Shopify Review 2024:  Features, Benefits, Pros and Cons

Shopify is a powerful, customer and merchant centric platform.

Considerations

Choosing the wrong ecommerce platform could literally cost you hundreds of hours and thousand of dollars (or more).

That’s why its critical to do your research and start with the right platform.

In this review I’m going to walk you through:

• What Shopify is and who it’s best for. Hint: I’ll ask you three questions to help decide.
• The key features of the platform. Here you’ll find pro tips and pitfalls to avoid.
• Shopify’s pricing. You might be surprised at what you find here.
• Ecommerce statistics you need to know. These statistics are critical to know because they anchor your expectations.
• Much more…

There are a lot of website builders and ecommerce solutions on the market, but Shopify is an industry leader!

Why?

Because of ease-of-use.

You can build a Shopify store, list your products (or use a dropshipping app) and be selling in a couple hours.

All while looking good too.

That’s the value of Shopify.

I’ll give you the TLDR – it will cost you money to run a Shopify store (gasp!).

But all other solutions will as well.

But it’s worth it.

Because this platform and its tools will help you sell.

Here’s something that has been brought to my attention recently and it really applies to building an online store, want to know what it is?

Speed matters.

I’ll elaborate because I think it will help you in choosing a platform that provides you the highest likelihood of success.

Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner wrote a book called How Big Things Get Done. In this book they hit on a really important point – that most projects fail to meet their deadlines.

Their primary discovery for why projects don’t finish on time and on budget?

Speed of execution.

The longer the project takes, the more it costs, and the less likely it is to get completed (due to various factors, some of which are outside of your control).

So how many sales will you get from a half-built online store?

Probably 0.

A little bit further down I’ll explain how choosing Shopify will actually help you maximize your sales in increase your revenue compared to other ecommerce solutions.

But first, let’s do a quick primer on what Shopify is and who it’s best for.

What is Shopify?

Shopify is a complete commerce platform that lets anyone start, manage, and grow a business.

This platform allows you to sell online, or in person.

Shopify enables you to sell things you make (e.g. a painting), sell your services (e.g. marketing services), or sell other people’s products (e.g. dropshipping or resold goods).

It provides all the tools you need to get up and running quickly.

Shopify has four different plans: Basic, Shopify, Advanced and Plus.

Basic through Advanced are geared towards small and medium sized businesses.

Shopify Plus is meant for large organizations and recommend this plan for businesses hitting annual revenues of approximately $1 million, or $80,000 per month.

Shopify has over 6.1 million live websites. Shopify Plus has over 200,000.

Put another way, there are 28 times more regular Shopify stores than Shopify Plus. This is a lot of small and medium sized businesses!

Now considering the fact that you’re reading this and starting your ecommerce journey, we’ll ignore the Plus plan and focus on the Basic plan and the features that are applicable to just starting out.

Let’s dig in and explore the different facets of Shopify.

How Shopify works

Shopify streamlines the process of creating and managing an online store.

It has the ability to cover all aspects of ecommerce.

From customer acquisition via its marketing and SEO features all the way to order fulfillment and repeat business.

Who is Shopify Best for?

Although Shopify serves everyone, from sole proprietors to large multimillion-dollar organizations, the platform is particularly great for entrepreneurs and small businesses.

Why?

Because of its ease of set-up and how quickly and efficiently you can put together a professional storefront and start selling.

Here are a couple questions you should ask yourself to help determine whether Shopify is right for you.

1. How much time do you want to spend building your website? Do you want to design your store from scratch or do you want access to high converting themes that look great and are easy to customize?
2. Do you want to manually integrate services into your store or do you want a platform that has thousands of highly optimized apps?
3. Do you want a questionable, potentially clunky inventory management solution or a state-of-the-art, drop-dead simple inventory management platform?

Different platforms have different pros and cons. If you’re looking for an easy-to-customize ecommerce store that provides easy inventory management and thousands of high-quality apps, Shopify is the solution.

Now, let’s elaborate on store design, because website look and feel is extremely important.

Shopify Themes

Take a minute to check out the Shopify Themes.

They offer 12 free themes to choose from and over 150 paid themes.

Themes are used as your foundation. From there, you can make customizations to the theme with the drag-and-drop builder which is extremely easy.

Attention! One of the drawbacks to Shopify was historically, and still is to a degree, customization. Other website frameworks and ecommerce platforms may offer more control and customization capability out of the box.

That said there are still ways you can customize your theme:

Customize existing theme: If you go to Online Store -> Themes and click Customize, you can add/delete/modify sections.

