Shopify review

Most comparisons of Shopify count features, which settles little because every serious platform has the features. The decision is structural: own the selling stack, or rent certainty about it. Themes, apps and the administration interface are details that follow from that one answer.

What the subscription removes

Selling online has a small number of difficult problems, and the shop front is not among them. Payment security and compliance. Fraud. Tax in jurisdictions the merchant has never visited. A checkout that does not lose a large share of its customers on a phone. Staying available when a campaign succeeds and traffic multiplies within an hour. A platform subscription makes all of those the vendor's operational responsibility, permanently, and that is the product. Judged against it, the monthly fee is a minor part of the decision, and merchants who evaluate the subscription as a website cost tend to reach the wrong conclusion.

What it costs

The typed block at the top of this entry holds Shopify's published EU figures and the date of reading. Three elements combine: the plan subscription, which increases from Basic to Plus; the Shopify Payments processing rate on each online card payment, which decreases as the plan rises; and a further percentage on orders settled through a third-party payment provider, which also decreases with the plan. The first two have equivalents in any hosting plan and any payment provider. The third is specific to the platform model, and it makes the total track sales volume instead of traffic. A merchant should calculate the sum at launch and once a year afterwards, since the plan that is cheapest at low volume is not the cheapest at high volume.

What it costs beyond money

• Control of the checkout. The surface with the most influence on conversion is the one the merchant can least modify. On the platform's own terms that is usually an advantage, since its checkout is better tested than a custom one, and a constraint for an unusual sale.
• The data model. Products, variants and customers fit the platform's shape. A business that does not fit that shape ends up working around it with apps.
• The exit. Products and customers export cleanly. Themes, apps and checkout configuration do not, so leaving is a rebuild that reuses the data.

When assembly is the better choice

The alternative is to assemble the stack, typically WooCommerce on managed hosting, where Liquid Web is the comparison's choice for that market. The merchant takes on updates, security and scaling, and in return pays no platform fees, controls the checkout fully and defines the data model. That trade is favourable in three situations: when volume is high enough that percentage fees exceed the real cost of hosting and maintenance; when the sale is unusual enough that a standard checkout cannot express it; and when owning the stack is strategic rather than incidental. Outside those three, assembly is usually a more expensive route to a weaker checkout.

Compared with its neighbours

Shopify is also a hosting decision, because choosing it means never administering a server. The hosting view of Shopify covers that aspect and the hosting tiers it replaces.

Where Shopify is the wrong choice

• A store whose sale cannot be expressed in a standard checkout, such as configured products with dependent pricing, complex B2B terms or a regulated purchase flow; the checkout is the surface the merchant can least modify.
• A merchant whose volume has reached the point where the additional fee on third-party payments or the percentage structure as a whole exceeds the cost of hosting and maintaining a store of their own.
• A business for which owning the customer data model is strategic, because products, variants and customers must fit the platform's shape and a business that does not fit it ends up working around it with apps.
• An owner who expects a cheap exit: products and customers export, the theme, apps and checkout configuration do not, and leaving is a rebuild that reuses the data.