Shopify review

What Shopify sells

Shopify is the whole commerce stack as one subscription: storefront, checkout, payments, inventory, taxes, fraud screening and the security compliance that card payments require. No server appears anywhere in the store owner's responsibilities; the platform is a software service, operated, scaled and patched by the vendor. At this end of the range, hosting means precisely that the infrastructure is someone else's responsibility in full.

What it costs

The pricing block gives the subscription figures and names the date of reading. The cost has three parts: a subscription that rises with the plan, a card-processing rate per online payment that falls with the plan, and an additional fee on orders paid through a provider other than Shopify Payments. The subscription is comparable to a managed hosting plan; the processing rate is comparable to any payment provider's; the additional fee is the component that distinguishes the platform model, and it is the reason the total cost grows with sales rather than with traffic. The Shopify commerce page works through that arithmetic; the hosting view records that the amount paid for infrastructure is bundled into those three components and cannot be separated from them.

Which hosting tiers it replaces

The hosting range, shared, VPS, dedicated and cloud, is a series of answers to one question: how much of the machine does the owner want to be responsible for? Shopify removes the question. There is no plan to outgrow, no operating system to patch and no point at which traffic forces an unplanned migration. Hosting comparisons sometimes exclude it on those grounds; for a store it is a legitimate and often correct outcome, the same outcome that managed hosting sells, taken one step further.

What it removes from the owner's responsibilities

• Launching without technical staff. A store can be selling within the week without anyone on the team knowing what a DNS record is; the knowledge is worth acquiring later, not as a prerequisite.
• Traffic peaks. A campaign that succeeds is the platform's scaling task rather than the merchant's; on a self-managed tier the same peak is an outage.
• Attention. The time that would go to patching and uptime goes to product, photography and customer service, where store revenue is made.
• Idle capacity. There is no server between launches, because there is no server.

Compared with its neighbours

Where Shopify is the wrong choice

• Any site that is not a store: the platform hosts one kind of thing, and a blog, a portfolio or an application needs a conventional host.
• A store whose checkout must do something the platform's checkout does not allow, which is a question for the commerce page and usually answered by a self-hosted build.
• A merchant at a volume where percentage fees exceed the cost of hosting and maintaining a store of their own: the subscription is inexpensive at the start and scales with sales.
• An owner who wants to keep the option of a cheap exit: products and customers export, the theme, apps and checkout configuration do not, and leaving is a rebuild.