Shopify Ecommerce Review For This Year

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Every business to, who is eagerly on choosing an appropriate online website builder as his/her favorite platform for showcasing an inventory, should foremost be in search for the awareness of how reputation and the level of operation the choosing one is. And by completing this task, one has to deep - dive in research to know about the preferred website-builders: user reviews, key pro and cons, pricing, features, and ratings.

Apparently, here comes the review for Shopify. But before the in-depth analysis for this very huge website builder; I will like to first give a brain refreshing about Shopify 

Shopify Ecommerce Platform Review for This Year

This is an impartial review for Shopify. This review you're about to read is all about the unique standard Shopify has as an online store builder (Lets you decide whether it is the best among its folks or not, gives you a picture of how huge your result would be! by choosing them, and the potential that customers would patronize your good and services)

In this detailed Shopify review for this current year, I look at one of the most popular online-store building tools (Shopify) currently available and provide a complete overview of its key pros and cons. Is it right for your business, or should you use another e-commerce solution? Read on to find out.

My overall rating: 4.7/5

 What is Shopify 

Anyways, Shopify online store by definition, is a commerce platform that allows anyone to set up an online store and sell their products. Shopify has been around for more than ten years ago. Shopify, a cloud-based SaaS (software as a service) shopping cart solution. A monthly fee gives you access to an admin panel where you can enter store data, add products, and process orders

Whether you sell online, on social media, in store, or out of the trunk of your car, Shopify has you covered. In addition, every of their merchants can also sell their products in person with a system called Shopify POS.

Is Shopify free to use?

The answer is No, but you can get started with Shopify on their 14-day free trial. During the trial, you can build your store and make it available to the public.

However, in order to receive sales, and after your trial is done, you will have to choose one of the paid plans:

Basic Shopify ($29 / mo),
Shopify ($79 / mo)
Advanced Shopify ($299 / mo).

 

How does Shopify work

Shopify helps hundreds of thousands of Entrepreneurs around the globe to showcasing and sell their products to potential customers. As an Aspirant, once you choose your pricing plan, you can create and develop an online store to promote, sell, and ship your products to customers

Your action 

You must firstly design or modify your Shopify store, include products on it, and test your website to ensure that both desktop and mobile are ready for public view. 

Then, you promote the heck out of your products. If you’re selling online, a customer visits your online store. You can view in real-time in the Shopify admin whether that customer is adding a product to their cart or completing a purchase. If a customer buys from your store, Shopify will process the payment for you and you’ll get paid. After a payment has been made, you can process the order so that the customer receives the product. You can access Shopify reports to better understand who your audience is. Customers can opt-in to your email list when they become customers allowing you to remarket to them. 

Ultimately, Shopify allows you to not only build an online store but gives you insights about your customers so you can better serve your audience. With so many features, it’s basically your go-to tool to building a successful online st

How Good Are Shopify’s Themes?

The answer is simply, great! For they’re all professionally designed, mobile responsive, come crammed with features, and even give you different styles to choose from. And luckily, there are only 10 free themes, however, which is the main drawback. The rest cost between $140 and $180, so choose carefully. Shopify came third for design in our research, scoring 3.7 stars out of 5!


All Shopify themes are mobile responsive, meaning they’ll automatically reformat to fit mobile and tablet screens. People are 62% less likely to buy from you again if they have a bad mobile experience with your site, so this feature is vitally important.

Good to know: We strongly recommend installing the G AMP app – rated an impressive 5/5 by fellow Shopify users – to ensure that your pages don’t just look great on mobile, but they load quickly, too. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. AMPs use stripped-back html code to stay as ‘light’ as possible – think of them like a diet version of your regular pages. A faster experience will make your users happy, and boost your chances of ranking well with Google. Remember: a one second delay in page response is thought to mean a 7% reduction in conversions!


These are great features, and are important for creating a successful store that will satisfy your customers. But we know what you’re really thinking: do the themes actually look any good?

The short answer is, yes!

These Shopify’s themes are professionally designed and look clean, stylish and appealing. You can browse themes by industry, from art and photography to electronics, furniture, and beyond. You can also view by popularity, price, or collection, such as “minimalist,” “fun and lively,” or “great for small inventories.”

Themes come with different styles, so you can choose the one that best matches your brand. Below, you can see an example of how different styles can change the look of your theme – this variety means you’ll always find the right tone for your brand.

 

Customizing Shopify Themes

Shopify’s themes may look great already, but you’ll want to make yours totally your own. To do that, you’ll need to customize your theme by adding your own products, rewriting text, replacing images, and creating new pages.

