--- title: "My Shopify review — why you should stop comparing and start selling ASAP" author: "Stan Voo" url: https://www.99rabbits.com/blog/shopify-review published: 2015-02-28 summary: "In this post, I'll tell you how I made all the wrong choices that nearly ruined my business and why you should stop googling for Shopify reviews." --- # 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 But I'm fed up with my outdated indie CMS, supported only by the one guy who developed it.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](http://www.shopify.com/?ref=99rabbits) 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. ![](https://www.99rabbits.com/blog/shopify-review-shopify-minimal-theme.webp) *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](https://themes.shopify.com/themes/minimal/styles/fashion "Shopify's free 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](http://www.shopify.com/?ref=99rabbits). 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](https://web.archive.org/web/2016/http://99rabbits.com/blog/free-responsive-html-email-templates-for-shopify-notifications/). 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. ![](https://www.99rabbits.com/blog/shopify-review-start-testing.webp) As Andrew from [ecommercefuel.com](http://www.ecommercefuel.com/shopify-vs-bigcommerce/) 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.