Shopify Review: The Crown Jewel of The eCommerce World

Shopify Introduction

Shopify has been thriving since it was founded in 2004. Powering more than 3 and a half million live websites as of December 2021, Shopify provides users with unmatched functionality while maintaining a smooth and friendly user experience. For that reason, we have conducted thorough research and written this Shopify review with a view to giving you profound insights into what Shopify has to offer.

Our Shopify reviews will cover:

• Brief introduction of Shopify
• Top-notch updates on Shopify in 2021-2022
• Most essential information of Shopify (functions, ease of use, pricing)
• What should you consider when choosing Shopify?

Feeling excited? Let’s get into our Shopify reviews!

What Is Shopify & Is Shopify Worth It?

If you are tired of reading these walls of text, check out our visual Shopify review below to catch all the pros and cons of Shopify!

Shopify is a SaaS (software-as-a-service) eCommerce solution, meaning it includes everything you need to create a website. Instead of having to get yourself a host and dealing with technical stuff, you just need to go to the main website, create an account and that’s basically it. You can launch your Shopify store with no bustle and hustle.

Reading this article, you can answer the question “Is the Shopify worth it?” by yourself. Then, you’ll have the chance to re-confirm your thoughts and considerations by joining the “eCommerce Platform ProFitting” event, experiencing Shopify hands-on without charges

Shopify offers a 14-day free trial and you can try out this platform easily without entering credit card information. Once you decide to opt for a plan, Shopify will charge you a monthly fee, and this varies depending on your plan.

No matter how big your business is, Shopify is always an option worth considering. Its scalability is one of the factors that help build trust and reputation among users. With an astonishing amount of add-ons and integrated functions, the eCommerce platform ensures utmost satisfaction even for large stores.

To compare Shopify with other web builders, see the

Top-Notch Updates on Shopify for a Thriving 2022

Shopify has been continuously updating its functionality. Here are some of the most exciting new features we would like to share with you. These updates will help you decide is Shopify worth it. For more information, please visit Shopify changelog.

#1 Adding shipping speeds at customer checkout

The new update function allows your customers to track their shipping status whenever they need it. As a result, you can gain more trust from shoppers as well as provide them with convenience. This also brings clarity and transparency to your store.

Buyers will see a range of days at checkout that reflects the estimated transit time of their purchase. Therefore, you can help your customers stay alert to their shipping process at any time.

#2 Include country-specific tax in product prices

If you sell internationally, you should be familiar with adding sales tax to your price. With the new update, Shopify will automatically calculate and include tax based on your customer’s country.

Please notice that the country-based tax is only added at the checkout page, therefore, the price on the product or cart page remains the same

#3 View your real-time store activity with Live View

Live View Shopify includes a world map that shows you all the activities that appear in your store in real-time and the location of visitors and customers so you can easily track your e-store.

Live View will automatically capture and display the visual of your customers’ behavior (within 10 minutes) throughout their checkout process.

This function is super useful during high traffic times of your store such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas…when you want to get the big picture of your recent marketing activity, discounts, or other promotions.

#4 Fulfill orders more efficiently on the Shopify mobile app with new functions

This brings merchants a series of new bulk actions for order and fulfillment tasks so you can speed up the fulfillment process and get products to customers faster.

 Mark as fulfilled: set up your order status as fulfilled

• Capture payment:set up the order status as you finished collecting payment
• Archive products:this status keeps track of open orders that have not yet been completed
• Unarchive products:Mark your order as unarchive product if you want to delete it later
• Create shipping labels(available in the US, Canada, and Australia only): Shipping labels show information that’s used by shipping carriers to make sure a shipment is delivered correctly
• Manage returnsdirectly in Shopify: There’s no doubt that the product return process is one of the most important parts when it comes to customer care. This new attribute allows you to manage refunds from the Shopify orders page.

#5 Facebook Pay for Shopify Payments & Checkout

Facebook Pay allows customers to check out with their saved credentials when customers are logged on to Facebook.