Customization happens in two places: visual customization takes place through the editing interface, while edits to your products are managed in your dashboard.

Think of it like fixing up a car. The outside is where you paint, wash, smooth, buff, and polish to make it look beautiful. The engine is where you tinker, replace parts, and get hands on with tools to make sure the car is powerful and runs smoothly.

The editing interface of your Shopify store is where you look after your store’s design. Here, you align your images, edit text, and feature your logo. The dashboard is where you add products, create discount codes, manage shipping, and more. This is also where you can change your theme if you want to redesign your storefront.

I recommend you start off by adding products, and then style your storefront. Because Shopify is a store builder, its themes naturally revolve around products – so it can be difficult to design your page without any products to feature!

 

Take away. 

You might need some help building and customizing your website’s pages? I recommend downloading the DragDropr app to make the process a whole lot quicker and easier. DragDropr seamlessly integrates with Shopify to allow you to create, change, and edit 50+ landing pages and 200+ content blocks (such as product videos and contact forms) using a simple drag-and-drop editor, without having to do a single bit of manual coding. All of its content is mobile responsive, meaning it will look great across all devices. 

Branding

Are you one of the business owners who wanting to build an online preference and is yet to figure out what exactly name to be tagged after? Never be worried, for Shopify makes it easy for you to create a suitable name for your business.

Shopify has an awesome feature called Business Name Generator which helps in generating a preferred name. This name can also be used as a Domain Name; which depicts you on an Internet. 

Shopify Pricing – Is It Good Value for Money?

Quick Answer: It’s fairly good, but value for money is where Shopify scored the lowest in our research. Its price plans are very reasonable, with scalable choices, and essential features included even on the lowest core plan. However, Shopify lost marks due to its reliance on apps, and the transaction fees it imposes on third-party payment gateways.

If you have the budget to pay upfront, you can reduce your Shopify fees by purchasing an annual or biennial plan — 10% and 20% discounts are available if you pay for one year or two years of service respectively, instead of paying on a monthly basis.

How much does Shopify cost to build a website?

The Shopify plan definitely works well for growing eCommerce businesses that are looking to scale up their operations, as it includes gift cards, reports, and abandoned cart recovery. These features enable business owners to sell more through gift cards, while also offering them the opportunity to recover lost revenue through abandoned cart recovery. In addition, having access to reports, provide you with valuable insights into the purchasing habits of your customers to help you make better business decisions.

Shopify has a number of plans, so you can choose one that best suits your needs and budget.

First of all, Shopify provides a 14-day free trial – you don’t need to enter any payment details, so there’s no risk, and no pressure to sign up. You’ll just need an email, and you can test out Shopify totally cost-free for two weeks.

Shopify Pricing Summary

Shopify Lite: $9 per month – lets you add ecommerce to a Facebook page or existing website. 2% transaction fee, unless you use Shopify Payments.

Basic Shopify: $29 per month – cheapest plan to build your own store; provides all the essentials for a new online store. 2% transaction fee, unless you use Shopify Payments.

Shopify: $79 per month – for growing businesses; includes features such as gift card creation. 1% transaction fee, unless you use Shopify Payments.

Advanced Shopify: $299 per month – for big businesses wanting to scale up, includes advanced reports and third-party calculated shipping rates. 0.5% transaction fee, unless you use Shopify Payments.

Shopify Plus: custom pricing – for large-scale, enterprise level businesses with huge budgets. No set pricing – instead, you request a custom quote.

 Shopify pricing table

Here is also a free Shopify trial available which helps you get a sense of which of the above set of fees is right for you.


Finally, there’s a new add-on available, ‘Shopify POS pro,’ which unlocks more advanced point-of-sale functionality. It costs $89 per month. I’ll discuss this later in this post —but for now; let’s dig into the features of each of the Shopify plans.

Finding Products to Sell On Shopify Ecommerce Platform

Shopify simply has all what it takes to be what it is... Really?, Off course, Shopify cares for all its clients by integrating a third-party-entity, (Oberlo) that helps masses with no or less products to sell through Shopify. 

With Oberlo, through Shopify... you can get a bunch of products (even the ones you nave never been familiar with) to sell to your prospective customers without having to own an Inventory. 
Additionally, you could reach a millions of customers and boost your sales with some sales channels integrated with integrations shopify has as well. e.g Amazon, Ebay, Wallmart Marketplace, Facebook and Instagram. 

Who Can Use Shopify Ecommerce Platform?

