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Hostgator Review
Reviewed by: Jerry Low
Hostgator Inc. was founded by Brent Oxley in his college dorm back in 2002. The company grew from a one-man operation to one with hundreds of employees over the years; and was ranked 21st (year 2008) and 239th (year 2009) in Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Company.
In 2012, Brent sold the company was sold to Endurance International Group (EIG) for, unofficial figure, $225 million.
EIG, which also owns a number of other well-known hosting brands, including BlueHost, iPage, FatCow, HostMonster, Pow Web, Easy CGI, Arvixe, eHost, A Small Orange, and so on; is now the largest website hosting company.
About my 10 years experience with Hostgator
As a long time Hostgator user, I have witnessed the up and down of the company. This site was once hosted on Hostgator before I moved to cloud-based hosting WP Engine in 2011 and to InMotion Hosting two years later.
My 10 years billing history with Hostgator. Can I get a free company T-shirt at least? :)
This Hostgator review was first published in 2008. That’s 9 years ago – before Brent sold his company to Endurance International Group (EIG). Before EIG, Facebook, and Twitter are listed on NASDAQ. And way before Hostgator launched their new site design and reinvented themselves as a cloud hosting provider.
Testing Hostgator new Cloud Hosting
Obviously, a new review needs to be done.
And that’s what I’ve been working on since March 2017.
I have signed up a new Hostgator cloud hosting plan few weeks ago and currently holding two account with the Gator – one on the old Baby Gator plan and one on Hatchling Cloud Plan.
Multiple test sites are hosted on these accounts. I am tracking these sites’ uptime and load speed using third party applications.
This review summaries my decade of experience and findings with Hostgator.
Hostgator Shared Hosting Plans
Hostgator offers a wide range of different hosting services: Shared, Cloud, VPS, and Dedicated. We will focus on their shared and cloud hosting plans in this review.
There are three different shared hosting plans: Hatchling, Baby, and Business, to fit different webmasters’ needs.
Both Hatchling and Baby Plan comes with the same basic ‘unlimited hosting’ features, except that on Hatchling, you can only have one domain hosted and are unable to purchase a dedicated IP and private SSL. For Business Plan, you get a lot more extra features on top of what you can get on Baby, including free private SSL, dedicated IP, as well as tollfree business number with 100 minutes of free talk time.
Features
Hatchling
Baby
Business
Domain
1
Unlimited
Unlimited
Bandwidth
Unmetered
Unmetered
Unmetered
MySQL Database
Unlimited
Unlimited
Unlimited
Private SSL & IP

Free VoIP Phone

$100 Google Adwords offer

Signup Price (24-mo)*
$4.95/mo
$6.95/mo
$6.95/mo
Trial Period
45 days
45 days
45 days
* The price tags displayed at official shared hosting page (Hostgator.com/web-hosting) is based on 36-month subscription. I reckon that some of you might want to go with a shorter subscription period, hence the 24-month price in this table.
Hostgator Cloud Hosting Plans
Hostgator cloud hosting plans promise 2x faster server load time and 4x scalability (without any downtime and data migrations). Like their shared hosting, Hostgator Cloud Hosting comes in three different plans – Hatchling Cloud, Baby Cloud, and Business Cloud.
Features
Hatchling Cloud
Baby Cloud
Business Cloud
Domain
1
Unlimited
Unlimited
Bandwidth
Unmetered
Unmetered
Unmetered
CPU Capacity
2 Cores
4 Cores
6 Cores
Memory Capacity
2 GB
4 GB
6 GB
Dedicated IP

PRivate SSL

Signup Price (24-mo)*
$6.95/mo
$8.95/mo
$10.95/mo
Trial Period
45 days
45 days
45 days
* The price tags displayed at official shared hosting page (Hostgator.com/cloud-hosting) is based on 36-month subscription. I reckon that some of you might want to go with a shorter subscription period, hence the 24-month price in this table.
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What I Like About Hostgator Hosting
#1 reason why I like Hostgator: 100% uptime servers
Server uptime is the one thing that I stress a lot in my hosting reviews. Fancy additional features are meaningless if a site does not stay online.
And this leads us to the #1 reason why I like Hostgator so much: Server uptime.
FYI, Hostgator 99.9% uptime guarantee is backed by printed in the company’s ToS (clause 15).
If your shared or reseller server has a physical downtime that falls short of the 99.9% uptime guarantee, you may receive one (1) month of credit on your account. This uptime guarantee does not apply to planned maintenance. Approval of any credit is at the sole discretion of HostGator and may be dependent upon the justification provided. Third party monitoring service reports may not be used for justification due to a variety of factors including the monitor’s network capacity/transit availability. The uptime of the server is defined as the reported uptime from the operating system and the Apache Web Server which may differ from the uptime reported by other individual services. To request a credit, please visit http://support.hostgator.com to create a support ticket to our Billing department with justification.
Both Hostgator hosting plans I am on show outstanding results. Test sites hosted on both Hostgator Shared and Cloud hosting are tracked using Uptime Robot. The following images are previous uptime scores.
Hostgator Shared Hosting Uptime (March/April 2017): 100%
This test site hosted on Hostgator Shared Hosting has not gone down since November 2016.
Hostgator Cloud Hosting Uptime (March/April 2017): 100%
Test site hosted on Hostgator Cloud Hosting – 100%
Jun/Jul 2016: 100%
Hostgator uptime for June / July 2016 = 100%. Test site hosted on Hostgator has not gone down for the past 30 days.
Mar 2016: 100%
Another 100% uptime month for test site hosted at Hostgator.
Jan/Feb 2016: 100%
Hostgator uptime (Jan 24th – Feb 23, 2016). No downtime was recorded in 2016 so far.
Jan/Feb 2015 Uptime: 100%
Hostgator uptime (Jan 10th – Feb 11th, 2015) – test site hosted on Hostgator has been staying up for more than 780 hours.
May/Jun 2014 Uptime: 99.91%
Hostgator uptime scores for Past 30 days (May – June 2014) – 99.91% for the past 30 days
Sep/Oct 2013 Uptime: 99.97%
Hostgator Uptime for September – October, 2013 – 99.97% for the past 30 days.

Pro #2: Hostgator hosting loads extremely fast
I also test Hostgator server speed and stack the results against other web hosts using a tool named Bitcatcha. Here are the speed test results I got for different test sites hosted on Hostgator.
Speed test result for site #1, April 2017 – Test site scored an impressive “A” on first test. Most other web hosts in this price range do not score above A- in Bitcatcha speed test. This result (and the few that I am going to show you below) convince me that Hostgator is back to the top of their game.
Speed test result for test site #2: A!
Speed test result for test site #3: A! (For the record, the speed test score for this site was C+ in first run; the image shown above is the result for second run.)
Pro #3: Hostgator = Most popular hosting brand among bloggers based on WHSR Hosting Survey 2015 & 2016
In 2015, I spoke to a group of ~50 bloggers and asked for their comment about their web host. There were 43 votes and 21 hosting brands mentioned in the survey. Hostgator was the most mentioned names in the survey.
The same thing happened in 2016. The survey size was 4x larger and there were ~200 respondents. Out of the ~200 responses I got, 30 of them are hosting their primary site at Hostgator.
WHSR 2015 Hosting Survey – 7 out of 41 votes casted go to Hostgator hosting. More details: WHSR Web Hosting Survey 2015.
Numbers of web hosting brands mentioned in the survey. 30 out of 188 respondents are hosting their primary site at Hostgator. More details: WHSR Web Hosting Survey 2016
And guess what? Hostgator users are generally happy
After two major server outage in 2013 and 2014, I did not expect so many bloggers to stick with Hostgator hosting. Some survey respondents I spoke to complained about the long wait time at live chat but generally most of them are happy with their host.
For your reference, here are the feedbacks I collected via emails.
Reviewed by: Jerry Low

https://youtu.be/9HuCTWTNHME

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HostGator Review
OVERALL RATING
4.5 / 5.0
★★★★★
Features
4.6 / 5.0
Ease of Use
4.4 / 5.0
Pricing
4.3 / 5.0
Reliability & Support
5.0 / 5.0
Discount for Our Users
Ryan Frankel (HostingAdvice.com):
“HostGator has been around for over a decade and is well-respected for their large number of servers and their consistent reliability. Known mostly as a shared hosting provider, HostGator still supplies decent dedicated and VPS options if you need your site to scale.
HostGator costs a little more than some of the other budget-minded shared hosts, but that contributes to their reliability and well-known support. They offer decent features included in their basic offerings, unlimited disk space, a nice control panel, and free website templates. While the feature list is short compared to other hosts, you do get the flexibility to add them as you see fit.
Aimed primarily at the semi-technical user, HostGator's flexibility is their strong suit. Dedicated, VPS, and Windows hosting is available if that fits your needs. For those than need it, root access, SSH, and support for Ruby, Perl, Python, and other languages is available on all plans.
HostGator has nearly limitless options and control available for their server, however, they require a little more knowledge than beginner-focused web hosts. If you need to host multiple sites, their wide array of offerings make them a great choice.”
Easy-to-use control panel
FREE Weebly site builder
Unlimited disk space, emails, and bandwidth on all plans
No contract required and 45-day money-back guarantee
50% off your first month, plus domains starting at $5!
Get started on HostGator now.
Money Back Guarantee
45 days
Disk Space
Unlimited
Domain Name
New or Transfer
Hosting Plans
www.hostgator.com
Features (4.6 / 5.0)
An Array of Hosting Options
HostGator offers shared, dedicated, and VPS hosting, as well as domain registration and reselling options.
The crux of HostGator's services is their shared server hosting; this is what they're known for excelling at in the industry. While focusing on the shared server segment of the market, HostGator has mastered what it takes to create a great customer experience, knowing the needs of the shared server client very well.
HostGator's understanding of the shared hosting user makes the team the ideal guide to lead customers into the virtual and dedicated server world as they outgrow the shared space over time.
Great Support and Guarantee
A 45-day money-back guarantee allows you ample time to try out HostGator and make sure that their hosting can serve your needs.
A 99.9% uptime guarantee is pretty standard for the web hosting industry and will cover most people's needs. If you need a higher uptime rate, you can find it, but it will cost you.
24/7/365 support is available via phone, chat, ticket system, and an online knowledge base.
Lots of Freebies
There are a lot of freebies that HostGator throws in with each hosting plan, including: unlimited disk and bandwidth, a free website builder and website building tools, over 4,000 website templates, free domain transfers, and unlimited mySQL databases.
Additionally, new site owners can call attention to their web property utilizing the $100-worth of Google Adwords credits, courtesy of the HostGator team.
In addition, there are 1-click installs available for all of the major open-source projects, such as WordPress, Joomla, and Magento.
Control Panels Galore
HostGator uses the latest cPanel software to power their administration consoles. You can get rolling quickly, including tasks like organizing and launching eCommerce shopping carts.
Using their backend panel, you can gather stats and logs using AWStats, Webalizer, Raw Log Manager, and Error Logs.
A web-based file manager will help you keep your server clean and free of junk.
Ease of Use (4.4 / 5.0)
The HostGator Homepage
Strightforward Control Panel
Files, Logs, and Security Panels
With a quick provisioning system and clear icons, it is easy to get going with HostGator. I found the experience to be straightforward, and when I had questions, I could easily start a live chat to get them answered quickly.
Pricing (4.3 / 5.0)
"Hatchling" Plan
$3.48/month »
"Baby" Plan
$4.98/month »
"Business" Plan
$5.95/month »
HostGator's pricing is in the middle of the road when it comes to shared and VPS hosting. Good customer service and live chats cost money, and most good beginner web hosts fall in this range. Save some money at checkout by using a HostGator coupon from a site like DealCrunch.com.
Reliability & Support (5.0 / 5.0)
With a 99.9% uptime guarantee HostGator performs admirably when it comes to reliability. This level of service is the industry standard and while there are hosts with a higher uptime rate, they also have a higher cost. HostGator has been in the industry for a long time, so you can feel safely assured that they are not a scam and will be around for the long term.
HostGator Includes Extensive Online Knowledge Base for Common Hosting Issues and 24/7/365 Live Support via Email, Phone, and Chat
Other Hosts vs. HostGator
Wondering how HostGator stacks up againt other web hosting services? See our host-vs-host reviews below and compare them side by side.
HostGator vs HostPapa
HostPapa and HostGator — two similarly sounding hosting providers offer very different hosting experiences. The first, HostPapa...
see full comparison »
Overall Rating
★★★★★ 4.5/5.0
Overall Rating
★★★★★ 4.7/5.0
HostGator vs SiteGround
SiteGround and HostGator both emerged in the early 2000s. They are longtime members of the hosting community...
see full comparison »
Overall Rating
★★★★★ 4.5/5.0
Overall Rating
★★★★★ 5.0/5.0
HostGator vs WPEngine
The question here is simple: Do you plan on using the extremely popular WordPress to customize your...
see full comparison »
Overall Rating
★★★★★ 4.5/5.0
Overall Rating
★★★★★ 4.5/5.0
HostGator vs Wix
Comparing Wix and HostGator — two very respected and high-value hosting providers — is like seeking medical...
see full comparison »
Overall Rating
★★★★★ 4.5/5.0
Overall Rating
★★★★★ 4.6/5.0
HostGator vs Media Temple
Server power meets service prowess — Media Temple and HostGator are two top dogs in the hosting...
see full comparison »
Overall Rating
★★★★★ 4.5/5.0
Overall Rating
★★★★★ 4.8/5.0
HostGator vs JustHost
Solid entry-level hosts, JustHost and HostGator are good options focused on helping rookie website owners get online...
see full comparison »
Overall Rating
★★★★★ 4.5/5.0
Overall Rating
★★★★★ 3.7/5.0
HostGator vs. GoDaddy
While both HostGator and GoDaddy offer shared, VPS, and dedicated hosting, these two web hosts are uniquely...
see full comparison »
Overall Rating
★★★★★ 4.5/5.0
Overall Rating
★★★★★ 4.7/5.0
HostGator vs. FatCow
If you’re looking for a host to help you grow your business or online presence, look no...
see full comparison »
Overall Rating
★★★★★ 4.5/5.0
Overall Rating
★★★★★ 4.6/5.0
HostGator vs iPage
Easily among our favorite hosts, iPage and HostGator excel at providing feature-rich hosting plans for affordable prices....
see full comparison »
Overall Rating
★★★★★ 4.5/5.0
Overall Rating
★★★★★ 4.9/5.0
HostGator vs InMotion
If you’re looking for a web host to help you grow your personal brand or professional business,...
see full comparison »
Overall Rating
★★★★★ 4.5/5.0
Overall Rating
★★★★★ 4.9/5.0
HostGator vs eHost
We’ve long regarded eHost and HostGator among the best when it comes to feature-rich and affordable web...
see full comparison »
Overall Rating
★★★★★ 4.5/5.0
Overall Rating
★★★★★ 5.0/5.0
HostGator vs A2 Hosting
Touting a consistent reputation for reliability and a boatload of servers, HostGator is one of the largest...
see full comparison »
Overall Rating
★★★★★ 4.5/5.0
Overall Rating
★★★★★ 4.9/5.0
HostGator vs 1&1
As HostGator and 1&1 duke it out from across the pond, they reveal all the wonderful world...
see full comparison »
Overall Rating
★★★★★ 4.5/5.0
Overall Rating
★★★★★ 4.9/5.0
HostGator vs A Small Orange
For homegrown hosting or a host you can grow with, you needn’t look beyond A Small Orange...
see full comparison »
Overall Rating
★★★★★ 4.5/5.0
Overall Rating
★★★★★ 4.8/5.0
HostGator vs Bluehost
Both Bluehost and HostGator are longtime players in the shared hosting arena; however, they offer virtual and...
see full comparison »
Overall Rating
★★★★★ 4.5/5.0
Overall Rating
★★★★★ 4.9/5.0
HostGator is the winner
2 out of 15 times.
The Rundown
Ryan Frankel
Hosting Expert:
To recap, here's a rundown of what HostGator has to offer
HostGator is targeted toward beginners or those that are looking to host simple websites. They offer nice VPS and dedicated options to folks whose websites grow outgrow shared servers. Plus, HostGator's been around for over a decade and they have solid customer support available.
Ryan Frankel (HostingAdvice.com)

https://youtu.be/wP5tJid8TNY

Try HostGator Now
HostGator Web Hosting
By
Jeffrey L. Wilson
Pros
A variety of featured-packed hosting plans. Useful site-building software. Good customer service. Great uptime.
Cons
No Windows-based VPS hosting. No one-step WordPress import. Email lacks extra security.
Bottom Line
HostGator is a reliable Web hosting service that's simple to use and offers an array of useful plans for consumers and small businesses. It's our top pick for novice webmasters.
Every business needs a website, and for that you need a Web hosting service. It doesn't matter if it's a fully functioning e-commerce setup or a simple page with little more than your contact information. The feature-packed HostGator boasts wallet-friendly prices, and it offers plenty of tools to Webmasters. HostGator has quality dedicated and virtual private server (VPS) server packages, but its shared plans are one of the reasons why the company stands out from the very crowded Web hosting pack. In fact, HostGator's shared packages are so robust that PCMag named the Web host our top pick in that subcategory. The service is also very easy to use, so we've crowned it our Editors' Choice for novice webmasters.
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Shared Web Hosting Packages
HostGator offers month-to-month shared hosting plans, but pushes hard for you to sign up for longer terms, starting at six months. I don't like that during the signup process HostGator defaults to a three-year term. It's one thing to encourage users to skip month-to-month service, but pushing them into three years from the start is a bit much.
That said, HostGator offers Linux- or Windows-based based shared hosting packages that give small- and medium-sized businesses room to grow. The Hatchling plan (starting at $10.95 per month) offers unlimited disk space, bandwidth, databases, and email addresses, plus support for one domain and third-party applications such as content management systems and e-commerce platforms. The Baby plan (starting at $11.95 per month) builds on the Hatchling offering by adding unlimited domains. The top-tier Business plan (starting at $16.95 per month) includes highly specialized options, such as a free toll-free phone number and a private SSL (secure socket layer) certificate.
Arvixe matches HostGator closely in the shared hosting game, but HostGator offers slightly more bang for the buck with the inclusion of a private SSL certificate and free toll-free number.

Virtual Private Server Packages
HostGator offers Linux-based VPS hosting starting at $19.95 per month. If you need more power, expect high traffic volumes, or have specific compliance requirements that prevent you from using shared servers (but you don't want to pay dedicated server prices), these are good options to consider.
The most basic VPS plan, Snappy 2000, offers 2GB of RAM, 120GB of disk space, and 1.5TB of monthly data transfers starting at $79.95 per month (or as low as $19.95 per month with a three-year commitment). The mid-tier Snappy 4000 package, starting at $119.95 per month (or as cheap as $29.95 per month with a three-year plan), boasts 4GB of RAM, 165GB of storage, and 2TB of monthly data transfers. The most advanced plan, Snappy 8000, offers 8GB of RAM, 240GB of disk space, and 3TB of monthly data starting. It costs $149.95 per month, or $39.95 per month if you sign up for 36 months. The plans are much more flexible than what's offered by Network Solutions$2.99 at Network Solutions, but not quite as well rounded as Hostwinds$4.50 at Hostwinds - Shared, our top choice for VPS hosting.
Hostwinds has wallet-friendly, well-rounded VPS offerings that start at $7.50 per month for 1GB of RAM, 25GB of disk space, unlimited monthly data transfers, unlimited email, and half a CPU core, and scale to $172 per month for 28.5GB of RAM, 600GB of disk space, unlimited monthly data transfers, unlimited email, and eight CPU cores. Hostwinds's VPS plans also have a Windows operating system option, which is something that HostGator doesn't offer.
Dedicated Server Hosting
HostGator's dedicated server packages start at $174 per month, and they offer a fine set of features. HostGator users can customize their servers with up to 1TB of storage, 16GB of RAM, and an impressive 25TB of monthly data transfers, which bests the bandwidth offerings from Arvixe (10TB), GoDaddy$1.00 at GoDaddy - Shared (20TB), and many other Web hosts. Dreamhost$4.95 at DreamHost - Shared, on the other hand, is a rare Web host that offers dedicated servers with unlimited data transfers per month.
HostGator's dedicated servers come in both Linux and Windows flavors, which isn't as commonplace as you might think; Linux tends to dominate the field. In fact, HostGator is one of the few Web hosts we've tested that scored well and offers both operating systems. Even Dreamhost, one of our favorite hosting services, lacks Windows-based dedicated servers.
That said, Arvixe is the category's Editors' Choice. The company's excellent dedicated servers start at $108 per month for a cloud-based server, or $128 per month for a traditional server. Arvixe's options are more wallet-friendly than Media Temple's$20.00 at Media Temple - Shared dedicated servers, which start at a pricey $2,000 per month.
Arvixe lets you configure its Linux- or Windows-based cloud servers with up to 8GB of RAM, 300GB of storage, and unlimited monthly data transfers. The traditional servers can be outfitted with up to 32GB of RAM, 1TB of storage, and unlimited monthly data transfers.
Setting Up a HostGator Hosted Site
It's a good thing HostGator sends a getting-started email with links to all the resources you'll need to create a website because the interface takes a little getting used to. HostGator has a Billing Login link at the top of its site that leads to the customer portal, where all the payment information, details about your plan, and options to purchase add-ons are listed. This page has tabs across the top for account and domain management. The Hosting tab is where you see the actual control panel with site-building tools, applications, website statistics, and more. The introductory email also has a direct link for the control panel, but it looks different from what you'd get through the Hosting tab, making the experience a bit confusing at first.
HostGator has several options for building a website, including HostGator's own website builder. The drag-and-drop functionality let me quickly build an attractive page complete with slideshows, contact forms, social media links, and more in no time. You can also install WordPress or other CMS platforms such as Drupal, b2evolutions, Joomla, Mambo, and Tiki, to name a few. A File Manager tool lets you manually upload files to the server to create the website that way. The tool is better than a basic FTP client because you can edit the files directly or use a built-in HTML editor.