However, Facebook Pay is currently available only to online stores located in the U.S that use Shopify Payments. To use Facebook Pay for purchases, your customers also need to be in the U.S and on a mobile device.

Shopify Ease of Use

Just like other hosted platforms, Shopify is fairly easy to use. It’s designed for everyone, from eCommerce experts to total beginners. You don’t need to have experience in creating websites to get yourself a fully functioning online store with the help of Shopify.

While open-source platforms require a lot of steps such as buying a host and uploading the source code to your server, Shopify takes the hassles out of creating a website. It’s not even an exaggeration to say you can get your store up and running in a matter of minutes.

This Shopify tutorial video can help you quickly set up your Shopify store:

You can easily create a Shopify store via simple steps.  After filling in your email address, a password for your account, and a store name to begin, Shopify takes you to the initial configurations.

Sign up Shopify

There is hardly a point when you have to spend time looking around to find what you need. Right after you create an account, Shopify guides you through the important steps to make your store fully functional.

The main page shows the shortcuts to add first products, customize your theme and add a new domain or transfer the Shopify domain if you already have one.

As seen from the image, the dashboard is straightforward with categories containing corresponding sub-sections for easy navigation. You can easily import products to Shopify, add some finishing touch and your store will be ready to go live.

Before moving to the next part of our Shopify review, let’s hear what LitExtension’s customers think of Shopify:

Overall, Shopify has been a great experience. It does everything well, and even though the backend can sometimes get confusing, the front-end product it delivers to users is beautiful and efficient. I highly recommend Shopify if someone is thinking about launching an online store. It’s simple if you need it to be, and complex if you need to expand to fulfill a large online e-commerce presence.

Henry Smiths

Another Shopify review from Taylor Tabb:

I would recommend this product to somebody else if you are just beginning your journey with e-commerce and you do not want to waste a lot of time launching or developing a website.
I really like the user interface because it’s not complicating to read or review and it doesn’t take away time from any person that’s just beginning to write or develop their own website.

Shopify Pricing

You can try Shopify without spending a penny before deciding to provide payment details such as your credit card information.

The platform offers a 14-day free trial with full access to its functions. Even if you give your credit card details during this time, Shopify lets you cancel any time without charging as long as you do it within the first 2 weeks.

Compared to some other platforms, Shopify’s pricing plans seem rather costly. However, it is totally cost-effective once your business reaches potential growth with the help of powerful tools from Shopify.

The SaaS eCommerce platform offers you 3 plans with monthly costs.

Shopify Pricing

• Firstly, let’s take a look at the Basic Shopify plan.With $29 per month, you get all the basic eCommerce functions. If you’ve just started your business or just want to build a simple online storefront for your existing brick-and-mortar one, this is a suitable option.
• The next plan, simply called “Shopify”, costs $79 and has everything you need for a growing business. Paying such an amount provides you with additional features needed for your store to reach its potential.
• Advanced Shopify costs $299 per month, and comes with the most advanced features.A medium to large business can always grow more, and this plan makes the process even more possible.

Other than the monthly pricing, Shopify also charges different credit card rates for each plan when using Shopify Payments. If you go for Shopify Basic, the platform charges $2.9 + 30 cents per transaction. The fee is reduced to $2.6 + 30 cents with the Shopify plan and $2.4 + 30 cents with Advanced Shopify.

If you decide to use any payment provider other than Shopify Payments itself, the additional fee per transaction will be 2.0%, 1.0%, and 0.5% for Shopify Basic, Shopify, and Advanced Shopify respectively.

Shopify payment rate

If you have a long-term plan for your business, consider annual Shopify fees. Signing up for an annual plan saves you 10%, and paying once for 2 years uses saves 20%.

Besides these plans, Shopify also has a version that is tailor-made for enterprise-level businesses named Shopify Plus.

Wondering what’s the difference between Shopify vs Shopify Plus? Below is the thorough comparison between the two.

Shopify Themes

The conversion rate also depends on your store’s appearance. Getting yourself a good custom Shopify theme ensures more chances of a customer coming back for more and thus generates more revenue.

