Shopify

Shopify is where it's at if you want to get involved in the whole Direct 2 Consumer craze! You could literally have a store, up and running and transactional in 10 minutes assuming you're computer / web literate, have a bank account, and a product to sell...For getting up and running with hundreds of attractive themes to choose from (not all on Shopify.com, there are online stores that sell themes...) you really can't beat the ease of Shopify – with just the right amount of freedom, and automation to make sure you can get your products and logo looking their best, and not accidentally break the whole thing. And if you know a little HTML/CSS, the sky is really the limit in terms of customizing the theme. Plus there's a Shopify "App Store" that offers every possible function you could imagine if you wanted something not natively offered such as pop-ups, rewards clubs, or wholesale pricing.

In the beginning, I found it a bit cumbersome to deal with large catalogs with lots of variants (color / size) per sku. But Shopify and their lightning-fast chat support are nothing if not good listeners and they've made editing part of, or your whole catalog, much easier than ever before, with tons of filters for tailoring your product selection on the back end, to making almost any variable from Title, to Inventory, to Weight, easily bulk editable. So the thing I'll say that still stinks, is that all the apps charge subscription fees, which is super annoying, especially if you rely on a bunch of them. I would much rather pay a one and done license fee as opposed to $3 a month for my mailing list manager app, $16 a month for my Wholesale price tiering app, and $5 for my abandoned cart retrieval system. It adds up to a big, never-ending headache.

It is easy to get a website up and running. Adding products is easy.

WHERE DO I BEGIN:
-inventory records only go back three months...I was horrified to find out I lost 4 months of inventory records.
-to print a receipt...you need to buy and download an app...it is awkward to use and takes a couple minutes for the receipt to upload before you can print it.
-to have employees log in you need to download and app and pay monthly
-you can not do a credit on someone’s account if they return something...You need to either return their money or give them a gift card it is awkward and difficult to use.
-if you mark an order pending payment you cannot take payment on the POS system.
-you cannot add any vender information that is not visible to your customers.
-the duplicate feature when adding products doesn’t work properly....to hard to explain what should be duplicated and what shouldn’t but trust me it wasn’t created by someone that understands business

I find that it is pretty easy to create products and make them go live. Further, the fact that Shopify provides the hosting and therefore, the security for the site is quite amazing. I also like that Shopify is a major player in the marketplace. So many times I have had to go for knock offs and Shopify is not that.

Having been a guy that had never edited liquid files before, that was new to me, but finding what I need to edit and adjust in the code is really not that difficult. There is a lot of help available for this too. I do find that there are not as many apps to connect to your site as there is with WooCommerce. That is also connected to the security aspect as well though as sometimes having too many apps allows for more opportunities for things to go wrong.

I like how easy Shopify is to set up. We use Shopify for our online store, and the integration with shipping and the Shop Pay network is crucial! There are so many apps and features you can add, you can really get Shopify to work for your specific needs. We use Shopify every day to increase sales from our brick and mortar store.

Sometimes the image quality gets compressed or the colors get messed up upon import. I wish Shopify had a better file system for product images that would help size them and make sure they're correct right inside the browser. You really have to have your product images perfect before import., which can be challenging sometimes.