What are the pros and cons of using Shopify?
Much of Shopify’s popularity is down to its usability. To decide if it would be right for your business, you need to weigh the pros and cons of Shopify.
Pros and Cons of Shopify Every Online Seller Needs to Know:
Pros
Speed and security– Shopify is integrated with payment providers, and its built-in speed checkout allows customers to pay with minimal load time.
Marketing – Shopify allows custom Title tags, meta descriptions on every category page for SEO purpose and also allows you to build customized landing pages for marketing purpose.
Design – Shopify offers multiples free themes and numerous custom-built premium themes along with the option to customize and add features for Developers. 
Access to Themes –Shopify possesses a collection of beautifully responsive layouts with sophisticated customization capabilities. Shopify offers more than 100 themes, all of which appear professional and inspire trust in potential customers.
Opportunity to Extend the Functionality of Your Online Store with Apps– There are several apps built into a Shopify store, but you can add more by heading to the Shopify app store. Apps are made by professional developers and either enhance interactions for shoppers or simplify the work for you. For instance, there are apps to add chatbots for support, to allow you to partner with third-party shipping companies, to ask customers to rate your products, and even to manage bookkeeping for you.
24/7 Support– You can access a high-quality support system for troubleshooting at any time through live chat, email, or phone. This reduces the risk of store downtime.
Notify the shop owner about the new orders – Surely, it is important for you to check your online store from time to time to see if someone has placed a new order but there are times when your busy schedules restrict you from doing so. This may result in additional delay in proceeding the orders, but with Shopify, you will be notified whenever someone places an order via SMS, RSS, and email. It simply means that you will be able to process the orders of your customers as soon as possible, what makes it even great is that the notifications are sent real-time.
Cons
Pricing – Shopify’s basic plan starts from $29 a month; the average plan is for $79 a month, and advanced Shopify is for $299 a month.
Customization Hacking – Shopify uses a different set up to customize their themes rather than using PHP for their templates. It might be a problem for first timers on Shopify. Hacking can easily be done in Shopify e-commerce stores. It is less confidential and secure as compared to other e-commerce platforms.
Content Marketing – Shopify’s blogging platform is not as great as WordPress as it provides a basic layout for blogging.
Lock-In feature – Lock-in features to delete your online store permanently. Shifting from Shopify to another online store may not be a very smooth journey.
Transaction Fees- Shopify imposes a transaction fee of between 0.5 percent and 2 percent for every sale. The exact amount depends on whether you have a basic, regular, or advanced account. For a basic account, you pay $29 per month, for regular $79 per month, and for advanced $299 per month. This is on top of credit card rates, which are 2.4 percent to 2.9 percent (plus 30¢), again depending on your type of account.
You can avoid transaction fees (although not credit card rates) by using Shopify Payment. This is a credit card processing system that the platform offers as an alternative to third-party payment providers.
Potentially High Monthly Costs– Around one-third of Shopify apps are free, but two-thirds are paid. Some apps have a one-time cost, whereas others are monthly or peruse. Typically, the more complex the app, the more expensive it is. Just looking at paid apps, the median price is $7, but the average price is $29.06. This means that, if you integrate multiple apps into your store, you’ll be spending much more than your monthly fee.
You Need to Know Liquid to Customize Your Theme– Customizing your theme allows you to adapt your store for better usability, to match your brand image, and to add pertinent information. However, to customize your theme, you will need to know Liquid (as most Shopify themes are Liquid templates) as well as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Without an understanding of these coding languages, you will only be able to change font, colors, content, and layout.
Migration – Because Shopify is not open source you can’t easily export and migrate your website without losing your design and most of your work.
After considering the pros and cons of Shopify, you can decide whether the platform would be right for your eCommerce business, you need to plan a long-term strategy to avoid failure.
I hope you found this article helpful.
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