Here are the pros and cons of Shopify themes.

Pros	Cons
Sophisticated and contemporary design	Only 10 free themes are provided.
Professionally built and mobile responsive	Costs range from $140 to $180, which is quite costly.
Designated to suit your style and the feature of your e-commerce shop with certainty → they’ll reformat to suit the mobile and tablet screens	Multiple languages are not available in ALL themes.
Full of features and you can choose from various styles.

Generally speaking, Shopify themes seem tidy, elegant, and attractive. They are made by professional designers, so you don’t have to worry about the functionality and usability of each one.

If you are unsure whether investing around $180 in a premium theme is the right decision, you can get free themes to see how that works out for your store. Of course, they will be inferior to the paid ones in terms of functionality and attractiveness.

Having said that, we still recommend switching to a nicely designed paid theme later on when your business generates a decent amount of revenue. The price may be a bit higher for new businesses, but it’s not that expensive when you consider it as a one-time payment. Furthermore, the paid themes are designed by UI-UX professionals. Hence, you can expect to get excellent quality as well as highly customizable templates for your store.

Apart from the price, you should also consider the style according to what you’re selling and how you want your customers to feel when they see your store. On Shopify’s theme page, you can browse by industry or collections. Feel free to spend your time deciding what suits you the most.

Note that all themes are freely customizable with the Liquid code. You can add a personal touch to any of the themes by changing colors, fonts, social media buttons, and more. Once again, Shopify’s ease of use makes things much more convenient as you can add, remove or move sections by yourself with just a few clicks.

Shopify eCommerce Tools & Sale Features

#1 Shopify Reporting & Analytics

Shopify offers a decent range of reporting tools, which can be upgraded with higher plans.

Basic Shopify gives you a real-time overview of key factors such as revenue, consumer preferences, and so on. Further upgrades include detailed sales and customer reports, and Advanced Shopify or Shopify Plus both provide deep analysis with the help of filters.

You can also benefit quite a lot from Google Analytics integration. Connecting your store to a Google Analytics account results in an adequate and flexible combination between the two, where you may find almost anything you need.

In 2021, Shopify continued to improve its report and analysis with the new update on the store session and conversion rate KPI’s in Overview analytics.

The new function aims to support multi-channel businesses. It allows you to see an overview of key metrics for all your stores in one central place. Hence, you can easily monitor the health of your business as well as grab the big picture of “What’s happening right now” for all of your channels.

#2 Shopify Inventory Management

Shopify lets you manually add products or import them using CSV files. Additionally, customers, orders, and other pieces of data can also be imported.

Adding products is extremely simple. Clicking on “Products” right in the main dashboard directs you to the page where you can manage your products. If you haven’t had any, Shopify will show a big button right in the middle to add one.

You can fill in all the information related to your products, including title, description, featured images, videos, and so on. SKUs and quantity tracking features help manage your inventory easily and automatically mark out-of-stock products.

Add product to Shopify

Here you can also add variations for your products and set different prices for each one. However, note that you can only add 3 variants (size, color, material, etc).

#3 Multi-channel & Omnichannel

If you’re looking for a great eCommerce solution where you can take advantage of multi-channel and omnichannel to boost your sales, Shopify is surely a wise choice for you. Shopify provides merchants with a total of 8 sale channels including Facebook, Instagram, Amazon…  By connecting each sales channel to Shopify, you can easily monitor all of your products, orders, and customers in just one place.

If what you need is not on the list, you can always look for third-party integration in the Shopify App Store to get the job done. Now, let’s dig deeper into each sales channels

1. Social commerce

Social commerce uses social networking websites such as Facebook, Instagram, Messenger… as vehicles to promote and sell products or services.

