Shopify website builder review – all-around eCommerce star

Shopify is an all-inclusive eCommerce website-building platform, which lets anyone build a professional online store in just a few minutes with zero coding skills required.

Shopify remains among the best website builders, regardless of many tests carried out by the Cybernews team. As it’s heavily eCommerce-centered, Shopify is an ideal choice for small businesses. However, some users might find Shopify’s pricing a little steep. But don’t worry, you truly get what you pay for. After all, Shopify does it all and does it well.

Now to back up our claims, I’ve created my own Shopify account and set up a demo site for extensive testing. Throughout my examination, I found both advantages and disadvantages. However, its wide selection of eCommerce tools did prove to be one of a kind.

⭐ Rating:	3.9 ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
🥇 Overall rank:	#4 out of #32
💵 Price:	From $29.00/month
🪄 Ease of use:	Foolproof design options
🎨 Templates:	13 free templates, many more premium options
🏢 Business features:	Excellent first party features, good app market
👨‍💻 24/7 live support:	Yes
🔥 Coupons:	Shopify website builder coupon & promo codes

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Shopify pros and cons

How to build a website with Shopify – video review

If you're looking for a video guide to quickly learn how to build a website with Shopify, check out our Shopify tutorial that's suitable for complete beginners. You'll find how to get started, pick a theme, edit, and manage products.

Shopify pricing

Shopify offers 4 packages, that include website hosting, and all the main eCommerce features. The prices range between $29.00 and $2 300.00 a month – and that may seem a little bit expensive, especially if you're on a budget.

Here’s an overview of the four packages with their base prices:

Plan	Features	Price
Basic	Assign 10 warehouse locations, abandoned shopping cart recovery, gift cards, discount codes, multi-language website capabilities, unlimited products	$29.00/month
Shopify	Create reports based on user data, assign different prices for different countries, additional discounts for shipping from DHL Express, UPS, and USPS, 5 staff accounts, 10 warehouse locations, unlimited products	$105.00/month
Advanced	Create custom reports, 15 staff accounts, automatically calculated shipping rates, international variant pricing, unlimited products	$399.00/month
Plus	Unlimited staff accounts, 20 inventory locations, custom reports and analytics, shipping insurance, access to Shopify Plus Academy lessons	$2 300.00/month

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You may think that the prices are a bit too big to pay without even trying the plans.

However, you don't need to worry, as Shopify offers a trial for all of its plans, no credit card required. You get 3 days for free and then a month for just $1. And if you worry about accidentally getting charged after you forget to cancel the trial – this is not the case either – the account will just freeze.

In some other Shopify reviews, you may also hear a word or two about Shopify Starter. For only $5.00/month, it's an option to create a simple starter version of an online store that is ideal to sell on social media, email, WhatsApp and anywhere else you can share a link to a product. It's not a full-on eCommerce solution, and it doesn't let you use most of the platform's advanced features, so I won't compare them with the full plans here.

Similar is true with Shopify Plus – it is a much more expensive custom solution for major businesses.

Basic Shopify

Starting from $29.00/month, Basic is a great plan for a beginner.

All Shopify’s plans have a transaction fee, and naturally, the cheapest plan has the highest one. It'll be lower if you use its own Shopify Payments platform, and higher if you use a third-party option.

Basic Shopify will include a transaction fee of 2.9% + $0.3 if you use major card brands. For commercial, business, and corporate cards, and all cards issued by American Express there's a 3.5% + $0.3 transaction fee.

While this plan has all the core features to start selling. Keep in mind that the fees are the largest.

Shopify

For $105.00/month, the Shopify plan gets you some insightful professional reports, including every single feature from the Basic. If you’ve got a growing business where sales are expected to go in fast, this would be an ideal pick.

Especially when you consider the lower transaction fees. It's down to 2.7% + $0.3 on Shopify Payments, and the additional fee for using third-party payment processors is reduced by double, to 1%.

This plan is perfect for small to medium-sized businesses – when choosing a Shopify plan, try to predict your sales, and count the transaction fees you'd be paying. The more sales, the more sense it makes to upgrade.