Above you can see the the footer of the website being selected.

The drag and drop editor makes it easy to move things around and add or take away modules.

Secondly, you’ll want to pick a theme that is highly flexible. Stiletto or Aurora are good choices.

Pro Tip: Try the theme first! Shopify gives you the ability to load it into your store, customize it to make sure it works for you. Then, only if you’re happy, you pay for it when you publish.

The second option is to use a page builder app. Pagefly or Shogun are popular choices.

You can try Pagefly for free, design a page, and decide if this is the right app for you. If you decide yes, there’s a pay as you go and unlimited plan starting at $24 that scales depending on your requirements.

Shogun starts at $55 per month, but it offers 35 published pages. This price is comparable to Pagefly.

But one of the nice features of Shogun is it’s AI Copywriting. It’s integrated into the builder and can help you effortless generate product descriptions and page copy.

In our experience, the quicker you get up and running, the more likely you are to reach your goal.

The longer it takes you to do the foundational work, the more likely you are to get distracted, have life get in the way, and ultimately not finish.

And if we don’t finish – we don’t make any sales.

So the value comes from speed and the assistance that software provides.

Keep in mind, Shogun’s AI capabilities may not generate the perfect content for you – it may need tweaking.

That’s fine.

For most people, having something there and being able to edit it is much easier than starting from scratch.

The important thing is that you get something up and running, even if you need to revise and optimize it in the future.

Let’s detour and look at a couple examples of popular brands that have built on the Shopify platform. 

#1 Unique Vintage

#2 Vessi

#3 Lime Crime

Pro Tip: If you want to see if an ecommerce store is using Shopify as it’s platform, you can quickly look at the source code. On the website, Right Click > View Page Source > Ctrl F to find and type Shopify. If results appear, you know it’s a Shopify site.

Most Popular Shopify Themes

Having a look at the Paid themes section and sorting by popularity, the top three results are:

1. Prestige – $380 USD
2. Impulse – $380 USD
3. Impact – $380 USD

Customizing Your Store

If you don’t opt for one of the page builders like Pagefly we mentioned earlier, that’s okay.

Shopify is built with the non-technical ecommerce seller in mind.

This means you can use their built in page builder and come out the other side with a site that looks really good.

When you go into the dashboard, under Sales channels and select Online Store > Themes > Customize you’ll be brought to the page builder.

Here you can customize most of the different aspects of your site.

Their default sections include 17 options such as email signup, video, blog post, and image with text.

For those of you who know a little web development (styling language), Shopify allows you to edit the CSS (cascading style sheets). You can do this on a theme level or on a page level to help achieve the look you want.

If you haven’t used CSS before, it simple means you can style different elements of the page in a way that suits your brand.

For example, I might set the CSS to have all the headers match my brand color.

Out of the box the theme settings allow you to control a lot of the website.

If you go into this section you’ll see sections such as:

• Logo
• Colors
• Typography
• Buttons
• Social media
• Brand information
• Cart

There are 24 sections in total which gives you a lot of control.

One of the things I love about Shopify is the mobile responsiveness.

I can tell you that having built websites in the past, not all website builders or ecommerce builders are mobile friendly!

They may say that they’re mobile friendly, but they’re not.

When you collapse things down they don’t always line up. Sometimes areas get cut off or it just doesn’t look great.

Then you have to get in there and tweak things and play around with it until it looks right.

This is time consuming and a pain.

When you’re editing your site, you can change the view in the top right-hand corner and switch between desktop and mobile.

When you hit mobile it truncates the page down to exactly what you would see if you were on a mobile device.

Just a side note, 10% of all retail transactions will take place through a mobile device by 2025 (it currently sits at 8%). This is not an aspect that you want to ignore.

If you want to build something custom, or need additional support, Shopify offers their partner services. They offer theme customization support along with almost anything else you can think of if you get stuck.

Competitive Research

There’s a variety of tools you can use to help you uncover ecommerce information (themes, plugins, traffic, etc.).

We recommend checking out the Koala Inspector Chrome app.

This app integrates into your web browser and pulls up data on the Shopify store. You’ll be able to see the sites structure, traffic, ad campaigns and more.

Their free plan gives you insight into structure, statistics and products, but limits your views on certain features site traffic and ad campaigns.

Attention: Third-party applications providing traffic and search data are just an estimate, keep this in mind. Use two or three different tools or datapoints to increase your level of certainty.

Now, let’s take a quick look at the company that is Shopify. Who are they and can you trust them?

