Overall Satisfaction with Shopify
I was hired by the owners of The Outdoor Patio Store to help usher in a new, more modern experience. The website was hosted on an extremely old and out of date platform that hadn't been updated in years so I had a little experience using Shopify, and I felt it was a really good choice for a small to medium sized business. The back-end is incredibly simple to use, and on the front-end you get a really modern website that does an incredible job displaying your products.
- Back end is insanely easy to use.
- Follows best practices.
- Depending on the template you use, the front end looks just as good as any high-end website.
- Customer service is always extremely helpful.
- Not the most inventory-friendly solution; we spend an additional $90 a month on an app for purchase orders (PO's) which is kind of ridiculous.
- Not friendly for shipping either; we spend an additional $40-$60 a month for ShipStation which allows us to print FedEx Labels.
- Exporting reports and .CSV files could use a little work; it's not always as easy as it could be.
- We're experiencing a higher conversion rate due to the modern look & feel of our site.
- I'm personally spending more time than I'd like fussing with our inventory & shipping.
- Shopify does a great job implementing best practices that are going to get your website noticed on search engines like Google.
My #1 issue with small business and ecommerce is that there's this belief that you can plug a few pictures into any old website, and the orders will start pouring in. This is simply not true, and if you try and build your online business that way you'll save yourself some time if you just start flushing money down the toilet and focus your energy elsewhere. Best practices are your very first tool in convincing Google that your page and products should be included in its search results. Volusion is simply terrible at this where with Shopify it's almost automatic. With Shopify you can almost follow your best practices by accident, but with Volusion I'm finding that I'm using a lot of duplicate content just to get the H1 tags correct, the URL structure is outdated (and again, it could be significantly easier to fix), and its more than happy to leave the meta tags blank where Shopify will pull from the description if you leave it blank.
Shopify Implementation
- Implemented in-house