Shopify Review

By Adam  |  28 Sep 2015 09:00:00

Shopify is the big name when it comes to eCommerce website creation tools. If people have heard of only one service which can give them an eCommerce website, it will probably be Shopify. Obviously, they've earned this level of renown for a reason, so I decided it would be a good idea to sign up to Shopify and find out what it is that they're doing such a good job with. Here's a review of what it is like to use Shopify and you might just be surprised by what you read...

You get things started by using a simple drag and drop-like system in order to put your new eCommerce website together. It's so simple that anybody could use it. In fact, it's too simple. From a developer's stand point it's quite frustrating as you have no way to change the coding. So, if you've got a more advanced set of web design skills and you wanted to put them to use... it's not going to happen. But, anyway, you can ignore that and carry on. Next you start to upload your products, fair enough. Products, once uploaded, will of course need to be categorised so that a customer visiting your website will have no problem browsing through them... Except that Shopify's categorisation process is so frustratingly inconvenient that you will probably end up wasting a lot of your time on it. Other than that, yeah, it's not a terrible system and you can use it to put together a nice eCommerce website, but these are two pretty big flaws and it's not great to know that you're paying more to use Shopify with these flaws than you'd be paying for another service without them.

So, really, it seems like Shopify gets used so much just because it's Shopify. It's been around for over ten years and was one of the first services of this kind, meaning that initially it would not have had much competition. That's how it grew to be what it is today, but since then it has been outdone by others. Sellr, for example, gives you all the tools you need to create your own eCommerce website, allows you to make edits to the coding, comes with an easy to use categorisation system and is much more affordable... In fact, you can even use Sellr for free! But just because Sellr hasn't been around for quite as long as Shopify, it doesn't have the same reputation. So if you were looking to start up your own eCommerce website, keep Sellr in mind and remember: the most popular option is not always the best option.