Shopify Review

The Starter plan costs $5/month and is built for selling products through social media, email, SMS, WhatsApp, and anywhere you can share a link. Expect to pay 5% transaction fees.

Here’s what you’ll get:

• Unlimited product pages
• Fast, secure checkout
• Contact page for customer inquiries
• Shopping cart to enable multiple purchases
• Shopify inbox
• Shopify order management and integrated fulfillment network
• Linkpop eCommerce tool

The Basic plan costs $39/month ($29/month if paid annually) and includes an online store. If you use Shopify Payments, the credit card rate is 2.9% + $0.30 for online transactions and a straight 2.7% for in-person transactions. If you use another payment processor, Shopify charges a 2% Shopify transaction fee.

This plan includes the following:

• Online store
• Two staff accounts
• Up to four inventory locations
• Multichannel selling
• Access to API and app store
• Discount code engine
• Gift cards
• Built-in blogging engine
• Up to 20 themes on your store
• Manual order creation
• Shipping discounts of up to 77% from DHL Express, UPS, and USPS
• Shipping labels
• 133 international currencies with 3.9% + $0.30 rates
• International commerce tools
• Language translation and local payment methods
• Fraud analysis
• Access to Shopify Fulfillment Network
• Free SSL certificate
• Abandoned cart recovery tools
• Basic reports
• Customer segmentation
• Marketing automation
• Unlimited contacts
• Shopify POS Lite
• Access to Shopify POS Pro ($89/month)
• 24/7 multichannel support

The Grow plan costs $105/month ($79/month if paid annually). If you use Shopify Payments, the credit card rate is 2.6% for online transactions and a straight 2.5% for in-person transactions. If you use another payment processor, Shopify charges a 1% Shopify transaction fee.

This plan includes everything in the Basic plan, plus:

• Five staff accounts (in addition to the owner’s account)
• Up to five inventory locations
• Standard reports
• eCommerce automations
• Discounts of up to 88% from DHL Express, UPS, and USPS
• 133 payment processing with 3.6% + $0.30 rates
• USPS Priority Mail Cubic and Parcel Select Cubic pricing

The Advanced plan costs $399/month ($299/month if paid annually). If you use Shopify Payments, the credit card rate is 2.4% + $0.30 for online transactions and a straight 2.4% for in-person transactions; if you use another payment process, Shopify charges a 0.5% Shopify transaction fee.

This plan includes everything in the Grow plan, plus:

• 15 staff accounts
• Up to eight inventory locations
• Advanced reports
• Third-party calculated shipping rates (outside of Shopify Shipping)
• Custom report builder
• International payments with 3.4% + $0.30 rates
• Duties and import taxes
• Custom pricing by market

Shopify Plus is for enterprise businesses. If your sales top $500K/year, you may be a good candidate for this plan. It comes with a price tag starting at $2,300/month with three-year terms.

Designed for wholesale and global sales, Shopify Plus offers additional features and priority service. Contact a Shopify rep for more information.

Shopify Payments is Shopify’s in-house payments processor that works for online and in-person transactions.

Depending on your Shopify subscription level, you may be offered discounted payment processing rates when compared to alternate payment processors, such as PayPal and Square. When you use Shopify Payments for your payment processing, you avoid Shopify’s transaction fees.

Here’s how payment processing fees break down by plan level:

Unfortunately, not every seller will qualify for Shopify Payments. Check to see if Shopify Payments is available in your country, and read the terms of service to make sure your business qualifies.

Shopify charges transaction fees in addition to fees charged by your gateway payment provider. These fees vary from 0.5% to 2% of each sale, depending on your plan level.

The only way to avoid Shopify’s transaction fees is to use Shopify Payments as your processor. If you use Shopify Starter, you’re stuck with 5% transaction fees, even if you use Shopify Payments.

Here’s a summary of how Shopify’s transaction fees are applied:

Be sure to factor in the cost of these transaction fees as you build your business plan, especially if you aren’t using Shopify Payments for your sales.

Except for Shopify Starter, all Shopify accounts come with built-in free access to Shopify POS Lite. However, users who expect heavy POS transactions may want to upgrade from the Lite version.

If you stick with Shopify POS Lite, you’ll be able to sell in-person with credit card rates ranging from 2.4% to 2.7%, depending on your subscription level. You’ll have access to mobile POS, hardware accessories, and order and product management tools. You’ll even be able to access customer profiles, check in-store availability, and use QR codes to draw customers to your site to purchase online.

You can subscribe to Shopify POS Pro for $89/month per location. The store management tools and omnichannel features for brick-and-mortar businesses may make the additional expense worth it for your business.

