Why Shopify isn’t the Best Choice

Just as the shop location happens to be highly critical to the success of your brick-and-mortar stores, the platform proves to be a prime requisite for ecommerce shops. Therefore, ecommerce platforms bear a resemblance to the functions performed by strategic locations, in case of physical stores.

Needless to say, your choice of the ecommerce platform will play the vital part in your business expansion endeavors. And that inevitably creates the need for choosing the best platform.

Of late, Shopify has earned unparalleled popularity amongst potential ecommerce business owners. However, the platform is not without a fair share of drawbacks, which prevents it from emerging as the best ecommerce option. Let’s us dive deep into the discussion and begin with a brief background check on Shopify.

Shopify: Discovery and Emergence

Shopify is a highly flexible ecommerce platform launched in 2006, by a company with the same name. The platform happens to be a creative genius of Tobias Lütke, Scott Lake, and Daniel Weinand, who were utterly disgusted with the prevalent ecommerce experiences.

Since then, there has been no looking for Shopify. Ecommerce store owners can just set up their shops and organize products, without having to get into the technical details of doing so. Other than hassle-free setup, Shopify also offers:

• Stunning themes for designing your store
• Integrations for updating orders and creating shopping carts
• Blog posting features along with secured payment gateways

Other than the ones mentioned above, one of the greatest advantages of Shopify is its split pricing. Even that was not successful in saving the day for the platform. Let us find out why.

Drawbacks of Shopify

We are about to make a contradictory statement here. Although Shopify’s pricing policy is considered to be a major advantage, it qualifies as one of the crucial drawbacks too. The platform might not demand exorbitant one-time fees, but monthly subscription subsequently adds up to huge costs.

By breaking down the monthly subscription charges of Shopify, you will come across the following fee structure.

• Monthly fee: Sticker price paid per month for some standard features.
• Platform transaction charges: Additional fees paid to Shopify, which is a part of your sales.
• Credit card fees: These are standard fees incurred by store owners. However, with the emergence of Shopify’s own POS, these credit card fees are directly received by the platform.
• Add-on charges: Storeowners fight tooth and nail to develop stunning ecommerce stores offering unsurpassed shopping experiences to users. While doing so, they often end up purchasing 3rd party apps, software plug-ins, as well as other tools.

Shopify offers a complete inventory of store apps. Store owners will have to pay for every paid-app purchased by them.

Well, to some extent, yes. The strategic pricing policy offered by Shopify usually excludes all these costs at the first go. But quite like numerous other hosted platforms, the monthly add-ons keep on adding to the basic price, thus making the platform highly expensive.

Ecommerce development is a one-time affair, and you will surely not wish to develop your ecommerce store again and again. Going by the aspects mentioned above, it will be judicious to choose custom web development platforms over Shopify.