Should You Trust Shopify?

Shopify is a publicly traded company headquartered in Ottawa, Canada and traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange as well as the New York Stock Exchange, both under the ticker SHOP.

The company was founded in 2006 and has grown to over 8,000 employees and over 7 billion in revenues in 2023.

The primary question you might be asking is, how long will Shopify be around for?

To answer this question, we can look at the financials:

• Their top-line revenue continues to grow year over year (e.g. 2022 to 2023 was an increase of 26.07%)
• Their balance sheet shows total assets of 11.30B and total liabilities of 2.23B for a total equity of 9.07B
• Their free cashflow is 578.50M at the end of 2023

So we’ve got strong historical growth, a healthy debt to equity ratio, and over half a billion dollars in cash.

Finanically they’re in a good spot.

Lastly, Statista puts Shopify’s market share at 10.32%. This is enormous – they power millions of online stores as previously mentioned.

Now, I’m not saying to invest your money in Shopify stock, but as a company, they appear strong and probably aren’t folding up shop anytime soon.

This gives me confidence in building on their platform for the long term.

So, the platform is easy to use, reliable, and can help you make impressive looking websites quickly, but how much will it cost you?

Let’s find out.

Shopify Pricing

Shopify has a number of plans, but the primary ones they offer are Basic (for solo entrepreneurs), Shopify (for small teams) and Advanced (for larger volume businesses).

I’ll just quickly note, they offer additional plans like Starter, which is inexpensive but limited in its functionality.

Its primary use is for people wanting to sell on social media and having a simplified store to direct people to in your descriptions and bio.

The other main alternative option is Shopify Plus.

As stated earlier, it’s meant for large businesses doing a million dollars a year in revenue or more.

We won’t worry about this right now.

Let’s take a look at the pricing.

Let’s focus on the most popular plan and do a quick example.

Say you have an item in your store that you sell for $50. At 2.9% + $0.30 transaction fee, this will cost you $1.75.

This is a simple transaction using the Shopify payment pricing.

Another thing you also want to consider are conversion rate and fees.

If someone buys using a different currency, Shopify converts it to your home currency. For example, if someone in Canada buys from your store in the US, Shopify will convert their CAD to USD.

The fee they charge is based on your store’s primary country. If you’re in the US it’s 1.5%. All other countries are 2%.

Most credit card fees for online transactions are 2.9% using Shopify Payments, but some cards like American Express charge a higher rate – 3.50%

Important: Conversion fees are not returned to you if you need to issue a refund.

Shopify wants you to use their built-in payment processor. If you’re not using this, you have two options: direct providers and external providers.

Direct providers integrate and allow you to checkout within your store.

External providers route you to their third-party payment gateway away from your website.

If you choose to use a third party, they charge a 2% fee. This is on top of the payment processor fees. This can add up very quickly if you choose to go this route, so be careful.

Quick comparison: at the time of writing this Stripe, Square, and Wix Payments are all 2.9% + 30 cents for online transactions.

Now we’ve covered the pricing foundation, let’s walk through the key features that make up the Shopify platform and explore how it can help you reach more customers, let you manage your store with ease, and maximize your stores revenue.

Marketing and SEO

A critical piece of ecommerce is driving traffic to your store.

Without telling anyone about your store, there’s no way to make any sales.

So how do you promote it and get eyeballs on your goods and services?

One way is to bring in people from the search engines. This is called organic traffic. In other words, traffic you don’t pay for.

In order to maximize the free traffic potential, we need to optimize our online store for success.

One major piece of the puzzle is website speed.

The platform out of the box is hyper optimized and scores a Grade A, 100% score on GTMetrix.

There’s been a number of studies done – and slow website times increase bounce rates and reduce conversions.

Secondly, you get full control of your website meta data. This means your title tag, URL slug, and your description.

This functionality is critical when it comes to ranking your website in the search engines.

In addition to these features which you control, Shopify does some nice things under the hood as well.

For example, it properly wraps your title in an H1 tag.

What this means is instead of having to go out of your way to try and optimize the website to rank in the search engines, it does it for you.

Pretty cool.

Without getting too far into the weeds, the main on-page ranking factors that search engines typically look at are:

• Site speed (which effects bounce rate)
• Image optimization
• Meta data
• Title tags

Shopify has all of this out of the box which is a huge time saver.

A second way Shopify helps your marketing efforts is through its app store.

They have thousands of apps that seamlessly integrate into your store at the push of a button.