Your domain name is the URL associated with your store. You can use the free domain Shopify assigns you or purchase a custom domain.

Shopify’s free domain name is fairly basic and includes Shopify branding. It will look something like this: your-store-name.myshopify.com.

You can purchase a custom domain from Shopify, starting at $11/year. If you already have a domain name, you can transfer it and connect it to your Shopify account for no additional charge.

Shopify is an excellent SaaS product with basic eCommerce features. But it still has plenty of room for expansion via advanced features and apps. Even new sellers may need one or more extensions from the Shopify App Store to tune the platform to their precise needs.

You can choose from third-party solutions for shipping, CRM, marketplace connections, accounting software, and more. Most will come with an additional monthly subscription fee, often ranging from $10/month to $100/month.

Shopify is cloud-based software that lets you set up a functioning website with web hosting, your own domain name, an inventory management system, and shipping functionality. All of that is handled by Shopify.

You can choose a free theme or template to build your store with, purchase a template, or build your own. You can use a simple drag-and-drop editor to customize your store, add physical and digital inventory, and launch your website. You won’t need to type a single line of code as you build your store.

You can add functionality to your store by visiting Shopify’s app marketplace. You’ll find thousands of apps that require no coding to install and give you the customization you need to start selling.

Shopify’s point of sale app is available on the Apple and Google app stores. Download it to enable selling in person with Shopify POS hardware, an iPad or tablet, or your mobile device.

The Lite version comes free with every Shopify plan. If you want to sell at pop-up shops or events, use it to accept card and mobile wallet payments. And if you sell at a permanent location, like a retail store or salon, you can expand your reach and sell more online.

Between Shopify’s buy button and social media integrations, you can sell on just about any platform. That includes:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• TikTok
• Twitter
• Pinterest
• WhatsApp
• Facebook Messenger

Connect your Shopify store to sales channels like Amazon, Etsy, Walmart Marketplace, eBay, and Google, and you’ve got an omnichannel selling strategy.

Simply link your Shopify store with your seller account on the shopping platforms where you sell. Remember, you can sell from multiple platforms at once.

There are some nice Shopify templates and themes to choose from. You’ll find more than 100 themes available, and all are mobile responsive. Of those, eight are free options created and supported by Shopify, while the rest cost $140-$180 and are supported by their respective third-party developers.

You can add up to 20 themes to a single Shopify store. That lets you try out different looks, keep a seasonal version of your published theme, or test changes using another theme. However, you will be allowed to publish using only one of these at a time.

Shopify themes are professional, elegant, and easy for your customers to navigate. And you won’t need to do any coding to use them. On the other hand, if coding is your thing, there’s a code editor you can use. Along with HTML and CSS knowledge, you’ll need to brush up on Shopify’s proprietary templating language called Liquid.

Shopify accepts more than 100 payment gateways sorted by country. In the US, that list includes top names such as:

• Adyen
• Affirm
• Braintree
• PayPal
• Sezzle
• Skrill
• Klarna

Shopify also offers its own payment gateway (learn how to set up Shopify Payments for your store). This Stripe-powered payment processor is currently available to merchants in the US and 22 other countries. Be sure to check your specific country for feature availability. In general, using Shopify Payments delivers these benefits:

• No Extra Shopify Transaction Fees: The 0.5-2.0% additional fee charged by Shopify is eliminated. You still need to pay regular credit card fees.
• Reduced Credit Card Fees: Typically, Stripe and other similar payment facilitators charge 2.9% + $0.30 for online transactions. With Shopify Payments, those rates get reduced as you move up the subscription ladder. In-person processing rates also decrease as you move up in plan level.
• Fraud Protection: Shopify Payments provides its suite of advanced fraud and chargeback prevention features.

Shopify stores that use Shopify Payments are also eligible to add additional payment options to their checkout pages. The first is a special integration with a buy-now-pay-later service (BNPL), Affirm. BNPL options are becoming increasingly popular, and if you’re not already offering one, this could be your chance to add BNPL to your checkout options with seamless integration.

The second payment option available to Shopify Payments users is Shop Pay, an expedited checkout option that allows merchants to save their billing and shipping information across Shopify websites, thus drastically simplifying repeat purchases on your site. Both the BNPL and accelerated checkout offered via Shop Pay are secure for merchants and customers.

All of Shopify’s plans allow you to sell on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Amazon, or eBay, through Messenger, and with Buy buttons. You can also take advantage of Shopify’s own POS system or a third-party POS on higher-level plans.

