My Shopify review — why you should stop comparing and start selling ASAP

Thinking about open­ing your own online store? Just googled “Shopify reviews”? Or BigCommerce pros and cons? Or maybe WooCommerce is the plat­form you favor? There are plenty of choices, and they can overwhelm. In this post, I’ll tell you why you should stop com­par­ing and freak­ing start sell­ing now! But first, a short story about how I made all the wrong choices and nearly ruined my business.

My first store CMS choices

My first online store was built by a local web devel­op­ment agency back in 2007. I was 19 and knew noth­ing about online business. Selling lin­gerie online seemed like a good idea. Luckily, I was directed to a decent com­pany with some out­sourc­ing background. They knew noth­ing about the lin­gerie busi­ness but devel­oped some­thing that worked, for $1,000. A com­par­i­son of store CMSs? Nope. As I’ve already men­tioned, I had no expe­ri­ence at all.

Three years later, my busi­ness is up and running. Somehow it works and even makes some profit. But I’m fed up with my out­dated indie CMS, sup­ported only by the one guy who devel­oped it. I don’t want to invest more in that plat­form and decide to migrate to Magento. “Wow! That’s a good choice!” you may think.

Feeling more con­fi­dent in my webpre­neur­ial skills, I hired a big-name national company. I thought that if you pay enough, you can get a good prod­uct with­out hassle and sweat. Furthermore, I wanted them to build a fully loaded store at once. With all the bells and whis­tles, you know. How naïve I was!

They also knew noth­ing about the lin­gerie busi­ness and didn’t bother to research it. After more than a year of Basecamp talks, drafts and une­d­u­cated deci­sions, I finally man­aged to escape the con­tract that was going to suck up all the money I had. I dropped the whole project, because it was too raw and I had nei­ther the money nor the energy to finish it. Enter depression.

Here’s what I learned the hard way

• I started with­out com­par­ing CMSs at all, and that worked!
• Some weights are too heavy. Magento is one of them. Wanna play with the big guys? Watch out. It may break your neck.
• Big money ≠ expertise.
• Never invest lots of money if you don’t know what you need to build (what works).
• It’s normal not to know what you need in the beginning. You just have to make some­thing that works and build on that.
• Don’t be afraid to drop a project if it has hit a dead end or just isn’t what you need.

Turning point

Another year passed. My busi­ness is dying. My coun­try goes through a rev­o­lu­tion and finds itself in an unde­clared war with a neigh­bor­ing country. The econ­omy is some­where between inten­sive care and the morgue. Naturally, sales plummet.

The store looks too old even to our not-so-nerdy audi­ence of 40-something housewives. We update inven­tory by hand. We have poor SEO and look awful on mobile.

I’m des­per­ate and decide to throw away, or at least test, my pre­con­cep­tions about the business. In about a month, I build a brand-new Shopify store with a min­i­mal­ist design and the bare min­i­mum of fea­tures, and move to it. Made all by myself. No money to invest. No time to waste thinking.

I’m writ­ing these lines three months after the migration. We are still afloat. Tons of changes in busi­ness operations. Sales are still bad, but we have bought some time. I’m very happy I made a deci­sion and acted on it.

Here’s the take­away from this part of the story.

How to finally stop comparing and start your store

Even when I real­ized I needed to change store plat­forms, I wasted time com­par­ing Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce and others and others. This hes­i­ta­tion nearly cost me my business. I spent a couple of years think­ing and com­par­ing, then a few more mess­ing around with the Magento project, and then some more time before I finally set­tled on Shopify. I tried to do every­thing at once and ended up doing nothing.

Minimal, a free Shopify theme

Here’s what you should do:

• Set a dead­line (it’s scary, I know, but it works even if you’re late).
• Stop look­ing for the per­fect solution. It doesn’t exist, and you know it.
• If you don’t have enough expe­ri­ence to know what works in your market, don’t invest in expen­sive tools or features.
• Start with the bare min­i­mum of features. My Magento store was meant to be fully loaded, and that was one of the rea­sons the project failed.
• Start with a min­i­mal­ist design. I chose the Minimal theme for my store and am very happy with this decision. Design should be based on con­tent, and when you start, you don’t have con­tent yet. Therefore, you have no idea what your store should look like.