WordPress Hosting
HostGator lets you install the WordPress content management system (CMS) onto any of its aforementioned servers, but the Web host also offers three tiers of managed WordPress Web hosting: Starter, Standard, and Business.
Starter (starting at $14.95 per month) offers 25,000 visits per month, the ability to host just one WordPress site, 50GB of storage, and unlimited email. Standard (starting at $20.95) ups things to two WordPress sites, 200,000 monthly visits, and 150GB of disk space. Business (starting at $27.95 per month) grants three WordPress sites, 300,000 monthly visits, and unlimited storage. All plans come with page caching and an optimized WordPress hosting environment.
That said, 1&1$0.99 at 1&1 - Shared, our Editors' Choice for WordPress hosting, tops HostGator and the competition by offering unlimited storage, domains, visitors, and email with its high-end Unlimited plan ($14.99 per month). You also get automatic malware detection and removal.
WordPress is easy to set up on HostGator even if you don't go the managed WordPress route. The customer portal has an option called Quick Links that opens a dedicated interface for installing third-party applications. There's also a handy shortcut called Get Started With WordPress Today that leads to the Quick Links interface. I set the path to my blog's installation, entered the username for the WordPress administrator account, and clicked on the install button. As easy as that, my site was up and running. HostGator also automatically installed the WP-Super-Cache WordPress plug-in to help improve blog performance.
In testing, the process of setting up my WordPress site was easy, because the database was already there. There was also a link to the Mojo Marketplace under WordPress services with premium add-ons and services for my blog. HostGator lacks a blog import button, but WordPress makes the import process easy enough.
Flexible Email Hosting
What's the point of a Web presence if the visitor to your site can't contact you? Like Arvixe, HostGator provides an unlimited number of email accounts right from the start. Setting up an email account is simple. You create accounts one at a time, which is unfortunate; Network Solutions lets you make several at once. I did like the fact that HostGator let you set mailbox quotas. There's also a built-in password strength meter, which is important.
I was disappointed that HostGator lacks built-in antivirus or antispam features; Network Solutions and HostMonster$6.95 at HostMonster - Shared include those safety measures.
E-Commerce Tools on Hand
As mentioned, HostGator offers Mojo Marketplace, which has email-marketing tools such as DaDa Mail (starting at $34.95 per year), software that lets you send email newsletters to a subscribers list. Quick Links also has e-commerce packages, including Magento, phpCOIN, SugarCRM, and ZenCart. I installed Magento, which provides a drag-and-drop interface to create an attractive online store. There are tons of design options, which can get a little overwhelming.
Excellent Uptime Results
Website uptime is one of the most important aspects of a hosting service. If your site is down, clients or customers will be unable to find you or access your products or services.
For uptime testing, I used a website monitoring tool to track our HostGator-hosted test site's uptime over thirty days. Every 15 minutes, the tool pings my website and sends me an email if it is unable to contact the site for at least one minute. The testing data reveals that HostGator is remarkably stable, so you don't have to worry about your site going down for extended periods of time.
Quality Customer Service
Like HostMonster, HostGator offers both 24/7 telephone support and an online Web chat—I tested both help methods.
I dialed up phone tech support on a weekday morning to ask how I could import my WordPress.com blog into my HostGator site. I received detailed instructions via email and was quite satisfied.
I tested HostGator's online Web chat, too. After typing my question into a form and starting the chat, I was shown my estimated wait time: one minute. Less than a minute later, a customer service rep appeared and provided easy-to-understand instructions on how to import the blog.
HostGator also has a very deep knowledge base and it contains answers to practically every possible question you could have, ranging from basic to very advanced. Overall, HostGator provides excellent customer support.

Money-Back Guarantee
HostGator does better than most of its competitors here, offering a 45-day guarantee, but Dreamhost, our top pick for advanced users, is even more generous, with an impressive 97-day guarantee.
Dedicated to Hosting
HostGator is an excellent Web host that makes setting up a site or WordPress blog a breeze. You don't get one-click installs or imports, but its Quick Link interface is mostly straightforward and much more robust than most of the options out there. HostGator's generous hosting offerings are enough to win the PCMag Editors' Choice designation in the shared Web hosting subcategory, and it's the overall top pick for Web hosting novices, too. If you're an experienced webmaster, however, consider our Editors' Choice for expert hosting, DreamHost.
By
Jeffrey L. Wilson

https://youtu.be/7Ib6nrd14LY

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Web Hosting Awards and Reviews
The votes are in and the critics have spoken, awarding HostGator as the top pick for web hosting across the board. Whether it's our Shared, Dedicated, Reseller, or Managed WordPress web hosting plans, HostGator raises the bar in the world of web hosting. Our speed, reliability, and support are unparalleled in this industry. Below are just a handful of reviews from our affiliates/industry experts.*
Best Host To Grow With!
2016 Best Web Hosting
HostingAdvice.com announced HostGator.com as its 2016 Best Host to Grow With. HostGator web hosting received a reliability rating of 5 stars out of 5, based on our large number of servers and consistent response time.
Editor's Choice
Best Web Hosting of 2016
Best Dedicated Web Hosting of 2016
Best Managed WordPress Web Hosting of 2016
Best Shared Web Hosting of 2016
In 2016, PC Magazine honored HostGator with multiple Editor's Choice awards for our overall web, Shared, Dedicated Server, and Managed WordPress hosting plans.
Best Web Hosting for Business!
2016 Best Business Hosting
WPBeginner rates our web hosting a perfect 5 out of 5 stars and has endorsed HostGator as the Best Web Hosting for Businesses among their recommended WordPress hosting providers.
HostGator, founded in 2002, has long been in the hosting industry. With over 90% customer satisfaction and 12,000 servers under management, they are one of the largest and most well-known web hosts. They offer dedicated and VPS options for customers whose sites grow to require the extra power.
HostingAdvice.com
Ryan Frankel
Hostgator has been outstanding in term of server reliability. Personally, I have been with the Gators for the past 7 years (2008 – 2015) and I have to say their uptime record is remarkable.
WebHostingSecretRevealed.net
Jerry Low
The feature-packed HostGator gives you all the tools to craft attractive, functional websites.
PCMAG
Jeffrey L. Wilson
Overall, [HostGator is] an ideal source for shared web hosting and VPS solutions for bloggers or anyone else. The WordPress support and installation is easy, and the buy-what-you-need approach makes HostGator one of the most appealing options on the market.
Art of Blog
Nick Reese
It's rare to find such a large hosting company that readily offers efficient live chat, email and phone support for free. The added extras, such as the eNom account and affiliate programme, make them an ideal choice for a new business that's looking to grow or white-label. All in all, they offer a rounded feature set for a good price with a whole host of extra features to keep loyal customers happy.
WhoIsHostingThis
Claire Broadley
HostGator promises 24 x 7 x 365 service – and they actually delivered. I was transferring a development site from my HostGator account to my client's host – and was having a technical problem (turned out to be a misstep I had taken) at 2am. I logged in on chat – and yep, got my questions answered right away. Fabulous.
NateShivar.com
Nate Shivar
We have been with HostGator for over 5 years, and they haven't given us a reason to switch. Their always helpful support and server administrators have saved our site in numerous occasions.
WPBeginner
Syed Balkhi
I asked around to see which hosts people who were managing their Wordpress sites without breaking the bank were using. It was very clear the budget-friendly, quick, headache-free hosting solution was and is Hostgator. I made the switch, used a very simple and helpful Hostgator article on how to change my DNS (which I had never done before) and I kid you not, within minutes of the DNS change I had Wordpress installed and up and running. When someone asks me about a budget-friendly, super efficient web host (especially for Wordpress) with great customer service, including chat support, I always so enthusiastically say HOSTGATOR!!!
Oh Boy Love It!
Mary Anne Veluz
We have a family general contracting business that needed a website to show prospective clients what we can offer. By learning Joomla and building a site on HostGator, I was able to update my resume and get a job as a personal assistant for a very interesting entrepreneur.
Ricard General Contractors
Debbie Ricard
HostGator provided me with the platform that allowed me to build an engaging and fun website that customers enjoy browsing. Many of my customers also appreciate how fast the website loads with HostGator's hosting. The HostGator platform transformed my life by allowing me to build a website and consequently an engaging business which nearly paid for my first year university tuition!
Hamster Fun
Sari Abukhadra
I started my new Blog/Store using HostGator and it has been the most positive experience in my adult life. This weekend alone I placed 6 orders and I have people calling me left and right. Now I've almost become a mentor, in my area, to young and new entrepreneurs. I haven't made my first million, but I'm taking all of the right steps. Having this website has brought so much joy (and hard work) to my life. HostGator helped me, by providing all the tools I needed to succeed. Thank you, HostGator!
FamousMissFit.com
Marian Chism

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HostGator Review
John Stevens
Last updated: June 13, 2017
What's up with HostGator? People Love/Hate it. Why?
Update (2017): HostGator recently launched their new premium product called HostGator Cloud.
After testing their service for 12+ months, we can safely recommend HostGator Cloud as they’re currently ranked #1st. in our top rated hosts list.
In short, it has better uptime (99.98%) and load time (473ms) than regular, Bluehost Shared hosting option.
Visit HostGator Cloud ($2.99/mo)
Read our review on HostGator Cloud

Powerful web hosting. Really?
Now back to HostGator Shared Hosting review.
If there’s one name you’d recognize on our full list of web hosts, it’s HostGator.
You might not be sure why you know it exactly. But you do.
It’s probably because the Houston-based HostGator is one of the largest web hosts on the planet with over 9 million (!) domain names hosted. They boast partnerships with tiny tech titans Cisco and Linux (ever heard of ’em?).
HostGator has been around since 2002, originally founded by Brent Oxley before being acquired a decade later by Endurance International Group (EIG) who also owns Bluehost, Justhost, iPage, Fatcow, among others. They have two U.S. based data centers in Houston and Provo, Utah.
So what, exactly, is responsible for HostGator’s massive success?
Impressive uptime? Fantastic customer support? Or a HUGE marketing budget?
We wanted to find out for ourselves and provide an honest, unbiased report that sheds light on their performance (not their advertising claims).
In June of 2015, we set up a WordPress website on their ‘Hatchling’ shared plan.
Since then, we’ve monitored their performance statistics including uptime and speed to share the results with you.
Here’s what we found.
PROS of using HostGator (shared) Hosting:
HostGator has a few noble qualities, including a longer-than-average money back guarantee and an easy-to-use interface for beginners. Here’s a quick summary.
1. Uptime? Very Good – 99.99%
A website’s only useful if it’s up-and-running, stable and consistent.
Luckily, HostGator was able to hit 99.99% uptime over the past year, which is above the industry average and ranks them on the 3rd place on our list.
When we first connected our website to HostGator, their up times were horrible, but they have been improving ever since. They offer us the promised 99.99% uptime.
2016:
June average uptime: 99.97%
July average uptime: 100%
August average uptime: 99.98%
September average uptime: 99.97%
October average uptime: 99.98%
November average uptime: 100%
December average uptime: 100%
2017:
January average uptime: 100%
February average uptime: 99.98%
March average uptime: 99.98%
April average uptime: 99.99%
May average uptime: 99.99%
HostGator uptime is getting better, but it’s still below average. Here’s raw data.
2. Good Support (at least, we think so…)
HostGator conveniently offers 24/7/365 support through the phone, live chat, and email.
After a 16 minute delay, their representative was knowledgeable and friendly enough in our experience. We weren’t blown away by the level of service but didn’t walk away with a bad taste in our mouth either.
Chat with “Charles C” who is Hostgator support agent
3. 45-Day Money Back Guarantee
Most of the web hosts we’ve reviewed offer a standard 30-day money back guarantee. HostGator bumps theirs up to 45 days, giving you an extra two weeks or so to test drive their offerings before getting locked into a one-to-three year term.
4. Enhanced Security and Free Migration
HostGator will happily assist you with relocating an existing website over to their services for free.
And if you’re thinking about shelling out the big bucks (JK, they’re not that expensive) for any of their premium plans, you’ll also enjoy automated daily database backups, automatic malware removal and a free SSL certificate for processing website transactions.
5. Very User Friendly for Beginners
HostGator is very user-friendly for beginners (which is nice, considering the utilitarian interfaces of some web hosts read like a foreign language).
They also have endless tutorials, FAQ pages, and documents to help you at every turn, with detailed explanations and simple step-by-step walkthroughs.
CONS of using HostGator (shared) Hosting:
HostGator has a few redeeming qualities. However, they fall a bit short in some of the most important categories (like uptime and speed). Here’s how they fared in our tests.
#1 Not Fast Enough. Just Below Average…
HostGator followed up their lackluster uptime display with equally mediocre page loading times.
Over the last twelve months, their average was 866ms, which is a bit faster than the average 985ms.
That’s ain’t good. Especially when speed is factored into Google’s organic search (SEO) ranking algorithm and has been proven to hurt sales with each delayed second.
Website load time is more important than ever: not only does This is why site load time is one of our core metrics for ranking web hosts we review.
Again, not a great showing considering there are smaller web hosts will less experience delivering FAR better page loading times.
Last 12 month average load time (2016 – 2017)
2016:
June average speed: 653ms
July average speed: 622ms
August average speed: 678ms
September average speed: 714ms
October average speed: 707ms
November average speed: 761ms
December average speed: 1,045ms
2017:
January average speed: 1,060ms
February average speed: 1,082ms
March average speed: 1,064ms
April average speed: 995ms
May average speed: 987ms
2. Extra Fee for ‘True’ Backups
HostGator advertises ‘instant backups’ one of their differentiating features on the website.
Trouble is, they’re referring to manual ones which are available by default in cPanel.
Want automated backups to simplify their life? It’ll set you back an extra $15.95 annually.
3. Standard Pricing ‘Tricks’
Web hosting pricing looks great from afar, but far from good up close.
The first trick in the book is to only offer their lowest rates for the longest terms – meaning you’ll have to sign up for at least three years if you want the great ‘promotion pricing’ reflected on their website. Otherwise, if you want a true monthly option or even a twelve-month plan, your monthly rate will jump over 50-150%.
Speaking of ‘promotion pricing’, the second trick in the book is to offer this low advertised rate for your initial term ONLY. That means once your plan does expire and it’s time to renew, the rates will jump back up to their ‘normal’ pricing (which again, could be more than double the original price).
In that light, HostGator doesn’t look like such a good deal after all.
Overview on HostGator Shared Hosting Plans
Here’s a quick overview of the various plans offered by HostGator:
Shared Hosting: They have three shared hosting plans:
Hatchling plan: This plan starts at $3.95 per month. It supports 1 domain name, unlimited disk space and storage and unlimited subdomains.
Baby plan: This plan starts at $5.95 per month. It supports unlimited storage, bandwidth and domain names.
Business plan: This plan starts at $5.95 per month. It supports unlimited storage, bandwidth and domain names. It comes with a free dedicated IP, SSL and toll-free number.
Cloud Hosting: Here’s a quick overview of their Cloud hosting plans:
Hatchling Cloud plan: This plan starts at $5.95 per month. Specifications: 2 Cores, 2GB RAM, unlimited bandwidth and storage, and support for 1 domain name.
Baby Cloud plan: This plan starts at $6.95 per month. Specifications: 4 Cores, 4GB RAM, unlimited bandwidth and storage, and support for unlimited domain names.
Business Cloud plan: This plan starts at $10.95 per month. Specifications: 6 Cores, 6GB RAM, unlimited bandwidth and storage, and support for unlimited domain names.
Quick Facts
Ease of Signup: Easy signup process.
Payment Methods: Credit Card, PayPal.
Hidden Fees and Clauses: You cannot use more than 25 percent of their system resources for longer than 90 seconds at a time. Shared and reseller hosting accounts cannot have more than 250,000 inodes. Accounts with over 100,000 inodes are automatically removed from their backup system.
Upsells: Lots of upsells.
Account Activation: It can take up to 24 – 48 hours for accounts to be fully activated.
Control Panel and Dashboard Experience: cPanel.
Installation of Apps and CMSs (WordPress, Joomla, etc.): They make it easy to install popular apps and CMSs in a few steps using QuickInstall.
Do we recommend HostGator?
No.
HostGator is one of the biggest, household web hosting names for a reason.
And it ain’t their stellar performance.
Their consistently below average uptime and speed is greatly concerning. The customer support, while not terrible, didn’t blow us away either. And the extra features or plan add-ons are nothing to write home about.
They’re an average host. And there are far better options for your money. More top hosts can be found on our homepage.
Having said, that they seemed to have improved their services drastically since May/June 2016.
Have you used HostGator? If so, please leave your HostGator review below. Good or bad, doesn’t matter as long as it’s honest and useful.
John Stevens
Last updated: June 13, 2017

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Shopify Review
By Fahmida Y. Rashid
Pros
14-day trial. Easy to set up. Good customer experience. Attractive free themes. Third-party app store. Built-in email marketing tools.
Cons
Advanced features available only on higher tiers. Advanced plans are expensive. No refunds. Transaction fees can add up.
Bottom Line
Shopify offers small businesses everything they need to get started selling right out of the box. This flexible, easy-to-use e-commerce platform lets you expand features as necessary with third-party apps and add-ons.
The Internet has made it easier than ever for anyone to set up shop and start selling. There are plenty of nifty Web hosting services you can use to create a snazzy-looking website, but you can't ask your customers to use offline methods to pay you. For that, you need online shopping cart software, and Shopify (starting at $29 per month, plus fees) is perhaps one of the most popular tools out there. Its reputation is justified, thanks to its ease of use, modern templates, and flexibility. Want to set up an account for an online store? No problem. Want to set up a point-of-sale terminal with your iPad in your physical retail store? Shopify has you covered. I created a comprehensive virtual store in less than 30 minutes, and the experience was so good that Shopify is PCMag's clear Editors' Choice for online shopping cart services.
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For this review, I signed up with a Basic plan to set up an online storefront on an existing domain called Super Fun Tech Shop to sell a mix of handcrafted items. The starting price tag of my online store, with basic shopping cart tools and an existing domain, was $29 per month. If I'd had to register a domain, Shopify would have tacked on an extra $9 for the first month.
Shopping Cart Packages
Shopify offers users a 14-day trial, which gives small businesses the opportunity to actually set up a store and test transactions before committing to the software. Shopify accepts all major credit cards and has one rate for all of them, which simplifies the math for the business owner. Competitor 3dCart offers a 15-day trial.
View All 5 Photos in Gallery
If you are just starting out and have modest sales, you may want to consider the Starter plan ($14 per month), which is basically a paid trial that lets you list 25 products and comes with 1GB of file storage. The credit card transaction fees are the same as the Basic plan, which I explain next, but you don't get an HTML/CSS editor to build the store, the ability to generate discount codes, or phone support. The Starter plan is cheaper than the standard plans, but the lack of support and HTML editor may wind up costing you more time than the money you save is worth, so be absolutely sure that the Starter plan is a good fit.
Shopify offers three packages as part of its standard offering: Basic, Professional, and Ultimate. The best part is that you don't have to pick one until you've had a chance to try out the tool through the trial. While the pricier packages have some advanced features, the main difference is credit card-processing fees. The Basic plan ($29 per month) charges 2.9 percent and 30 cents for every online credit card transaction and 2.7 percent for every in-person transaction. The Professional plan ($79 per month) charges 2.5 percent and 30 cents for every online credit card transaction and 2.4 percent for every in-person transaction. The Unlimited plan ($179 per month) charges 2.25 percent and 30 cents for every online credit card transaction and 2.15 percent for every in-person transaction. Yes, the service offers in-person processing, but I didn't test it for this online-centric review.
Not all shopping cart services charge transaction fees. 3dCart and Pinnacle Cart are alternatives that don't charge, but keep in mind that whichever merchant account and payment gateway you wind up using with those services will charge you transaction fees. The benefit of Shopify is that it handles all that for you, freeing you up from dealing with merchant accounts and such and their additional bills.
The Professional plan has extra features, too, such as the ability to offer and process gift cards, generate professional-looking reports, and let customers recover abandoned shopping carts. The Unlimited plans offer an advanced report builder and a way to calculate shipping rates by different carriers. Upgrading across different plans is just a matter of going to the administrator screen and selecting the new plan. The new price will be reflected on your next bill. Going from Basic's $29 per month to Professional's $79 per month can be a little steep, so be sure you're going make enough sales to justify the increased cost.
If you decide you don't like Shopify, make sure to cancel your account before the 14-day trial ends, because Shopify doesn't offer refunds. Considering how otherwise customer-friendly the site is, this is a surprising omission. It was also frustrating how hard it was for me to find this information on the website. Shopify's search tool kept bringing up help pages on how to issue refunds to your customers, instead. It's a minor flaw, however.
Setting Up a Shopify Store
Shopify makes it easy to get a store up and running. After I created an account with an email address and password, I stepped through a wizard to set up each component. Shopify figured out my tax rate and currency based on my physical address. The service also used my store's name to create a customized URL for my dashboard: super-fun-tech-shop.myshopify.com. This way, you can see the store online right away even if you don't have your own domain yet.
The dashboard is where you do all the work, and it's straightforward. There are ways to see information about existing orders, product inventory, and customers. I found it easy to add third-party e-commerce apps such as discounts, recurring billing, and loyalty programs to enhance my store's capabilities, and the theme store offers easy-to-use and attractive templates. When I logged in for the first time, Shopify offered a list of steps I needed to complete to activate my store: add products, customize my store website, add a domain, and choose a plan.


