Should You Shopify Your Business? Website, Payments, and POS Review

Shopify is one of the best ecommerce platforms for small businesses, more than just a website designer, it offers a robust platform for online stores to advertise their products, manage their inventory and arrange shipping.

You’ll also get an app to take contactless payments on iPhone. And there’s an optional upgrade to take in-person payments with a physical card reader. This is known as Shopify POS (point of sale).

In short, a Shopify subscription gives you access to sales technology including an online store website, customer relationship management, and inventory management. Do you want to determine whether Shopify is truly worth the investment? Before taking the plunge, this review will help you decide based on: your budget, your business, the features of Shopify, and the hidden costs you need to know.

Shopify Review: A Quick Rundown

Based on in-house research comparing Shopify with the best ecommerce platforms on the market, we’ve found the following:

Shopify’s Pros and Cons

Signing up for Shopify is a bit like signing up for Apple. It works best when you go for the full suite of products because they all connect to each other.

However, Shopify isn’t too restrictive. If you want to sell in person as well as online, you don’t have to buy Shopify’s own hardware. It integrates with a wide range of external software, too.

We trialled Shopify’s website builder to see for ourselves how easy it is to achieve the website you want. See below for a walkthrough of our experience building a website.

Shopify Pricing Breakdown

All of Shopify’s price plans come with:

• A website (you customize a template, and hosting is included)
• Access to POS Lite (an app that lets you take payments via iPhone)

Below are the current prices for Shopify subscriptions. Note that if you want to use POS hardware (to take in person card payments) you’ll need to upgrade to another subscription on top ($89 per month, per location).

On top of your subscription, you’ll have to pay certain charges. For instance, unless you sign up for Shopify Payments, you’ll have to pay transaction fees per sale.

We’ve set out extra Shopify charges below:

For more detail, head on over to our guide on Shopify pricing.

Does Shopify Have a Free Plan?

No. Shopify offers a free trial of three days (downgraded from two weeks). You’ll get a taste of the premium features, including the website editor, inventory management, and customer segmentation tools.

After that, your website will be locked and you’ll be asked to pay to upgrade. This isn’t the case with Woocommerce, for example. In our Woocommerce vs Shopify comparison, we go into more detail in these two hold up against each other.

While there’s no free plan, Shopify is currently offering a deal of $1 for the first month on all its plans.

Shopify Key Features Reviewed

In this section, we’ll look at Shopify’s website builder and its mobile POS app.

DIY Website Builder: Business First, Design Later

Shopify sees your website as a business tool – which it is. Customers come to your ecommerce website to buy things, not to catch up on celebrity gossip (although you can set up a blog). That means many editing tools are found in the dashboard view, not the Editor itself (unlike Wix, reviewed on our page).

This is really helpful for making changes across your entire website, rather than editing every individual page, like you would do in the Editor view.

But it reinforces that we’re not here to build a “fun” website with bells and whistles. Though you can easily access the raw code of your theme to shape it the way you need.

AI-Generated Product Descriptions: Super Convenient

In a bid to stay competitive, Shopify regularly releases features that save you time selling online. Our favorite so far is Shopify Magic, an AI-powered gadget that spins up a product description whenever you need one.

It can be hard to think of 18 different descriptions for rigid boxes, but now Shopify’s built in assistant will do it for you. All you do is enter some keywords, choose from the available tones of voice (or even suggest your own) and a pristine, error-free paragraph appears within seconds.

Shopify is also releasing Sidekick, an AI tool for ecommerce. We weren’t able to get our hands on it as it isn’t widely available, but you can sign up to be considered for early access. Sidekick can carry out tasks for you such as adding discounts, writing product descriptions, and rustling up reports.

Sidekick is conversational so you can even bounce ideas off it to help you develop content for your brand.

POS App: Needs Improvement

Launching its iPhone and Android app for taking payments in 2020, Shopify’s advance into mobile payment is certainly vital (and appreciated). While the app worked smoothly and quickly when I tested it, some users feel it’s too much manual input for a system that should be automated.

On Shopify’s own app store, the point of sale app is rated 2.8/5 and the last four reviews are all one star. For its part, Shopify responded to all negative reviews with suggested workarounds or confirmations of feedback being passed on to developers.

AI in Commerce

Shopify Magic presents a range of AI tools to reduce the need for manual tasks. Alongside Sidekick, an AI commerce assistant which we mentioned above, Shopify is also releasing ‘Smart replies’. This AI tool helps you to respond quickly to live chat inquiries. You’re able to review, edit, and respond to live chat questions.

Shopify’s email tool is designed to help you overcome creative ruts and make it easy to create marketing campaigns without much effort on your part.

You can create branded emails using a drag-and-drop editor, choose from pre-built templates, and automate emails.

Although Shopify Emails was launched in 2020, it’s now almost completely automated and boasts a ton of templates. I liked that you could choose from a variety of templates including announcements, promotions, and newsletters. It was super easy to edit the templates, subject line, and email preview text.

With most of the information filled in for the relevant template, it only took a couple of minutes to modify it and create a professional and sleek email. The ‘send test email’ feature is also handy to prevent any mishaps.

Shopify Payments: A Simple Way to Take Payments Online?

Shopify does a lot to incentivize you into using its native payment gateway. Signing up is the only way to avoid transaction fees (2%-0.15%) you’ll otherwise pay on every credit card payment.

Plus, if you sell subscriptions then you’ll have to use Shopify Payments.

To be eligible in the US, you need a USD bank account in the States that’s set up for ACH transfers.