Advanced Shopify

At $399.00/month, Advanced Shopify is Shopify’s extensive and a more expensive option for its general audience. Boasting every single feature of previous plans – this plan’s a perfect pick for sellers looking to scale and solidify themselves in their respective markets.

The transaction fees are at their lowest here: with 2.5% + $0.3 for Shopify Payments, and only a 0.6% fee for third-party solutions.

Compared to the $105.00 plan, there aren't that many extra features. The play here is simple: this is a plan if you sell a lot, and want to cut down on your transaction fees as much as possible.

Shopify Plus

Shopify Plus is the most extensive and expensive plan that is targeted at complex businesses. It offers features for high-volume merchants that are very useful to run high-volume online stores.

The standout features of Shopify Plus are localized global selling that covers 50 markets, unlimited staff accounts, 200 inventory locations, and 200 POS Pro locations with Shopify Payments. Of course, this premium version will cost not so little – $2 300.00/month.

Is Shopify easy to use?

Shopify is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms. Its ease of use for users of varying experience levels has greatly contributed to maintaining its popularity to this day.

Since Shopify has long been a leading eCommerce platform, I wanted to explore how much it has evolved in recent years. To do this, I created a jewellery online store to test Shopify’s latest functionalities. In this review, I’ll share my experience of building the site and selling through my store. Let’s dive in.

Getting started with Shopify website builder

Starting with Shopify was a breeze. All I had to do was visit the Shopify website and locate a button to Start free trial.

Then, I was asked a simple set of questions used to tailor the overall Shopify experience to my requirements.

Then, a bit of personal information, and just like that – I was already in the Shopify dashboard.

Visually, this is as simple as it gets. The questions about my experience and goals are now reflected in the start menu right at the center.

Get comfortable in this menu. After all, this is where you'll get to add products and build a website.

So, let's do just that. Here's how Shopify handles the design, and the store management tasks.

Designing the online store

The menu on the left-hand side is where you'll get a chance to manage all of your pages and blog posts. But it's the Online store menu, where you want to be if you wish to edit how your Shopify website looks.

For your debut, you can either choose one of the premade templates or ask an AI assistant to create one for you based on your prompt. Once you pick a theme of your liking, customization is rather simple after that.

Everything's controlled by the menu on the left. I could easily hide and rearrange everything.

There I also had an opportunity to add new sections. I could choose from 17 options in total: video, blogs, images with text (your classic suspects).

Within the sections, you can also add content, which will depend entirely on your section.

There is also an opportunity to add custom content which basically allows you to make some sections of your own. This is where you do those less-common moves, like combining galleries with video, or collections with blogs. Also, if you wanted to add testimonials – it’s also done here. However, for these less common elements you’ll need some coding skills.

Then you can also edit your website's fonts, social media buttons, color scheme, and other similar site-wide changes.

Coding opportunities with Shopify

While Shopify is pretty easy to use for anyone, it also allows for more advanced customization. However, this option is available for more advanced users only. The reason is simple – despite most of the templates having all the needed elements for your online shop, some elements can only be added by code.

I realized that if I wanted a more unique and personal online store, using a template alone wouldn't be enough. Therefore, I had to use coding to add a testimonials section, as my template didn’t include one. I was pleased that Shopify offers coding opportunities.

While it’s not a big challenge to someone who is experienced in coding, a beginner might require assistance from a professional. Therefore, there are two options you can opt for – editing your website’s code or finding a template that will fulfill all your needs.

Managing the online store

The real fun begins when you actually work on managing your store: that means adding products.

This is where this Shopify website builder's review gets a bit more interesting, and the platform's muscles start to show a bit. The Products menu on the dashboard lets you quickly add a product, manage your inventory, as well as set up collections and gift cards. For this review, I'll be focusing on selling jewellery.

Once you've finished writing everything about your product – such as weight, customs info, price, stock, and vendor – you can also optimize its appearance for search engines.

And of course, there's a dedicated Discounts menu, where you can set up just about any type of discount you can think of.

You can also do some blogging – the editor is rudimentary, but as with most things Shopify, it's snappy, and it just works.

