Perfect for businesses of all sizes who want to sell products. Designed to help people build their own, scalable online shop with hundreds of built-in features and apps.
We’ve tested Shopify’s features to see how they match up against other website builders. We have all the information you need to decide for yourself whether Shopify is right for you and your new website.
Who is Shopify best suited for? Perfect for businesses of all sizes who want to sell products. Perfectly designed to help people build their own, scalable online shop with hundreds of built-in features and apps.
Pros
+ A full and scalable e-commerce solution for businesses of all sizes
+ Marketing, order management and eBay/Amazon integrations top a broad set of e-commerce feature
+ Themes are well built and designed to maximise web sales
Cons
- Website designing functionality is limited - the number of templates on offer is small in comparison to other online store builders like Squarespace or Wix
Shopify Review Summary
Choosing the right e-commerce platform for your online shop is a big decision and one that you need to get right. Shopify, like most website builders, allows you to create an online shop without coding experience. If you’re looking for a fast, easy, and affordable e-commerce option, Shopify could be for you.
Is Shopify right for your startup or small business? Read our impartial review to find out.
Is Shopify a good website builder?
Founded in 2004, Shopify was created when its founder wanted an easy, convenient solution to the e-commerce problems he was facing as an online snowboard seller. Then, he realised that his self-hosted e-commerce shop platform could benefit businesses all over the globe.
Shopify is one of the most popular e-commerce website builders in existence and is particularly attractive to small businesses and drop shippers – allowing its users to create online stores quickly and easily for both their digital and physical products, without the requirement that these users can code.
As a result of this, Shopify now hosts over 1.5 million online stores.
Who is Shopify best suited for?
Shopify stands out as one of the leading e-commerce website builders, but this doesn’t mean it’s the right solution for every business. While Shopify’s simplicity, convenience, and trusted branding are sure to appeal to many, there are going to be some companies out there that need something different.
Design, themes & templates
Build a website to be proud of with Shopify
Like most website builders, Shopify will present you with a range of templates/themes on which you can base your e-commerce website design.
In comparison to other web builders, Shopify has fewer themes to choose from – with no more than ten available for free – although over 60 additional templates can be purchased through the platform (or externally, for a slightly lower price). However, each template is responsive, well-designed and looks professional.
Once you have selected your theme, you can begin editing your website. Unlike its competitors, Shopify doesn’t have drag-and-drop editing capabilities, but you will still be able to customise your e-commerce store from a menu on the left of the Shopify interface, where you can edit the features of your theme or your web content.
From the outset, and after you’ve settled on a theme that you’re happy with, you’ll be prompted to add products to the back end of your website.
Listing products on Shopify
For each product, you’ll be given the option to add images, text, add variants of the product, and edit Google product search results, in addition to adding stock, barcodes, SKU references, shipping weight, pricing, tax, and more.
As a result of Shopify’s well-designed web templates, this data is fed through the platform to make the customer’s buying experience as seamless as possible, while ensuring the ultimate ease of management for the seller.
Shopify allows you to export product data from a CSV file easily, so you don’t need to worry about adding each product from scratch if all your data is compiled and ready to go.
Shipping on Shopify
When it comes to shipping, Spotify allows you to configure your shipping how you like, so you can set free shipping rates, flat rates, price-based rates, weight-based rates, and calculated shipping rates, in addition to being able to set shipping zones easily. More than this, Shopify’s stock control and shipping suite offer order management, label printing and multi-site stock holdings.
Shopify POS
One of Shopify’s biggest plus points is its Point-of-Sale functionality which allows businesses to expand beyond the online world, as the Shopify POS functionality aids in the creation of physical stores. Sellers are able to sell their merchandise in a pop-up shop, at events, from stalls or even from a retail outlet.
To aid you with your physical store, Shopify provides sellers with the option to purchase POS hardware including barcode readers, receipt printers and tills, which work in tandem with the Shopify POS app to ensure that your online and physical store are synched, and your stock is updated each time you make a sale from either shop.
While the POS Lite features will cater to sellers with fairly simple needs, to benefit from the full range of POS features, you’ll need to upgrade and purchase the Shopify POS Pro add-on.
The Shopify POS Pro features include the options for customers to buy online but collect in-store; product exchange; the option to create custom printed receipts; and the ability to credit staff with the sales that they made, among a number of other functionalities.
Shopify sales channels
The Shopify interface allows you to manage numerous sales channels to potentially maximise revenue. In addition to your online store, you can turn your Instagram posts into shoppable product listings, add a tab to your business's Facebook page – to allow your customers to browse and purchase your products via that page – and make use of the ‘buy button’, a feature from Shopify which can be embedded in any website/blog, to allow customers to make quick purchases of your products, even if they’re not currently browsing through your Shopify e-commerce store. You can also manage your Amazon listings from your Shopify interface.
While commerce sites such as eBay can’t be directly managed through the Shopify interface to start with, you can unlock eBay functionality by acquiring third-party apps. Indeed, a number of additional functionalities – that isn’t instantly available through the Shopify platform – can be obtained via the purchase of additional third-party apps, to allow sellers to unlock even greater functionality on their Shopify account.
Why Shopify e-commerce is the best
The first advantage that Shopify offers to users is that – unlike some of its competitors – sellers can manually edit their online shop, without code, using the Shopify editing menu, in addition to being able to insert code if you want to customise your e-commerce site further, making it a suitable choice for both website building beginners and seasoned coding pros.
