s all the hype about?

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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 including the USA, Puerto Rico, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden and the Netherlands (among others). Please note that 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

Don’t be mistaken, although Shopify is really easy to use, it’s an extremely powerful tool too. For example, you can set up and launch your online store in one weekend (no joke). But you could also spend days or even weeks developing a custom solution to fulfill your needs.

Personally, I think Shopify lets you do more with fewer clicks than competitors like Volusion or BigCommerce. And Content Management Systems such as WordPress or Magento don’t even come close in terms of ease of use.

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.

Templates & Design

Shopify is not short on templates and they generally look modern and professional. They are also responsive, which means that they’ll look great on any device – Google really likes this last point.

Shopify currently offers 12 free templates and over 130 paid templates.

If you’re not sure which to choose, install and test multiple themes before selecting one to publish. With paid themes, you can first install a free trial which gets added to your theme library. From there, you can edit it and preview how it will look before you purchase.

You can filter the themes by industry, popularity, and price to narrow down your choices.

Interestingly, around half of all Shopify stores use the free Debut theme. A few of these popular Shopify stores also use free themes.

However, if you have a budget, you can buy one of their paid themes that cost between $150-350. Another option is to purchase a theme from an external marketplace like Themeforest, where prices are generally lower (around $50).

Or if you need a specific design you could get one exclusively developed for you from one of the many Shopify experts.

In terms of template customization, Shopify gets it right. I find it super easy to personalize store templates. Changing global styles is a walk in the park (e.g. colors, fonts, or social media buttons) with the theme editor menu.

Editing the product page template with the Shopify editor

A criticism of Shopify in the past was that it wasn’t possible to easily make layout changes to pages other than the homepage – you needed to edit the code, which usually involved the help of a developer. With Shopify’s Online Store 2.0, you can now use the visual editor to add and edit sections on any page – including product, collection and blog pages.

Shopify ecommerce features

But let’s cut to the chase and review Shopify’s ecommerce features.

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.

Filling in the product information is intuitive (e.g. title, description, images or videos, price or SEO options). Finally, collections (category) can be assigned to keep your online store tidy.

The SKU (stock-keeping unit) and the inventory tracking features let you manage your stock more efficiently and prevent you from selling out-of-stock items.

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 (e.g. videos, images or documents) with Shopify, you’ll need to install a (free) app developed by Shopify themselves. To be honest, I am a bit surprised that this isn’t available out-of-the-box, but it works.

Unfortunately, selling subscriptions or taking recurring payments can get expensive. You’ll either need an app or a developer to code this for you. As far as I know, other competitors (e.g. Volusion, BigCommerce and Wix) don’t integrate this either.

Some projects require custom fields so users can leave feedback when purchasing products (e.g. engravings for watches or rings). With Shopify this isn’t integrated natively, you’ll need to tweak your code (really not that easy) or get an app to do the job. This only takes a couple of clicks with BigCommerce.

AI-generated product descriptions

Shopify recently introduced Shopify Magic, an AI tool that writes product descriptions. With this move, Shopify joins other web builders like Wix and GoDaddy in integrating AI technologies. Shopify Magic supports multiple languages, including English, German, Spanish, French, and more.

To use Shopify Magic, just provide a few product details and keywords, and the tool will automatically create a description (powered by GPT-4, Open AI’s latest version). This is a great way to ensure your tone is consistent across different products.

Right now, Shopify Magic is only for product descriptions, but more AI features are likely to roll out soon. In the meantime, you can use ChatGPT (or similar) to help with other ecommerce tasks.

Shopify generates product descriptions with a few key words, using your preferred tone of voice.

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.

But – there’s always a but- be aware that creating sub-categories with Shopify (e.g. puppies food or senior dog food) isn’t possible unless you use a complicated workaround or an app.

Pro tip: Try setting up automatic rules to create collections. For example, create a ‘Promotions’ collection with all products that currently have a discount – you see how powerful this can be, right?

Payment processors and transaction fees

As far as I know, Shopify has more online payment processors than any other alternative – over 100 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.

Sidenote: Shopify Payments is currently available in:

• North America (United States and Canada)
• Europe (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden)
• United Kingdom
• Asia (Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore)
• Australia and New Zealand

However, there are rumors they have plans to launch this in other countries soon.

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

In my experience, ecommerce logistics (shipping) can get tricky and having an efficient system can save a bunch of time and money.

Shopify is excellent here, no doubt. But let’s quickly review their shipping system.

Shipping rules can be set up easily (e.g. flat rate, free shipping, country or region based rates) from their backend for individual products, collections or for your entire store – nothing too exciting here.

But the shipping fun begins with the live shipping rates. This system connects your store with carriers (like USPS, FedEx, UPS, etc) and provides accurate shipping costs during checkout.

While it’s technically only available on the high-level plans (Advanced Shopify and Shopify Plus), you can also add it to your lower-level Shopify plan for around $20/month – you just need to request it from the support team. Alternatively, you’re also eligible for it if you switch your Shopify plan from a monthly to a yearly subscription. Again, you’ll need to contact Support to activate this as it won’t get added automatically.

