Shopify Isn’t a magic bullet for eCommerce success
Shopify dominates the eCommerce space with its promise of an easy-to-use platform, fast setup, and built-in tools. But once you scratch beneath the surface, you’ll find a long list of limitations that could be sabotaging your growth. If you’re serious about scaling your online store, Shopify might not be the right choice.
Shopify brands itself as a super easy and fast way to get an eCommerce website up and running. And whilst that is true, over time, they trap you into their ecosystem, with no way out, and no other solution other than to keep paying them, or pay more to migrate off.
No staging environment
As a web developer, this is one of my biggest pet peeves. There’s no easy or cheap way to get a staging environment for Shopify.
You either have to pay for a plugin to give you a staging environment, or test in production. Eeek!!
Although a lot of development can be tested on a separate test store, being able to replicate the exact setup you have is very important when you’re trying to debug a problem. Especially one that is hiding away, and you end up spending hours only to find an extra semicolon out of place that’s throwing everything off.
And if you need to test for with specific products (in a large store) or compatibility with certain apps or extensions that are paid… then you’ll need to go through a lengthy export/import process or buy the app twice.
Obviously if there’s no staging environment, there’s also something else that’s important and missing….
Backups!
Made a crucial mistake and need to roll back? The idea is to not make a mistake in the first place. This can be particularly frustrating for users who do want to dabble in the code a little but might not have the skills to fix it if they break it.
Backups also provide a kind of version control as well, giving you multiple restore points if you have a complex development issue or are working with multiple teams or agencies.
Customisation
No ability to change URL structures is probably one of the biggest personal pet peeves of mine.
Shopify forces you into rigid URL structures like /collections/ and /products/, which aren’t the worst, but it does mean you can’t do anything creative with the URLs and content structures.
Contents must fit a specific guideline, notably /pages/
And forget about customising the checkout flow…
Unless you’re on Shopify Plus (which starts at $2,500 USD per month at time of writing!), you’re stuck with Shopify’s default checkout. Even then, you don’t get access to the full suite of customisation options.
- Want to optimise conversion rates with a custom checkout flow? Too bad.
- Can you add a last minute upsell? Forget about it.
- Want a conditional thank you page based on what the user bought? You’re dreaming!
Customisation is really one of the biggest gripes, the lack of flexibility
Shopify sucks at SEO
PageSpeed is an important SEO factor. The fact that you as the user has very little control over it means there’s almost nothing you can do to remedy this. Regardless of people telling you that PageSpeed doesn’t matter, it definitely isn’t the be all end all of ranking factors, but it does play a part, and since it’s a factor that is generally within your controls on any normal self-hosted solution, it doesn’t make sense to give it up for the sake of a quick setup.
I imagine JB Hifi is on the highest Shopify Plus plan, which is $2,500USD per month (about $4,000 Australian Dollars as at Feb 2025).
Whilst it’s not necessarily the most important factor, a score of 6 is pretty damn awful.
Custom Functionality
Not to be confused with Customisation above! I’m talking about the function rather than the form this time around.
If you have a run of the mill, standard eCommerce site, 9 times out of 10, you probably won’t need any custom functions.
But if you have anything even remotely close to some custom functionality, such as minimum order value or want to display 5 different currencies at once, it’s going to be a major pain to add in Shopify.
In order to add custom functionality in Shopify, you’ll need to access all the various APIs, host the app somewhere, and authenticate the app before you even start building the damn thing! With WordPress, you can simply drop in some code to add additional functions without having to set up the damn thing first.
Or you can jump onto the next danger of plugins/apps…
All plugins cost money
Okay, the headline isn’t completely true, but there are very few completely free and fully featured plugins available when compared to WordPress.
Majority of the plugins are paid, and it makes sense from Shopify’s perspective. You’re vendor locked into their ecosystem so where else are you going to go?
The downside to Shopify Apps, apart from the price, is once you stop paying, the plugin stops working. Compare that with WordPress. Once you download a plugin, it works, and almost always works even without an active subscription to the plugin provider!
No access to server side
Most eCommerce owners will likely never need server-side access, but if you do, then you’re out of luck here. Now you’re probably thinking, if I don’t need access to the server, why would I want to?