Omnichannel Marketing

Shopify Marketplace Connect is an app that allows you to sell across multiple platforms such as Amazon, eBay, Walmart and Etsy – all from the back-end of your Shopify store.

This dramatically simplifies your sales management if choose sell through these channels.

Note: using this app provides you with 50 free transactions. If you go over that, there’s an additional 1% fee.

Integrated paid traffic

Search engine optimization is amazing because it’s a great way to generate free, consistent traffic (although, it’s not actually free, because it will take your time and effort), but the downside is that it often takes 3 to 6 months to rank in the search engines.

This is where paid traffic comes it.

You can immediately open the proverbial tap and start driving potential customers to your store through apps like Google, TikTok or Pintrest.

These apps allow you to use their merchant services and drive traffic to your store via their platform.

This means you have the potential to generate sales immediately.

Powerful Conversion Rate Optimization Apps

The last app I want to mention is Klaviyo.

This app gives you the ability to connect with your prospects and customers through email and sms (text).

Not everyone buys right away. Often it takes a few interactions and follow ups.

Klaviyo allows you to do a whole bunch of things like abandoned cart notifications, back-in-stock emails, price drop emails, product recommendations and so much more.

This is a super powerful tool and it has the ability to dramatically improve your conversion rates from the traffic that you drive to your store.

There are thousands of apps in the Shopify app store. An enormous amount of them dedicated to marketing and helping boost traffic for your business.

This integrated ecosystem is a massive benefit and should not be overlooked.

Customers

The Shopify dashboard has a section called customers and segments.

Segments are where you can group people into relevant categories or groups.

Shopify comes preloaded with a few different segments, for example; Abandoned checkouts in the last 30 days.

You can create segments based on your own requirements or work off additional templates they provide.

They provide 29 pre-made templates and are categorized by:

1. Engage first-time customers
2. Engage high-value customers
3. Re-engage customers
4. Target storefront behaviors
5. Target purchase behavior
6. Target specific location

This is powerful and extremely valuable as your customer base grows.

When trying to win new customers, it’s often advantageous to offer discounts.

I mean, who doesn’t like discounts, right?

Discounts

You have full control of discounts – a strategy that many retailers opt for.

Four different discounts are available:

1. Amount off products
2. Buy X get Y
3. Amount off order
4. Free shipping

These are built right in and super customizable which is great. You can get super granular and define all types of parameters, for example, you can:

• Specify discount codes or if you want automatic discount based (percentage or fixed amount)
• Set minimum purchase requirements
• Segment and select only specific groups of customers (e.g. customers who have purchased more than once or customer who haven’t purchased)
• Set limits

This is extremely user friendly and will tie into any promotion you want to run.

How to Manage Your Shopify Store

Once your signed up for Shopify, you’ll get access to the easy-to-use merchant platform.

an Here you can build your store, manage your inventory and utilize their tools to help build your business.

Orders & Shipping

The orders page provides a dashboard for orders.

It shows the status of all your orders for a defined period (today/last 7 days/last 30 days) and has analytics built into the top so you can see key metrics like total orders, returns and time to fulfill.

Sub-navigation items below Orders include:

Drafts: manually created orders (e.g. phone orders)

Shipping labels: creation of Shopify shipping labels (they’re tied carriers such as USPS, UPS, DHL and Fedex in the United States).

Pro Tip: Consider using an app like PH MultiCarrier Shipping Label. This app simplifies shipping by displaying real-time shipping rates at checkout, helps easily print shipping labels, and track shipments.

Abandoned checkouts: have you ever dumped a bunch of stuff into your shopping cart but ultimately didn’t decide to buy… then you received an email (probably with a discount) recommending you complete the purchase?

That’s abandoned checkouts.

It’s useful, effective, and Shopify gives you that ability through it’s Marketing Automations tool.

Keep in mind, this is run through Shopify Email app and there’s a limitation: you can send up to 10,000 emails a month, after that they charge $1 per 1000 emails per month.

Shopify Email app is an adequate solution to get you started, but if you want to get serious about connecting with your customers and prospect, Klaviyo is a much better choice.

Inventory Management

The user experience is seamless for managing inventory.

Shopify gives you full control of your products, inventory, your purchase orders to your vendors, store transfers if you have multiple stores and even gift cards.

If you don’t have your own inventory, there are a number of dropshipping apps that you can easily install.

Dropshipping allows sell goods and have them directly delivered to the customer, without ever holding inventory.

Spocket is a good example of this.