Third-party apps are also available to use. Note that you’ll also need to have your own account with each carrier in order to be able to offer carrier-calculated rates.

Sidenote: Live shipping rates are only available for some countries (e.g. US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, etc).

If you’re in the US, Canada or Australia, you can also take advantage of Shopify Shipping. This will let you use Shopify’s partnerships with leading shipping carriers (USPS, UPS, DHL Express, Canada Post and Sendle) to display calculated shipping rates and get reduced rates for labels – without the need to have your own carrier accounts. When fulfilling orders, you’ll be able to buy discounted shipping labels from Shopify’s backend. You only need to print it and stick it on the parcel – a big-time (and money) saver. Please note that for this to work, you need to specify the weight of your products and packaging.

Eligible store owners in the US and Canada can join the Shopify Fulfillment Network, where products can be stored, picked, packed and shipped from fulfillment centers around the US. Benefits include fast (and even same-day) delivery, free / branded packaging, and discounted shipping rates.

Shopify is the leading solution for dropshipping – an ecommerce model where the order processing and fulfillment are done by someone else (a dropshipping provider).

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.

Note: as of June 15 2022, Shopify’s own dropshipping app, Oberlo, is being discontinued, and they recommend transitioning to DSers instead.

Shopify & Taxes

I am not good at maths, so I appreciate online store solutions that make my life easier – especially when it comes to a topic that nobody likes: taxes.

Shopify doesn’t do anything too impressive with taxes, but I like that it doesn’t require rocket science to set it up and it actually works.

• You can display prices including taxes or excluding them, whatever works for you.
• Shopify includes an automated tax calculator by ZIP code – only for US based stores.
• If your store is on Shopify Plus, you can access the Avalara AvaTax software, which provides real-time tax rates for over 12,000 US jurisdictions, and also automates the tax filing process.
• Automated registration-based taxes are available for store owners based in the US, Canada, EU, UK, Norway, Switzerland, Australia, or New Zealand.
• For everyone else, manual tax settings can be added for countries or regions.

Sidenote: If you are targeting customers in Europe, you can also adapt the taxes settings to comply with the European legislation, even for digital products. This means letting your business customers shop VAT-free, using the reverse charge-mechanism, however, this will require an external app.

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

See the potential, right? And that’s not even the full list – there are other Shopify sales channels (e.g. Walmart Marketplace, Wanelo, etc.) you can explore. Check this list for more details.

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.

Shopify Online Marketing features

As any other store builder, Shopify provides you with a bunch of tools to help you implement your Shopify marketing strategy.

Discount codes can be added to your Shopify store easily. They are very flexible as you can set codes for fixed amounts, percentages, free shipping or even “buy one get one free” promotions.

You can also promote gift cards for your online store (a feature that was recently made available on all plans, excluding Shopify Lite).

Shopify doesn’t come with a loyalty program (e.g. collecting points with each purchase). If you’d like to implement this, getting an app (like Smile.io or S Loyalty) is your easiest and cheapest option.

Shopify also has its own email marketing tool that will allow you to send emails from its platform. However, at this time, it’s somewhat simple and other alternatives could be a better fit for you.

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.

Shopify Email recently added a whole suite of automation templates to help you stay connected with customers. Beyond abandoned cart emails, you can set up a welcome series, a post-purchase upsell, thank you emails and more.

Sidenote: Shopify now includes this feature in all three main plans, including Basic Shopify.

Sell face-to-face with Shopify – PoS

Yes, I know, the whole point of getting Shopify is to sell your goods and services online. But 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.

The great thing about it is that it’ll be completely integrated with your Shopify backend, so your reporting, inventory management, prices, etc are automatically synced.

You can also integrate the POS with extensions such as full-screen apps and product recommendations, to increase cross-selling opportunities and enhance the customer purchasing experience.

You can start small, by selling items using the Shopify PoS app (e.g. using your smartphone or tablet) and accepting payments. You won’t need anything else, and the Shopify POS Lite subscription is free on all Shopify plans. Pretty useful to test physical store ideas.

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.

Sidenote: If you are based outside the US, Canada or the UK, you can’t purchase (PoS) hardware from Shopify. However, you can get a third-party device.

In light of the pandemic, Shopify also introduced the local pickup / curbside pickup feature, which allows customers to purchase products online and collect them at a nearby location. If you have the Shopify POS Pro plan (free on Shopify Plus plans, or on lower plans for an additional $89 USD/month per location), you can even prepare and manage pickup orders directly from within the POS app.

Shopify SEO – Any good?

I get dozens of SEO questions a month. And a lot of them are users wanting to know if they’ll ‘conquer’ the first organic positions with this website builder or that other one.

Let me say that most of the time, SEO ranking issues are related to poor optimization jobs (e.g. bad content) and not Shopify (or other tools’) issues. However, Shopify has a few SEO drawbacks you should be aware of:

However, despite the above-mentioned pitfalls, I would say that Shopify’s SEO is good and intuitive. For example, customizing most of your SEO parameters (e.g. title tags, descriptions, image alt text, etc) is easy.