This is the gist of using Shopify, and as you can see it's pretty easy. Even though you will be given a lot of limits of what you can do, the things you can do will be placed in neat, easily accessible zones. And so, it could be a pretty good trade-off for many people. If you've come here to sell, not to design, all of this has to sound pretty good.

Shopify website building templates

• How many themes? Shopify lets you choose from 230 themes. 13 are free, others are paid. Third-party options are also available.
• How much are they? Shopify's own premium themes are anywhere from $100 to $500.
• Are they any good? The themes are sleek, modern, and most importantly, optimized to sell. You can change quite a lot, but there's no pixel-perfect editing.

Shopify has a sufficient number of templates that focus heavily on delivering quality. So, you have a good selection to choose from.

In case you can’t find a template that you like and find yourself wanting more options, you can always ask an AI assistant to create one for you. It will generate 3 personalized options just for you.

While exploring the templates, I’ve noticed that most of them put the product and the images right in the center, and everything about them is laser-focused to increase your sales. But if you wish to get a slightly less common look, you may want to check out the premium options.

There are 217 of them, and compared to the free options, they do look even a tad more modern and refined.

Here are a few that I loved. This one looks perfect for a fashion-centered store. It includes an adaptable layout, site-wide cross-selling sections, and media-optimized product pages. It’s easier to customize Dawn than regular Shopify themes since sections and blocks let you add, rearrange, and edit every page without coding.

And this one is created specifically for dropshippers and high-volume stores.

And here's another theme that would look great on a full-blown multi-category shop.

Of course, the biggest issue with Shopify's templates is that they cost money: and quite a lot of it. $250 for a theme is nothing if you're a decent-sized company, but possibly plan-stopping if you're a single entrepreneur looking to get by.

For that, there's always an alternative option: and it's third-party themes.

Third-party themes

Shopify allows you to upload and use any theme of your choosing, as long as it complies with the platform's own guidelines.

This, combined with Shopify's popularity and expensive first-party themes, leads to a lively third-party market. Platforms such as ThemeForest or TemplateMonster offer thousands of templates you can pick from.

However, there are a few considerations you should keep in mind before choosing a third-party theme. Such themes can be poorly coded, which can later cause problems with updates or maintenance. Also, third-party themes can look pretty but lack functionality and negatively impact customer experience. Therefore, I would recommend sticking with official Shopify themes as they are more reliable.

Shopify gives you plenty of theme options: thanks to both itself and a lively Shopify community. The styles are fully optimized for selling, and it's up to you, whether you wish to go free, invest a lot of money into Shopify's own creation, or aim somewhere in between with a third-party option.

Shopify features

I'll go straight to the spoilers: Shopify is the most feature-rich eCommerce solution out in the market. These are the features offered, you can read all about them later on or just click on the ones that caught your eye the most:

• Automatic tax calculation. Shopify lets you relax and does the heavy lifting by calculating your taxes and then giving you a complete tax report.
• Shipping and payments. You can pick between 100+ payment gateways or keep everything in-house by using Shopify Payments. Additionally, Shopify works in hand with top shipping providers to give you extra options.
• Abandoned cart recovery. To boost sales and revenue, Shopify notifies you which of your customers left an item in their cart. Hit them up with a discount to push them to buy it.
• Point of sale (POS). If you have a brick-and-mortar store, the inventory gets automatically tracked in your online store. All the sales register in your Shopify system, not to mention, it's very simple to accept card payments, offer discounts, or loyalty programs.
• Dropshipping. Use your Shopify store to dropship without any hassle.
• Print on demand. Shopify has apps that automatically take your orders, print out a custom product, and send it to your customer.
• Selling digital products. Sell digital goods and services on your Shopify store – music, ebooks, audiobooks, or courses.
• App store. There are tons of helpful apps in the app store for all your eCommerce needs. But they’ll probably cost some extra bucks.
• Shopify Magic. With the help of AI, you can write product descriptions in seconds, increase your email effectiveness, and create professional product pictures.
• Email Marketing. This section covers how email campaigns on Shopify engage customers, boost conversions, and drive brand awareness.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Learn how Shopify's SEO tools optimize your website, enhance visibility, and increase organic traffic.
• Blogging. This part explains how blogging on Shopify helps establish authority, attract traffic, and support content marketing efforts.
• Analytics and Reporting. Discover how Shopify's analytics and reporting tools measure performance, track success, and improve marketing strategies.