Integrations are available for additional marketplaces, such as Etsy and Walmart Marketplace.

You can add a Buy Button sales channel in your Shopify admin and then create buy buttons for a product or a collection. Just copy the automatically generated code and plug it into the webpage or post where you want the button to appear. Before you place the button, you can customize its appearance and functions.

Customers who click your buy buttons can add products to their cart, and they will be directed to checkout for purchase. They can also view the product without choosing to purchase it.

Shopify supports international shipping and checkout in more than 50 different languages. You can set up your store in up to 20 languages and accept 133 international currencies. On the Advanced plan, you can activate duties and import taxes and set custom pricing by market.

You’ll be able to use customer accounts to learn more about your customers and to group them by location, shopping tendencies, and demographics. Abandoned cart recovery tools let you know when a customer leaves items in a cart without purchasing, so you can automatically send an email to encourage them to complete their purchase. Shopify Chat allows you to engage with site visitors via live chat.

All Shopify plans include unlimited products, storage, and bandwidth.

Build your catalog with ease by using Shopify’s bulk import/export feature to facilitate migration from your previous platform or to make bulk edits to your catalog. You can list unlimited products and track them with Shopify’s inventory management and product category organization features. You can list variations such as size, color, and material, though you may need to download a free extension if you want to add unlimited variations.

You can select factors to determine the cost of shipping, whether it’s free shipping, a flat rate, a tiered rate, a weight-based rate, or a location-based rate. Users on the Advanced plan can use calculated shipping options to integrate with a third-party shipping service that provides customers with real-time shipping rates.

If you use Shopify Shipping for your order fulfillment, you will have access to the discounted rates Shopify has negotiated with USPS, UPS, DHL, and Canada Post. These discounts range from 20% to 50% off regular rates, but they can be as high as 90% on certain shipments. Your access to these rates depends on your Shopify subscription level, with the best discounts available on the highest-level plans.

Shopify makes it easy to start a profitable dropshipping business. For starters, you’ll find a complete guide to dropshipping with Shopify on the webpage. You can integrate your Shopify store with several global dropshipping apps. Just check the Dropshipping category on the Shopify App Store to see 425 results that include AliExpress, Sprocket, and Printful. You can work with your top choice of Shopify dropshipping partners and more niche dropship partners in subcategories such as print-on-demand.

Shopify offers SEO features that include customizable H1s and the ability to write title and meta tags as well as product tags. A sitemap.xml is automatically generated for each store.

All Shopify paid plans come with a built-in blogging engine that you can use to improve your store’s SEO, tell stories that increase customer engagement, and help you convert lookers into buyers. Shopify’s default blog is called News, but it’s easy to replace that with a custom name, and you can manage your blog right from your store admin and add it to your main navigation menu. You can even manage your blog’s SEO potential from your admin, using the Search engine listing preview and URL and handle sections.

Shopify excels at its coupons, gift cards, and discounting features, which are available on all paid plans except Starter. Users can create discount codes and coupons, including BOGO, that apply to specific products or categories, and you can limit those to specific groups, a specified number of uses, or a minimum order total.

Shopify makes available a range of software tools, app templates, example apps, and libraries to accelerate development. These include Shopify CLO, a command-line tool for scaffolding and managing Shopify apps; App Bridge, a JavaScript library that streamlines embedding an app in the Shopify admin; and Shopify App Generator for Rails, a Rail engine for building Shopify apps.

You’ll also find a full list of Shopify API libraries and app templates to kickstart your Shopify app development. That includes a well-documented REST API that makes it easy to build integrations and applications for those with the skills and the inclination.

Shopify offers a point of sale (POS) system for in-person selling. It’s recently added a new retail kit to the mix, which includes a tap-and-chip card reader and a retail stand for the iPad. Shopify POS Lite is included on all paid Shopify plans except Starter. You can upgrade to Shopify POS Pro for $89/month per location.

The reporting options vary by plan level, and this is one of the areas where Shopify can come up a little short on the lower levels. The Basic plan lets you access your store’s acquisition reports, several behavior reports, and a marketing report. If you want more, you’ll need to purchase an add-on or upgrade your plan.

On the next level, the Grow plan includes access to professional reports with more valuable information, including sales of specific items and sales based on the time of year. Customer reports on the Grow plan let you see how customers are browsing your store and purchasing, with reports available on customers over time, first-time customers in comparison to returning customers, and customers by country.

On the Advanced plan, you’ll be able to access information about your most at-risk and loyal buyers. And if you visit the Shopify App Store, you’ll find thousands of options for add-ons, all of which include ratings and reviews from users.