Overall Satisfaction with Shopify
We've used Shopify to test new products and new markets. Shopify is perfect for those cases because it's cheapest plan is functional enough to test a product and market, yet it has enough out-of-the-box themes to look presentable without much time and effort in customizations. BigCommerce has a bit more functionality but it's cheapest plan is more expensive and takes more effort to make presentable, so Shopify is perfect for rolling out a website quick and cheap.
- Great themes out of the box.
- Very affordable plans to be budget-conscious.
- Very easy to setup and customize a site with little to no coding experience.
- Shopify doesn't have much native functionality and you must pay for third-party apps for somewhat normal features. Naturally, third-party apps aren't always perfectly integrated into websites.
- Shopify can get expensive as you scale and isn't as good a value in the medium and large-scale enterprise space when compared to BigCommerce in my opinion.
- Shopify charges additional payment processing fees if you don't use Shopify's payment processor. This can cause problems in the back office of businesses.
- At the low-cost range, Shopify provides great value to test new products, websites, and markets.
- Their payment transaction fee can be tough for low margin businesses.
- Having to tweak and pay for third party apps that provide functionality that should be included in eCommerce software isn't fun.
Shopify is great for the quick deployment of eCommerce websites and scaling them to test for feasibility. It's very affordable and easy to use. BigCommerce provides more function and customization but it takes coding experience to execute so it may not be best for some teams, especially lean ones. Shopify is much better than Wix and Squarespace for eCommerce, hands down.