Shopify - Open your own online shop

Shopify - Open your own online shop

Figure 1: Post from X.com
 

Since the day Shopify founded, the ecommerce giant created a platform to help individuals whom wanted to try to work for themselves or open online shops to sell their handmade products.

There is a controversial topic on which Shopify is a hoax or a real-deal, however, I have to considered that Shopify is a Swiss army knife to people whom could utilise the full potential of its.

Today, I will do a research on this topic, and will list some advantages and disadvantages of Shopify in this blog post.

Figure 2: Statistics from demandsage.com

Firstly, the highlight of Shopify is that within only 17 years, it gained more than 4-million shops from over 175 countries, and attracting more than 700-million customers this year only. The total sale revenue from Shopify is exceeded $700 billion since it founded. As of Q2 2023, the total revenue is standing at $3.20 billion, topped the global ecommerce platform market with the market share of 25%. Shopify also has its own App Store with more than 7000 applications to support any user's need. Not only that, Shopify created a new web coding language called Ruby-on-Rail, and developers can create their own applications without any hassle.

Figure 3: Post from X.com

Secondly, I will talk about the advantages of Shopify. Shopify is a one-stop solution, which mean the users are not required to have any knowledge in web programming and web designing to be able to operate their own store. Which mean, it would cut down the costs from traditional method of hiding web developers to code the store from the scratch. Moreover, Shopify's shop is fully integrated to all marketing platforms, such as Facebook, Google, and Bing Ads. Furthermore, users do not need to worry about attackers, as Shopify hosts all the shops on its own servers, with military-grade protection and they constantly update their security, and fix any zero-day vulnerability within hours.

Figure 4: Shopify Pricing

Thirdly, there are some disadvantages of Shopify. The first one is, shop owners need to pay for monthly subscription, plus transaction fees from every transaction. For the small shops with tight budget, it could be a deal breaker. As there are few other ecommerce platform alternatives, such as WooCommerce, where users does not required to pay to use it, it could be a huge disadvantage. Second one is, Shopify is not open-sourced, which mean, the source code is not modifiable. If the users need to modify the store out of the traditional way, they have to find and use the existing applications on App Store. If the application does not exist, they have to hire web developers to make it.

In conclusion, Shopify is still a best choice for beginners whom want to be business owners. It is fully automated, no-coding required, and ready-to-open at any time. The subscription is a small fee, compares with all the hassles that Shopify saved for the users.