Shopify’s complexity matches its ability to solve unique challenges other platforms don’t, like Lemon Squeezy’s USD-only transactions and Paddle’s limited market targeting. Its Sections and Blocks architecture suits both complex design systems and casual customizations. Despite a slow admin dashboard, Shopify offers robust storefronts, multilingual support, and various selling options, making it ideal for brands seeking perfection.
For
Fun for developers
Massive Shopify community
Ability to have total control
Against
Slow admin
Slow learning curve
Not a Merchant of Record (MoR)
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Shopify is well-established as one of the best website platforms out there for those wanting to sell their wares and designs, and it's deservedly been included among the best website builders for artists when it comes to monetising your art and design.
With the current revolutionary onslaught of AI and digital platforms taking a leap forward seemingly every 8 minutes, we realised that our review from 2022 was woefully outdated, so I've given the platform a new look-over, test and full review treatment from the perspective of creatives. Is it still the best? Well, read on and find out.
Pricing and subscription options
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Basic
Shopify
Advanced
Plus
For:
Solopreneurs
Small teams (1-6)
Large teams (7-16)or Custom reports
Very large teams (17+)or Custom checkout and wholesale/B2B selling
Developers can choose to expose certain design elements and components from their storefront’s theme to users of the admin dashboard, allowing virtually anybody to make changes to the design. This ensures that designers (and merchandisers) aren’t eating development resources. Although, themes in the Shopify Theme Store are normally fully customisable, so having a developer isn’t a requirement.
At the highest level, designers can add, remove, and reorder components (or as Shopify calls them, “Sections”) without code. They can also edit their dynamic parts, such as turning a left-image/right-text component into a left-text/right-image component as your theme/developer/design system allows.
The middle level is all about “Blocks.” A block is like a heading, an image, or a bit of text — anything you’d want to insert inside a Section. These too can be added, removed, reordered, and edited without code (again, if the theme allows for it).
At a granular level, things like logos, colour schemes, typography (including the font scale!), spacings, animations, button styles, social media links, search behaviours, currency formats — frankly, anything — is easily editable without code. Navigations are separate from all this but are just as easy to customise.
Ultimately, design customisation in Shopify is as flexible as you (or your design system) need it to be. Ideally, you’d want the customisation options to match your design system’s rules, but Shopify doesn’t force you to approach storefront design in a certain way.
The only design restriction is that checkout pages can only be fully customised on the Plus plan, starting at $2,300/month.
Development setups
(Image credit: Daniel Schwarz)
Shopify facilitates storefront development in three key ways.
You can download a pre-built theme and then customise the code, which is the fastest option, but you’ll likely end up with some performance overheads as a result of code redundancy. You can develop a theme from scratch, which requires specialist knowledge of Shopify’s proprietary templating language, Liquid, which isn’t difficult for developers to learn, especially with Shopify’s decent documentation. Finally, you can build a headless storefront that decouples the front and back end so that developers can have full control over their front-end tech stack.
Either way, Shopify-powered businesses have complete control over how they scale and customize. This is compared to simpler alternatives which can be more all-or-nothing, causing growing pains during the business’s growth stage.
All of that aside, developing Shopify stores is also a lot of fun.
Merchandising opportunities
(Image credit: Daniel Schwarz)
Merchandising folks will be the heaviest users of your Shopify admin dashboard after the initial design and development is over and done with. You can sell in several ways beyond having a run-of-the-mill price tag — subscriptions, digital products, Try Before You Buy, pre-orders — there’s even POS hardware available for taking orders in-person, which, for the sake of reporting, analytics, and customer segmentation, are unified with your online orders. While the data isn’t as insightful as you’d want it to be, it can allow for some super sleek automations that make your business feel like a living, breathing operation.
The different types of discounts are fairly standard. What really makes them interesting is the Sections and Blocks that I mentioned earlier, as the perfect balance of creativity and design constraints really empowers marketing people to put their best promotions forward.
Saving the best for last, Shopify’s new-ish Markets features enable merchants to publish multiple storefronts, each having different languages, currencies, catalogues, payment options, delivery options, sales taxes, and so on. Naturally, this comes with many design challenges but you can have a modified theme for each storefront to simplify things.
Also, Shopify’s new Managed Markets feature provides a Merchant of Record powered by Global-e, but only if you’re in the US (for now). Without this, you’re responsible for local tax compliance and customs clearance for every country that you sell to. To be fair, this also applies to Shopify competitors like BigCommerce, but not simpler alternatives like Lemon Squeezy and Paddle, so that’s just something to consider.
Apps and community
(Image credit: Daniel Schwarz)
Of all the ecommerce platforms, Shopify no doubt has the best app store being the first ecommerce platform to exist. You can install apps to introduce live chat, product reviews, SMS and (smarter) email marketing, social widgets, dropshipping, print-on-demand, and much, much more to your Shopify storefront. What’s even better is that you can build your own private apps to address your business’s specific needs.
On that note, Shopify’s massive developer (and merchant) community ensures that there’s never a lack of support if needed.
Additional features
There are plenty of smaller features that probably won’t be a top concern to begin with, but can be pretty useful later; for example, the ability to create a blog or newsletter, add custom attributes (“Metafields”) to products, or collect consent for cookies and data processing. The list of features is huge — I couldn’t possibly list them all.
Who is it for?
Given the large number of ecommerce platforms out there today, Shopify is best for complex stores. While it totally works right out of the box with a pre-built theme of your choosing, which is perfect if you want to scale and customise over time, the wealth of features and customisations is unnecessarily overwhelming for those with less ambitious needs, particularly when it comes to the number of product types, currencies, localised markets, and even languages. However, if you do want to offer a fairly personalised experience as well as have a great deal of flexibility when it comes to development setups and design, then Shopify is definitely for you. Otherwise, something like Lemon Squeezy, which doubles up as a Merchant of Record and offers the same storefront experience across all markets, would be simpler.
Buy it if...
You want a meticulous amount of control
You want something that just works but scales later
Don't buy it if...
You want a Merchant of Record at no extra cost
You want an easy learning curve, especially as a solopreneur
The Verdict
8
out of 10
Shopify
Shopify’s complexity matches its ability to solve unique challenges other platforms don’t, like Lemon Squeezy’s USD-only transactions and Paddle’s limited market targeting. Its Sections and Blocks architecture suits both complex design systems and casual customizations. Despite a slow admin dashboard, Shopify offers robust storefronts, multilingual support, and various selling options, making it ideal for brands seeking perfection.
Previously a design blog editor at Toptal and SitePoint, and before that a freelance product/UX designer and web developer for several years, Daniel Schwarz now advocates for better UX design alongside industry leaders such as InVision, Adobe, Net Magazine, and more. In his free time, Daniel loves gaming, café culture and Wikipedia, and also travels perpetually when there isn’t a pandemic.
