The EASIEST Ecom platform all around the globe

No more struggling to create an eCom website. I started creating websites and promoting my products a little bit late than others, but I was speechless once I started with Shopify the ease of use they give you to kickstart your project is astonishing. With Shopify you are limitless and you are always motivated to go further and further building your business and getting it to the next level. Thank you for having great software that makes everything easy.

Pros

Free themes: A friendly dashboard to complete your website in a blink of an eye Real cheap: With only $29 you can design, track your product, manage your clients, and so on... High secured platform: It gives you the power of creating your website and never ever worry about getting hacked or struggle with the server downtime. Unlimited plugins and APPS: Yes it's like having an iPhone and you want to download an app for it, the Shopify app store is limitless any kind of app and plugins is available, and easy to install. Customer service is available 24h/7 by email/Online Chat/ FAQ Community: Huge community and video explanatory contents. YOU NEVER STRUGGLE.

Cons

Sometimes downloading a lot of APPs might make your website slow on loading, just need to be careful about what app you're integrating and just work with the MOST HAVE APPS.

Experiences from using Shopify over 5 years

I would give shopify top marks if it wasn't for the duplicate customer issue. Had I know about it I would never have chosen it in the first place.

Pros

It is very flexible and does most things for a simple shop using the free themes and apps, however you will need IT skills to customise it further - or pay for specialised apps. It is fairly easy to manage customers and orders using online or the POS application.

Cons

The major omission is the inability to merge customer accounts - which often happens when customers change email or mistype when placing orders. What is worse is that this has been requested by many many merchants for over seven years via multiple support and feature requests and in a dozen or so threads on the community forum and shopify have simply ignored it. As I run a primarily magazine subscription business having a clean customer database is essential.

Thought I was signing up for an Integrated POS System and Website

Feels like Shopify sucks you in and is not transparent. When you realize what the system doesn’t do...they apologize and are very kind but not very helpful. There are a bunch of awkward apps you can buy to fix the problems but they don’t work very well. Wish someone would just make an easy functioning system that met business that sell inventory on line and in person.

Pros

It is easy to get a website up and running. Adding products is easy.

Cons

WHERE DO I BEGIN: -inventory records only go back three months...I was horrified to find out I lost 4 months of inventory records. -to print a receipt...you need to buy and download an app...it is awkward to use and takes a couple minutes for the receipt to upload before you can print it. -to have employees log in you need to download and app and pay monthly -you can not do a credit on someone’s account if they return something...You need to either return their money or give them a gift card it is awkward and difficult to use. -if you mark an order pending payment you cannot take payment on the POS system. -you cannot add any vender information that is not visible to your customers. -the duplicate feature when adding products doesn’t work properly....to hard to explain what should be duplicated and what shouldn’t but trust me it wasn’t created by someone that understands business

Don't Shop Around, Shop-ify!

Overall, Shopify has been good to me. They made me a Partner because of the – you know I can't actually recall what the criteria was to become one – maybe you just apply to become one. But if you are a Partner, you can develop stores at no cost, and then get paid a referral fee and a residual for transferring it to a paying client. A very nice gesture towards us store-builders – I wish all creative software or SaaS platforms were as fiscally friendly. They also make it easy for devs looking to expand into Shopify App creation – so they can be on the receiving end of that sweet, month-to-month autocharged booty.

Pros

Shopify is where it's at if you want to get involved in the whole Direct 2 Consumer craze! You could literally have a store, up and running and transactional in 10 minutes assuming you're computer / web literate, have a bank account, and a product to sell...For getting up and running with hundreds of attractive themes to choose from (not all on Shopify.com, there are online stores that sell themes...) you really can't beat the ease of Shopify – with just the right amount of freedom, and automation to make sure you can get your products and logo looking their best, and not accidentally break the whole thing. And if you know a little HTML/CSS, the sky is really the limit in terms of customizing the theme. Plus there's a Shopify "App Store" that offers every possible function you could imagine if you wanted something not natively offered such as pop-ups, rewards clubs, or wholesale pricing.

Cons

In the beginning, I found it a bit cumbersome to deal with large catalogs with lots of variants (color / size) per sku. But Shopify and their lightning-fast chat support are nothing if not good listeners and they've made editing part of, or your whole catalog, much easier than ever before, with tons of filters for tailoring your product selection on the back end, to making almost any variable from Title, to Inventory, to Weight, easily bulk editable. So the thing I'll say that still stinks, is that all the apps charge subscription fees, which is super annoying, especially if you rely on a bunch of them. I would much rather pay a one and done license fee as opposed to $3 a month for my mailing list manager app, $16 a month for my Wholesale price tiering app, and $5 for my abandoned cart retrieval system. It adds up to a big, never-ending headache.

Shopify is great for Startups

Overall experience is good. Its very useful for startups as withing few weeks you have a store ready and you can goto market faster than other solutions.

Pros

Shopify is a SaaS ( Software as a Service ) and is very easy to use. Customizing is easy with liquid templating engine. Plugins economy is robust and helps you in providing new features in minutes. Also they manage the infrastructure so user need not worry about hosting. Even a complex system like multivendor marketplace can be installed and setup in a day max.

Cons

As its SaaS service, you dont control the software, so you cant go to some other service provider. You are captive. Shopify dont give you control of checkout pages in lower plans. So you have to use what is available.