Shopify

Comentarios: For the price of the software, it is hard to complain about anything. It is super easy to set up and manage, tons of usability and plugins for advanced features, great customer service.

Puntos a favor: Shopify is very easy to get started with. It practically holds your hand with simple shops and the plugins make for a robust software that almost anyone can make use of. I use it primarily for selling eLearning courses. Shopify has plugins available for most LMS software. Simply connect the LMS to Shopify with a plugin, input the course identifier, with my LMS it is a string of numbers and letters that is unique to each course, then set the price and start selling. When you sell a course through Shopify, the purchaser automatically gets login information for the LMS and is automatically assigned the course they purchased. Shopify has a couple of options for setting up a shop. The first option, which is the easiest, is to create a storefront within Shopify that is like a website, just for your store. It is very easy to pick a theme and then just type in the information. The storefront through Shopify looks very professional and is worth it if you just need a simple storefront. The second option is the buy button, which I use for my companies website. This way, if you already have a website, you can just use Shopify to generate a code that will give you a button to place on your website. There are other options I rarely use such as generating a code for email which is similar to the buy button but I am sure it would be very useful for those wishing to email out their products. There are so many plugins to sell different ways that there would be too much to post in this review. The customer service is top-notch. They respond quickly and when I needed something, they worked with me until it was resolved. The last customer service need I had took a few tries to get everything going but they kept at it until it was fixed.

Contras: The only con I have is for a lot of the advanced usage, you will need plugins for anything beyond selling simple items, like I said before, this is a pro but it can be a con at the same time. Some of the plugins are simple and free but a lot have an extra cost to either purchase the plugin or a monthly fee to use the plugin. The creators of the plugins do need the pay, that is understandable, but most are out of small businesses', like my company's, budget.

Comentarios: Helped a friend setup multiple online businesses.

Puntos a favor: If you want to stick to just basics and you need a clean, responsive E-commerce site, then Shopify is for you. No programming knowledge is required and there are many fine templates to choose from, and you can always find more. If you are interested in starting online, Shopify is a good choice because it offers a PCI compliant and secure shopping cart and payment gateway solution. Adding products to Shopify is surprisingly fast and easy but you are limited to 100 Variants. Shipping integration with USPS, UPS and Fedex is included and integrates with many popular software via Add ons. Things like email marketing, product feeds, and popups are easy to find and setup. And you can export your products to Google, and setup customer reviews with some other add ons. Having all these extra with add ons is both good and bad, and customers should be aware of the small downsides to Shopify.

Contras: Most things come included, however any extra customization requires some kind of add-on with monthly charge. Thankfully they have a good amount of add-ons to choose from, but most have fake reviews. Shopify much like other modern shopping carts is unable to store credit cards, out of the box. If your business needs to charge a customer for re-shipping, you have to create an invoice each time using an addon or creating a new order. Customer support is responsive but very general, but the basic Shopify will suit most small business owners. I am however not like most people, and like more customization. You cannot customize things too much other than what templates and add ons offer. Development on Shopify is highly difficult and goes above and beyond html / css however you can make some small changes like adding an image, or a link, a variable, or a tracking script with a look in their help center.