The app store is extensive, but be aware that adding these features can make your monthly bill skyrocket. Scrutinize all payment details for each add-on before selecting it. If you think you will need a lot of third-party extensions, check out competitor BigCommerce, instead. It has a higher price tag, but it comes with more features out of the box, so you may wind up saving money if you plan to use a lot of advanced features.
On the Add a Product page I entered the title (the name of the product) and a description of what I was selling, uploaded images of my products, assigned a price (with a checkbox specifying if it was taxable), listed the associated SKU and bar code, told Shopify to track inventory, and saved the total shipping weight. This screen is also where you can specify variations, such as size, material, style, and color, as well. Shopify automatically handled assigning prices and unique SKU codes for each variation. All the way at the bottom, I saw how the product page would display on search engine results so that I could focus on SEO. I created tags and collections to make it easier to group like products in my store. If the sheer amount of information this page asks for feels overwhelming, you may prefer BigCommerce which breaks out the product page into different tabs, or Pinnacle Cart, which has bulk import options.
Shopify offers free, attractive, and modern-looking themes in eight different categories: Home, Clothing, Food, Accessories, Art, Electronics, Books, and Other. These are among the best-looking store themes I've ever seen; the free templates are better than the ones you will get through 3dCart, for example. I browsed through the themes and clicked on Demo buttons to see what the entire page would look like. Once I was happy with a theme, I clicked Publish to apply it to my account. I was satisfied with the free themes, but if you want something more sophisticated, you can visit the Shopify Theme Store, which has more than 100 free and premium templates. Some premium templates are pretty expensive, so keep an eye on your total monthly bill.
Shopify keeps your previously used themes in your account so that if you ever change your mind, you can just scroll down on the Themes page in the dashboard to find the older one to switch back. You can download the theme as a .ZIP file to upload it manually to your Web host, customize the theme with a built-in drag-and-drop editor, and edit the HTML/CSS through a built-in text editor.
An online store isn't just inventory pages and order forms. You also want your shoppers to find the information they need. Shopify lets you create a blog to engage with customers, as well as static pages such as About Us and FAQ pages. Ia also integrated my Google Analytics codes for Web metrics. You can also capture customer data via user accounts, which users can also access to see order status or enroll in a loyalty program. Shopify also offers built-in email marketing tools, which makes it easy to keep in touch with customers.
I had the choice of using an existing domain or registering a domain through Shopify and letting the company act as my domain registrar. Prices begin at $9 per year for common domains such as .com and .net, $14 per year for a handful of country domains, and go up to $22 and higher for custom domains such as .bargains, .boutique, .blackfriday, and .camera. I used an existing domain for this review. Shopify provides thorough instructions on configuring the DNS records on your domain to point to Shopify's servers. I could have also just stuck with the free Shopify-generated URL and not bothered with my personal domain.
I was able to get my store completely set up within the 14-day trial period. I selected the Basic plan to unlock my store and activate the site as my last step. Remember, though, that Basic doesn't have a lot of helpful features, such as discount codes or gift cards. Make sure to really scrutinize the feature list on the Shopify site to make sure everything you need is available on your site.

Customer Experience & Payments
The easiest shopping cart software is worthless if the customer finds it difficult to find products and pay for them. I found the user experience easy and seamless as a customer trying to buy the product and as the seller managing the transaction. Other than the shopify.com URL during checkout, there was no Shopify branding anywhere on the site, giving me, as the customer, a consistent experience.
It's worth noting that Shopify directs customers away from the existing domain to its own payment page (checkout.shopify.com) to process actual payments, which may result in abandoned shopping carts if customers get confused about getting redirected to an unknown site and don't want to proceed. You can warn users ahead of time about the redirect, or look into using other services that let you buy and manage your own SSL certificate, such as BigCommerce.
Shopify by default uses its own payment gateway Shopify Payments, as well as PayPal Express Checkout. It can also integrate with 70 other payment gateways. For this review, I set up PayPal. Remember that PayPal also charges its own credit card-transaction fees. If you use Shopify Payments, Shopify waives the transaction fees. BigCommerce and 3dCart don't charge transaction fees, so they are good alternatives if you don't want to deal with Shopify Payments.
Shopify also supports Google Wallet, alternative payment systems such as Dwolla, BitPay, Coinbase, and GoCoin, as well as offline payments such as check, money order, and bank deposits. If you are uncomfortable having Shopify charge customer credit cards automatically—or you want to wait until everything has been shipped before charging the card—you can set up the store to just authorize payments and manually charge the card when ready. Shopify offers a very helpful page explaining the difference between automatic and manual payment capture.
Excellent Customer Service
As I mentioned earlier, Shopify lets you use the same platform for online and physical store sales. There is also the option to put a Buy button on another website, which may be useful if you don't want to use Shopify's site builder tool.
The manual is easy to use and there's email support, too, but Shopify also offers 24/7 phone and chat-based support when emailing is not enough and you need a person to help you out. There is also an active discussion forum. Customers based in North America, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand have a designated regional phone number. I found it easy to get someone in chat even at 1 a.m., and the phone support representative was very helpful in answering my questions about the different options available in each package.
Great Shopping Right Out of the Box
Simplicity is critical when setting up an online store. The customer doesn't want to jump through hoops to give you money, and the seller doesn't have much time to learn how to use the software. Shopify makes it easy to get off the ground with basic features and the ability to fine-tune features at a later date. Shopify is our Editors' Choice for shopping cart tools for its intuitive and easy-to-navigate dashboard, and its ease of use for first-time merchants. I would like to see some advanced features added in the base pricing so that the final price tag doesn't balloon so quickly, though.
By Fahmida Y. Rashid

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Shopify Review
By Liz Hull
Overview
Shopify is a fully hosted, web-based eCommerce platform that specializes in ease of use. Reasonably priced, with a solid feature set and round the clock customer service, Shopify is one of the best shopping carts on the market today.
The company’s philosophy can be described simply: If you don’t want to join them, try your best to beat them.
Based out of Ontario, Canada, Shopify began as a better way for Tobias Lütke, Daniel Weinand, and Scott Lake to sell their snowboards online. Since its founding in 2006, though, Shopify has grown to be much more. The company now hosts more than 400,000 stores worldwide and has facilitated over $34 billion in transactions.
And it’s not just about snowboards anymore. Shopify merchants sell everything from handmade soaps to refrigerators, and Shopify hosts a handful of big-name clients, including the Foo Fighters, Amnesty International, and Github.
Despite its lack of some advanced features, Shopify’s platform provides the basics that can support most merchants. The rest can be added on with integrations and applications.
Shopify is one of the shopping carts that we most frequently recommend here at Merchant Maverick, quirks and all; it’s fully deserving of its high marks. Keep reading to find out why.
Don’t have time to read an entire review? Take a look at our top rated eCommerce solutions for a few quick recommendations. Every option we present here offers excellent customer support, superb web templates, and easy-to-use software, all for a reasonable price.
Pricing
Shopify’s pricing plans are billed on a month-by-month basis. While there are no contracts to sign, if you choose to purchase a full year-long plan, you can save 10%. If you purchase two years at a time, you’ll save 20%.
Here’s the full rundown of Shopify’s four basic pricing tiers.
Shopify Lite plan (No Online Store Included): $9/month
Credit Card Rate with Shopify Payments:
2.9% + 30¢ Online
Transaction Fee:
2.0%
No transaction fee if you use Shopify Payments. If you choose an external payment gateway, there will be a variable transaction fee, based on your plan.
Features:
Unlimited bandwidth
Unlimited number of products
Unlimited online storage
Facebook integration
Chat and email support
One staff account (in addition to the owner’s account)
Basic Shopify plan: $29/month
Credit Card Rate with Shopify Payments:
2.9% + 30¢ Online
Transaction Fee:
2.0%
Additional Features:
Unlimited products, bandwidth, and storage
24/7 Support
Discount code engine
Free Shopify card reader
Online store and blog
Shopify shipping
Two staff accounts (in addition to the owner’s account)
Shopify plan: $79/month
Credit Card Rate:
2.6% + 30¢ Online
Transaction Fee:
1.0%
Additional Features:
Gift cards
Professional reports
Abandoned cart recovery
Five staff accounts (in addition to the owner’s account)
Advanced Shopify plan: $299/month
Credit Card Rate with Shopify Payments:
2.4% + 30¢ Online
Transaction Fee:
0.5%
Additional Features:
Advanced report builder
Real-time carrier shipping
Fifteen staff accounts (in addition to the owner’s account)
Shopify Plus (Enterprise):
If you’re planning on selling over a million dollars per year, you’ll need to contact Shopify for special pricing. Check out our full review of Shopify Plus.
If you’d prefer a visual representation of Shopify’s plans (not including Shopify Lite or Shopify Plus), this screen shot might help you out.
You may have noticed the transactions fees listed under each plan. While most other shopping carts have eliminated transaction fees, Shopify maintains theirs, which is, no doubt, a pain. On the other hand, Shopify waives those transaction fees if you choose to use Shopify Payments as your payment gateway. More on Shopify Payments in the Payment Processing section.
Web-Hosted or Licensed
Shopify is web-hosted, SaaS (Software as a Service) technology. You’ll never have to worry about coordinating with a third-party hosting service.
Hardware and Software Requirements
Because Shopify is a web-based platform, all you need to access it is a computer, an internet connection, and a reliable web browser.
Ease of Use
There’s a Free 14-Day Trial available for you to test out Shopify, no credit card required. When you sign up, you’ll receive an email with a login for your admin as well as a link you can use to view your storefront. The account automatically cancels at the end of fourteen days; in order to activate it again, you have to purchase a plan.
I think you’ll be pleased with your trial of Shopify’s admin. Ease of use is what Shopify does best.
Shopify’s dashboard is clean and orderly.
Although there is no tutorial video or setup wizard, Shopify helps you get started with a checklist on your dashboard. From here, you can choose a theme, add products, and set up your domain.
Adding products is easy. It only takes a few clicks and keystrokes.
Shopify has recently redesigned their discount engine, and I am quite pleased with the results. Merchants can now create discounts and coupon codes that apply to specific products or categories. In addition, those discounts can be limited to a specified number of uses or a minimum order total.
When it comes site customization, there’s a visual theme editor available, and you can preview all of your changes before your store goes live. Read more about the theme editor in the Web Design section of this article.
Overall, Shopify gets an A+ in terms of ease of use.
Features
Shopify comes with all of the basic features you need to set up shop, right out of the box. Advanced functionality often requires add-on applications, but if you don’t need to have a bunch of bells and whistles, Shopify likely has enough features to get you rolling.
You should note that some of these features are only available with higher level plans. Look into each plan before you purchase.
Checkout
Language Capabilities: Your checkout can be displayed in over 50 different languages.
Automatic Shipping Rates: Shopify calculates shipping rates from UPS, USPS, and FedEx (available only in the Shopify Advanced Plan). And, you can select the factors that determine the cost of shipping, whether it be a fixed rate, a tiered rate, a weight-based rate, or a location-based rate. Shopify Shipping now makes calculated shipping rates available for all plans.
Abandoned Cart Recovery: When a customer leaves items in their carts without purchasing, you can automatically send an email to encourage them to complete their purchase.
Automatic Tax Calculator: Shopify calculates tax rates based on your location and the locations of your customers.
Store Management
Guest Checkout: Don’t let a customer’s fear of commitment keep them from purchasing. Shopify allows customers to buy without creating an account.
Customer Accounts: On the other hand, customers are also able to create personal accounts to make future transactions easier and to receive your promotional emails.
Customer Segmentation: Use those customer accounts to find out more about your customers and to group them by factors like location, shopping tendencies, and demographics.
Fulfillment Center Options: Shopify connects with fulfillment services like Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA), Rakuten Super Logistics, and Shipwire.
Dropshipping Apps: Shopify integrates with Ordoro, Inventory Source, and eCommHub.
Marketing and SEO
SEO Best Practices: Shopify follows SEO best practices with features like a customizable H1 and the ability to write title and meta tags as well as product tags. Also, a sitemap.xml is automatically generated for your store.
Discounts: You can create discount codes and coupons. Gift cards are available at higher plans.
Social Media Integration: Sync your information with Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr. You can even use Shopify to sell on Facebook, provided that your page and products comply with Facebook’s terms.
Email Templates: Shopify comes with its own email template. The platform also integrates with MailChimp if you’re looking for more complex email functionality.
Product Reviews: Let your customers give your products star ratings and write comment-style reviews. Potential customers will trust your brand more if they know that others approve of it.
Analytics: Use Shopify’s built-in analytics to view product reports, export reports, and traffic reports. Or, you can integrate with Google Analytics.
Product Management
List Unlimited Products: Keep track of all of those products with Shopify’s inventory management and product category organization features.
Product Variations: List variations on your products like size, color, and material.
Digital Products: Sell both physical and digital products from the same site.
Bulk Import/Export: Use this feature to facilitate migration from your previous platform or make bulk edits to your catalog.
Web Hosting
Unlimited Bandwidth: You’ll never be charged bandwidth overage fees.
Daily Backups: Ensure your content is saved.
Automatic Upgrades: Keep your site up to date with Shopify’s newest features, without any effort on your part.
99.9% Uptime: With a record like that, you can be confident that your store will stay online through high traffic seasons.
Shopify Mobile
Access your Site from Anywhere: Use Shopify’s app to manage your admin from your mobile device.
But, wait! There’s more! See Shopify’s full feature list.
Web Design
Shopify’s web design is truly beautiful. There are 54 mobile responsive themes available and ten of them are free. The rest are priced between $140-$180.
These themes are among the best I’ve seen. They’re professional, elegant, and easy for your customers to navigate.
Editing these themes is also relatively simple. Using the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, you can update content on your pages quickly. The theme editor in the backend allows you to make small changes to your theme and to preview those changes in real time, without reloading the page. From the theme editor, you can change backgrounds, images, colors, and fonts without ever touching a piece of code (hallelujah). This is what the theme editor looks like.
Shopify has also recently introduced a new way of theme editing. It’s called Sections, and it’s currently available with select themes. Sections is essentially a drag and drop feature. You can arrange the order of your storefront’s widgets by dragging and dropping elements in the toolbar on the left. Shopify hopes to make Sections a feature of all of its themes soon.
Here’s what the Sections theme editor looks like.
On the other hand, if coding is your thing, there’s an HTML/CSS editor. You should note that Shopify themes are built with Shopify’s own coding language, Liquid. Here’s an example of Liquid code.
If you know what any of that means, congratulations. For the rest of us, I’ll translate a bit. Liquid is a flexible code that allows changes in the admin to be featured on your site. While I personally do not speak computer, I’ve read several reviews from developers that praise Liquid as an easy-to-learn and easy-to-use language. So, that’s a plus.
Although Shopify is not open source, further customization is still an option. There are Shopify Experts ready to help you with that.
Integrations and Add-on
The Shopify App Store is one of the most extensive I’ve seen. With over 1500 apps available, I can say with certainty that Shopify integrates with whatever you’re looking for.
A word of warning: Part of the reason Shopify’s App Store is so extensive is that Shopify stores often have to use applications in order to get all the features they want. While Shopify does a great job offering the features most stores need, any additional functionality requires an app.
So, if you want to add faceted search AND automated email marketing AND one-page checkout, you’re going to have to spring for three apps, all of which may be billed on a monthly basis. That can get expensive. Make sure you know which features you need before joining Shopify. While Shopify is typically one of the least expensive shopping carts, it can quickly become the most expensive option if you need lots of advanced features.
(If you’re looking for an easy-to-use cart with lots of advanced features already built in, I suggest you take a look at Zoey. Their plans are significantly more expensive than Shopify’s, but you won’t have to purchase as many add-ons.)
Payment Processing
Shopify integrates with over 70 gateways, including Authorize.net, Amazon Payments, Dwolla, and Quickbooks Payments.
As I’ve mentioned before, Shopify also offers its own payment method, Shopify Payments. With Shopify Payments, not only do you enjoy 0% transaction fees but also you may benefit from reduced credit card fees. Shopify Payments is currently available to merchants in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and Ireland. Take a look at the graphic below to see what credit card fees would be for your plan.
Customer Service and Technical Support
Customer service is available through all of the typical channels. You can contact support by email, live chat, and phone.
Shopify’s phone support is available 24/7. The phone number for the US is listed below. There are separate phone numbers for customers from Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, India, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. You can find those numbers by clicking “Next” on this page.
There are lots of other ways you can find the information you need to resolve issues on your own. Here’s a quick list of all the support options available.
Support Center
Knowledge Base
Forum
Shopify Experts
Guides
Email from their web portal
Phone (US): 1-888-746-7439
The quality of Shopify’s customer service varies depending on who you ask. Some merchants absolutely rave about Shopify’s “gurus.” They say that Shopify provides informed, friendly support. On the other hand, I’ve also read a lot of angry comments that condemn Shopify’s support representatives for reading answers from a script. These customers say that the representatives they contacted did not have the power to help.
I’ve had fairly neutral experiences with Shopify, myself. When I called with a simple question, I received an informed answer after waiting on hold for thirty minutes. I was satisfied with the support, though a little nonplussed with the wait time.
Negative Reviews and Complaints
Shopify has overwhelmingly positive reviews on most comment boards and third-party review sites. However, that doesn’t mean every merchant and developer is satisfied with all aspects of Shopify. These a few of the complaints that I’ve seen most often:
Limited Functionality: Because Shopify aims to keep its functions basic and easy-to-grasp, there are a few missing elements in the features list. Customers are often frustrated with limited variations for their products (you can only list up to 100 combinations) and with the lack of wholesale (B2B) selling options.
Costly Add-ons: In order to make up for that lack of functionality, merchants may have to enlist add-ons, which can become quite expensive.
Sub-Par Checkout Features: Shopify’s checkout redirects your customers to Shopify’s own checkout page, which does not belong to your domain. While this isn’t likely to scare away many customers, some merchants would prefer to do everything on their own site. Also, there’s no one-page checkout feature (unless, of course, you use an app).
Poor Customer Service: As I’ve mentioned, opinions on customer service are widely varied. For every frustrated customer bashing Shopify’s service, there’s one singing its praises. Take that how you will.
While the following complaints are less frequent, I also see these factors mentioned in negative reviews:
Transaction Fees: Most shopping carts have moved away from transaction fees by now, but Shopify is still going strong.
Learning Curve to use Liquid: Although many developers like Liquid, it does take some time to learn the new language in order to use it effectively.
Some reports of downtime: Some customers have reported that their sites went down during critical selling periods.
Positive Reviews and Testimonials
Shopify has far more positive reviews than negative. Here are the most commonly voiced pros:
Ease of Use: As I’ve said before, ease of use is Shopify’s niche. You can get a store up and running in just a day. It’s a great approach for startup and midsize businesses alike, even if you have very little experience with creating a website.
Beautiful Themes: A professional-looking site inspires trust in your customers. Shopify helps by providing the best-looking themes I’ve seen from an eCommerce platform.
Liquid Coding: Isn’t it strange how sometimes a negative can become a positive? Although Liquid does take a bit to learn, once you’ve got it down, it’s easy to make changes to your theme at the base level. Most developers love Liquid.
Good Customer Service: I can only shrug.
Other customers mentioned:
A Well Documented REST API: It’s easy to build integrations and applications.
The Benefits of a Fully-Hosted Platform: It’s nice to not have to worry about organizing a third-party host for your site.
Security
Shopify is Level 1 PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) compliant, which is the gold standard for eCommerce platforms. Every merchant gets a free 128-bit shared SSL certificate.
In the past year, Shopify has made site-wide encryption available for all their merchants. You just have to opt-in. Read more about why and how to encrypt your store on their blog post.
Final Verdict
If you’re looking for an easy-to-use, dependable, and elegant online platform for your store, you can stop the search now. I feel confident recommending Shopify to most merchants, provided they aren’t seeking lots of advanced functionality on a shoestring budget.
But before you make the leap, I encourage you to take the admin for a test drive. Sign up for your free trial, call into customer support with any questions you have, and see what features you may need to add-on. You’ve got nothing to lose.
By Liz Hull

