Shopify Review (2022) — The Key Pros and Cons

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In this Shopify review, I look at one of the most popular online store builders available and provide a complete overview of its key pros and cons. Is it right for your business?

There is a huge number of online store building tools now available, and choosing the right one for your business can feel really difficult. Shopify is probably the best-known ecommerce solution currently on the market — but is it actually the best fit for you?

In this review, I’m going to help you find out. I’ll cover the platform’s pricing, templates and selling features in depth — and by the end of this post, you’ll have a clear idea of whether Shopify is the right ecommerce solution for your project, or whether you’d be better off with an alternative.

Let’s dive in with an important question. What is Shopify?

What is Shopify?

Shopify is a web application that lets you create your own online store. It provides you with a wide range of ‘themes’ that can be customized to meet your own branding requirements, and allows you to sell either physical or digital products.

The platform aims to let beginners build an online store themselves — you don’t need to know how to code to use Shopify.

However, the platform also caters for developers, because it provides full access to CSS, HTML and Liquid (Shopify’s templating language).

How does Shopify work?

Shopify is a ‘hosted’ solution. This means that it runs on its own servers and you don’t have to buy web hosting or install software anywhere to use it.

You don’t own a copy of the product, but instead pay a monthly fee to use it — and, so long as you have access to a web browser and the Internet, you can manage your store from anywhere.

With Shopify, the key things you need to build and market an online store — like templates, a payment processor, a blog and even email marketing tools — are provided ‘out of the box.’

That said, you can customize your store more extensively through the addition of apps — more on these later — or using custom code.

The number of Shopify users — and why this matters

Shopify was founded in Canada in 2006 by German-born entrepreneur Tobias Lütke, who realized that an ecommerce solution he created to sell snowboards could actually be used by — and sold to — other businesses.

Fast forward to today, and the platform has generated over $543bn in sales, and is now used by millions of merchants in 175 countries — according to Internet stats company Builtwith.com, Shopify currently powers around 3.7 million online stores. Over 10,000 staff now work for the company.

These statistics matter because when you choose a hosted solution for your online store, you are placing a huge amount of trust in the company providing it.

There have been instances in the past of similar services closing down — for example, Magento Go — resulting in serious problems for their users, who had to migrate their stores over to a different platform at very short notice.

However, Shopify’s large user base and market share makes the prospect of this happening very unlikely.

Now: how much does Shopify cost to use?

Shopify pricing

There are five Shopify pricing plans available, with the following monthly fees:

• Starter — $5 per month

• Basic — $29 per month

• Shopify — $79 per month

• Advanced — $299 per month

• Shopify Plus — custom pricing.

(The above prices are in USD; if you’re based outside the US, you’ll find that the plan names and features are the same, but fees will be in your own local currency, and broadly equivalent to the US ones.)

There are a couple of things it’s worth mentioning quickly here:

• If you pay upfront for your plan, you can avail of a sizeable discount — paying yearly rather than monthly gives you 10% off your plan (for the first year of service). Paying for 2 or 3 years in advance gives you a 20% and 25% discount respectively.

• Additional fees apply to make the most out of Shopify’s point-of-sale features, which let you sell goods in a physical location. (I discuss these in more depth later on in this Shopify review ).

There is also a free trial available, which lasts for 14 days (and can usually be extended if you need more time to finish building your store).

You can access this free trial on the Shopify website.

Shopify pricing for its most popular plans

Key differences between Shopify plans

All the Shopify plans provide the core ecommerce functionality you’d expect — on every plan you can create catalogs of unlimited products, accept credit card payments, sell gift cards, offer discount codes on purchases and make use of a wide range of third-party apps.

But there are a few key features to watch out for — and not miss! — by selecting the wrong Shopify plan.

These are:

• A fully-featured, standalone online store — The ‘Starter’ plan doesn’t let you create one. Instead, you can use the Starter plan for selling on social media and messaging apps; and for adding a ‘buy button’ that you can embed on existing websites.

• Point of sale features — you can only use Shopify’s ‘point-of-sale’ system to sell goods in person (i.e., in retail outlets, market stalls etc.) if you are on a ‘Basic’ plan or higher.

• Staff accounts — the number of ‘seats’ you get varies by plan (from 1 user on ‘Starter’ to 15 on ‘Advanced’).

• Reporting — full reporting functionality is only available on the $79+ plans.