According to Forbes, 30% of consumers now say they’d purchase social media. Therefore, this sales channel is an effective way to approach customers as well as boost your sales. You can connect Shopify to Facebook, Instagram, or even Messenger

Sale Channels	Supports from Shopify
Facebook and Instagram	– Sync your products to a catalog on Facebook and Facebook Shop – Allow you to create and manage Marketing and Ads campaign on Shopify – Let you run Ads retargeting
Messenger	– Allow your customer to shop directly from the conversation – Add the “Contact Us” button into your store – Bring you the ability to customize your automated messages

2. Shopify POS

A point of sale (POS) is a physical place where a customer purchases goods or services. A POS transaction may occur in person or online, with receipts generated either in print or electronically.

Shopify POS is an application for iOS and Android devices that you can use for transactions in a brick-and-mortar store, markets, or pop-up setting. Find products, process orders, take payment, swipe credit cards, produce receipts, and control it all from your iPad or mobile devices.

Currently, there’re 2 Shopify POS subscription plans for you to choose from: Shopify POS Lite and Shopify POS Pro with a bunch of amazing features

3. Marketplaces integration

Besides Social media and POS, Shopify also allows merchants to connect with some of the best eCommerce platforms and marketplaces around the world such as Amazon or Handshake officially (Available for the US). Besides, if you choose the Shopify Plus plan, you can take advantage of the separated  wholesale channel as well

Shopify Amazon Integration 

• Link Shopify to your existing Amazon listings or create a new list on your Amazon store
• Link your existing Amazon listings to your Shopify admin
• Manage everything from your Shopify Admin panel

Wholesale channel (only available for Shopify Plus)

• Create a separate, password-protected storefront for Wholesale
• Add wholesale-only products that are available in your wholesale store only.
• Manage everything from your Shopify Admin panel

Please note that you can still integrate your Shopify store with other markets by using an extension or third-party developer.

#4 Shopify Payment & Shipping

What is Shopify Payment?

Shopify offers over 100 payment processors (probably more than any other platform), including the most popular names such as Stripe, 2Checkout, PayPal or Authorize.

This is great news except for the fact that Shopify will charge you a transaction fee (2.5% to 0.5% depending on your plan) unless you use its own payment gateway – Shopify Payments.

The option of accepting payment in multiple currencies is only available with Shopify Payments. The system will automatically convert the price according to current exchange rates. You should definitely consider this option if your target market expands overseas and your location is on the list of where Shopify Payments is available.

Besides, opting for Shopify Payments also opens the door for an accelerated checkout function, Shop Pay. To learn more about this built-in feature, please take a look at our Shop Pay review for more.

#5 Shopify App Store

With a total of 6000+ apps, Shopify is by far the platform with the biggest app store on the market. Basically, you can find almost anything you want there.

Shopify App Store

While Shopify has already included most of the functionalities to meet basic needs, the App Store breaks all limits to what you can make of your eCommerce site.

The Shopify team does a good job helping you navigate through the enormous store by letting you browse by categories or collections. They are even passionate enough to create a “Staff picks” section containing apps personally selected by the team themselves.

One of the popularly used features is dropshipping, which is not integrated by default. Thus, you will need the help of the app store if you want this feature. Fortunately, there are a lot of apps for this, and Obelo is one of the recommendations.

Other than that, you can browse the app store for more marketing tools, order & inventory management, store design tools, more. Some apps let you connect to social media platforms in order to further promote your business and increase traffic to your site.

One of our favorites is Recart that you can build your Messenger and SMS lists with, and segment them any way you like to send targeted flows and high-converting campaigns”

Don’t forget to take a glance at our recommendation on the best Shopify apps to build a fully-fledged website.

#6 Shopify Internationalisation

Shopify is a strong candidate if your priority is cross-border selling so you can reach customers all around the world. It allows your store to connect with various sales channels, enable multiple languages, multi-currencies, and location-based tax settings so you can create a localized shopping experience for your visitors.

1. Multi-languages

Shopify Multi-languages function lets you create separate URLs for your original content with a different language.

When customers land on a translated URL, your website will automatically show the translated version. After that, your customer can view the product, create an order, checkout, and receive notifications in their local language.