The Spocket app allows you to select the type of products that aligns with your business. You can select US/EU suppliers, AliExpress, or even White Label (which means take existing product and put your own logo on it).

Plans start at $39.99 per month, with 0% transaction fees and allow you to list up to 25 unique products.

This is enough to get you started.

If you want to go the White Label route, Spocket redirects you to another app called Jubilee:  Beauty Dropshipping DS. This app is focused on brand labelling/private-labelling cosmetics and beauty products.

Whether you resell products, have your own brand and sell your own products, or have no inventory and want to sell someone else’s products – there’s an option for you.

Now, there’s pros and cons to all of these business models, but the foundation is the same across all of them: it’s super easy to set-up on Shopify.

As we wind our way through the sales process, customers have found your products and added them to their cart. The next step is to checkout.

Checkout

Here’s an area that Shopify markets brags about – their high converting checkout.

They literally make the assertion: “The best-converting checkout on the planet.”

15% Higher conversion than the competition.

They base this claim on a study they did with a top consulting firm.

Here’s an example of a high converting checkout page (mobile view):

Without dissecting it in its entirety, I just want to point out a couple things:

1. Discount code or gift card – we mentioned this feature previously, and they’re using it here to sell coffee – fantastic!
2. Multiple ways to pay – Shop Pay, PayPal and Google Pay. Choose your pick.
3. Email me with news and offers: this is critical to get your customers to join your mailing this. This gives you the ability to easily stay in touch with them and dramatically increased your LTV (lifetime value).
4. Add a donation. This company that sells coffee offers you the opportunity to make a donation if you’d like. In this spot, you can also add product recommendations to increase your average order value (AOV).

Having a well organized and high converting checkout will dramatically add profit to your bottom line.

I love it.

I hope you do too.

Something you may run into is chargebacks and frauds, so I want to look at it up front. This is a risk to all online commerce, here’s what you need to know.

Fraud Protection

Shopify’s default fraud prevention is set to automatically decline charges that fail CVV verification.

This is good, but they also offer a feature to decline charges that fail AVS (Address Verification System) postal code verification.

This is when address information doesn’t align with the card issuers data.

I recommend turning this on.

The app is configurable and can either warn you of a high-risk order, or cancel it completely.

Now for these fraud prevention tools to work, the customer’s card-issuing bank must support these checks.

Attention! Shopify makes it very clear – they are not responsible for chargebacks and the costs related to fraud.

Read through this when it comes time to start selling, it will save you some headaches.

Analytics and Reporting

The analytics tab in Shopify provides a dashboard overview.

The sub-tabs below are reports and live view.

There are 90 different reports that are pre-made by Shopify, but you can also create custom reports if you’re looking for specific data that isn’t there.

These reports can be pinned to the dashboard so you can easily track the most important metrics for your business.

Live view takes a real-time look at the visitors currently on your website and highlights a few different data points such as top locations and customer behavior (active carts, checking out, and purchased).

Point of Sale (POS)

If you want to sell at markets and fairs, popups or at your own brick and mortar store, they have their POS solution.

After the initial setup you have the ability with POS Pro to manage staff, locations and devices.

With staff, you can apply POS permissions, or what they call roles. The default roles are Associate, Limited Permissions, and Full Permissions.

You have the ability to customize these or create new POS roles.

The POS role has 32 custom permissions. This provides granularity for all kinds of responsibility.

You can also give a 4 – 6 digit pin for the POS app for added security.

POS also gives you access to locations and devices where you can see multi-location stores, if you have them.

Shopify offers a point-of-sale system, POS Go mobile kit, which is $319 USD to take in-person payments.

POS Pro is free for the first three months, then get 6 months for $80/mo. Then it’s $119/mo thereafter.

But what happens if you have questions or need additional support?

Customer Support

If you have questions, the Shopify Help Center has extensive documentation and the Shopify Community has an enormous database and discussion board on all things ecommerce.

Both of which are really helpful.

Now, it’s important to know some of the metrics out there. These will not necessarily dictate what your store will do, but it will give you a reference point.

Shopify Statistics you Should Know

l  Average ecommerce conversion rate: 1.30%

l  The highest converting traffic source – email marketing: 4.29%

l  Average revenue per Shopify customer: $92

l  Average number of apps used: 6

l  Average store revenue per month: $2000

Frequently Asked Questions

I hope you found this review helpful. Deciding which ecommerce solution you want to use for your business is critically important.

For beginners, Shopify provides an amazing platform to jump start your online selling efforts.

If you’re ready to get started, click here to go to their website and start a free trial.