If you want to read more on this “bare min­i­mum” approach, search for “lean startup”. But you prob­a­bly already know every­thing you need to know.

OK. I hope I’ve made my point. If you got it, you’re prob­a­bly look­ing to go live as soon as possible. Guess what: I think your best choice is the Shopify platform. Here’s why.

My brief Shopify review

You can easily google lots of detailed Shopify reviews and comparisons. It’s not my goal to write another one. I’ll try to be as con­cise as possible. In my expe­ri­ence, any­thing com­pli­cated usu­ally doesn’t work. What works is simple.

Pros of Shopify:

• It’s SaaS (a hosted cart) and doesn’t require an upfront invest­ment like Magento.
• It’s per­fect for small stores with­out too many prod­ucts, but it can host thou­sands with some extra tuning (we have over 2,000 prod­ucts now).
• It has the most dynamic and modern ecosys­tem (app mar­ket­place, user and devel­oper com­mu­nity, etc.) I’ve seen. The BigCommerce app store pales in com­par­i­son (sorry, BigCommerce).
• Tons of apps with enterprise-level fea­tures out of the box, for a frac­tion of the cost. This alone is a very strong reason to choose Shopify.
• Liquid, an easy-to-understand tem­plate language. You’ll be able to make minor design adjust­ments yourself. Here’s an example. I had a “View all prod­ucts” link on the main page of my Magento project. When I asked my devel­oper to change it to “View all cat­e­gories”, they put half an hour of work on my invoice. That’s $20 for a tiny change I can now make myself in Shopify in 30 seconds.
• Their ads don’t lie. You really can start sell­ing very fast.

What about the cons?

Shopify charges a trans­ac­tion fee if you don’t use their pay­ment gateway. I’m in Ukraine, and it’s not avail­able here. So if you are going to sell in big vol­umes with low mar­gins and you can’t use Shopify Payments, Shopify may be the wrong choice.

I also found a few things the Shopify team hasn’t addressed. These are mostly advanced store customizations. I believe they are not crit­i­cal for you at this stage of your business.

• You don’t have full con­trol over the check­out page design. However, the new respon­sive check­out is more flex­i­ble with CSS and translations.
• You can change the order of ship­ping options only by chang­ing their prices (options are sorted by price).
• It lacks advanced coupon code rules. Sometimes, though, this can be cured with addi­tional apps.
• There’s no nested cat­e­gory hierarchy. Products are cat­e­go­rized by inde­pen­dent tags and collections. You’ll have to create some workarounds to address minor SEO issues.
• Some issues with sup­port for non-Latin languages. These can also be cured with some effort.
• You can’t send trans­ac­tional emails through an exter­nal app (Mandrill, for exam­ple) and thus track their performance. However, you can fully customize them.

I could go on with more insignif­i­cant issues, but you prob­a­bly get it already. They shouldn’t con­cern you at this stage.

Why my pros and cons probably don’t matter to you

Read this twice.

When you start, you don’t know which fea­tures you’ll need. You don’t know yet what your store should look like to bring in profits. Drop your assumptions. Take a sci­en­tific approach: “I don’t know it yet, but I have some ideas I will test.” Treat your store as an R&D lab.

What to do, then?

I’ll keep repeat­ing this. Start with some­thing simple. ASAP.

Customer wish­list? Forget about it for now. Fancy design with ani­ma­tions? No! You’ll want to add tes­ti­mo­ni­als in a few weeks. Or a detailed prod­uct descrip­tion table. Or advanced prod­uct fil­ters in a sidebar. What will your design look like with them? It will col­lapse after a few apps are installed, or when your assis­tant adds prod­uct descrip­tions in the font size and color she thinks look gorgeous.

What works for me won’t nec­es­sar­ily work for you. The advice you’ve seen in this arti­cle: same thing. Find your min­i­mal require­ments and start test­ing every­thing else on a live site with real paying customers. This is my ulti­mate piece of advice for those who are still on the fence about their project.

As Andrew from ecommercefuel.com clev­erly pointed out:

So if this is the 14th Shopify vs. Bigcommerce review you’ve read – stop! Quit read­ing, pick one and move for­ward with build­ing your busi­ness! You’re wast­ing valu­able time.

Believe me, I spent a hor­ri­ble couple of years just like that!

Please share this post with your friends and followers. Maybe some­one needs a sign to start. Let this be it.