Well, the answer is that anyone can use Shopify, whether you’re a first-time seller, or a multi-million dollar business like Harry’s Razors (yep, Harry’s Razors is just one of Shopify’s satisfied customers). All you need is an idea, something to sell, and an internet connection, and you could have an online store live in no time.
With over 1,200 apps, specialized features such as inventory tracking and shipping tools, and a range of price plans, Shopify is a powerful platform to choose. It can be used by any sized store, and is extremely scalable.

How Did I Test It? And What Were the Results?

Yes, there’s a lot of hype around Shopify, but we wanted to get to the truth behind the marketing.
We put our world-class methodology to good use, and went digging into Shopify’s designs, sales tools, marketing features, SEO capabilities, and more. As well as testing it ourselves, we even went one step further, asking non-tech experts to try it out and tell us what they thought.

Here at TheCuteAdviser, we analyzed all the results, compared Shopify with other platforms we’ve tested, looked at its strengths and its flaws, and calculated scores for each key area – all so we can give you the most accurate and helpful information about this online store builder.
Straight away, we can tell you that Shopify did extremely well in our testing, scoring 4.7 out of 5 stars overall.

How to Save Money With Shopify

All Shopify’s prices are for a month-by-month subscription. So, if you signed up to the Basic Shopify plan, you’d be paying $29 per month for as long as you stay on that plan. 
However, you could save almost $190 per year on the Shopify Plan if you sign up for two years, or you could save $94 annually if you sign up for one year. Those savings could go towards household bills, your holiday fund – anything!
 

Is Shopify even worth the money? Definitely! It came top in our Customer Score research out of all the ecommerce platforms we tested. So, why not give them at try and start putting some money away? 

 

Shopify Pricing Plans	Monthly ($/month)	1-Year ($/month)	Savings (%)	2-Years ($/month)	Savings (%)
Shopify Basic	$29.00	$26.10	10%	$23.20	20%
Shopify	$79.00	$71.10	10%	$63.20	20%
Advanced Shopify	$299.00	$269.10	10%	$239.20	20%

You’ll need to pay the annual or two-year cost upfront as a lump sum, but in the long-term, you’d be spending less than if you stayed on the monthly plan.

 

Shopify Payments and Transaction Fees.

You’ll have noticed that we mention you get charged transaction fees unless you choose to use Shopify Payments. 

What is Shopify Payments? 

Shopify Payments is Shopify’s in-house payment gateway. Think of it like PayPal, Stripe, or Square – it processes your store’s payments, and accepts most major payment methods. The idea is that using Shopify Payments is less hassle than connecting a third-party payment provider (such as PayPal), and streamlines your store by keeping everything in-house.


The main incentive to use Shopify Payments is that it’s the only way to remove Shopify’s transaction fees. It’s also the only way to support multiple currencies on your store, so if you’re selling internationally, it’s your best choice.
Further Information

Which Plan is best? – My Recommendation

If you already have a website and you just want to sell a few products on the side, then Shopify Lite is the best place to start. However, if you want an actual online store, start off with the Basic Shopify plan for $29 per month. For everything you get included in the plan, it’s a reasonable monthly price!

Remember, Shopify gives you 14 days to try out its platform for free, so make sure to make use of that before signing up.

Shopify’s Sales Tools and Features

Apps

Shipping

Dropshipping

Abandoned cart recovery

Product management

Payment options

Tax

POS

Multi-channel integration

Digital selling 

What Is The Pros & Cons of Shopify? 

As you may expect, while Shopify is an excellent option for many merchants, it isn’t for everyone. Here’s a brief list of the reasons merchants choose Shopify, followed by a list of common customer complaints:

Pros

Easy To Use: This is by far the biggest reason merchants love Shopify. Shopify is built for the average user, not skilled developers. It’s simple to add products, create discounts, and process orders. Web design is user-friendly — and even easy — with Shopify’s drag-and-drop editing tool.

Low Startup Cost: Shopify’s relatively low monthly fees make setup affordable. How much does Shopify cost, you ask? The basic plan costs $29/month, and the mid-level plan is priced at $79/month.

Beautiful Themes: Subscribing merchants can choose from a variety of free, mobile-responsive themes. Premium (paid) themes are also available for merchants who want more options.

Good For Dropshipping: Shopify is the platform of choice for many dropshippers. Integrations with Spocket and Oberlo make dropshipping from your Shopify admin a lot simpler.

Lots Of Support Options: You can access technical support every hour of the day through phone, live chat, or email. Self-help options are available as well. Customers like that Shopify’s support is available outside of regular business hours.