Try Shopify Now
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Shopify Reviews
What is Shopify?
Shopify is one of the leaders in the e-commerce space, and perhaps the easiest-to-use tool to build your online store with. Their mission is to build a hassle-free platform for setting up your e-commerce business.
Shopify Review Scores
Price - 9/10
Ease of use - 10/10
Support - 10/10
Features - 10/10
Summary
To summarize this review, we think Shopify is a great, tailor-made platform for those of you who need an online store above all else, and treat all the other elements (such as a blog, additional pages) as an added bonus.
9.8/10
No matter if you’re just starting out (and have no website or e-commerce experience at all), or if you’re looking for a way to take your business to the next level, our Shopify review promises to have something to suit you!
But is Shopify really as great as the marketing material says? Is it really the most beginner-friendly platform out there? Let’s find out!
This Shopify review – updated for 2017 – talks about every important aspect of the platform and answers the most common questions asked by budding e-commerce business owners. It explains how to use it, who’s it best suited for, and whether or not having a Shopify store is the right path for your business. We also talk about the important aspect of pricing and compare Shopify to other alternatives available on the market.
Shopify overview
In simple terms, Shopify is an online platform for all forms of e-commerce. It allows you to set up your online store and sell whatever you wish (goods and services). You can organize your products, customize the way your store looks, accept payments (online and credit cards), track and respond to orders, and you can do it all within Shopify’s interface. Shopify is a fully integrated e-commerce solution, providing ready-made online shops that you can tweak and customise til your heart’s content. Shopify has the capacity to be feature heavy out of the box, but that doesn’t drag load times or the slickness of using a Shopify site. Payment plans are based on monthly billing, but for anyone running a profitable store, these should quickly become negligible costs.
Using Shopify is quite intuitive and easy to grasp right from the get-go. You just have to sign up, and then you’re taken by the hand through the whole process.
To start with, you get to choose from over 100 optimized online store designs – so you don’t need to either have design skills yourself or hire a designer. The designs that Shopify offers are really top-notch and optimized to generate good conversion rates from your visitors.
Does Shopify include web hosting?
Yes. One of the convenient benefits of Shopify is that it also takes care of hosting your store for you. This means that you don’t need to sign up for any external web hosting service. Everything is neatly handled in just one place. Shopify uses an optimized server structure, built specifically with e-commerce in mind, so you know that you’re getting the good stuff.
Who’s Shopify best suited for?
Shopify stands apart from other e-commerce solutions mainly due to its multipurpose nature.
First of all, Shopify is extremely easy to set up and get going, so it can be used by beginners who have never gotten their feet wet in e-commerce.
Secondly, the whole tool is very affordable (more on that in a minute), so it’s an attractive choice for small businesses that are just starting out and want to minimize on costs.
Thirdly, Shopify offers many template designs/structures for you to take advantage of, so you don’t have to hire anyone to help you with the store. You can literally build, style, and launch your online store all on your own.
Fourthly … we’re almost done … Shopify also offers offline solutions – you can use Shopify in your actual brick-and-mortar store, integrating it with the operation that you have already set up.
And finally, Shopify scales really well, so it will be able to grow with you regardless of the number of products you have on offer, the volume of your sales, and the number of customers that have bought from you.
HOWEVER.
If we were to point out the absolute perfect user, the kind of user who will get the most out of Shopify, we’d say that it’s beginners . People and business owners who are just starting out in the e-commerce space and want to get the best solution possible, while at the same time minimizing the costs as much as possible, will find Shopify to be the most beneficial.
Which brings us to one particularly important part of this Shopify review:
Pricing – how much does Shopify cost?
Before we list the plans available, we should to mention that there is a 14-day free trial available. It unlocks all the features, so you can test the platform thoroughly before committing to any of the premium plans. You can also cancel your trial account at any time.
Here’s the official pricing table:
Which Shopify plan is best?
It depends on your requirements. The option that’s the most sensible for anyone who wants to launch a new online store is $29 / month. It lets you in on all the features you might need, and also handles the payments and the technical back-end of your store.
If you want to, you can hook up a custom domain name to your store (either buy it through Shopify or import from a third-party domain registrar). If not, your store is going to be available under something like YOURSTORE.myshopify.com.
As part of the $29 / month price tag, you get access to:
Shopify’s online store module (the thing you came here for),
the Point Of Sale (POS) system (allowing you to collect payments offline through an iPad),
the Facebook and Pinterest modules (sell directly on Facebook and Pinterest),
the Shopify Buy Button – allowing you to add a custom “buy button” on any website (not necessarily your online store).
It’s also worth mentioning here about the Shopify transaction fees. Whilst not part of the pricing, if you’re not using Shopify Payments, you’ll be charged their subscription transaction fee on every order processed in your store. To learn more about Shopify transaction fees, visit the Shopify site.
Is it easy to use?
In today’s online space, every tool out there promotes itself as ‘easy-to-use’. But few actually are. The tough part about being easy-to-use is that a truly friendly platform should be usable right from day one, and not once you invest hours of your time learning about it. In that manner, anything could be labeled “easy-to-use.”
Shopify’s e-commerce platform doesn’t share this problem. You don’t need to be a Shopify expert to set up shop and you can easily launch an online retail store within a matter of minutes. The main traits that separate Shopify’s ease of use from everything else out there are:
The platform gives you an already working online store structure, so instead of building a store piece by piece, you can just adjust the pieces that are already there (tune them to your liking) but essentially the core of the platform works right away (more on this in a minute).
You get to choose from ready-made designs (templates), so you don’t have to possess any design skill either (again, more on this in a minute).
The templates are also automatically responsive in design meaning that your site will be optimized for mobiles as well as desktops and tablets.
Online payments are handled for you – no need to actually work with sensitive credit card data yourself. And you can even sell your products directly to your Facebook contacts (among other things).
You get your product catalog handled through an easy to grasp module within Shopify (more on this in a minute too).
All of the above add up to a really reasonable solution – something that’s truly targeted towards novices and doesn’t require any technical skills.
Okay, to the nitty-gritty of this Shopify review:
How does Shopify work? – building your online store and selling online
Right after taking care of a standard sign-up form (your name, email, etc.), you get to use Shopify’s wizard that will help you get through the whole building process of your e-commerce store. First, they ask you about the things you’re going to be selling:
Giving the most accurate answer here will make your future experience with the platform even easier, so try not to select something at random.
Next, you get to choose from a handful of the most popular options (the first one – “Create an online store” is what you’re likely here for):
In the next step, you will have the option of selecting a design for your online store and decide on how it is going to look:
The online store designs in Shopify
No Shopify review can skip the design talk! Onward!
Shopify offers contemporary, sophisticated designs – over a hundred of them(!) – so you are sure to find something that suits your style and the personality of your e-commerce store. Additionally, everything is optimized to be viewed on desktop, mobile and tablets.
When picking your design, you don’t need to pay much attention to what kind of products are on sale within that demo template – this is only example stock, and you can sell whatever you wish through whatever design template you select.
The theme we selected to test in this review is called Solo. It’s a simple, minimalist design yet functional for most purposes.
Whatever template you decide to go for, you can make adjustments – a couple of tweaks here and there – to make it look exactly how you want.
Shopify’s customization interface provides a range of options neatly displayed one after another, so you can just go through them from top to bottom and fine-tune every little detail about the design.
The things worth doing right away are:
changing the colors to your default company colors
adding a logo
selecting what should appear on the homepage (screenshot below).
Basically, Shopify’s e-commerce store builder is very intuitive and easy to use. Instead of giving you a blank canvas, where you’d have to pick the elements one by one, you get a ready-made design, and through the options panel you can adjust the elements already there (plus add new ones).
This is a very beginner-friendly approach because it’s not confusing at all, and allows anyone to just jump in and create a quality store design for themselves.
How to edit text on the page
To work with the text on the pages, you need to go to the Pages section in the dashboard:
There, you can pick the page that you want to edit and then use an editor screen that’s likely to be familiar to you thanks to tools like MS Word or Google Docs.
How do I add and manage my products on Shopify?
Since you’re reading this review, you’re more than likely interested in finding out how to use Shopify to add and manage your e-commerce store inventory (or whatever it is you want to sell), so it’s high time we talk about how this is done!
The first thing you should do is configure the general settings about your store. For this, go to Settings from the left sidebar:
There, you get to set every piece of standard information, like your store’s name, address, timezone, currency, and so on.
Online payments
The next important step is configuring the online payment options that you’re going to be offering your customers (under Settings / Payments).
Shopify allows you to accept credit cards through various gateways (there’s a good selection of those), and even set up Bitcoin payments if you want to go that route. Plus, there are also manual payments available, like bank transfers or cash on delivery.
Does Shopify accept paypal?
Yes. Shopify is also conveniently integrated with PayPal (as soon as you open a store, you’re set up with a PayPal Express Checkout account).
What is Shopify Payments?
Shopify Payments is the simplest way to accept payments online. It comes fully integrated with your store eliminating the need to set up a third-party gateway and/or merchant account and there’s no need for the laborious task of inputting the credentials either. Shopify Payments allows you to manage your entire business and financials in one convenient place.
Shopify Payments allows you to:
Automatically set up to accept all major cards as soon as your Shopify store is up and running.
Select your card rate based on your Shopify plan. If you change your mind later down the line, Shopify of course makes it easy for you to change it as and when you want.
Track your pending payout balance and your payout schedule from the Shopify admin.
View how much you’ll receive for any order or charged in payment fees since payments are linked to their corresponding orders.
Easily recover lost sales from chargebacks using chargeback responses compiled by Shopify for any affected orders.
Depending on where you are in the world, you may not incur additional transactions fees above the card rate e.g. United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and Australia.
Should you choose to operate with Shopify Payments, you will be exempt from Shopify’s subscription transaction fees. These are only payable by store owners who choose to use a third-party payment processor on top of their gateway or merchant account provider’s credit card fees.
Other online store settings
Apart from the payments, Shopify lets you set every other important store setting. Here’s what’s in the options menu:
Just to discuss a few in a little more detail:
In Settings / Checkout, you get to choose if your customers are required to open user accounts with your store or not. You can also select how much data you need from each customer when making a sale.
Also in Settings / Checkout, you can set your order processing workflow, the checkout language, your refund policies etc.
In Settings / Shipping, you can set everything related to your shipping costs. This also includes international shipping.
In Settings / Taxes, you can take care of all the tax-related (boring) realities of your business. Shopify helps you with the maths here.
In Settings / Notifications, you can set both how your e-commerce store will be contacting customers, and also what sort of messages you will get whenever a new order comes in.
How to add and edit your products in Shopify
Accessing the store module is simple, just select Products from the left sidebar:
There, you get to set everything related to the items/services that you’re selling in your online store.
Again, things here are extra easy to grasp. For instance, to help you get started, Shopify displays a large button for adding your first product:
In the next step, it gives you an editor-like window where you can input all the important details.
The most important parts:
Title and description
This is the main description of a given product – it’s what’s going to be displayed to the customers.
Images
Below the title/description block there’s place to upload your product images. The nice thing here is that it works through drag-and-drop, so just grab an image from your desktop and drag it onto there.
Pricing
The next step would be to set the pricing for your product. There are a handful of options here which you can see in the screenshot above.
Visibility and Organization
Finally, you can set if the product should go online right away and be available to your customers. You can also categorize it for better browsing and management experience.
Once you’re done with all that, you can just click the Save button, and your product is now online.
How to list your products on the homepage
The one thing you’ll probably want to do is showcase some of your products on the homepage of your e-commerce store. In Shopify, this can be done through the theme customization panel that you used when adjusting your design right after sign-up (left sidebar: Online Store / Themes).
Clicking on Customize Theme brings you to a page where you can pick what exactly is going to appear on the homepage:
Basically, you can select whatever product, or whatever category of products. You can also realign the product blocks on the homepage, or even display an entirely different piece of text there. It’s up to you.
In this example, we decided to display two products on the homepage inside the Featured Products block:
Reporting – AKA. checking how your store is doing
Selling is one thing, but knowing where your business stands and reviewing it regularly is another. Shopify has you covered here as well.
Everything happens in the Reports section of the dashboard:
Here you will find every piece of data you might need as an online store manager. You can browse through your gross sales by product title, by month, by channel, by payment method, taxes by rate, by traffic, and much much more.
Additional site elements
Although selling is going to be the main activity within your store, you probably also want to include other elements to make your store look more complete, and be overall more appealing to your customer base.
Those things can be done from the Online Store section in the dashboard (we already used it to adjust the store’s theme).
So the first thing you might want to do is create a blog and add some blog posts. This can be done through Online Store / Blog Posts.
The other thing you can do is add new pages and edit the existing ones. This is done in Online Store / Pages. (A good starting point here would be to create an About page for your e-commerce store.)
Finally, you get to set the navigation and pick what should appear in the top and footer menus on your site. This is done in Online Store / Navigation. (You can edit the individual links by clicking “Edit link list.”)
All of the above options will come very handy once you start adjusting your store to fit the exact needs of your business. Shopify delivers just the right number of possibilities here.
How to make your store available to the world
To finally launch your e-commerce store – and start marketing to actual customers (accepting their payments and so on) – you need to unlock it. This is done, again, in the Online Store section of the dashboard:
To fully unlock the store, you’re going to need to select one of the available plans. As we mentioned earlier in this Shopify review, the most sensible one if you’re getting started is $29 / month (entry-level plan). If you ever need more functionality, you can always upgrade later on.
And that is basically it! At this point, your e-commerce store is online.
Other Shopify FAQs
Is Shopify the best/a better platform for eCommerce?
Shopify is certainly a great place to start if you are looking to set up your own ecommerce site and is suitable for businesses of any size, catering for a wide range of industries.
Whether it is the best will largely depend on the requirements of the user including their budget. There are many alternative ecommerce platforms out there, including Woohoo (reviewed here), Magento (reviewed here) and Bigcommerce (reviewed here).
Which ecommerce platform is the best for a small business?
Shopify is ideal for small businesses who typically have limited resources, especially in time and money. With Shopify, small business owners can set up their online store and have it up and running in no time. There is no need to learn or know any code beforehand and with so many design templates to choose from, small business owners can literally build, style, and launch their online store all on their own without any help.
Depending on their requirements, they also have a selection of price plans to choose from that suits that budget so it is an attractive choice for those that are just starting out and want to minimize on costs.
Is shopify a good platform for beginners to ecommerce?
Yes. Shopify is one of the easiest e-commerce builders to help beginners and small business owners set up and run their online store for the first time.  With process straightforward and painless processes and ready made store design templates, Shopify is so user-friendly that even those with no prior ecommerce experience or coding knowledge can create an online store fairly quickly.
Which eCommerce platform will give a greater, more relevant audience reach?
Regardless of what ecommerce platform you decide to go with, whether it be Shopify or Woohoo, your audience reach will largely depend on how your website is marketed and not the technology it is built with.
What is the difference between a content management system (CMS), like WordPress, and an eCommerce platform, like Shopify?
A content management system (CMS) is designed to build and manage dynamic web pages within a website e.g. a blog or corporate website. An e-commerce platform on the other-hand is designed to sell goods online and process payments.
There are plugins available that will allow site owners to manage ecommerce activity within a CMS like WordPress.
Which is the best mobile/responsive ecommerce platform?
Most of the ecommerce platforms on the market are responsive so they have the capabilities to handle mobile and tablet customers, including Shopify.
Why use Shopify or any paid ecommerce platform over a free ecommerce platform?
Whilst there are ‘free’ ecommerce platforms out there, Shopify is designed for convenience and is ideal for business owners who have little or no knowledge and/or experience in ecommerce. For those who are considering a free ecommerce platform, be sure to assess other costs such as:
Domain name
Web hosting
SSL certificate
PCI testing and certification
Ongoing software and security updates
Conclusion – is Shopify the right tool to set up your online store with?
Shopify is really effective at providing you with a working online store solution that’s easy to set up, and then easy to use on a day-to-day basis.
Even though Shopify isn’t expensive by any standard (considering that it’s going to run your whole online business), there are even more affordable solutions out there, like Wix, for example (read our review of Wix).
Here, Shopify dominates completely. The platform is as easy-to-use as it gets, and even a complete beginner shouldn’t have any problems working with it. To add to that, with this entirely hassle-free solution, you can have a new online store launched in a matter of minutes (and we’re not exaggerating).
Shopify has full 24/7 customer support: telephone, chat, and email for all regardless of which plan you’re subscribed to. There’s also a whole knowledge base platform available, with answers to all the most frequently asked questions that users have had asked in the past.
To say it simply, Shopify offers everything you might need as an online store owner. You get full product and inventory management, with the handling of payments, taxes, the reporting of sales, and your e-commerce store is also completely optimized for search engines. But that’s not all; there are also offline solutions – you can use equipment and software delivered by Shopify in your physical store location. That way, you can keep all of your sales info in the same place. Extra handy!
Pros of Shopify E-commerce Platform
Speed and Load Times: When you build an ecommerce site you need it to be fast and secure – two often mutually exclusive goals for all but most often comes with expensive hosting packages. Even fractionally longer load times can send your paying customers on to the next site, costing you potential sales.
Security: With Shopify, your site is ultra-fast, while being totally secure for handling sensitive data and processing payments.
Great Design: Shopify is largely about great design, and you will quickly find there are plenty of templates available, both free and paid, that will leave your site looking aesthetically pleasing whilst also professional.
Add-ons: There are plenty of add-ons available for Shopify, so you can expand the feature set if you need it. That means you probably don’t have to worry about hiring a coder just yet – the easy interface means you can quickly bolt on new features and functions within your site.
Cons of Shopify E-commerce Platform
The Cost: Shopify costs money, both monthly and in terms of individual transaction processing fees (if you don’t choose to operate Shopify Payments). You need to take account of these when comparing packages to get your store off the ground, especially if you intend to sell in volume.
Uniquely Coded: While Shopify can be made to do pretty much whatever you want out of the box, if you do have to explore the back-end, you’re going to be dealing with proprietary coding. In a nutshell, this means that you need someone who knows what they’re doing, and has the time to learn how to work with Shopify particularly, to get the job done. This can increase maintenance costs and result in delays in managing your store.