The number of available languages depends on your current Shopify plan:

– Basic Shopify, Shopify, Advanced Shopify, then you can translate up to five languages.

– Shopify Plus merchant, then you can translate your store into 20 languages.

2. Currencies

Selling with multiple currencies is also supported by Shopify. When applying this function, your customers can view prices in your store, pay for their orders at checkout, and receive refunds in their local currency.

The conversion rate is set up by default based on the real-time foreign exchange rate. If you want to change the currency, you can lock in a fixed rate for each currency manually.

Note: Selling in multiple currencies is only supported by Shopify Payments. Orders placed using Paypal or other third-party payment providers are processed in your store currency.

3. Tax settings

Tax is also an obstacle when you want to sell internationally. Fortunately, Shopify has it covered for your business.

Many countries charge taxes based on an order’s destination. Therefore, you can set up these rates manually (more on this below).

#7 Shopify Dropshipping

Although dropshipping is a newcomer in the market, it has quickly become one of the most famous business models at the moment. It allows store owners to sell a product to a customer through a supplier without having to hold the inventory.

You can control the purchase price displayed on your Shopify store while making profits by paying the wholesale price for the supplier.

Since Shopify is a powerful eCommerce platform, it’s definitely an ideal place to kickstart your dropshipping business.

#8 Shopify Sales Tax

Sometimes, store owners may need to charge tax for some specific types of products on their online business. However, one difficulty is that tax laws and regulations are flexible, they can change depending on your country and religion.

Shopify will handle your problem by an automatic sales tax calculation. You can also set up tax overrides to address unique tax laws and situations.

However, this eCommerce platform won’t help you file or remit your sales taxes. You might need to register your business with your local or federal tax authority to have them handle it.

Check Shopify sales tax off your to-do list with our super digestible guide!

Shopify SEO & Marketing

Most (if not all) eCommerce stores rely heavily on SEO & Marketing to sell products. No matter how much time and money you invested in developing your website, bad Search Engine Optimization and improper marketing can always hurt your sales since customers are the core of all businesses.

Fortunately, Shopify’s SEO is quite effective. It is adequate, intuitive, and can help you rank well when being utilized properly. Once again, Shopify’s ease of use comes in handy as you can access most built-in functions without a hitch.

As seen from the image, adding a title, meta description, and images to your pages is easy and straightforward. Shopify also lets you create custom URLs and 301 redirects every time you change the URL so as to avoid 404 errors.

The site speed is decent. Especially if you choose a simple and light theme, fast loading speed is not so hard to get. You can also structure your site by categories, which not only benefits your SEO but also helps users navigate seamlessly.

Having said that, there is still room for improvement. Certain URLs bear a mandatory string, which isn’t good for SEO. For example, product pages have ‘/products/’, and posts are stuck with ‘/posts/’ right after your domain name.

Additionally, the Robots.txt file and Sitemap aren’t available for modification, making Shopify SEO a bit frustrating if you’re serious about site optimization.

Things aren’t that bad though. Those were just some minor inconveniences that are outweighed by the number of benefits you can derive from Shopify. Don’t forget the huge app store with endless SEO possibilities, and other tools to help you gain more traffic. Discover here

#1 Shopify Blogging

If you want to write blog posts related to your business, the good news is that Shopify does have a blogging feature.

However, there isn’t too much to expect, as this is not the main focus of the platform. It only gives you some basic functionality to write posts, meaning you may find it lacking if you already know how other platforms such as Weebly or Wix work.

The features you may miss the most include blogging analytics, social bookmarking, categories (you have to stick to tags). If your site is centered around content with a few eCommerce sprinkles, perhaps Shopify is not for you.

Having said that, Shopify blogging features still somewhat satisfy those with simple needs and goals.

You can start writing right away without having to install any apps. Adding tags, editing titles and keywords is easy and simple. There are also SEO parameters for you to customize and increase your chances of appearing on the first search results page.

#2 Shopify Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the best ways to connect to your customers. Shopify gives you a built-in email tool to promote your products and share updates.