Shopify is easy to use, truly anyone can build an e-commerce shop using the platform. More than simply having an ergonomic user interface, the site aims to make things as easy as possible for sellers – for example, US, Canadian and EU tax rates are applied automatically by the site to save sellers the hassle of calculating it themselves.
In addition to being easy to build your first e-commerce site through Shopify, it is also quick to do – you can easily create the e-commerce site of your dreams in a weekend, allowing you to ‘go live’ as soon as possible start selling and to begin reaping the rewards.
The templates available on Shopify are well-built and designed to maximise web sales. The Shopify themes are easy on the eye, professional, responsive, and easy to customise, allowing any seller to create a professional sale-rich e-commerce site.
Shopify caters to the multinational seller, as multi-currency selling is possible through the platform and you can create multiple versions of your site in different languages. More than this, Shopify’s stellar shipping service makes international shipping easy to carry out, and easy to manage through the Shopify interface.
Shopify is a self-hosted platform, which means that purchasing external web hosting is unnecessary. And, since it's such a large, well-established e-commerce platform, there is a better guarantee that you won’t have to shift your shop to another platform on short notice (if, for example, a hosting platform shuts down) – an event that has caused nightmares for sellers in the past, when using smaller, younger platforms.
Lastly, Shopify’s ease of connecting different sales channels, in addition to the platform’s Point-of-Sale functionality, and the provision of the necessary hardware to connect both online and physical stores, are its greatest assets, and where Shopify leaves its competitors behind in the dust. If you see your business extending through and beyond the online world, then using Shopify as your web builder is a no brainer.
Why Shopify e-commerce is not so good
In contrast with its competitors, Wix and Squarespace, Shopify does not enable its’ users to edit the layout of their e-commerce shop with drag and drop editing. Consequently, all layout features must be edited through the editing menu on the left side of the Shopify interface.
When you come to upload your product images, these images aren’t automatically changed to a uniform size – a.k.a. if you don’t edit the images before you upload them to your e-commerce site, all of the images for your products will be different sizes, which will ruin the aesthetic (and decrease the credibility) of your online store. As such, some pre-upload editing is necessary, which is a bit of a hassle.
While Shopify gives sellers the option to create up to 100 variants for one product, these can only be formed from three product options – for example size, style and colour – so products which can be personalised to a greater extent (such as the colouring or lettering of a T-shirt, or the colour of laces on a pair of shoes) aren’t a great fit for a Shopify-powered store.
Shopify pricing
Shopifys pricing plan with monthly fees
Basic
For a basic plan, Shopify offers a pretty comprehensive set of e-commerce shop features, which would usually be spread across the plans of other site builders. The basic plan enables e-commerce and allows the sale of an unlimited number of products, in addition to unlimited orders, and the ability to sell through marketplaces. In addition, sellers are able to take offline payments through their Shopify account.
If you’re just starting out in the world of e-commerce, we recommend beginning with the basic plan.
Shopify
The Shopify plan includes all the features from the basic plan, with added gift card functionality, retail hardware support, and reporting. Moreover, sellers can use Shopify in 5 different physical locations.
Advanced
The advanced plan includes everything from the basic and Shopify plan but increases the number of potential physical locations that a seller can run through Shopify to 8. Moreover, sellers gain access to 3rd party live shipping rates.
The verdict?
Shopify is an easy-to-use web builder which strikes a healthy balance between flexibility and usability, allowing both web building beginners and website coding pros to build the e-commerce site they desire, without having to worry about external hosting.
While there are some limitations to the Shopify web builder that you won’t find with some of the platform’s competitors – such as the limited number of free themes available for sellers to use, the absence of drag and drop editing functionality, and the lack of capability to sell items which have many customisable features – Shopify offers a range of incredible e-commerce focussed features that outshine those of its competitors.
Namely, Shopify allows sellers to easily integrate and maximise the effectiveness of different sales channels – particularly, the ‘buy’ button, which allows any website or blog to be embedded with the option to buy, allowing potential customers to buy your e-commerce store products with a quick click of the button.
More than this, Shopify’s Point-of-Sale functionality trumps any similar attempt by the platform’s competitors, providing access to hardware that can be connected to a seller’s Shopify account through the complementing app, allowing for the easy integration of a seller’s e-commerce store with any physical sales points.
So, if you have a business that you want to grow on both the online world and in the physical one, and you’re looking to sell through a number of different sales channels, then Shopify might be the web builder to make your ambitions come true.
On the other hand, if you’re a seller who sells highly – or even moderately – customisable items, or you’re someone who gets frustrated with older, less ergonomic web building editing styles, Shopify might not be for you.
Yes, you can use your own domain name (URL) with Shopify, simply connect it to Shopify from your store's admin. If you don't have a domain name yet, you can buy one through Shopify or another third-party provider.
Do you need a business license to dropship on Spotify UK?
In the majority of cases, drop shippers can trade in the UK without a business license but you have to be registered with HMRC.
In which countries can I use Shopify?
You can use Shopify in nearly every country in the world!
Can you add colour variants in Shopify?
Yes, variants can be added to a product that has more than one colour option, you can also add size variants as an option as well, ideal for those who want to set up a clothing store.
How to add quantity on Shopify?
Follow the below quick steps to add a products stock quantity on Shopify:
Go to the theme editor
In the theme preview, click on a product
Then, click on the Product pages tab
You will see a menu with the option Show quantity selector, so click on that checkbox