Try Shopify Now
https://youtu.be/_al3VZ9r-rI

Shopify Review: A solution for beginners or real pros?
By Armin Pinggera
The Canadian company Shopify launched its online store platform in 2006. The goal was simple: provide an easy way to sell products online that frees sellers from all technical hurdles.
Shopify states that there are already more than 350,000 businesses that rely on their platform to sell products. Given the fact that there is only a free trial but no free plan, this is an impressive number indeed and makes them one of the leading store builders worldwide.
In our test, we’ll find out how easy or hard it is to setup and maintain a Shopify online store. How much knowledge do you need beforehand and what are the limitations? Is Shopify a reasonable alternative to other big players like eBay or Amazon’s marketplaces? We’ll also take a look at the differences between their paid plans to give you a better picture of which plan makes the most sense.
Let’s find out the secret behind Shopify (or rather, if there is any secret to it)!
Check what is shopify & how shopify works
Video Transcript
Shopify’s Online Store can be tested for 14 days for free here. (Link will open in a new window.)
Pros
Cons
Ease of use: Fortunately, you don’t have to worry about technical stuff at all. Everything can be done with a few clicks. Shopify provides great beginner guides and extensive documentation.
Designs: Both quality and quantity of their designs are excellent and they are mobile-friendly (responsive). In case you don’t find one that fits your needs among the roughly 170 themes, you can either create your own or buy one.
Flexibility: The core system and templates are already great, but it doesn’t stop there. You have full access to the code and can add new functions via their app market or API (for programmers).
Scaling: Shopify is very powerful, but still user-friendly. It’s easy to scale for small and big online stores.
Future Proof: Shopify is one of the biggest and most successful ecommerce solutions out there. The chances that this platform will be shut down are close to zero.
The Shopify Online Store in Detail
Criterion
Rating
Comment
Ease of use
Shopify has many features, but it is logically structured. Setting up an online store is not really complicated. Designing and arranging elements can be done with a live preview in the backend.
Basic functions
Product presentation
Zoom function, picture gallery, video - it’s all possible.
Product variants
First you define up to three options (e.g. size, color, material), then you add the variants (e.g. S,M,L,XL). From that Shopify will then generate all possible combinations, which can be up to 100. If you need more you can use one of their apps.
Cart function
yes
In the “Shopify” plan there is an “Abandoned cart recovery” feature integrated. Among other things, it allows you to remind your visitors with an automatic email to complete their purchase.
Article numbers
yes
Add your own SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) numbers to each product.
Mobile view
yes
Optimized for smartphones and tablets with fully responsive layouts. For store owners, there are iPhone and Android apps that let you manage your store on the go.
Checkout, payment and shipping
Payment options
Credit card (via more than 70 processors including Stripe and Authorize.net), PayPal, manual payment options and even BitPay for Bit Coins. They have even introduced their own Shopify Payments Gateway, which will waive the Shopify transaction fee for all plans (Currently available in the U.S., UK, Canada, and Australia only). More details.
Sale of digital goods
yes
It is possible to limit the number of downloads or the time of availability. Delivery is handled via email. Supports the new rules on charging VAT for digital goods in the European Union.
SSL encryption
yes
Customer data and payment transactions are encrypted via SSL (https). Included at no additional cost.
Customer log-in area
yes
Visitors can check out with a guest account or create their own personalized login. It’s even possible to let your customers decide whether or not they want to create an account.
Coupon codes
yes
Fixed price, percentage, free shipping. You can set a maximum amount of usage and expiry date.
Shipping cost settings
Shipping rates can be set for each country individually or by shipping carrier (UPS, FedEx, etc.). You can also choose fulfillment/dropshipping with services like Amazon.
Tax settings
Is able to pull US tax rates automatically. Individual tax rates for other countries can be set individually. Allows you to display VAT prices on your product pages.
Backend
Article management
Shopify tracks all items you have in stock. There are also settings to receive notifications automatically. There is even a new POS system to manage both your online and offline inventory. This also allows you to take offline payments via an iPad.
Customizable e-mails for order confirmation
Yes. You can edit every notification email as you wish.
Importing/exporting product data
yes / yes
Product data can be imported from Magento, eBay, WordPress and CSV. This saves a lot of time and makes moving previous web stores to Shopify easy. Exporting a CSV-file is also possible.
E-Commerce analysis
yes
Shopify offers reports in its “Shopify” plan and higher; product reports, order reports, and more are available (you can see how orders vary from month to month, for example). Moreover, it’s always possible to integrate Google Analytics.
Exporting order data
yes
Export your orders in a CSV-file.
Total Score
4.7/5
An excellent online store both for beginners and professionals. It almost doesn’t matter how big or small your online store is. Shopify offers you a platform that makes selling not only easy, but also gives the tools to improve your sales. It’s worth mentioning that their website builder and blog are also pretty decent. Try it for free.
Conclusion
After having tested Shopify for a whole week, we have to admit that we are quite impressed. To compare it with small-scale online stores like Weebly or Squarespace almost seems unfair as they easily beat them in every single category – except price.
Adding products as well as setting up payment and shipping options works absolutely painlessly: no important service is missing. That makes both ordering and paying easy for your clients. Their layouts can be modified to a large degree without any programming knowledge.
But Shopify is not only an online store. You can also use it to do content marketing via a blog and also add content pages. And that’s what we find so fascinating: Shopify can be handled by an absolute beginner while at the same time providing a great looking, cutting-edge online store.
Just in case you’re missing a function or want to change the layout, most of the time you are only one click away. New templates and apps can be installed with one simple click via their app store. If you should need a function that doesn’t exist, it’s possible to create it since Shopify has a powerful template language called “Liquid.”
No matter how fast your business and requirements grow, with Shopify you don’t have to be afraid of moving to another platform and restarting everything from scratch (unless you become another Amazon, that is).
Of course, quality has its price. Shopify is not the cheapest solution, and even in their “Shopify” plan ($79/month) they charge you a 1% transaction fee. But you can bypass this fee by signing up for Shopify payments, which is their own payment gateway.
In their “Basic” plan ($29/month), they offer telephone support and the ability to modify your entire template. Find our full analysis of Shopify’s pricing plans here.
Still looking for flaws in Shopify? We’ll give you one: you won’t be able to set up a multilingual store out of the gate. However, we found an app priced at (a relatively steep) $17.50 per month that can help you create a multilingual store.
If that’s not an issue for you, Shopify might be THE answer to all your ecommerce questions!
>> Try Shopify 14 days for free (no credit card needed)
Our recommendation: before going “big,” consider picking the “Basic” plan ($29/month) if you need more features you can always upgrade. WordPress users can integrate Shopify Lite for only $9/month.
Is Shopify the right choice for you?
We recommend Shopify if:
We DON'T recommend Shopify if:
you want to sell physical and digital goods
you require customer logins
you need an easy way to integrate third party ecommerce features and apps
you would like to have full control of the templates
you need a wide range of payment options
Shopify Online Shop Examples Websites
Tattoo
Tattly
Accessoires
hard graft
Headphones
SMS Audio
Prints
Pop Chart Lab
Shopify E-Commerce Alternatives
BigCommerce
See review
WooCommerce
See review
Weebly Store
See review
FAQ
Can I sell digital goods like MP3s, videos or eBooks with Shopify?
What payment fees does Shopify charge?
Can I upgrade or downgrade my plan easily?
How do I cancel my Shopify subscription?
Can I use Shopify with WordPress?
Techie Stuff (Mainly for Geeks)
Shopify Uptime
This widget shows you the exact website availability of our Shopify demo website during the last 30 days. Ideally the uptime is 100% with zero outages. In ecommerce you would generally want to have an uptime of 99.95% or higher as every minute your website is down will cost you money.
Shopify Response Time
Nobody likes a slow website. That’s why we test the response time from different locations around the world. Your online store generally should have an average server response time of less than 400ms or it can feel slow, however, the overall experience also depends on the page speed (see section below).
Shopify Page Speed
Shopify
Desktop
Mobile
User Experience (mobile)
Template 1
87
70
98
Template 2
87
73
97
Template 3
84
73
97
Average Rating
86
72
97.33
For an online store it is extremely important to load fast. For this test we randomly selected three blank Shopify templates and ran them through the Google PageSpeed testing tool. For an online store a rating of 82 (for desktop) or higher is desirable.
By Armin Pinggera

Try Shopify Now
https://youtu.be/vun0VBGUGb0

Shopify Review: Pros & Cons of Using Shopify For eCommerce
By Nate Shivar
There are a lot of options for running an online store – Shopify is an all-in-one ecommerce solution that I’ve used to run several online stores & consult on with clients since 2009. Here’s my Shopify review – with 6 pros and 6 cons of using Shopify for your online store.
You can check out Shopify’s current Plans & Pricing here.
EDIT 05/01/2017: This Shopify review was originally published 7/13/2013 and re-published frequently with updates throughout to reflect new features/pricing/opinion. In 2016 through 2017, Shopify has improved on several fronts, especially with a much improved checkout process. Enjoy!
But first, a bit of intro. There’s a lot of options for running an online store, and your choice of best ecommerce platform can have just as big of an effect on your business as choosing a building or location for a physical store. It’s not the end all of the business – but it certainly can make or break your business – and can either expand your opportunity or severely kneecap your business.
What Is Shopify?
Shopify is part of a group of turn-key ecommerce (aka “hosted ecommerce”) solutions that provides everything you need from end to end (minus the product and business know-how) to setup and start selling your product(s) to the world in contrast to you putting all the pieces together yourself (see Shopify’s plans here).
It’s sort of like hiring a general contractor to build your house, over being the contractor and hiring sub-contractors yourself. You’re still in control, but you let the general contractor use their expertise to make the project happen.
There are pros and cons to the approach – which is what we’ll get into. But basically know that Shopify competes mainly with BigCommerce and Volusion – all three of which provide turn-key ecommerce solutions, which in turn competes with non-turnkey solutions (like setting up your own store with WordPress).
And these hosted solutions sort of compete and integrate with ecommerce “marketplaces” like Amazon, eBay and Etsy. I wrote more about how Shopify can work with Etsy here.
Shopify also has a “Buy button” functionality that allows you to use Shopify as Point of Sale (POS) / Inventory option – and let customers click to buy your products anywhere online (Pinterest, Facebook, WordPress blog, Tumblr, etc). I’ll be looking less at that – and more at Shopify’s full online store package. You can get the Buy button only as part of the Lite Plan, but it competes with PayPal rather than full online store options.
So How Does Shopify Work?
Shopify is fairly straightforward – which is sort of their whole selling point. The broad process is as follows –
Pick a Shopify plan that fits your budget and feature needs.
“Point” your domain that you bought from a registrar like GoDaddy or NameCheap to your Shopify store. You also buy one via Shopify.
Choose a design / template for your store. You can edit a free one via their drag / drop tool or buy a premium one or hire a designer.
Add your products, page content, payment options, etc
Go get customers! Here’s an ecommerce marketing strategy to get you started.
Make sense? Cool. Let’s dive into the actual Shopify review.
Pros of Using Shopify
There are a lot of Shopify reviews online – usually with user-generated reviews based on anecdotes and personal experience. That’s fine but I take a different approach. I’ve worked with Shopify not only as a storeowner but also as a consultant to stores running on Shopify in addition to stores running on platforms ranging from custom built platforms to WooCommerce and dozens of others. There is no such thing as a “best” choice – only the right choice for your store based on your resources and objectives.
With that in mind – here’s what I found to be pros of using Shopify – not just in comparison to BigCommerce and other direct competitors, but also as an overall ecommerce solution.
Built-in Speed & Security for Hosting
Here are the results of a Speed Test on Shopify Store:
One of the challenges of running an online store is that you have dual needs from your hosting: you need it to be screaming fast and you need it to be super secure if you are processing credit cards.
For every extra tenth of a second that a customer waits for your page to load is a second that they might very well leave and go to your competition. In fact, most studies show that people will only wait up to 4 seconds for a site to load before leaving – and this gets even tighter for ecommerce sites.
On the flip side, you also need to route your customer’s credit cards through extra layers of security to remain PCI compliant and process credit cards. Many stores outsource payments to a third-party vendor (such as PayPal or Google Wallet), but even that connection can be slowed if your store isn’t set up right.
An all-in-one solution like Shopify allows you to turn that side of the business over to the pros and just let them worry about hackers, caching, compliance, and a whole range of issues that come with hosting an online store. Shopify can do things like pay bounties to security researchers to hack-proof their systems. Shopify is safe and legit. They are a publicly traded company with huge investments in software & security engineering.
Since Shopify can handle speed & security at a “global” platform level – they can do it especially well: provide 100% SSL, keep their sites screaming fast, and integrate with payment providers well so that you can always gets paid, and customers are never waiting for their page to load.
All The Necessary Features
Whether you are building your own ecommerce solution or shopping for an all-in-one solution, getting all the pieces of an online store together can actually be a bit challenging.
Sure, you can strip the bare bones down to having a product up to buy, and allowing someone to pay and give you their information – but to do it right – you’re going to want other features on top.
You’re going to want integrated payments; you ‘re going to want an easy way to add and remove products; you’re going to want to be able to customize the look of your store; and you’re definitely going to want to have solid, easy to implement Analytics to track everything (something that Volusion makes it tough to implement).
Whenever I have run stores for clients or myself in the past, Shopify had everything I needed to run an amazing online store – without being nickel and dimed in upgrades or left out to dry without a key feature.
Great Customer Support
When I contrast my experiences between building an ecommerce store myself (with something like WordPress + WooCommerce) and running it with something like Shopify – customer support is one of my top reasons to go with something like Shopify.
When you are building it and running it yourself – you have no one to turn to, except $$$ developers and often unresponsive online forums. With Shopify – you get answers fast. And all my customer support experiences with Shopify have been really fast, correct, and helpful – from both a developer and store owner perspective.
They have a huge database of FAQs, email/chat support…and phone support – with a real, knowledgeable rep on the other side.
When you are focused on running your online store – this safety net of always having someone at your back with answers is basically worth the Shopify subscription price alone. And on this point Shopify especially shines.
Marketing
What good is an online store if you can’t get anyone to show up? That’s what marketing is for – and is something that Shopify really excels at. Shopify doesn’t offer the fanciest marketing tools on the planet (as part of the main package – they offer more in the App Marketplace) – but they do include the essentials – and they make sure they do the essentials really well. For example, SEO:
For marketing campaigns (such as email, AdWords, etc), Shopify allows you to quickly and easily create landing pages, which is a key differentiating factor between other all-in-one platforms (and some DIY platforms).
And for SEO – Shopify creates 100% crawlable, clean code. They allows custom Title tags, and meta descriptions (see screenshot) – even on collections, in addition to other essentials like Search Console, sitemaps, and the prevention of the perennial ecommerce bug bear…duplicate content (for SEO geeks, they use canonicals).
Even though they don’t allow “root” or FTP access, as an SEO consultant, I’ve always been able to implement even technical items via their front-end code editor. Or – they actually already have all the advanced technical items done for me (e.g., Schema, SSL, Canonicals, Sitemaps, etc) so that I can focus on things like content strategy.
If you’re looking for an all-in-one platform that does good marketing for SEO, AdWords, and anything else up your sleeve – Shopify is a great choice in my experience.
Design
I think that good web platforms should always offer at least 3 levels of customization: first, it should look fine out of the box; second, it should be easily improvable without having to employ and professional graphic designer or developer.
WordPress is a good example for this – it looks great out of the box; it has tons of custom themes that you can buy and apply; but it also has the ability to be wielded by a professional designer to create a really high-end website.
Shopify has this ability as well, and I give a huge pro to Shopify for that. Shopify runs off a theme system. It has free themes bundled out of the box to choose from, and a wide variety of custom-built themes to purchase through their marketplace. In addition, as you can see in the screenshot above, Shopify makes its theme system available so that a designer or developer can customize it and create any type of shop you want – whether you are a tiny niche boutique or a multi-million dollar enterprise.
If you are just starting, you can make do just fine with a free theme and upgrade as you can justify/need it.
Add-Ons (Shopify App Store + Buy Button)
Shopify comes with a ton of features built-in, but no platform can possibly accommodate all the features needed by storeowners – so Shopify took a page from Facebook, Apple, Android, and started an App Store.
Shopify provides the platform and all the core features, and allows developers to offer hyper-specialized products that plugin seamlessly to Shopify’s platform.
Some are paid and some are free. The Chimpified App is my favorite example though. Not all retailers need or do email marketing, but some love it. It’s not a core feature of Shopify – but MailChimp (an awesome email marketing company) built an App that integrates MailChimp seamlessly with Shopify. It’s free, and awesome.
With this set up – you don’t have to worry about finding a developer every time you want a certain feature, because it’s probably in the App Store…and will be a lot cheaper and will work exactly as advertised.
Additionally, Shopify has really invested in their Buy button. On one hand, it’s a bit confusing to sell product separate from your website. On the other hand, it adds a lot of flexibility for brands that have a presence all around the web – or for merchants that just don’t want to setup a full online store on a domain.
Not all platforms have the scale to pull this off correctly, but Shopify does – and they have a business development team that specifically works on developing new apps and bringing new developers to solve problems. The App Store is a huge pro for me with Shopify.
Cons of Using Shopify
Not every platform is perfect though, and a Shopify review wouldn’t be complete without covering the cons of using Shopify for an online store. Let’s dive into the 6 cons of using Shopify for ecommerce.
Pricing
If you have a small online store – Shopify is going to be more expensive than BigCommerce at the beginning, and get more affordable as you grow. The kicker isn’t the $5 difference – it’s the transaction fees that Shopify charges (which are on top of any credit card feed). They justify it by pointing out that they go away as you grow – but it still represents a bit of a barrier to entry for Shopify.
They ameliorate some of the pricing by offering the “Get Started” option at $14/mo – but to me the transaction fees come off as a con of using Shopify, especially since you may not be sure about your sales volume or profitability at the start.
If you want a small online store – and plan on staying small, then you might want to also check out BigCommerce (just don’t go with Volusion because of their Analytics issues). But otherwise, it’s not a deal breaker for most online store owners – but is a con to be aware of and plan for.
In 2014, Shopify has restructured their pricing in line with new industry business models. To put their pricing in context and help you decide between competitors (like Bigcommerce – review here or Volusion – review here), here’s a rundown of 4 elements of pricing you should consider.
First, your monthly price – the sticker price you pay every month for a certain level of features. Shopify’s plans start with the Lite Plan at $9 USD per month and go up from there, for example. But note that the Lite plan is only for Buy button sellers. Really, I’d say that Shopify starts at $29/mo and goes up.
Second, your platform transaction fees – the additional fee you pay to a platform as a percent of sales. Shopify used to charge these on all their plans, but no longer does. You should pay attention to these when cross-comparing.
Third, your credit card fees – these used to be pretty standardized – and for the most part still are. However, Shopify recently set up their own POS & processing network so you don’t have to go through a 3rd party processor. That means fees go to Shopify rather than a processor like PayPal or Authorize.net. It can be confusing, and there are some lock-in issues to consider with Shopify. But be sure your are comparing apples to apples.
Fourth, your add-on fees – these are 3rd party apps, plugins or bits of software that you can purchase to make your store better. Usually these are one-time purchases, but sometimes they run off transaction fees. Shopify has a huge app store. Many are free, but some are paid. Be sure to budget for these when planning your store.
Pricing is “con with caveat” for Shopify. The built in credit cards & no transaction fees are huge, but monthly price & add-on fees can add up. Basically, Shopify is slightly pricier than Volusion & slightly cheaper than Bigcommerce as a general rule (but again, everything depends on your payments, apps, etc). The price differences are close enough that you should be comparing based on features & service.
Shopify, like all hosted platforms, is going to be consistently more expensive month to month than a self-hosted store you run yourself. However, self-hosted stores (like WordPress + WooCommerce) tend to have really $$$ development needs occasionally – especially if you’re running a bigger setup.
If you have some technical know how and a smaller shop, Shopify pricing will be expensive. If you want to focus on running & marketing your store (and prefer known monthly costs), then Shopify’s pricing will actually be a an incredible value. You don’t have to hire developers or a technically savvy SEO consultant to take care of things like Google Merchant Center or Schema.
Hacking around customization
I made the point earlier that a pro of Shopify is that it looks good out of the box, has great custom themes available, and has the ability to be fully customized by a developer/designer.
Now to the con of their customization setup – they use a unique setup to customize their themes versus using something like PHP for their templates. It’s a huge plus in some ways, but for someone who loves to tweak things without doing a full-on customization, it can be annoying.
I’m used to tweaking WordPress templates because they are in PHP – which is a common language and tons of forums and support, while the Shopify Liquid setup is a bit foreign to me and any other first-timers.
It is fairly straightforward to pick up, and they do offer amazing support in the Shopify forums, but I still consider it a bit of a con to have to become familiar with Liquid to tweak my store’s theme.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is a huge marketing medium for ecommerce. You can boost you organic traffic, increase social shares, grow your brand, and educate your customers. To me, blogging software is a must for an online store.
Shopify comes with built-in blogging software…but it’s not the greatest – especially if you are spoiled for WordPress. It gets the job done, and it’s better than it’s competitor’s options, but is definitely something I’d love to see improved upon.
Shopify Jargon
Every ecommerce platform is going to have a learning curve, but I found that Shopify has a slightly steeper curve just because the jargon the use is slightly off. Whether it’s their Liquid theme setup, using “collections” over “categories”, or various other small edits – I find their store setup to be not exactly how I’d set things up.
It’s not a huge con – but other solutions like BigCommerce are a bit more straightforward with their “user experience.” This con is much improved though with the release of Shopify 2 (as seen in the initial setup video below) – but is still there.
Lock-in
Lock-in is something I had to include in my Shopify review, even though it is a con for all-in-one ecommerce in general. Here’s the deal – if you ever decide to move your store to a different platform – it’s not going to be smooth. This makes choosing an ecommerce platform especially tricky because you have to plan for the future – and not just consider costs right now.
In my opinion, Shopify is an amazing platform to grow with. They have the scale, features, support, and pricing to cover you whether you are a brand new 1 product shop – or if you want to be the next Amazon.
However, if you were to ever want to leave, the best you could get would be a CSV export of your product information. Everything else – gone. It’s the same with BigCommerce, Volusion and any “hosted ecommerce platform”, but it’s still a con to consider when looking for an online store platform.
Initial setup
The last con of using Shopify for your online store is their initial setup process. With the release of Shopify 2 – Shopify has definitely made initial setup of your online store much easier – but it still isn’t a “just add water” step by step. It’s easy in a sense, but I think they oversell it a bit. It requires a little bit of technical know-how (especially to get your domain name redirecting correctly).
For anyone who buys into Shopify expecting to be making money in 15 minutes is going to be disappointed. The reason is takes a bit longer, and requires a bit of technical knowledge is that Shopify does do it right, and doesn’t allow you to cut corners – and they don’t make real decisions for you. However – to round up the last con – here’s a video tour of the Shopify backend so that you can see for yourself.
Shopify Review Conclusion
If you are looking for an all-in-one ecommerce solution for your online store, and you are looking to grow and add products – and you have a little bit of technical know-how, then Shopify will be a great fit for you.
You should check out Shopify (see their plans here).
If you are looking for something a little bit cheaper, and a little bit easier to setup – then I would also consider BigCommerce (see their plans here & see my Bigcommerce review here). Take my ecommerce platform quiz here that will help you decide.
If you are a brand looking for an enterprise solution, I wrote about my experience with Shopify Plus – Shopify’s enterprise solution here.
If you have any comments, questions, or experiences – let me know in the comments!
EDIT: Due to the extraordinary amount of spam this post attracts, I’ve disabled comments. Talk to me via Twitter!
Shopify
Shopify is a hosted ecommerce platform that allows anyone to setup an online store with hosting and support included.
Shopify Review
Written by: Nate Shivar
Date Published: 05/01/2017
If you are looking for an all-in-one solution for your online store, Shopify is a great way to go.
4 / 5 stars
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Related posts:
Volusion Review: Pros & Cons of Using Volusion for Ecommerce
Shopify Plus: An Enterprise Ecommerce Platform Review
BigCommerce Review: Pros & Cons of Using BigCommerce For Online Stores
8 Reasons To Choose Shopify For Your Online Store
Filed Under: Ecommerce Platform Reviews, Reviews
About Nate Shivar
I'm Nate Shivar - a marketing educator, consultant, and formerly Senior SEO Specialist at a marketing agency in Atlanta, GA. I try to help people who run their own websites...run them a little better. I like to geek out on Marketing, SEO, Analytics, and Better Websites.
Comments
S Allman says
June 28, 2013 at 7:09 am
One functionality that I can’t live without isn’t present on Shopify, and it drives me crazy. While you can set up an instore blog, you can’t reply to comments. What? This is the age of social, of responding to comments immediately. So we need that funtionality.
Suzy
Nate Shivar says
June 29, 2013 at 7:34 pm
Hi Suzy – thanks for the comment! I totally agree. Shopify’s built-in blogging functionality isn’t top-end. However, what I’ve found works well for any hosted ecommerce platform is to separate your blog from the ecommerce functionality completely. Run your blog off WordPress on a sub-directory of your site (yourstore.com/blog) or a subdomain (blog.yourstore.com). It’s an inconvenience to work off 2 dashboards – but you get the best of both worlds.
Good luck on everything!
yue says
July 18, 2014 at 1:50 am
Thanks for sharing, can i use my own domain for selling on shopify? or I have to use shopify subdomain?
Nate Shivar says
July 18, 2014 at 7:31 am
Thanks Yue! Yes – you can definitely use your own custom domain. You start your store with a Shopify subdomain, but you can use your own custom domain. Shopify’s documentation is at http://docs.shopify.com/manual/settings/domains. It’s fairly straightforward and highly recommended. Good luck!
Chris Hazel says
July 19, 2014 at 10:30 am
One of the primary benefits of Shopify for those who have never run an online store before is the website wizard feature. This helps walk you through the entire set-up process of the site. Shopify has a S.E.O friendly CMS that allows customizable H1, title, and meta tags. It also can automatically generate sitemaps, so that when you update your site these changes will show up on search engines quickly.
Nate Shivar says
July 19, 2014 at 3:02 pm
Agreed – well said, Chris!
Trackbacks
Bigcommerce Review: Pros & Cons of Using BigCommerce For Online Stores says:
May 27, 2014 at 7:21 pm
[…] cons to this, but know that Bigcommerce competes directly with Shopify (see their site here and my Shopify review here) and Volusion (see their site here) as all-inclusive […]
Starting an Online Store and Guide to Building an Ecommerce Website says:
July 6, 2014 at 8:06 am
[…] you want to go that route.  If you’d like read more about it, here’s a link to a full Shopify Review. And some other reviews […]
By Nate Shivar