• Third-party real time carrier shipping — this is available as a paid-for add-on, via an annual purchase of your plan, or on a monthly ‘Advanced Shopify’ / ‘Shopify Plus’ plan .

• Inventory locations — you can assign inventory to retail stores, warehouses, pop-ups etc. on any plan, but the number of locations you can use varies with each.

• Transaction / credit card fees — these get lower as you go up the pricing ladder.

• Shipping discounts — the more expensive the plan, the more generous these are (the availability of these discounts depends on your country, however).

• International selling features — you can only set country-specific prices for your products on the ‘Advanced’ or ‘Shopify Plus’ plans (on other plans, a straightforward currency conversion will be applied). The same goes for adding duties and import taxes at checkout — you’ll need to be on an ‘Advanced’ or higher plan to do either.

Shopify Plus, the enterprise-grade version of the platform, provides additional functionality and elements aimed at big corporations, including:

• the option to host and manage ten stores using one account

• guaranteed server uptime

• enhanced API access

• ‘white glove’ level of support via a dedicated ‘Merchant Success’ programme

• access to more apps and integrations

• more sophisticated options for selling in multiple currencies

• sales automation tools.

(Our Shopify vs Shopify Plus comparison gives you a more detailed overview of all these differences).

’ll explore all the core Shopify ecommerce features shortly, but first, let’s take a quick look at how Shopify lets you accept payments for your goods.

Accepting credit cards using Shopify

There are two ways to accept credit card payments with Shopify: with Shopify Payments, its built in payment processing system, or by using a third-party payment gateway.

Shopify Payments

The cheapest and easiest option — for users in countries where it is supported — is to use Shopify Payments, Shopify’s built-in payment system.

If you use this, you don’t have to pay any transaction fees at all on any plan except the ‘Starter’ one.

(If you’re on the ‘Starter’ plan, you’re looking at transaction fees of 5% per sale. This is quite a high rate).

Additionally, there’s a credit card rate to factor in — in the US, depending on your plan, you can expect to pay a credit card processing fee of between 2.4% and 2.9% of each transaction.

(In other countries, this rate can be considerably lower).

Setting up Shopify Payments

Other payment gateways

The other way to accept payments in Shopify is by using a third party ‘payment gateway’ — of which there are over 100 to choose from.

If you do this however, Shopify will apply a transaction fee to each sale — between 0.5% and 2% depending on the plan you’re on.

And an important thing worth noting about Shopify Payments is that it is only available only to users based in certain countries / territories.

These are:

• Australia

• Austria

• Belgium

• Canada

• Denmark

• France

• Germany

• Hong Kong SAR

• Ireland

• Italy

• Japan

• Netherlands

• New Zealand

• Singapore

• Spain

• Sweden

• United Kingdom

• United States of America

So if you’re not selling from one of those countries then you will have to use a separate payment gateway provider, and you will encounter additional transaction fees for doing so.

Now that we’ve gone through pricing and payment functionality, let’s discuss how Shopify stores actually look.

Shopify themes – how good are they?

Shopify provides 9 free ecommerce templates (or ‘themes’) that you can use as the starting point for your store design.

Examples of some free Shopify themes — ‘Boundless,’ ‘Simple’ and ‘Brooklyn.’

Now, this number of bundled templates is small by comparison to the range offered by key competitors like Wix or Squarespace (these two platforms offer 800+ and 140+ themes respectively).

The free Shopify themes are attractive however, and they are fully responsive too, meaning that they will automatically adjust their layout to suit the screen size of the device they’re being viewed on (smartphone, tablet, desktop computer etc.).

And, if the free templates don’t appeal, you can use a paid-for or ‘premium’ theme — of which there are 82 available. Most of the premium themes are provided in a few variants, further extending the template choice available to you.

The premium themes range in price from $180 to $350 and, as with the free ones, they are all fully responsive.

Shopify’s themes are responsive, meaning they will automatically adapt themselves to suit the device they’re being viewed on — mobile, tablet, desktop etc.

In the Shopify theme store, you can browse all the free and paid templates using a range of filters, including:

• template price

• industry type

• catalog size

This means that you should be able to find a suitable theme for your store without too much difficulty.

In terms of the aesthetics, the Shopify templates are all professional in appearance, easy on the eye, and very contemporary in nature — no complaints at all here.