Of course, without proof, these words are just bites of empty information on your screen, so let's have a look – is it exactly what you are looking for? Let's break down a few of Shopify's core eCommerce features and see how it works.

Automatic tax calculation

I find tax laws and regulations very complex, not to mention, they can change often. However, Shopify makes this tedious job easier – you can set up Shopify to automatically handle the most common sales tax calculations.

To do so, Shopify uses many default sales tax rates, which are updated regularly. If you end up using the default rates, you’ll need to confirm that they are current and correct for your particular circumstances.

After setting up your store address and shipping zones, it’s a piece of cake to set Shopify to calculate all your taxes automatically. You can even select whether taxes are included in your prices or if you want to apply taxes to your shipping rates.

To further help with your sales tax reporting, download both a taxes finance report and a sales finance report. It will contain all the information on order amounts, taxes, POS, billing, and shipping locations.

Payment options

Shopify has its own payment gateway — called Shopify Payments — which lets you sell in 10 major international currencies such as the US dollar, Canadian dollar, pound sterling, and Euro. It also helps your users easily checkout via all major credit cards, as well as Apple Pay and Google Pay.

It integrates smoothly with Shopify, and signing up is easy.

However, Shopify Payments isn’t available worldwide. For the US, it works perfectly fine, but for vendors from many other countries, an alternative checkout option is required. Luckily, Shopify offers a massive selection of other, third-party gateways, which you can use, as long as you pay the 0.6-2% transaction fee.

Among these options, you'll find some other popular payment gateways, such as 2Checkout, PayPal, Braintree, and Stripe.

Shipping options

Shipping can be tricky – more so when you’re just getting started or operating on a smaller scale.

And so, Shopify’s got it all covered in terms of shipping. It was pretty easy to manage rates, locations, and shipping labels all from the same platform.

Also, Shopify has partnered with various shipping companies, such as DHL and UPS, as well as the US and Canada postal offices, giving you a fair amount of shipping outlets to choose from.

And depending on the plan you choose, you’ll get discounts on your parcels – giving an additional incentive to upgrade. You can also use the shipping calculator to see how much it would cost to get a parcel to a particular address with a specific plan.

Alternatively, if you plan on using only USPS, and wish to have the most budget-friendly shipping experience possible, I suggest a simple free app called Pirate Ship, which will scour the seas for the lowest possible shipping rates.

That's arguably the most budget-conscious option out of all, so definitely check it out.

Abandoned cart recovery

You might have a product so good, users quickly add it to cart, bringing them one massive step closer to paying.

But then, 60% of people just leave their full carts empty in the middle of the store. This is where abandoned cart recovery comes to aid.

Available with Shopify email app, it’s a great way of boosting sales and squeezing out some extra revenue from your traffic. Shopify will give you a list of people who left their carts, so you can see exactly who they are and what they nearly bought. Then, you can contact them and suggest reconsidering.

Automated email software, such as MailerLite, makes this process even easier, offering plenty of email templates and handling much of the tedious conversion work for you.

Of course, I don't suggest you just go in empty: offer a discount while you're at it, and you might convert some holdouts into customers.

Point of sale (POS)

If you’ve got a brick-and-mortar business and need something more than just a website – Shopify’s POS might be just the thing for you.

You can use it to sell your products offline, i.e., in physical locations like farmer markets and pop-up shops.

The best thing: it comes fully combined with the online store.

That means the inventory gets automatically tracked, all the sales register in your Shopify system, and it's very simple to accept card payments, offer discounts, or loyalty programs.

There’s a Lite version that comes along — with no extra cost — with all Shopify plans.

Withholding a portion of your sales, it boasts a robust order and product customer management system. It's not ideal, the inventory management is relatively barebones, and there are some staff restrictions as well.

Shopify offers a Pro plan that helps solve all that. For the first month it's free, and later, it costs an additional $79 a month. Using the Pro plan, you can remove staff restrictions and expand the inventory management system to its max.