✔️ Benefits

Shopify Payments is convenient because it synchs with your Shopify dashboard, so you can track charges, refunds, and payouts more easily than alternative providers.

Customers can save their shipping and payment details through Shop Pay (another tool from Shopify). This will save time during checkout for repeat buyers. Yet it has to be said many competitors offer identical features.

You can also accept payment in installments if you choose to activate Shop Pay Installments.

Shopify Payments provides security benefits too, including:

• 3D secure authentication
• Automated dispute management
• Card testing protection
• Flags proxy IP address users

Its companion Fraud Control app monitors activity that could signal fraudulent purchasing.

❌ Weaknesses

Shopify provides some assistance with chargebacks, but you’ll have to pay a $15 fee. This could be refunded if the customer’s claim isn’t genuine.

Due to restrictions from Stripe and the law, Shopify Payments doesn’t permit several business types, including:

• Financial services (eg. wire services, crowdfunding or insurance)
• Real estate investment
• Mortgage consulting
• Debt reduction
• Gambling (including bidding fee auctions, fundraising raffles or lotteries)
• Adult content (including toys, strip clubs or dating services)
• Drug paraphernalia
• Telehealth services
• E-cigarettes
• Essay mills

And there’s always the possibility of your Shopify Payments account being frozen if any suspicious activity is detected. It may remain locked for a period of time while Shopify investigates the issue. But this risk applies to any online payments facilitator, including PayPal.

There are actually around 100 alternative payment providers in the US to connect your Shopify store to if you’re not sold on Shopify Payments.

Shopify POS: Good for Selling in Person?

Keeping up with competitor Square (created by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey), Shopify also has a suite of physical payment processing equipment. Its POS connectivity delivers the to-die-for convenience of synchronizing your website sales with those made in person.

Unfortunately, Shopify’s POS did not score as highly as Square’s POS, the best POS system according to our research. In our like-for-like testing, Square came out on top with 4.8/5 with Shopify trailing behind at 4.1/5. The main reason was pricing: Square POS has no monthly fee while Shopify POS Pro requires a $89 payment per location on top of your main subscription package.

✔️ Benefits

Handily, Shopify POS connects with a really wide range of POS devices. This will save you from buying extra retail hardware from Shopify if you’re migrating from another system.

There are quite a few ways Shopify connects in-person shopping with online selling, too:

• Inventory levels synched across physical and online locations
• Buy online, collect or exchange in-store (pro upgrade)
• QR codes for products in store so customers can scan to buy online
• Email customers with abandoned in-store items
• Pay in store with email gift cards

Now that customers expect greater connectivity between the online and in person buying experiences, features like these will help you capture sales you may otherwise lose.

❌ Weaknesses

Like many card reader devices, you won’t be able to use Shopify POS without an active WiFi connection. But (you guessed it), you’d be able to with Square POS. Toast POS can also process credit card payments offline, but it’s best suited to restaurants.

So if your Shopify-connected device drops offline while you’re out at a trade show, you’ll only be able to take payments in cash. If buyers don’t carry cash, you could potentially lose out on stacks of sales.

However, if you could do with technical support at a special event, you can hire a Shopify expert to assist you all day as part of the company’s hardware rental program. Be warned, it won’t come cheap at all.

Curious about other POS options? Check out our guide to the best retail POS systems for more advice.

How Does Shopify Compare to Other Providers?

We’ve seen how Shopify’s POS lags behind Square, a more established provider of in person sales tech. But the advantage of Shopify is its superiority as an online selling platform.

No other online store comes with the same strength of inventory management features that Shopify has. However, you now have to synch Amazon, Walmart, and eBay sales using third-party apps on Shopify, whereas BigCommerce connects to these directly from its dashboard.

Nevertheless, our test users found Shopify more user-friendly than BigCommerce overall, and were more likely to recommend the former.

Shopify’s integrated AI text generator places it a cut above GoDaddy (which has no AI text generator). Wix released its own AI text generator back in January, but its choice of writing tones is more limited than Shopify’s.

The best website builder for you ultimately depends on what you’re looking for from a platform. If advanced sales features and inventory management are your top priorities, we recommend a sales-first platform like Shopify or BigCommerce. These will better support your needs than a more design-focused platform like Squarespace.

On the other hand, if you’re a photographer, designer or other creative just looking to showcase your work on a fittingly stylish website – Squarespace or Wix may be more suitable than Shopify, with all its sales-oriented bells and whistles.

If budget is your number one concern, we’d recommend starting with a platform that offers a free trial or even a free plan, such as Wix or Square Online. Smaller businesses or solo entrepreneurs may benefit from this approach too, before taking the plunge on a pricier subscription.

What Kind of Business is Shopify Best for?

Shopify is an online selling platform best suited to more confident or established business owners. We wouldn’t recommend its premium plans for beginners because the costs involved mean you need a healthy stream of sales to make it worthwhile.

If you’ve already got your inventory set up and sorted (with product types, names, images, and unit pricing), then you’re ready to get started with Shopify.

Beginner sellers can look into Shopify Starter, a $5-per-month subscription that lets you add “Shoppable links” to your Instagram, Facebook (or similar) profiles. You’ll pay 5% transaction fees with Shopify Payments on this plan, and won’t get a website included.

Our Methodology: How Do We Know What to Recommend?

We regularly test website builders (such as Shopify) so that every review is based on first-hand experience and real opinions. We round up some test users and ask them to carry out the same set of tasks under timed conditions. Their feedback is recorded and feeds back into the full research for the product.

We make sure to compare features to similar website builders and POS systems on the market, too. That way we can confidently recommend where to find the business tools you need for the right price.