I really like the redirect system they have in place. When you change a URL, Shopify will automatically create an optional redirect from the old URL to the new one – so you don’t generate 404 errors.

For more information about Shopify’s SEO, please check this detailed Shopify SEO review.

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:

Sidenote: Some of these missing features can be added by installing an app from the Shopify App Store.

Despite all this, I have to acknowledge that Shopify’s approach to blogging is a way better solution than what BigCommerce or Volusion offer and should be good enough for most ecommerce sites.

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.

Reporting and Analytics

Shopify reports are OK, good or amazing, depending on what plan you have. I am not a big fan of this and I believe everyone should be given access to all the data – as Shopify competitor BigCommerce does.

The Basic Shopify plan reports are limited to:

• An overview of a few key metrics (e.g. sales, user sessions, orders, etc)
• Real-time reports
• Finance reports (e.g. sales, taxes, payments, etc.)
• Acquisition reports – general information about how you got your visitors
• Inventory reports (e.g. month end snapshot, % of inventory sold)
• Some behavior reports (e.g. conversion rates, check out rates, etc.)
• Analytics by marketing campaign linked to a UTM campaign (e.g. a newsletter)

The ‘Shopify’ plan comes with a couple of nice perks:

• Sales report – connects customer metrics with sales metrics
• Retail sales report – for POS sales
• Profit reports – including profit by product, variant, and POS location, as well as the effect of discounts and refunds
• Customer report – to find out things like returning customers or customers by country

Finally, if you have the Advanced Shopify plan or Shopify Plus, you’ll be able to create custom reports. Using their filters you can dig as deep as you need into your data.

Connecting Google Analytics (with conversion tracking) is also possible. So, you may not even need Shopify’s reports at all – although not all the Shopify Reports data can be found in Google Analytics.

Additionally, there are dozens of reporting apps you can get from the Shopify App Store – personally, I’ve never used any of these apps, so I can’t comment on their quality or features.

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.

Some of the apps are even developed by Shopify themselves. For example, the digital downloads extension or the Facebook, Google and Amazon integrations.

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.

Shopify Support & Experts

You can contact Shopify 24-hour support team via email, phone or live chat. One of their Support Gurus will take care of your question – yup, that’s their real job title.

In general, my experience with Shopify support has been good. They are (relatively) fast and helpful. But this depends a lot on the type of question (e.g. how technical it is) and your luck with the support agent.

We also tested their support on a broader scale, comparing it with 9 other website builders and ecommerce platforms. Shopify came out 2nd, thanks to both the quality of their answers and their useful knowledge base. In this test, Shopify’s rival BigCommerce only made it to the 5th place.

In my opinion, support is one of the biggest advantages of using Shopify (or similar solutions) over a traditional CMS (like WooCommerce). Being able to ask an expert when you’re stuck can save loads of hassle.

Personally, I don’t want to contact support for each tiny question I have, as that’d be very unproductive. Luckily, Shopify has many detailed tutorials and guides, so check them out first if you have a question – they may solve your doubt instantly.

And if you need professional help with your store, Shopify has a directory of (certified) Experts you can contact – but make sure you read the experts’ reviews before hiring one. Another option is Storetasker. There you can easily submit your custom project (e.g. a complete store setup or just some design tweaks) and have their vetted Shopify Experts submit a quote for your job.

Security and backups

Being hacked is not fun, it can put your business under serious pressure. So I don’t have to tell you how important it is to keep your store safe.

Unlike WordPress and similar CMSs, Shopify takes care of updates and security matters in the background – and I love this. I’ve wasted many hours trying to fix WordPress issues after plugin updates that went wrong.

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.

In short, to keep your store protected, you only need to do regular backups and have a strong admin password.

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.

OK, this was a long article, but I hope it helped you clarify what to expect from Shopify. But if you are still not sure if Shopify is right for you, leave me a comment and I’ll try to help you decide.

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BigCommerce and Shopify are relatively equal. But for some, even their small differences can be crucial: BigCommerce is in the lead when it comes to SEO. This added flexibility can be valuable in competitive markets. Also, unlike Shopify, BigCommerce doesn’t charge any transaction fees. However, they will put you into a higher pricing plan as you hit certain thresholds in your sales. Check out our Shopify vs BigCommerce comparison or full BigCommerce review for more details.

WooCommerce should be your preferred choice if you’re not afraid of terms like FTP, MySQL and plugin updates as you’ll have to install it on your own WordPress site. The main reason to choose it over Shopify, from our point of view, is if you need a multilingual website and you need a lot of flexibility. In this article, we’ve compared both Shopify and WooCommerce.

Wix Ecommerce plays in a different league as it’s made for smaller stores. So if you primarily want to have a great looking website with a blog and an added shopping cart, Wix is for you. As it’s geared towards beginners, adding content and managing your store is a lot easier than with Shopify. It’s not to be underestimated as it comes with customer accounts, lots of payment methods and the ability to sell digital products. Read our comparison of Shopify vs Wix here.

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