In addition to that, there is plenty of hardware to aid the physical selling experience even further.

These peripherals integrate smoothly with Shopify’s POS, and you can buy them in bundles or one-off.

Overall, it's a very solid hybrid selling experience. If you actively sell both in-person, and online, Shopify POS is a solution that combines both, and reduces headaches to a minimum.

Dropshipping

Dropshipping is a popular way of selling online where orders are processed and fulfilled by a third party — like AliExpress, Spocket, Amazon, or Etsy — in place of the store owner.

In there, you simply act as an intermediary, who sells the product to the customer, and keeps a portion of the profit.

And for me, Shopify is the best platform for it. Namely, because of several great platforms that work together with Shopify to help smaller businesses do sales without keeping a massive inventory.

In fact, one of the platforms was recently acquired by Shopify – and to me, it's the best Shopify dropshipping option out there. It's called DSers.

This platform focuses mostly on AliExpress, so if that's the source of your choice, that's the one to pick.

And there's a free plan available for all Shopify users as well. It's restrictive, but still rather solid, with a product limit of 3000.

The two premium plans cost $19.90/month and $49.90/month respectively, and both offer 14-day free trials. DSers give you the bulk orders feature, shipment tracking, and multiple staff accounts.

Print on demand

If you're a designer or an aspiring lifestyle brand, this means that you have a lot of great visuals that you want to sell as complete, finished products such as posters, shirts, or hoodies.

Printify is a print-on-demand service that will automatically take your orders, print out a custom product, and send it to your customer. You don't have to do anything, except choose your printing partner, add the designs, select the products, and set the prices for a solid profit margin. Printify has a free option that's perfectly capable of handling most small business needs: but if you sell more, the $29/month plan will help you save more on the products, making it pretty good value.

Selling digital products

Shopify also makes it possible to sell digital goods/services via your online store: think things like music, ebooks, audiobooks, or courses.

And while there’s no baked-in feature for that, Shopify has a first-party Digital Downloads app allowing anyone to sell digital products via its store.

Keep in mind, Shopify’s default recommendation isn't the best-ranked app out there – with 2.6 stars out of 5, it's average at best. The disappointed users report that sometimes their customers do not receive the files they paid for. But there are also plenty of other plugins that are rated much better and appear to work as advertised – such as Easy Digital Products.

There is a free plan, too, but it will limit you to just 3 products and 100MB of storage. If that's not enough, you can always upgrade to a bigger plan. At a cost, of course.

Shopify app store

You might’ve already noticed – if Shopify can’t do something on its own, there’s for sure going to be a paid or free app for it.

Indeed – during this Shopify review, I found a wide range of useful eCommerce apps available on its app store. Some were built by Shopify itself. Then, third-party developers try to fill in the gaps and do some things better than the platform itself ever could.

Put these together, and you get probably the best eCommerce app store out there.

Separated in categories (marketing, productivity, places to sell, and store design), and in collections (for just starting out, for selling in-person, and for scaling), there are apps for nearly anything.

Shopify literally has nearly 150 apps just for different ways of setting up live chat on your store. Sadly, the app market is so big, it has both advantages and disadvantages.

While you might be tempted to download every high-rated app there is, remember that a lot of them will cost extra. Make sure to keep your expenses on track.

Similar to point of sale, dropshipping, digital downloads, and print-on-demand apps I mentioned earlier in this Shopify review, many apps will offer either a limited free plan or a free trial.

However, to make the best out of them, you have to pay.

Let's have a look at a few other great options and see just how much they would cost.

If you don't want to use Shopify's automatic tax calculation, TaxJar will prepare and file tax return information in minutes, as well as do automated tax reports, and handle your returns. If you're not a spreadsheet type of person, this can be a lifesaver, keeping track of all your expenses and taxes.

It's free for the first 30 days, and costs $19/month after that.

Bundler – Product Bundles will let you easily make product bundles, and offer combined discounts. It's free for the first 7 days, and costs from $8.99/month after.

Vify Order Printer PDF Invoice app allows your users to automatically receive and manually request custom invoices, complete with your branding.

It has a free plan, while all of the paid plans are available with a 14-day free trial.

