Pros & Cons of the Shopify Platform

Shopify is one of the greatest platforms ever created for e-commerce. But like anything else, and has its disadvantages and advantages. For most people, the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages, but to be fair, both sides should be presented so that you can choose whether or not Shopify is right for your e-commerce venture. Let’s start with some of the advantages of Shopify.

Advantages of Shopify

·         Shopify is competitively priced. The prices that they charge for the various packages are comparable with other shopping platforms.

·         Shopify is extremely easy to use. The backend is modeled after WordPress and so it has much the same look and feel. You can easily figure out how to add products, how to enable or disable features of your store, how to set up payment options and many other useful features. This is probably one of the main strengths of Shopify.

·         You can customize the look of your Shopify site using the free themes that come with your membership. This is useful because not every e-commerce platform offers that to you.

·         Shopify takes care of a lot of details if you choose to take advantage of their platforms. For example, Shopify has payment gateways already integrated into the backend that you can set up on your store. Shopify also has shipping options available, to make it easy for you to print a label and ship.

·         Shopify has a lot of help information in an app store to allow you to add even more features to your site. Some e-commerce platforms have a very noticeable lack of documentation but Shopify is not one of those. They have a manual that is extremely comprehensive plus additional documentation and live support.

Disadvantages of Shopify

The only real disadvantage that Shopify has is an e-commerce platform is the pricing, which was included as an advantage. The reason that it is also included here is simply because there are e-commerce platforms out there that charge nothing and with Shopify you do end up paying credit card processing fees, app fees, and of course the monthly fee which can range between $29 and $179 a month. However, for the functionality that you get, the price is still extremely fair. With the $29 a month store and even with paying credit card processing fees you’ll still have the potential to make a profit with your Shopify store.