Try Shopify Now
https://youtu.be/Ai9Csq3RurQ

Shopify Review 2017 - Is It Right For You?
By Chris Singleton
In this Shopify review, we look at one of the most popular online-store building tools currently available. Read on to find out more about the pros and cons of this e-commerce solution.
Our overall rating: 4/5
What is Shopify?
Shopify is a web application that allows you to create your own online store. It provides you with several templates that can be customised to meet individual users’ branding requirements, and the system allows physical or digital goods to be sold. One of the key ideas behind Shopify is that users without much in the way of technical or design skills can create a store without recourse to a design agency or web developer; however, people who are familiar with HTML and CSS will be pleased to discover that Shopify allows you to edit both, allowing you quite a degree of control over the design of templates.
Because Shopify is a hosted solution, you don’t need to worry about buying web hosting or installing software onto servers; the idea is that (nearly) everything you need to build and run your store happens ‘out of the box’. Shopify state on their website that the product has been used by 325,000 people to generate $24bn in sales.
Shopify pricing
There are five Shopify plans to choose from:
'Shopify Lite' - $9 per month
'Basic Shopify' - $29 per month
'Shopify' - $79 per month
'Advanced Shopify' - $299 per month
'Shopify Plus' - fees are negotiable
Shopify represents one of the cheaper ways into selling online, with its starter plan, "Shopify Lite" costing $9 per month and allowing you to sell an unlimited number of goods. However, it's important to note that this plan does not actually allow you to construct a fully-functional, standalone online store: rather, it
lets you sell via your Facebook page
lets you use Shopify in a physical location to sell goods / manage inventory
gives you access to Shopify's Buy Button, which allows you to sell goods on an existing website or blog.
The Buy Button works similar to a Paypal 'Buy Now' button but because it links back to Shopify, more sophisticated options regarding tracking orders and their fulfilment status are available. Using the Shopify Buy Button allows you to integrate Shopify into a site built on another platform - for example Squarespace, Wix or Wordpress; and will come in handy for users who are otherwise happy with their existing website but wish to integrate some Shopify e-commerce features onto it.
As you move up the pricing scale, you encounter the ‘Basic Shopify’ plan for $29 per month; the 'Shopify' plan for $79 per month and the 'Advanced Shopify' plan for $299 per month. Unlike the 'Lite' plan, all of these plans do allow you to host a fully functional online store; unlimited file storage and bandwidth is also included.
Key differences between Shopify plans
Key features to watch out (and not miss by selecting the wrong plan!) are:
reporting - professional reporting functionality is only available on the $79 'Shopify' plans and up
abandoned cart recovery – this allows you to automatically email users who nearly completed an order and see if you can persuade them to follow through, and is only available on the $79 'Shopify' plan and up
gift cards - these are only available on the $79 'Shopify' plans and up.
real time carrier shipping, which is only available on the most expensive 'Advanced Shopify' plan
staff accounts - these allow you to give different members of your team different permissions (which is useful for restricting access to sensitive data); you are allowed 2 staff accounts on the 'Basic Shopify' plan; 5 on the 'Shopify' plan and 15 on the 'Advanced Shopify' plan
There is also a ‘Shopify Plus’ plan – an ‘enterprise grade’ solution which is designed more with big businesses in mind rather than the average user; it offers advanced features regarding security, APIs and fulfilment. (This Shopify review focuses on the four other plans however).
Finally, it’s worth mentioning that you don’t have to pay for plans on a monthly basis – you can pay on an annual or biennial basis - Shopify offer a 10% discount on an annual and a 20% discount on a biennial plans, when they are paid upfront. However, it is only worth availing of these options if you are 100% certain that Shopify is going to meet absolutely every business requirement you’re likely to have for your store over the next 1 to 2 years – otherwise, a monthly plan is a safer bet.
Overall Shopify’s pricing structure is fairly consistent with key competing products like Bigcommerce, Squarespace and Volusion; the main difference involves the 'Lite' plan really, which whilst not giving you a fully hosted online store, does allow you to make use of many key Shopify features for a very low monthly fee. If I had a criticism of Shopify's pricing structure it would be that some features which you might expect to find on entry level plans - like gift cards and professional reporting - are only available when you opt for a more expensive one. Other solutions, especially Bigcommerce, are a bit more generous in this regard.
Shopify free trial
Shopify Payments, payment gateways and transaction fees
There are two ways to accept credit card payments on Shopify. The most straightforward, for users in countries where it is supported, is to use Shopify Payments, Shopify’s built-in payment system, which is powered by Stripe. If you use this, you don't have to worry about transaction fees. However, there is still a 'credit card rate' to consider: you can expect to pay a rate of between 1.6% and 2.7% of each credit card transaction (plus on some plans, an additional 30c). The exact rate depends on the type of plan you are on, with the more expensive plans being more generous with regard to this.
Alternatively, you can use a third party ‘payment gateway’ to process card transactions - of which there are over 70 to choose from (far more than competing platforms Bigcommerce, Volusion or Squarespace).
Using a third-party payment gateway requires a bit of configuration – you’ll need to set up a ‘merchant account’ with a payment gateway provider. Depending on the payment gateway provider you use, you can expect to pay a percentage of a transaction fee, or a monthly fee or both. If you use a payment gateway, Shopify will apply a transaction fee as well (of between 0.5% and 2% depending on the Shopify plan you're on - the transaction fee gets lower as the monthly plans get more expensive).
Whether or not it works out cheaper to use Shopify Payments or a payment gateway will depend very much on the kind of payment gateway you’re thinking of using, and the Shopify plan you’re on.
One important thing worth noting about Shopify Payments is that it is available only for users based in United States, Puerto Rico, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Australia; so if you’re not selling from one of those territories then you will have to use another separate payment gateway provider. As mentioned above however, Shopify integrates with far more gateways than key competing products do, so if you are selling outside of these countries, you should easily be able to find a payment gateway that’s suitable for your location.
Shopify themes
Shopify provides 9 free templates (or 'themes') that you can use – each of these comes in two or three different variants, so these templates actually translate to quite a lot of fairly different designs. These are all good templates, and they are responsive too, meaning they will display nicely across all devices.
Alternatively you can use a paid-for template - a 'premium' theme - of which there are 44 (again, each theme comes in a few variants). These range in price from $140 to $180. As far as I can tell, these are all responsive too.
An example of a free Shopify theme (click to enlarge)
You can browse all the free and paid templates by category, so you should be able to locate a suitable theme for your store fairly easily.
In terms of the aesthetics, the templates are all professional in appearance, easy on the eye, and very contemporary in nature - no complaints here.
Key features of Shopify
As discussed above, the features you get with Shopify vary according to the pricing plan you opt for. All Shopify plans from $29 ('Basic Shopify') and up provide:
the ability to sell physical or digital goods, in categories of your choosing and using shipping rates / methods of your choosing
a wide range of themes to choose from
credit card processing via Shopify Payments (Stripe) or a third party payment gateway
integration with Paypal
blogging functionality
import / export of customer data
content management (CMS) functionality
good search engine optimisation (SEO) options – it’s easy to add relevant keywords to your products and site pages
integration with Mailchimp
discount codes
the ability to edit CSS and HTML
a 'buy now' button that you can use to sell goods on an existing blog or site
point-of-sale integration (more on that below)
the option to create multiple staff accounts (as discussed above, how many you can created depends on the plan you're on).
If you opt for one of the more expensive plans ('Shopify' and 'Advanced Shopify'), you also get:
gift cards
better reports
abandoned cart functionality (more on this below).
And finally, if you're on the 'Advanced Shopify' plan you get the following additional features:
advanced report building
real-time carrier shipping
Point-of-sale applications
One particularly nice feature offered by Shopify which deserves a special mention and makes it stand out from its competitors is its 'point of sale' (POS) options and kit. These let you use Shopify to sell not just online but in physical locations too – as long as you have an iOS or Android device. Merchants in the US or Canada can avail of a free credit card reader for their device from Shopify.
The 'Point of Sale' kit allows you to use Shopify to not only run your business online, but to sell in physical locations too.
The full point of sale kit includes a card reader, barcode scanner, cash drawer and receipt printer - you can buy any of these items individually or as a package. You can also use your own card reader.
There are a several applications for Shopify's point-of-sale tools: for example, they allow you to sell in a pop-up shop, from a market stall, at an event or even in a permanently located retail outlet, whilst keeping your inventory and stock count automatically synced.
Using Shopify Point of Sale with multiple staff members is more expensive though – it costs $49 to use "Shopify Retail" on top of a regular plan.
Interface and ease-of-use
Shopify is pretty straightforward to use – it’s got a nice clean, modern interface. Editing the design of your store and adding products is very easy; but I have two gripes.
Navigation
I'm not keen on Shopify's approach to organising the site navigation – it requires you to create ‘link lists’ and use ‘handles’ – a drag and drop or 'parent folder' approach would be simpler. Despite having built quite a few Shopify stores at this point, I always have to spend a while reminding myself how to create simple menus.
Shopify's interface is clean and easy to use (click to enlarge).
Product images
Possibly more annoying than the navigation issue above is the way Shopify treats product images. If you upload images on Shopify with different aspect ratios, then Shopify does not crop them automatically. In other words, your product catalogues will consist of a series of differently-shaped images; this impacts negatively on the design. You can get around this by using a photo editing program to ensure consistent image aspect ratios for all your products - but unless you do this before you start uploading your images, you may find yourself with a headache, particularly if your store contains a large number of products.
These gripes aside though, Shopify’s interface is clean, user-friendly and shouldn’t present too much of a learning curve to most users. You can take a look at a vlog-style video overview of it below:
Importing and exporting data
Shopify allows you to import product data from three sources:
a CSV file
Ebay
Magento
If you want to import posts from a blog, this is possible too, but you will need to use a third-party app (the paid-for app 'Blogfeeder' is an option; there's also a free Wordpress importer app available from Shopify).
With regard to exporting data, you can export product data to CSV file very easily; but as far as I can tell there's no simple option to export static pages and blog posts - they are exportable, but as far as I can tell you'll need to make use of Shopify's API to get them out of the Shopify platform.
Working with product variants and options in Shopify
Shopify allows you to create up to 100 different variants of a single product. However, these variants can only involve three product options.
So, for example, if you were selling shoes, you could allow users choose from up to 100 different variants of a particular shoe, each with a different colour, size and style - but you couldn't allow them to pick a shoelace colour on top of this.
I ran into a problem with this actually with a Dublin wedding invitations site I built for a client recently. My client wanted in many cases to offer four or more options per invitation, for example:
envelope colour
card colour
card size
ribbon colour
Shopify's hard limit of 3 options meant that I couldn't facilitate this request without resorting to a workaround, which was to combine two product options into one, i.e., envelope and card colour. It made for a slightly fiddly build and a slightly fiddly user experience.
On the plus side, third-party apps are available to enhance the product option offering in Shopify, but you will need to be prepared to pay for these, and it would be nice - as is the case with rival Bigcommerce - if this a flexible approach to options functionality was available out of the box.
Using product categories in Shopify
Although there's room for improvement regarding how Shopify handles product variants and options, the way it handles product categories is fantastic and better than that found in many competing products.
You can manually add products to a collection or - and this is a huge time saver for users with large product ranges - set up rules which automatically slot products into the correct category. This can save you hours, if not days, of data entry - particularly if you have a large number of products in your online store.
Abandoned cart recovery in Shopify
Abandoned cart recovery in Shopify is designed to help you sell products to people who went most of the way through a transaction only to change their mind at the last moment. It's available on the $79 'Shopify' plans and up. The makers of competing product Bigcommerce claim that using abandoned cart recovery tools can boost your revenue by up to 15%, which - if true - is obviously very significant, and probably the strongest argument for forking out for the 'Shopify' plan rather than the cheaper 'Basic Shopify' option.
In terms of how abandoned cart recovery works in Shopify, it essentially allows you to either:
view a list of people who've abandoned their carts and manually send them an email
instruct Shopify to automatically send one email to visitors to your site who abandoned their carts (containing a link to their abandoned cart on your store).
The latter option is probably the best way to go about abandoned cart recovery, as it saves time.
Helpfully, Shopify suggests 2 particular time intervals for sending your abandoned cart saver email: either 1 hour after your user abandons their cart, or 10 hours later (you can also send the reminder email 6 hours or 24 hours later). This is because according to research carried out by Shopify, this is are the time intervals which generate the most sale completions.
For the sake of balance, it's worth pointing out that Bigcommerce's approach to abandoned cart recovery is arguably a bit better than Shopify's. With Bigcommerce you can program three emails to be sent out automatically to users who abandon their carts; and inserting discount codes (designed to convince people to complete their transactions) into them is a more straightforward process too.
Custom fields and file uploads
Some merchants will require the functionality to allow a user to provide some text at the point of purchase (for example, jewellers might require inscription copy etc.). Shopify will allow you to capture this data, but it's a bit of a fiddly process - you need to manually add some HTML code to your template. The other alternative is to pay for an app to do this job, which isn't ideal.
It's a similar story with file uploads - if you would like to offer your customers the option to upload a file (for example, an image to be used on a t-shirt or mug), you're going to have to get coding or, yes, you guessed it, pay for a relevant app.
I would much prefer - again, as is the case with Bigcommerce - if text fields and file upload buttons were simply options that could simply be selected / enabled when creating products.
Shopify’s App Store
In addition to Shopify’s core functionality, there is also an app store which you can visit to obtain apps (free and paid) that beef up what your store can do. Examples include:
data capture apps
accounting apps (that let you integrate your store with popular tools like Quickbooks)
abandoned cart saver apps (that are more sophisticated that Shopify’s out-of-the box cart saver)
advanced reporting apps.
So if Shopify’s ‘out of the box’ feature set doesn’t initially seem to meet your requirements, it’s well worth having a look through the App Store to see if there’s an add-on that will help.
Key third party apps that are supported include Xero, Freshbooks, Zendesk and Aweber.
Shopify and VAT MOSS
One really strong aspect of Shopify which is not often picked up on in other reviews is the way that it caters extremely well for VAT MOSS - or, to use its full title, 'VAT Mini One Stop Shop.' VAT MOSS is basically a requirement that sellers of digital products to consumers in the EU add value added tax (VAT) to each digital product on a per-country basis (i.e., there's one VAT rate to be applied for the UK, one for Ireland and so on). Unlike a lot of competing products, like Squarespace or Bigcommerce, Shopify calculates the appropriate rate automatically. So there's no faffing about with setting up manual tax rules and so on. This is a very handy piece of functionality.
Reporting
A Shopify sales report
Shopify offers a comprehensive range of reports:
customer reports (where your customers come from, the percentage of new vs returning customers, their overall spend and when they last placed an order)
marketing reports (how you acquired your customers)
search data reports (what products customers searched for in your online store)
finance reports (sales, tax reports etc.)
abandoned cart reports.
There is something negative worth pointing out here however: these reports are only available in Shopify if you are on their more expensive plans - 'Shopify', 'Advanced Shopify' or 'Shopify Plus'. If you're not on one of these plans you just get a fairly basic dashboard containing topline stats only. This contrasts poorly with key competing product Bigcommerce, which provides strong reporting functionality on all its plans.
An advanced report builder is also available in Shopify, which allows you to create your own custom reports - but again, it comes at a price: you'll need to be on a $299+ plan to avail of this.
Blogging in Shopify
Blogging is usually crucial in getting people to visit your online store; and thankfully Shopify comes with a built-in blogging tool which allows you to create the sort of content you'll need to ensure your site is visible in search. Shopify's blogging functionality is not by any means as sophisticated as what you'd find in a Wordpress site (don't expect content versioning or Yoast-style SEO plug ins) but it it's pretty good. You can also - with a little bit of fiddling around - hook it up to the commenting tool Disqus, which is useful too.
Support
Shopify's support is comprehensive - you can contact the company 24/7 by email, live chat or phone. This is better than the support options offered by some competitors - for example Squarespace doesn't provide phone support at all; and Volusion doesn't make it clear what hours their support desks are manned. Another positive aspect of Shopify's support is that you don't have to go through hoops to find a phone number for the company - contact information is presented very visibly on the Shopify website (along with estimated waiting times for email and live chat support).
There are two niggles worth pointing out here. First, having used Shopify support in the past, I've found that if your enquiry is of a particularly technical nature - i.e., if you want to code something and need help - then you may not get the answers you're looking for from the standard Shopify support service. You'd be better off posting a query in a forum and hoping a Shopify developer gets back to you on it. This could be improved a bit I feel - it would be nice if, for relevant queries, Shopify offered some sort of way to contact their developers directly for technical advice.
Secondly, it's unclear as to whether phone support is actually provided globally. Support phone numbers are only provided for North America, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore - there's no 'any other country' option.
Shopify review conclusions
Overall, Shopify is one of the best hosted solutions for those wishing to create an online store – and possibly the best for anyone who wants to use one product to sell online AND in a physical location. It’s competitively priced, easy to use, and its templates are strong. It has a big user base - 400k users, according to Shopify - which also inspires confidence (the last thing you want to happen is for a hosted e-commerce solution provider to go bankrupt and close down a successful store you might have with them).
The main disadvantages of using Shopify are its transaction fees if you use a third-party payment gateway (some of its competitors don’t charge any transaction fees at all, regardless of payment gateway used); its limit of three options per product (note: don't confuse this with variants, of which you can have 100 per product - see above); and its fairly basic abandoned cart saver.
Of course the only way to find out if Shopify is for you is to try it out fully – a 2 week free trial is available here. And if you've tried Shopify before, do feel free to leave your thoughts and comments below!
Shopify pros and cons
These are the main pros and cons of using Shopify:
Pros
With its 'Lite' plan, Shopify represents one of the cheapest ways to start selling online using a hosted solution.
There are no transaction fees if you are happy to use Stripe.
It has a clean, easy-to-use interface.
It provides a good range of free, responsive and attractive templates
The point-of-sale options are excellent and help Shopify stand apart from its competitors.
There is a simple Paypal integration available.
Shopify state that over 400,000 individuals have built online stores using the platform, which makes it a relatively safe bet that the company (and thus your online store!) is not going to disappear any time soon.
You can extend Shopify's functionality easily thanks to a huge range of third-party apps (although note that you will have to pay to use many of them).
Shopify handles the creation of product categories really well.
VAT MOSS rates is worked out automatically by Shopify.
The Shopify Buy Button allows you to use Shopify with an existing website built using another platform (for example Wordpress, Squarespace, Wix or Jimdo).
Cons
Whilst you can create 100 variants of a product, these can only involve up to 3 product options.
Adding custom fields such as text boxes or file upload options, whilst doable, is unnecessarily complicated.
Professional reporting functionality is only provided on more expensive plans.
Shopify Payments (Stripe) only allows you to sell from certain countries –  United States, Puerto Rico, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Australia. If you want to sell from another country you will need to use a payment gateway.
You can’t avoid transaction fees if you use a third-party payment gateway.
There is no way to automatically ensure that product images are displayed using the same aspect ratio. This can lead to messy presentation of your products unless you have cropped all your images in advance of uploading them to Shopify.
Implementation of the abandoned cart saver could be a bit better.
Creating drop down menus and adding items to them is a fiddlier process than it should be.
The cheapest plan (the $9 'Lite' offering) doesn't permit you to create a fully-featured online store.
It's not clear how to access phone support if you live outside of North America, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore.
Alternatives to Shopify
Of the solutions I’ve tested to date – Shopify, Bigcommerce, Volusion, Squarespace and Magento Go – Bigcommerce is probably the strongest alternative to Shopify. It’s similarly priced, easy-to-use and its feature set is broadly comparable with Shopify’s. Bigcommerce also offer a 14 day free trial. Our full Bigcommerce review is here.
Additionally, you may wish to investigate Ecwid, which allows you to add an online store to an existing website (Ecwid offers similar functionality to Shopify's Buy Button, but with more advanced features). You can read our full Ecwid review here.
Finally, you may wish to check out Squarespace, although you need to bear in mind that Squarespace's e-commerce functionality only allows you to take payments through Stripe (Paypal is not an option!).
More Shopify resources
You may find our article on Shopify fees useful; additionally, you might like to read our Shopify vs Squarespace comparison or our Bigcommerce vs Shopify comparison reviews.
For a visual overview of how Shopify works, you can watch the below video walkthrough (from Shopify).
By Chris Singleton