If you want to know more, Cybernews team combined an entire best Shopify apps list – feel free to snoop around.

Overall, Shopify is a king of eCommerce features. I've only scratched the surface here – with an extensive in-house platform, and a lively community of developers, this is a one-stop shop for all things selling.

Sadly, the community has its own bills to pay. And so, prepare to pay extra for some of those amazing features.

Shopify Magic

Recently Shopify has introduced its AI feature Shopify Magic designed for commerce. While it’s not very extensive it can help optimize such simple tasks as generating headings, product descriptions, and helps to make professional product images by transforming product image backgrounds. It can definitely save you some time.

Email marketing

Shopify comes with an in-house solution for email marketing, allowing you to contact and entice your leads with custom emails.

As per usual, there are some third-party options you can choose, if the built-in app does not please you.

For example, there's Klaviyo, a freemium plugin that’s specially created to aid email marketing efforts.

Boasting quite a few pre-built templates, Klaviyo provides precise targeting, in-depth analytics, and better audience segmentation – granting greater freedom as well as results compared to Shopify’s native email marketing solution.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

SEO — or search engine optimization — is the process of maximizing a store's chances of ranking on the top of Google’s search results. Which is where you want to be if you're looking to sell.

You won't be given total freedom to do anything, but there are still tools for adding titles and meta descriptions to all pages of your store.

And there's even a little search engine result preview.

A few years ago, Shopify announced a long-awaited possibility for site-owners to edit robot.txt files. Using this feature, you can direct crawl-bots away from the site areas you don’t want to be crawled and save crawling budget. Also, by utilizing robots.txt rules, you can prevent duplicate content issues.

Besides that, there's the possibility to add extra sitemap URLs as well as do some changes in terms of crawlers. For example, you can block certain crawlers, add crawl-delay rules and even allow or disallow certain URLs from being crawled.

If these changes aren’t enough for you and you’re serious about your URL structure and wish to have everything set up in your very own, special, optimized way there's an app for that too.

Booster and SEO Image Optimizer is an option many people pick to save themselves from various SEO-related troubles.

Sadly, it's also a premium pick. The free version, however, will still give you an SEO audit, and help to optimize images, so they're completely SEO-friendly.

The paid plan costs nearly $39.00 a month, and offers full SEO and meta tag optimization. It also fixes broken links, and helps you get into Google's snippet results.

Blogging

Blogs can be a great marketing medium for online stores. You can use blogs to increase your overall traffic by educating potential buyers, and solidify your brand’s social presence as a result.

To help you do that, Shopify provides a built-in blogging solution with all its plans. It allows you to adjoin a blog to your store, create/manage posts, and perform basic optimization.

I've covered these tools earlier, but I'll just repeat what I said before: blogging on Shopify isn't all that. The editing options are limited, and even the whole interface is a little bit behind the times.

Now, to be fair, I’m not asking Shopify to emulate something like WordPress – a complete blogging-centered platform. Shopify is not a blogging platform, after all.

Don’t worry, as you can probably guess already – third-party apps will solve this issue for you.

the DropInBlog app is the perfect option for this specific scenario.

You click once, and DropInBlog gets installed onto your store. It automatically picks up your store’s colors, fonts, layout, and some basic formatting. So you don't spend hours in front of a PC to match your store’s and blog’s look. The entire editor is very SEO-focused, and keeps offering a lot of tips and tricks on how to improve the content for search engines.

Plus, you can embed products in a post – something you can’t do with Shopify’s native blogging solution.

Even though there's a 7-day free trial available, with the two premium plans costing $49.00/month and $99.00/month, respectively, it's definitely on the more expensive side.

That being said, it's not the only blog-related Shopify app out there, as there are over 40 such options available. You might just find something that suits you or your wallet better.

Analytics and reporting

Understanding your clients via analytics is a crucial aspect of running any kind of successful business. And unsurprisingly, this is where Shopify shines.

It has an in-depth analytics dashboard. I'm talking about in-depth eCommerce analytics, with such metrics as conversion, return rate, and sales from specific sources.

These can come real handy as you scale and optimize your store.

For example, if I see a product getting tons of clicks – I can promote it using paid ads or place it at the top of my product pile. Increasing my sales as a result.