In fact, you can choose from different email templates to have an easy start while still maintaining professionalism. Of course, emails are editable so you can add a personal touch of your own. All of this is processed within your admin panel, including reports of campaign effectiveness.

Additionally, you can find the best email marketing app for your Shopify store from this collection here.

As of October 1, 2020, if you’re on any paid Shopify plan, then you can send 2,500 emails for free every calendar month with Shopify Email. Emails are counted based on the number of individual email addresses that you send a specific promotional email to.

You can send additional emails beyond the 2,500 free emails at a cost of $0.001 USD per additional email. For example, if you send 1,000 additional emails, then it costs $1 USD.

#3 Shopify Abandoned Cart Recovery

This is a really useful feature that is integrated by default for all plans. Instead of having to get an app, you just need to go to Orders from your Shopify admin and then click Abandoned checkouts to manage abandoned carts.

Here you can view payment events from abandoned checkouts. Shopify notes all payment events in the history of the abandoned checkout each time a customer fails to pay for a cart. You can get the information about their unsuccessful check out here in case your customers contact you for help with payment details.

For example, this Shopify’s feature also helps you figure out why carts are left unpaid by looking at the similarities. You can also choose to automatically or manually send emails containing check-out links to your customers to get them back to their abandoned carts.

Wondering how that works out for you? Shopify even lets you evaluate the effectiveness of cart recovery by email reports. Go to the Marketing section from your admin dashboard and you will be able to see orders that are completed via reminder emails.

Shopify Security

When it comes to security, apparently there’s less to worry about when you opt for a hosted eCommerce solution instead of building a store with open-source platforms. Therefore, you don’t even need to do anything – Shopify takes care of all tasks regarding security in the background.

With SSL Certificates for every Shopify site, all data transferred between you and your customers is encrypted. This helps increase trustworthiness as sensitive information such as credit card details is completely secure. Additionally, Shopify is also PCI compliant, meaning it follows security standards for processing credit card and debit card details. Besides, this platform also enables users to use Shopify cookies policy generator on their sites.

Shopify Support

Shopify has a support team available 24/7 for phone, email, and live chat support. This is also a great advantage over its open-source rivals.

For more details, the dedicated Shopify support team delivers valuable service regarding both information quality and response time.

Other than that, you also get to access its community forum, help center, and other video tutorials. The ultimate form of support is hiring professional certified Shopify experts to ensure maximum problem resolution and seamless business operation.

Shopify Review – FAQs

• Is Shopify safe to buy from?

Absolutely yes. It’s totally safe to buy from online stores hosted by Shopify.

• Can you really make money with Shopify?

In some cases, making money on Shopify doesn’t even require you to sell anything at all. For instance, the Shopify affiliate marketing program lets you earn money per successful referral made from your account to the Shopify platform.

• Is Shopify a legit business?

Shopify is packed with lots of eCommerce features yet it is fairly easy to use. It is suitable for any eCommerce user regardless of their technical background. However, a downside of Shopify is the high transaction fees it charges for every purchase.

• What are the best Shopify alternatives?

Magento, BigCommerce, or PrestaShop, can be great solutions for Shopify alternatives.

• Is Shopify good for beginners?

As you can see from our Shopify review, Shopify is a dynamic all-in-one solution to host and manage an online store that doesn’t take much muscle and technical expertise. Thus, it’s ideal for newbies and amateur users.

Shopify Review – Recap

Hopefully, this Shopify review has successfully cleared all your doubts about Shopify – an eCommerce giant, an excellent alternative to other big names like BigCommerce, WooCommerce or Magento.

We suggest using Shopify to create your eCommerce store as it’s a highly flexible platform with a large app store, reasonable pricing plans, and an impressive range of built-in features.

Furthermore, Shopify has great sales potential, ease of use, and satisfaction rates, making it a great option for newcomers and big sellers. According to our recent data report, our customers have been flocking to Shopify because of its outstanding features and we have also received positive feedback on this platform.

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