Review of Shopify - from a developer's point of view

I setup this online shop over a couple of weekends - Chow Slow - Slow Feeder Dog Bowls. After launch I continued to make various improvements and optimisations to the presentation and content of the site. Since launch three months ago, the online shop has so far taken 72 orders.

The eCommerce SaaS product Shopify was used to build the site, on the Basic Shopify (monthly) plan.

Here below are my opinions on Shopify:

Shopify - Good points

• Many payment options - I chose the Shopify Payments option. It accepts Apple Pay and Google Pay when on a mobile browser for example. You can tell that Shopify have extensive experience with taking payments - everything is really polished.
• Test mode works well for putting through test credit card orders and seeing the customer experience end to end. Can also password protect the site while its under development.
• The free themes are good and can be customised for most online shops. I used the free "Minimal" theme and then customised the layout of the home page, added several pages and added a blog.
• Great optimisations and layouts which work well on mobile. More than 60% of the traffic for the site comes from a smartphone browser as opposed to a traditional desktop browser.
• Really useful "Timeline" admin feature on the customer and order admin pages - see all the interactions that have happened with a customer in a simple timeline display, with a timestamp shown on each interaction.
• Excellent "Conversion Summary" admin feature - see the site behaviour of your customer from when they first visited your site to when they bought something.
• Comprehensive "Fraud Analysis" admin feature - for orders paid by Credit Card - recommendation of whether the transaction is likely fraudulent or not: probability shown as low, medium, or high.
• Ability for customers to sign up with either their mobile phone number or email address. Shopify automatically sends communications to the customer using either mobile SMS or by email.
• Easy to add social media accounts, which then automatically appear on the site footer.
• Products are easy to configure and easy to change in terms of page title and content.
• Ability to edit raw HTML in most places.
• Easy to setup a custom domain, with TLS/SSL included (which just works).
• There are SEO optimisations and settings available at a page level. You can change the page title, meta description and URL.
• Integration with Google Analytics is excellent - the 'Advanced eCommerce' option should be turned on - it results in a data going straight into GA for your conversions and sales.
• Page load time is good - bulk of the home page loads typically in 2-3 seconds.
• A comprehensive API for writing custom integrations with other backend software and systems.

Shopify - Bad points

• Marketing integrations - Facebook Ads for example - difficult and error prone to setup. Facebook Ads never worked for me after many headaches trying to setup. The marketing integrations seem like a quick way to lose money fast.
• Inability to structure the Products, Pages and Blog sections to be within a custom sub-folders structure (as is typically recommended to silo a website for SEO purposes).
• Checkout page customization is limited to Shopify Plus users.
• Checkout script editor is limited to Shopify Plus, so any custom logic to apply discounts has to be done through plugins.
• API is rate limited - will be fine for most users however ERP systems which run via batch processing or via polling may have issues. You need to implement everything as event driven webhooks rather than by polling the Shopify API.
  

Shopify - Areas for improvement

• I'm not convinced of the need for many of the Shopify apps (plug-ins) that get automatically suggested. I have a feeling that they will result in bigger page sizes and slower load times. I have not needed to use any apps yet.
• Its sometimes hard to find the relevant place for a setting - whether under preferences of the online shop or under settings of the account itself. I should probably make more use of the search bar at the top for this in the future.

Shopify - Conclusion

I highly recommend Shopify for setting up an online shop. When launching, your focus will be taken up with gaining your first customers, online marketing and the delivery process, so having a solid full featured website behind you is crucial.



A bit more about our online shop - Chow Slow - Slow Feeder Dog Bowls

I setup the site for my wife, who runs the business day to day. She handles the processing of orders and deliveries. We came up with the idea of selling to this niche market after finding out about this type of product in 2018. Our pet beagle (Ripley) had an issue of regular regurgitation due to eating too quickly. The slow feeder bowl product solved his problem and results in more relaxed meal times every day.


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