Sadly, not all plans have the same level of analytics. The $29.00/month Shopify Plan won't give you advanced sales, profit, and customer reports. For that, you'll need to upgrade to the $105.00/month regular Shopify plan or higher.

However, everyone gets an opportunity to integrate the website with Google Analytics. It's a powerful, free solution that collects a lot of data. For some, it may even render in-house Shopify analytics useless.

Or rather, it would, if it had your sales figures. For that, you might want to check out some third-party options (of course). Currently, my favorite advanced report builder is Report Pundit.

It works even on the cheapest Shopify plan.

There are over 80 pre-built reports and dashboards available, and you can even contact the team live on chat to solve any of the issues that might appear.

There's a free plan, but if you want, of course, it's paid with a starting price of $9.00/month. But that's a smaller fee than moving from Shopify Basic to regular Shopify. And if analytics is your only draw to that, this might be a great solution.

So weigh out your options — Shopify’s native analytics, Google Analytics, or a third-party app — and pick the most suitable one.

Shopify customer service

Shopify provides reliable customer support, which you can contact via chat. I tested out their promptness by asking a question regarding the types of databases Shopify supports. First interaction with customer support is done via chat asking your question to a chat bot.

I was connected to a live agent after I made such a request, for which I had to queue for 4 minutes. After that I had to wait 3 minutes more to receive an answer from the agent. Based on this experience I would say that Shopify’s customer support hasn’t impressed me. In total I had to wait for 7 minutes to receive an answer to my question. Also, there’s no direct way to contact a live agent, as first contact is made with the chat bot, slightly prolonging the time of getting solutions.

Nevertheless, after I successfully made it through the agent and received the answer to my question. The reply was on-point and concise.

But that's only one of the options available on the Shopify Help Center. For less pressing matters, you can browse Shopify Help Center’s library.

Alternatives to Shopify

Each business is unique, and so are its needs. And by now, you might not be considering Shopify for your online business. Maybe it's the prices of the platform, plus the additional themes and plugins. Or maybe you want something with a different approach at site customization.

Regardless, here are some top Shopify alternatives:

Wix

Wix is perhaps the best general-purpose builder out there. It's less eCommerce-focused than Shopify, but its versatility still makes it a pretty good place to build an online store (read more in our Wix vs Shopify comparison).

Rivaling Shopify’s app store, Wix hosts a varied app marketplace as well. Plus, there’s an extensive template library with over 700, entirely free picks. And you can use one of their robust editors — called ADI and Classic Editor — to make these templates your own.

eCommerce-powered plans start at $10.50 a month, and while they're less powerful than Shopify's, they're also much friendlier to your wallet.

Visit Wix

Squarespace

Squarespace is a small business owner’s dream – as it combines analytics, eCommerce, and blogging tools in one multi-purpose website builder. See how it stands up to Shopify in our Shopify vs Squarespace comparison.

Visually, the templates offered by Squarespace are minimalist, yet genuinely quite stunning. Some of them, just like Shopify's, are also focused entirely on selling your products.

It's a simple business solution, suited for the entrepreneur who wants to do it all. eCommerce plans start at a low $16.00 a month.

Visit Squarespace

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Shopify’s price puts you off?

Try Web.com – perhaps the cheapest all-in-one website builder for all kinds of purposes. A user-friendly website builder, coupled with hosting services and an in-house design team, Web.com prices start at just $1.95/month.

Sure, there aren’t many sales and marketing features as on Shopify, but for simple, budget-conscious selling, this is the way to go.

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Shopify review: final verdict

In Shopify, everything's all about eCommerce and it does the basics incredibly well. It's not perfect, and there are issues, namely related to requiring many plugins that can immensely increase the prices. However, with third-party apps, that offer free plans, this can be taken under control. With the right apps, and the right template, Shopify is going to be your perfect business tool.

Note, however, that Shopify is not a platform for careful pixel-perfect designing or heavy blogging. Instead, it is a platform for helping you make the best out of your online business.

All in all, if you think that advanced business tools and supreme simplicity are worth the bigger price, Shopify is certainly the way to go.

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