 Try Shopify Now
https://youtu.be/ZmjvKn3S0yI

Shopify Reviews: The Best Ecommerce Platform? (May 2017)
By Catalin Zorzini
Lots of people ask us which ecommerce platform is the best suited for a company just getting started with an online store. If we gave you the long answer it would be a little more complicated. However, a short answer to that question is that Shopify should be able to offer all the functionality you need. It's filled with tools for launching a site within minutes, and you don't have to worry about self hosting or buying a domain name from a third party. You'll find my full review below. For more Shopify reviews from our readers check out the comments area.
In that respect, one could call it the perfect out of the box solution, built with pricing plans that cater to small starter stores as well as shops that are bringing in millions of dollars in sales.
The reason we like Shopify so much is that it's not like WordPress or Magento, (which are great as well,) but you need some sort of development knowledge to keep your site running smoothly. On the other hand, it's not like some of the more simplified solutions like WIX and Weebly, where you're going to have a tough time scaling up.
Shopify is right in the middle, where complete beginners can create products, manage inventory and share promotions, all without having to take a development class. In addition, more advanced designers gain access to CSS and HTML files, and you can upgrade to gain more advanced features as your store grows. Overall, it's a beautifully constructed ecommerce platform with plenty of themes that look modern and stylish but also simple and minimal if that's what you're looking for.
Shopify was founded in 2006 by Tobias Lütke (CEO of the Year in Canada), Scott Lake and Daniel Weinand. Since the launch, the platform has quickly grown from a small player to one of (if not the) leading ecommerce solutions. The company is currently powering more than 220,000 online retailers. Some of their most notable customers include General Electric, Amnesty International, Tesla Motors, Encyclopedia Britannica, Foo Fighters, GitHub, and many more. If you are looking for an ecommerce solution with a lot of great features that still remains easy to use for the novice users, then you should definitely give them a try.
The Platform's Top Features: Shopify Reviews
I have tested quite a few ecommerce platforms in the past, and I must admit, Shopify has the most thought-out feature set I have ever encountered. Almost everything you need to run your own online store is taken care of by a distinct feature. It doesn’t matter if you are planning to run your store fully online or from a brick and mortar setting, there is something for everyone. The reason Shopify manages to achieve such a strong feature-set is because they either have a tool built-in, or they let you install it with an app.
For example, taxes and shipping are included in the Shopify interface, yet for most of the themes you're going to have to find a free app for social media buttons. Both options work, and you often don't have to pay any extra money when opting for an app.
Try Shopify
The company has one of the most complete dashboards or control panels I have ever seen. All tasks, from processing orders to managing inventory, are given to you on the backend.
The platform also provides an interface called Shopify Partners, where developers can play around with new websites without having to open up free trials every time. It's like a sandbox interface for those who have several clients and need to present website builds before landing jobs. You can install new themes, customize full websites and seemlessly transition from a Shopify Partners website to a launched site. Not only that, but you gain a commision for every client you bring on board with Shopify.
If you have any familiarity with WordPress, the dashboard actually looks pretty similar to that interface, with the tabs on the left side for you to access quickly. You can also use the dashboard for generating discount codes, or for examining the latest reports. (In fact the reports on Shopify are my favorite out of all the ecommerce platforms. They're organized, clean and simple, with options like sales by billing address, sales by traffic referrer and gross sales by product title).
If you are looking to sell your products in an actual retail setting, then you can opt for the Shopify POS. This includes everything you need to sell your products offline, both on the software and hardware side. The software includes an iPad app, which makes selling your products in a retail setting much easier. With the app you can use the credit card reader to swipe the customer's credit card right there. You can even purchase additional hardware from the company such as a cash register, a receipt printer and even a barcode scanner.
Shopify also offers one of the biggest App Stores out of all the ecommerce solutions; they provide hundreds of free and paid apps that will enhance your store. These have been divided into different categories such as Marketing, Sales, Social Media, Shipping and Customer Service. Thanks to their formidable content management system (CMS) you can easily create additional pages, as well as pages through which your clients can easily contact you. Furthermore, Shopify makes running your own blog super easy, since everything is handled from a single dashboard.
Keep in mind that the entire Shopify feature-set is hard to walk through in a single section, but it's worth mentioning that each of the Shopify themes are responsive with mobile ready checkouts. The responsive checkout means that your site automatically adapts to the size of your screen, whether it be through a tablet or smartphone. Along with direct Facebook and Pinterest integration, gift cards, discount codes and a decent custom profile, the company has pretty much perfected the built-in features.
In general, if you need a feature that's only in the app store, you can test it out, and move onto another option if it's not working out on your website.
Something New: Shopify Sections
Shopify Sections is an exciting new feature that doesn't exactly give your a drag and drop builder, but it comes close. The visual editor offers a wide variety of content sections that you can insert onto your homepage. For example, you might want to place a slideshow, button and product carousel towards the top of that homepage.
It's done with the click of a button. After that, you can adjust the order of those sections by dragging and dropping them in the sidebar.
Shopify Ease of Use
Is it intimidating to handle all of the features in Shopify? Not really at all. In fact, we like the feature-set for companies that are just getting started with web design, since a few steps are given to you for getting your site up and running.
So, you could simply stick to the handful of steps offered in the dashboard (adding a product, customizing the look of your website and finding a custom domain,) or you could expand your store with the help of apps and custom coding.
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The apps install within seconds, so it doesn't take a genius to handle those. However, if you are more of an advanced developer, Shopify has the tools for you as well. The only area that may be of concern for people with more advanced coding and development skills is that an FTP client is not included with the ecommerce platform, somewhat hindering the control you have over the site.
In terms of pre-publication, Shopify gives you the opportunity to test your store before it goes public, and the live editor is pretty nice for seeing your changes immediately after a setting is adjusted.
The company is pretty much hell-bent on making their interface the easiest in the industry. What's interesting is that they are walking a fine line, since it's still a platform that can satisfy those with more experience with coding and what not. Overall, importing hundreds of products is simple, and making an item from scratch uses quick tools and settings for things like images, videos, titles, pricing, discounts and more.
I don't really see any beginner or intermediate developer having a problem with Shopify. At the same time, most advanced developers are going to be just fine. There's the select few who are planning on scaling up incredibly fast who might get a little bogged down with the Shopify interface.
However, Shopify has enough flexible pricing plans to keep your comfortable for a significant period of time.
Shopify Pricing Makes Sense
Shopify offers four different pricing plans, and the lowest starts at just just $9 a month. While their other plans range from $29 (for their basic plan) to $299 (for their biggest plan,) you do have the opportunity to try out a free, 14 day trial before committing to anything.
If you want to sell your products both online and offline, then Shopify has plans that you must call in and speak to a rep to setup. Furthermore if you wish to only sell your products offline, then they also offer a plan for that, which can be quite handy.
The cheapest offline plan starts at $29/month while the most expensive costs $299/month. Unlike with the other platforms, all plans come with unlimited bandwidth and, with the exception of the starter plan, an unlimited number of products you can sell in your store.
That said, let's outline some of the online plans for you to understand which one is best for you:
Lite – $9 per month for credit cards rates of 2.9% + 30¢, a Shopify buy button (so your site is technically not a real online store,) Facebook selling, POS integration, fraud analysis, manual order creation and shipping codes. One staff account is provided.
Basic Shopify – $29 per month for everything in the previous plan, credit card rates of 2.9% + 30¢, an actual online store, 24/7 support, fraud analysis, manual order creation, discount codes, a website and blog, and a free SSL certificate. Two staff accounts are provided.
Shopify – $79 per month for everything in the previous plan, credit card rates of 2.6% + 30¢, an actual online store, gift cards, professional reports and abandoned cart recovery. Five staff accounts are provided.
Advanced Shopify – $299 per month for everything in the previous plan, credit card rates of 2.4% + 30¢, an actual online store, advanced report builder and real time carrier shipping. 15 staff accounts are provided.
Each plan allows for an unlimited number of products, unlimited file storage, shipping label discounts and a retail package if needed.
If you want to learn more about this, check out my full guide on Shopify pricing.
Shopify Templates and Design
One area where Shopify really excels at is its themes and design. The company offers some of the most professional looking themes of any ecommerce platform. As of this article,  the company has around 21 free themes for you to choose from. On the other hand, you can pay for a theme, and select from over 100 options. The nicer ones start at around $100, but you may be able to locate a few that are cheaper.
The Shopify Sections functionalty (for dragging and dropping certain sections with the theme) is live for most new themes. Therefore, if you're starting a new site, you shouldn't have any problems getting Shopify Sections. Unfortunately that leaves all the currently running sites in the dark with Shopify Sections.
However, Shopify claims that all online stores will get Shopify Sections by the end of 2016, which is hopefully going to be the case.
As we talked about above, CSS and HTML modules are given for you to make more advanced customizations to the themes you buy. In my experience, the free themes aren't as easy to customize, and Shopify probably does this to get you to purchase premium options. The theme selection includes categories like clothing, electronics, food, toys and much more. I've had my eye on Shopify for quite some time now, and the company seems to share new themes on a consistent basis, and the designs are looking more and more modern.
My main concern with a theme design is how quickly people can checkout and get through the shopping cart process. The Shopify themes have both two and three step checkouts, and you can tryout tools for things like social and guest checkouts.
Once you've found the right theme, you can easily customize the look and feel to your heart's desire, simply by opening the template editor and editing your theme until you feel like it’s exactly what you are looking for. On the other hand, the new Shopify Sections feature is sure to speed up your editing, since it's a rather simple drag and drop editor.
If you have created a theme that you would like to use for your store, then you can upload your own template.
Go to the Theme page and scroll down until you find the Upload Theme button, then just add your own theme.
None of the Shopify themes have Shopify branding. In fact, it's not that easy to find any trace of the Shopify brand on your own site. This is a wonderful thing for beginners, since it's not going to affect your search engine rankings, and people will think you designed the website yourself.
Shopify Inventory
Inventory management is an important part of running your store, and Shopify has you covered in this area too. Once you are ready to add inventory to your store then all you need to do is press the Products tab in the sidebar on the dashboard. You will then automatically be taken to the following page:
As you can see in the image above, everything from product title to description and price is customizable. In addition, you can give each product a distinct SKU, as well as a bar code.
Transfers, Inventory, Collections and Gift Cards are seen as tabs in this area as well. I like the Inventory tab because it features all of the items in your store, all organized into a clean and manageable list. The product page also offers several options for things like SEO, shipping and the imagery that users are going to see when landing on this product page.
Shopify SEO & Marketing
If you have an amazing store but your customers are unable to find it, then chances are you will be very disappointed with the sales figures. Shopify offers great features for both SEO and Marketing. Thanks to the built in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) features, your site will easily be found on all major search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo.
What's cool is that even though the SEO settings are automated, you can go into each product page and customize your own target keywords, URLs and more.
If you really want to customize your store further, the company offers customizable H1, title and mega tags. Also, the URLs are all SEO friendly. Shopify has partnered with Google in order to occasionally give you advertising money for a new AdWords account. I certainly wouldn't base my decision on which ecommerce platform gives me money to advertise on Google, but I guess it's a nice bonus.
The gift cards are extremely user-friendly, and you don't have to go out to find a third party app for better gift card features. It depends on your payment plan, but once you get everything activated it allows for gift card codes in the checkout area.
The discount codes are generated on the backend as well.
To help boost your marketing, Shopify created a discount code coupon generator to promote your products on different social networks.
Along with selling options on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest, your marketing game is in good hands with Shopify. However, you should know that social media following and sharing buttons are only in the app store. Yes, you can create an online shop through Facebook, but the buttons are in the app store.
Finally, the email collection form is pretty simple. It certainly does the job and integrates with the major email options like MailChimp, but many ecommerce stores tend to look towards the app store to find something more suitable.
Read this post if you want to learn more on which is the best ecommerce site builder for SEO.
Shopify Payments
Traditionally if you wanted to accept payments you would have to use a third-party payments processor like Stripe, PayPal, or others that would charge a certain fee per transaction. Shopify has created their own payment processor called Shopify Payments (Powered by Stripe). If you decide to sign up for this program then all transaction fees will be lifted regardless of your plan.
We covered credit card fees in the pricing area earlier, but it's worth noting that you do have the option to integrate with over 70 different payment gateways.  These include accepting payments from credit cards, Google Checkout, PayPal and many more.
The gateways all come with their own transaction fees. Since these can get a little confusing, I strongly recommend that you familiarize yourself with these before signing up, as you might otherwise be surprised at just how much you'll have to pay.
In short, Shopify has one of the biggest lists of supported payment gateways out there. This doesn't mean you'll use them all, but it opens up more opportunity for people from all over the world. It also gives you a chance to research which of the payment gateways are going to work for your particular business.
Shopify Security
Security is taken very seriously when you run an ecommerce site. Therefore Shopify has its shopping cart hosted on a Level 1 PCI DSS compliant server. In other words, your data, and the data of your customers, is secure. In addition, all pricing plans (besides Lite) offer 128-bit Free SSL certificate at no added cost.
While data security is very important to retailers, many also worry about their store always being available, and Shopify provides their customers with a 99.94% uptime guarantee. Furthermore, the company creates secure backups of all your data, so even if your store should crash, it will be backed up for restoration later.
Security badges come with your plan, considering those are some of the only ways you can show to your customers that your website is secure. That, along with the https mention and padlock in the URL area of your browser.
Some other things that come into play with security include vulnerability management and access control. You get to specify which users are able to access certain content on the backend. So some people might get a little access, while others might get admin access, and others might get no access.
Finally, the vulnerability management area helps out with catching problems from malicious hackers to fraudulent transactions. You get to monitor what's going on with your site and Shopify assists in identifying criminal activity.
Shopify Support
If you find yourself in need of support, then Shopify has one of the best teams in the industry. Regardless of which pricing plan you decide on, the company has 24/7 full customer support, which includes phone support as well as chat and email support. Another great form of help offered by Shopify is the access to a sizeable support system directly through their website, including user forums, tutorials and FAQ’s.
If you are just beginning your journey as an online seller, Shopify has created something called Ecommerce University. Here users gain access to eBooks, videos and guides, with the idea of helping customers learn the ins and outs of running their own web store.
Overall, you have the ability to either speak to a professional or learn about the system yourself. Obviously some people hate waiting on the phone for a support rep, so we feel like the forums, courses and videos are enough for you to figure out your own problems if you'd like. So, the support team has something for everyone, and in my experience they're pretty darn knowledgeable and responsive.
From videos to podcasts, and success stories to a huge encyclopedia of ecommerce terms, the Shopify online support seems to improve on a regular basis. Heck, the last time I did this article I don't recall them having an ecommerce podcast.
A Note On Development Requests
When working with any online platform, app or software, it's nice to have access to the developers or at least some sort of feedback system for letting them know what features you would like to see in the future. In addition, we like to see the developers actually respond to the requests with new features being released on a consistent basis.
I consider this a type of support, since a company that doesn't listen to customers is bound to lose them because of this lack of communication.
Shopify thrives in this department, seeing as how they regularly share blog posts about the feature requests they have listened to and implemented. For example, many ecommerce professionals worry about images slowing down their sites, since media is usually what causes this problem. Well, Shopify responded by optimizing and updating all previously uploaded images on Shopify, while also providing file modification instructions for future image optimization. This not only helps with SEO, but it speeds up the user interface for all Shopify merchants.
Conclusion
Who is the Shopify ecommerce platform built for?
Beginners, intermediates and advanced users (the ones looking to speed up the development process by not spending much time on coding or more complicated processes). I also like it for generalist bloggers or content creators who would like to turn go with the Lite plan to throw some Buy buttons on their websites. The Shopify Lite plan is ripe for converting a regular business site into an ecommerce one. It's also nice to see a homepage builder (Shopify Sections) that has draggable elements.
I would gladly recommend Shopify to anyone, if nothing else then at least give their 14 day free trial a try. I'm certain you will not be disappointed.
By Catalin Zorzini

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https://youtu.be/7ly2HVp9ksM