Cons

Limited Functionality: Shopify comes preloaded with almost all of the features smaller merchants need to build an online store. However, every business has some specialized requirements, and Shopify typically does not have the features to meet those specific needs. This is where add-ons come in. Many merchants end up needing to purchase a handful of add-ons to make this shopping cart work the way they need it to.

Costly Add-Ons: As I’ve said, while Shopify offers almost every basic feature, the software is lacking many advanced features. You’ll have to find these features in the form of add-ons, which are not free, the cost of adding just three add-ons can double your monthly fees.

Transaction Fees: Although most shopping carts have dropped their transaction fees entirely, Shopify has retained its 0.5% to 2.0% fees (depending on your pricing plan). You do have the option to have Shopify waive these fees when you accept payments through Shopify Payments. However, Shopify Payments has its fair share of complaints, and it may not be the best payment processor for everyone.

 

Having official 24 hours support is something I value a lot!

Strained Customer Support: While Shopify was known for responsive customer support in the past, more recent customer reviews voice mixed reports on the support team. Some users are impressed by the support they received, while others complain that Shopify support representatives were not able to help them resolve their issue.

 What I like about Shopify Ecommerce Platform

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

Adding products as well as managing payment and shipping options and processing orders is absolutely painless.
Their layouts (templates) can be modified to a large degree without any programming knowledge.

Shopify can help you with your content marketing too as it comes with a blog and more. {Although with some limitations}

It’s possible to change your store’s look and add extra-functionality by installing new templates and apps in seconds.
And if you are a programmer (or hire one), you can have complete control over your online store customization.

No matter how fast your business grows, Shopify can accommodate small, big and colossal ecommerce projects.
If you are into dropshipping, Shopify integrates with several apps/providers, you can read the insightful guide on this from Websitetooltester (read guide).

A nice perk is that you can sell offline with their PoS solution. To sum up, I like (you will probably too) Shopify because it’s straightforward but at the same time you can develop custom solutions if needed. Additionally, I don’t have to worry that my stores will get too big for Shopify; their system will grow with them.

Shopify’s Flaws

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

I think Shopify Prices are fair, but you’ll definitely need a budget as it starts at $26 per month.
I am not a big fan of their extra transaction fees if you don’t use Shopify Payments – they can add up quickly.
Setting up multilingual stores isn’t easy (or cheap). A good solution for you could be this (paid) app.
Some of the coolest features are only included in the higher plans (e.g. abandoned cart).
As you can read above, it has a couple of SEO issues.


My 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 Lite for only $9/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.

Try Shopify 14 days for free (no credit card needed)

Shopify Uptime & Server Response Time

                  Shopify Page Speed

This image shows you the website availability of our Shopify demo website during the last year. Ideally the uptime is 100% with zero outages. In ecommerce you would generally want to have an uptime of 99.95% or higher as every minute your website is down will cost you money. Shopify is as good as it gets with an unparalleled 99.99%!

Response time: nobody likes a slow website. Your online store generally should have an average server response time of less than 800ms or it can feel slow, however, the overall experience also depends on the page speed.

 

 Is Shopify Ecommerce Platform The Right Choice For You?

 

RECOMMENDED IF:

 

.you require customer logins

 

.you want to sell physical and digital goods

 

.you need an easy way to integrate third party ecommerce features and apps

 

.you would like to have full control of the templates

 

.you need a wide range of payment options.

 

 

NOT RECOMMENDED IF:

.you want to open a Multilingual online store

 

.your store is only a small side-business of your main website. 

 

 

Shopify Ecommerce Platform Alternatives

 

1. BigCommerce
Shopify’s main rival, BigCommerce is designed to help large and fast-growing stores fulfill their potential. BigCommerce has the most in-house features of any ecommerce builder, meaning you won’t have to rely on apps like you do with Shopify. It has great SEO and fantastic multi-channel selling, but it’s not as easy to use as Shopify. 

2. Volusion

It didn’t perform as impressively in our research, but Volusion does come with great analytics tools and payment gateways, and with very similar pricing to Shopify. It doesn’t have any blogging tools, however, so bear this in mind when choosing. 

3. WooCommerce

A more technical choice, WooCommerce is a self-hosted platform where you create a store using WordPress. This makes it a powerful and flexible option, with better tools for complex stores. It’s also more challenging and less beginner-friendly

 

4. Wix eCommerce

A website builder first and foremost, Wix has ecommerce plans starting from $20 per month (paid annually), making it a more budget friendly option. It’s got some great sales tools, and is ideal for small stores that put branding first.

5. Squarespace 

Another website builder that offers ecommerce functionality, Squarespace is built for creative. Its designs are the best on the market, and will really make your products shine.