Shopify Reviews 2017 | 12 Key Things You Need To Know
By Jeremy Wong
There are a number of Shopify reviews and we’re the first ones to admit, choosing the right e-commerce online shop builder is tough.
A lot of reputable online shop builders give you all sorts of tools and it’s confusing – which one is the right one for you?
In our minds, if you are starting a new online business, or just bringing an existing business to the online world, Shopify is definitely one of the easiest ecommerce builders to help you create your online shop (we’ll explain why below).
Shopify is a leading online shop builder – it is currently powering over 400,000 online shops and has helped businesses process over $34 billion worth of sales. Take a look at these examples here and you can see what Shopify can do for you.  You can also see a lot of customer success stories here.
It doesn’t matter if you are just starting a new online shop, or bringing an offline store online to grow your business, the last thing you want to do is troubleshoot technology.  Shopify can help you save time so you can focus on other important aspects of your business.
One key thing that we think Shopify has done exceptionally well, is inviting other vendors (such as theme designers or online tools providers) to integrate their services and products into Shopify, making Shopify a 1-stop-shop for all the tools you’ll need to create a successful online shop.  We’ll give you more details below.
The best thing about Shopify is that it’s made me not have to worry about anything that has to do with the e-commerce portion of my business – Chris Tsang, Mindzai Toys (www.mindzai.com)
eCommerce Examples & Case Studies – click to see how other people are building successful online stores with Shopify
REVIEW OUTLINE
Click on the following links to read the specific sections:
Top 3 Pros and Cons
Shopify Review Video
Shopify is Ideal for…
Ease of Use
Template Design Options
Abandoned Checkout Recovery
Shopify App Store
Mobile E-Commerce
Support / Tutorials / Community Resources
Hosting, Security and Backup Options
Shopify Pricing – Is it Worth the Investment?
Conclusion / Recommendation
1.
SHOPIFY REVIEW – TOP 3 PROS AND CONS
Pros
Cons
Pros About Shopify
#1
Over 100 beautiful, professional looking, mobile ready storefront themes
Shopify offers you over 100 beautiful and professional templates (themes), so your online shop can look great.  If you have an online shop, your shop has to look good.  Why? It builds credibility and trust right off the bat.  It’s the same idea as a brick and mortar store – it has to look clean and professional to encourage visitors to stay and have a look around.
Shopify provides you with a Theme Store where you can pick and choose from their collection of premium themes (either free or paid) across different industries (clothing, jewelry, furniture, art, etc), so you can dress up your website accordingly.  One thing we appreciate is that Shopify invites professional theme designers to create themes for Shopify.  These themes are quality-checked by Shopify, so they are fully compatible with Shopify.  This allows you to choose from a broad range of professional designs so your website will look good.
#2
Comprehensive, flexible ecommerce builder with a large App Store to extend the functionality of your online store
Shopify is very flexible and has all sorts of tools (Apps) to meet your needs and to extend the functionality of your online store. They offer you a large App Store where you can choose from over 1,400 different Apps (free and paid) for you to plug into your store.  The tools include accounting, customer service, inventory management, marketing, reporting, shipping, social media, fulfillment, etc and these apps can help automate a lot of your business processes.
This is really one of the biggest strengths about Shopify – Not only do they give you a way to build an online store and handle payments, they also offer you helpful tools you need for other important aspects of running a successful business.  You probably won’t need all of them, so you can pick and choose the apps that you need.  These apps are fully integrated into Shopify, so you don’t have to mess around with different systems and try to make them “talk” to each other.  Just plug and play – which will save you a lot of time and work.
#3
Shopify offers you a true 24/7 anytime support
You can reach them at any time through phone support, online live chat or email.  They even provide you with 4 international phone numbers so you can choose the number that fits your region.  If you’re running a business, you need immediate access to support when you need technology troubleshooting – Shopify provides this for you. [More details on Shopify’s Support below]
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Cons About Shopify
#1
Shopify charges a transaction fee for every sale (unless you use Shopify Payment)
In addition to a monthly service fee, Shopify charges its customers a 0.5% – 2% transaction fee for their plans (unless you are using Shopify Payments to power your payment transactions – in which case all transaction fees are removed). What this means for you, is that Shopify will charge you 2% of the sales value if you are using the “Basic Shopify” plan, 1% of the sales value if you are using the “Shopify” plan, and 0.5% of the sales value if you are using the “Advanced Shopify” plan (more details about their monthly plans below).
While this might sound high initially, let’s put this in perspective. To illustrate, the cost to you is $0.5 to $2 for every $100 in sales that you make, or $50 or $200 for every $10,000 in sales.  This fee is intended to cover the technology it takes for Shopify to power your sales.  More sales usually mean more visitors, and more visitors use up a lot of bandwidth (think of it as the power it takes for Shopify to allow your visitors to look around the store).
While this transaction fee is in addition to the monthly plan fee, we would still be very excited if we sold $10,000 per month in products and would gladly pay $50 or $200 to Shopify to power and manage the transactions for us.
One thing you should appreciate about Shopify is that they are very transparent in their fee structures.  A lot of other large online shop builders are well known for charging hidden fees, so you get a big surprising bill that you can’t calculate at the end of the month.  With Shopify, you can actually calculate how much you owe them based on the agreed upon monthly plan, and also based on how much sales you’ve made (which you know).
#2
Monthly cost may add up if you integrate multiple Apps
Although Shopify offers you over 1,400 apps to extend the functionality of your online shop, a lot of the apps are not free and they charge you a monthly fee for you to use them.  Naturally, this might be concerning due to increased monthly costs.  For example, integrating Freshbooks (a leading accounting / booking software) to your Shopify store is $31.99 per month.
However, consider it this way.  If you need to manage accounting, this means that you are making a good number of sales, so you’re going to need to manage your accounting anyway.  You can either sign up for an accounting software elsewhere, and manually export your sales information and import them into your accounting software (you know there will be a few glitches along the way, and in most cases, nobody will step up to help you because it’s “not their problem”), or you can hire a bookkeeper for a lot more than $31.99 per month.  Or, you can use one of Shopify’s apps to make your life easier – because the apps are fully integrated with Shopify, so there is no manual work to make the different systems communicate properly. Everything is integrated and you don’t have to lift a finger to deal with bookkeeping.
Will the cost add up if you need several paid apps to extend your online shop’s functions?  Yes.  Will it save you time, headaches and money over time?  Yes. We’ve all tried to pinch dollars when running businesses.  But don’t be “penny wise, pound foolish”.  The apps are here to make your life easier, so you can focus on other important aspects of your business. Also, keep in mind that apps are completely optional.
#3
You need to know “Liquid” if you want to customize your theme extensively
If you know code (HTML and CSS) and want to customize your website (or hire a programmer), it’s not as straightforward as in addition to editing through HTML and CSS (the basic codes), Shopify also uses their own coding language called “Liquid”.
What this means is that if you want to hire someone to quickly make modifications, you might have to hire a Shopify Expert who knows Liquid to help, which won’t be as cheap as a normal programmer.  Of course, this assumes that you want to make customizations.  What you can do is keep with the basic premium themes first, and as you start to make more sales, then consider making customizations.
Other Expert Opinions About Shopify
See what other leading experts are saying about Shopify
2.
SHOPIFY REVIEW VIDEO
[Update to Video – In the video at the 7 minutes 30 second mark, we discussed Shopify’s pricing and their transaction fees.  Now, through Shopify Payments, Shopify will waive all your transaction fees]
3.
SHOPIFY IS IDEAL FOR…
“Shopify is ideal for you if you want to launch an online shop, or if you already have a physical store, but want to continue to grow your business by selling your products online.”
Shopify caters to a broad range of industries, such as art & photography, clothing & fashion, jewelry & accessories, electronics, food & beverages, home & garden, furniture & household, sports & recreations, toys & games, etc. (See Shopify examples here)
Basically any sort of gadgets or widgets or physical products that you can sell, Shopify can help make this an easier process for you.
Dealing with technology isn’t easy, and technology is not the only thing in running a successful business.  So allowing platforms such as Shopify to help you manage the technology side of things, while you can focus on other parts of your business (such as marketing, product development, customer relationships building, administration, etc), Shopify can make your already hectic life a bit easier.
[UPDATE (Sept 2013) – Shopify launched their Point of Sale (POS) System.  So if you have an offline retail store, you can now integrate your entire sales system with a Shopify online store!  You can effectively turn an iPad into a sales terminal, using it to help your customers browse through your product catalog, handle credit card transactions, and even hook it up to your cash register.  A bold move from Shopify, which moves it closer to being a “true” commerce service provider.]
Shopify Plus (Enterprise Level Users) – If you’re in the big leagues & your business generates 6 to 7 figures in sales per year, this is how Shopify Plus can help you grow even more.
4.
IS SHOPIFY EASY TO USE?
“Shopify gives you tools to build your online store.”
It’s not magic, so you will have to commit a few hours to learn the basics, but once you do that, it’s pretty smooth sailing from there (don’t forget you also get 24/7 online or phone support from them).
Here is a quick video demonstration from Shopify that will show you how easy it is to create your own ecommerce website.  You really don’t need to need to know anything about codes to set up your online store!  Click this image to watch the demo video:
Shopify gives you the tools to:
Insert product images, descriptions / details
Manage your inventory
Organize your products into categories (easier for your prospective customers to find what they need)
Discount code engine
Creating web pages and blogs
Track customer and order details
Accept payments from 70 different payment processors in different currencies
Set up customer accounts (so your customers can login into their private accounts to manage their personal information such as address, credit card information, so it’s easier for them to buy next time)
Sort your customers by location, money spent, etc, so you can better understand where your customers are from and their spending behaviors, so you can market better to them
Manage multiple staff login – so if you have staff helping you, you can grant them different permission levels to help you manage your online shop
Click image to see Shopify Features / Tools
The overall theme from Shopify is that they can do the “heavy lifting” for you, so you can focus on other parts of your business.
5.
TEMPLATE DESIGN OPTIONS
As mentioned in the “Pros About Shopify” section above, Shopify offers you over 100 premium themes for you to dress up your online shop.  Having your online shop look professional and elegant builds trust and credibility.  As vain as that sounds, it’s true and it works.
Imagine yourself walking into a store that looks mediocre or messy – does it inspire trust?  Most likely not.  Shopify offers you a lot of professional themes to help you built trust, and sell products.
Some of the themes are free, and some are paid.  For the paid themes, they range from $80 to $180.  While this might sound pricey at first, just remember that it is a 1-time payment (no need to pay monthly / recurring fees), and an investment to making your online shop look professional with the end goal of keeping your visitors on your website and improving your chances of making sales.
After all, you don’t really need to invest in a paid premium theme yet if you have a tight budget.  There are plenty of free themes to start off with.  Once you start to get more sales, you can always upgrade to a paid theme later on.
If you are interested in more information, click here to see our discussion on  Shopify themes and how Shopify Experts can help you.
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6.
ABANDONED CHECKOUT RECOVERY
Did you know that for an average e-commerce store, 2 out of 3 of your potential customers actually place products into the checkout cart, then forget to complete the purchase process as they get distracted by emails, people, random things?  This is actually true according to statistics and if this happens to you, you will be losing a lot of potential profits.
What a lot of advanced shopping cart provider offer is the ability for you to discover who these people are, and follow up with them to remind them to purchase the products that they added to the shopping cart.
Shopify also offers an abandoned checkout cart recovery service to you as part of their “Shopify” and “Advanced Shopify” plans (more details about the plans below).
This tool enables you to automatically track and email these potential customers to follow up and remind them to complete their purchases.
The way this tool works is that it will “remember” the email addresses that were inserted during the checkout processes, and Shopify will automatically email them after a number of hours of your choice, with links hat are  unique to each one of them, and bring them directly back to the shopping cart with their products already added to the cart, for them to complete the purchase with relative ease.
This entire process is automatic, and statistically, you will see a meaningful increase in your sales without having to lift your finger.
These potential customers were ready to purchase but got distracted, so this is a quick and easy win for you to remind and help them to complete their purchases.  This tool is readily available with Shopify.
See our detailed article on how Shopify’s Abandon Cart Recovery tool can help you make more money
7.
SHOPIFY APP STORE – ADD MORE FUNCTIONS TO YOUR SHOP
As mentioned above, Shopify offers you an extensive number of Apps (over 1,400) so you can add more functions to your online shop, and automate a lot of business tasks.
The tools are not just sales & marketing tools, they also include additional tools that help you manage administrative tasks such as inventory management, fulfillment, shipping, customer service, bookkeeping, etc.
While Shopify already includes basic functions for a lot of these areas, if you need more, these Apps can help you.
As discussed above, while these apps do have monthly fees, they’re well worth it if you need those functions to save yourself time (and pain).
For example, you can add live chat functions to your site to improve customer service and answer pre-sale questions, add customer review / rating widgets so your visitors can see what people are saying about your products (peer reviews can influence shopping behavior), or automate inventory / fulfillment process so you don’t have to manually process orders all day long.
You can pick and choose which app you want to use, so if you don’t need the app, you don’t have to use it. You have full control over that.
The apps are there to streamline your business, so to save you time and headaches, allowing you to focus on other parts of your business (or life).
Sell Products Directly on Facebook or Pinterest – Shopify makes it easy for you to sell your products on Facebook and Pinterest.  See how you can grow your business by selling on Facebook or Pinterest.
8.
MOBILE E-COMMERCE
An e-commerce shop builder is not complete without mobile features – and Shopify does not disappoint here.
Shopify includes free, built-in mobile e-commerce shopping cart features so your prospective customers can browse and purchase from your store directly from their mobile phones.
The mobile e-commerce settings are set up in a way that it works great with mobile phones such as iPhones, Androids or other smartphones.
Not only does Shopify present your online shop professionally on a mobile phone, it also allows you to manage your store on a mobile phone.  You can check your sales statistics, customer data and manage your sales orders on your mobile phone.  This way, you are always in touch with your business even if you are not in your office.
9.
SUPPORT / TUTORIALS / COMMUNITY RESOURCES
Customer Support
Tutorial Resources
Shopify Community Forum
Shopify Customer Support
Shopify has one of the best support team in the industry.  You can reach them 24/7 through the phone, online live chat, or email.
When you’re running a business, the last thing you want to do is troubleshoot technology yourself.  This is why having a 24/7 support team to support you is so important, and you get this from Shopify.
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10.
HOSTING AND BACKUP OPTIONS
As part of your monthly plan, Shopify will host your online shop for you and gives you an unlimited amount of bandwidth.  So in theory, if you have 10 million visitors per month, you won’t get charged a penny more than your monthly plan.
The good thing is that they manage the entire hosting process for you so you can focus on other important parts of your business, such as marketing, products or just enjoying life!
Shopify takes care of all the security upgrades for their servers and does all the technical details to ensure your website is always up and running, and doesn’t get hacked.
Top notch security is included to ensure that your customer data is secure with Shopify.  Your online shop will be Level 1 PCI compliant and the shopping cart also includes an SSL certificate that uses industry standard 128-bit encryption technology (the same level of encryption used by large banks) to keep your store’s information on Shopify secure.  You can also mention this to your visitors so they know it is safe to purchase from you.
Shopify also backs up your data automatically every day.
All these e-commerce hosting benefits are all included in your monthly plan with Shopify.  As mentioned before, Shopify is good at taking care of all these technological details and tasks from you, so you can focus on other things.
11.
PRICING – IS IT WORTH THE INVESTMENT?
Truth be told, if you’re looking for something free, Shopify won’t be able to provide that.
But if you are looking for a solid, robust, flexible online shop builder that can actually help you grow your sales and manage a lot of administrative business tasks for you, Shopify is a good candidate to consider.
If you’re going to build a business, the key consideration is value – does the price of having the online infrastructure and 24/7 live support justify your investment in Shopify?
Based on what we’ve covered above, you can get a sense that using Shopify can help you offload a lot of administrative and technology related tasks, so you can focus on building your business.
In terms of pricing, Shopify’s plans can range from $29 per month for their Basic Shopify plan, all the way to $299 per month for their Advanced Shopify plan.
Shopify Pricing Plans
Monthly ($/month)
1-Year ($/month)
Savings (%)
2-Years ($/month)
Savings (%)
Shopify Basic
$29.00
$26.10
10%
$23.20
20%
Shopify
$79.00
$71.10
10%
$63.20
20%
Advanced Shopify
$299.00
$269.10
10%
$239.20
20%
Before we break down what you get from each of Shopify’s pricing plans, know that you can save either 10% or 20% if you decide to subscribe to their 1-year or 2-years plans, respectively.
Let’s dive into the details of their plans here.
All Shopify plans allow you to sell through all sorts of channels such as Facebook Store / Facebook Buy Button / Pinterest Buy Button / Twitter Buy Button / Point of Sale (making offline sales). This increases your branding presence exponentially and makes it easy for your customers to purchase (i.e. they can purchase directly on Facebook, and don’t have to visit your website).
You get more features and tools as you move higher up in their plans, and the credit card rate and transaction fees rate also reduce (which makes sense as you are subscribed to a higher monthly plan).
With Shopify, you can process payments in 2 different ways:
Use Shopify Payments; or
Use an external payment gateway (such as PayPal)
If you use Shopify Payments to process all your sales, you will not need to pay any transaction fees (fully waived).  You will only need to pay credit card fees, which is basically a fee for Shopify to help you collect payments from your customers’ Mastercard, Visa, etc.  This is a payment processing fee that you can’t avoid, no matter which payment processor you use.
Note that Shopify’s credit card rate is pretty similar to what PayPal charges you in transaction fees (PayPal starts at 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction as well, then goes lower if you start to ramp up sales).
The primary advantage of using Shopify Payments is that you can manage all your finances and transactions within the Shopify platform, so you don’t have to log into yet another service provider (such as PayPal).  Setup time is also kept to a minimum as the payment system is built in already.
If you want to use another payment gateway such as PayPal (Shopify integrates with over 70 different payment processors), for each sale Shopify will charge you a transaction fee ranging from 0.5% to 2% (depending on which plan you are subscribed to). Note that this is in addition to payment processing fee that your payment processor will charge you for handling the payments.
The “In Person” credit card fee which ranges from 2.7% down to 2.2% relates to using Shopify’s Point of Sales (POS) system which enables you to power your offline store, or even host pop-up stores to process sales away from your computer.  So if you want to sell your products offline, this is a very helpful option.
If you consider the pricing of Shopify’s plans, just the Abandoned Checkout Recovery tool that comes with the “Shopify” and “Advanced Shopify” plan is worth a lot of money every month.
Imagine this automated tool being able to recover hundreds (or thousands if you have a large store) of dollars every month automatically.  [See how Shopify’s Abandoned Cart Recovery tool works to make you more money here]
If you want more flexibility, Shopify’s apps can also “extend” your shop’s functionality, which helps your website grow as you scale up your business.  If the app you choose is a paid app, it will also have its own separate monthly fee.  So just keep this in mind.
Overall, the saying that “there’s no such thing as a free lunch” really holds true here.  If you want something cheaper, you’ll receive an inferior experience, fewer tools, less support, and that’s not something you should aim for if you are serious about your business.
Outside of the 3 plans as highlighted above, Shopify also offers a “Lite” plan which is $9 per month.
Just note that you can’t actually build an online store with their “Lite” plan. If you want to build a full online ecommerce store, their “Basic Shopify“, “Shopify” and “Advanced Shopify” plans are more suitable for you.
Instead, the “Lite” plan is great for those of you who already have a website (such as WordPress, Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, Blogger, Tumblr, Drupal, Joomla), but just need some sort of ecommerce add-on to easily convert your website into an online store – by adding a Shopify Buy Button.
However, if you use the Lite Plan, you won’t be able to access more advanced ecommerce features (see features list in the image above).
Even though Shopify is not the cheapest option around (aside from its “Lite” plan), it definitely provides you with a high-end online shop solution, flexibility to grow with your business, 24/7 support (which is so valuable when you run a business), and pricing transparency (a lot of other online shop builders have hidden charges).
Shopify also comes with a risk-free 14-day trial for you to test for yourself.  If you don’t think it’s suitable for you, you can always walk away before committing.
Overall, as online business owners ourselves, we can definitely appreciate investing the right amount of financial resources to receive help and convenience.
Investing in the right tools to grow your business is not something you should take lightly.  In our own experiences, investing in tools resulted in saving us a lot of time, money and resources.
You only have 24 hours per day, and as a business owner, you have to juggle between operating your business and life.  Investing in tools can make your life easier so you can focus on other important aspects of business and life.  This is one of the secrets to growing your business, and maintaining a personal life to remain sane.
Shopify Pricing Review – see a much more in-depth discussion on Shopify’s pricing plans, including how they compares to PayPal.
12.
SHOPIFY REVIEW – CONCLUSION / RECOMMENDATION
Overall, we feel that Shopify is a very strong e-commerce online shop builder.  Specifically, we are impressed with 2 unique things:
Premium store front themes – your online shop will look professional, which is a key ingredient in attracting more visitors and keeping them on your website to increase sales
Shopify Apps – to add more / extend functionality to your online shop as you grow your business
Shopify understands that their core strength is to allow you to build and manage a website with a secure shopping cart, and they understand that they can’t build all the different business tools in the world for you.
So what do they do?  They invite professional designers and services providers to integrate their designs and apps / tools with Shopify.  You have access to designer-caliber store front themes, and a broad range of fully integrated apps to help you manage and automate a lot of your business (this means less work for you).
This flexibility and the ability for Shopify to grow with your online business is one of the unique aspects that we’ve grown to appreciate, and I hope you do as well.  You can start off with fewer features and tools, and add more and bolt them on to your online shop as you grow.
[Update Sept 2013 – As mentioned above, Shopify’s Point of Sale (POS) system will also help you grow your offline retail store (if you have one), or help you process sales away from your computer (such as a pop-up store). Start using your iPad as your mobile store catalog and payment terminal, while synchronizing all your data with your online store – a “true” business commerce setup!]
Keep in mind that to have success with your online shop, you need a very strong, capable and flexible online platform / infrastructure to support you.  Shopify is one of those platforms that you should consider investing in, especially with their 24/7 phone and live chat support.  It makes a lot more sense to let them deal with the technology aspect of things, so you can focus on other aspects of your business.
Shopify offers you a risk-free 14 days trial to see for yourself if they fit your needs. So there is no financial risk to you to try them out.
By Jeremy Wong