There are actually many benefits to accessing the server. Rules such as banning and block entire country IPs. For example, if you only ship within Australia and New Zealand, you can pretty much ban every other country’s IP address in a blanket ban style, and never worry about spam or hits from overseas servers.
Additionally, you might have custom caching requirements for your specific clientele, which needs to be configured at the server level. And lastly are logs – this is particularly useful if you are working with an experienced seo agency who can analyse the logs for bot hits, frequency of the Googlebot, and see what pages are being accessed so you can block unnecessary access to improve your search engine rankings and improve server performance.
Shopify is publicly listed
That means they need to turn a profit, and shareholders can and will push for higher revenue from Shopify at some point. This means at any time, they can raise prices and essentially hold your website hostage if you don’t pay up.
There’s no protection for you here if they decide to do this except pay the new price. This in turn will probably force you to increase your own prices to cover the cost, and most likely lose customers in the process.
This makes things a bit dangerous as you are essentially at the whim and beacon of whatever they decide to do on the pricing side.
And this is just on the platform side, there’s also the add-ons that you need to pay for that are at an extra cost.
In the process of writing this article, we also learnt that the CEO of Shopify came out in defense of Trump’s tariff demands, and blames the recently resigned Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau of not stopping the trade war.
Canada thrives when it works with America together. Win by helping America win. Trump believes that Canada has not held its side of the bargain
Tobi Lutke on X (formerly Twitter)
I worry that this turns into a Tesla/Elon Musk situation where Tesla owners are famously getting rid of their Tesla’s or at least distancing themselves from the automaker with the recent political affiliations and antisemitism from Elon Musk.
You have no ability to change hosts
You’re essentially locked into the Shopify ecosystem, there’s no simple or easy way to migrate Shopify to WooCommerce or any other platform.
This is by design, also known as vendor lock-in, great for the vendor, bad for you.
This means you can’t choose a cheaper host or better host. You can’t increase the performance of your current host if you want to.
Whilst the storage plans do start at a very healthy and generous 100GB of space, sometimes you need more computing power, more processing power, or you might just need 101GB of space. Shopify doesn’t give you that flexibility so you’ll either need to suck it up and pay the premium, or pay for a rebuild. There aren’t many options to choose from unfortunately.
Shopify’s payment timeline, not yours
Cash flow can make or break a business, with Shopify, you are working on their own payment timeline, not yours. They can unfairly withhold funds or delay a payout as they deem fit, and their support might stall you around for months.
There are documented cases where Shopify can seemingly hold funds for no obvious reasons. And as a business owner, you want to be able to get on the phone with someone immediately to clarify the issue and lift the block. However, this doesn’t seem to be the case, and they don’t offer phone or localised support if you are in Australia.
It’s been strangely accepted as just a risk of doing business by some, but it’s a risk which is completely avoidable by simply avoiding Shopify!
More payment providers
If you want to get started quickly using Shopify payments, that’s great. However, there will come a point where you want to offer a localised buy now, pay later (BNPL) options such as Clearpay or Afterpay, or simply other banks that have a much better payout timeline.
It’s well known that Shopify uses a trimmed down version of Stripe. It doesn’t make sense though because Stripe offers so many options, that for some reason, Shopify refuses to adopt or integrate to give the user more options.
Self-hosted platforms like WooCommerce simply allow the user to connect with thousands of international and local payment providers, many of which, have far better % and fees than Shopify’s limited options.
Fraud and chargebacks
Fraudulent transactions, card testing, and stolen credit cards are just part of running an eCommerce store. However, in self-hosted solutions, there are many ways to mitigate these issues such as blocking entire countries that you don’t ship to, adding captchas, enabling 3D Secure v2, capturing and verifying emails first, to name but a few. There’s no such solution on Shopify, therefore, you’re at the whim of fraud and card testing attacks, and pray that Shopify will do something to stop them.
And then there’s chargebacks…
Shopify generally takes the side of the consumer more than the store owner, immediately issuing chargebacks which are costly to the business and impact the bottom line almost immediately. There’s not much controls for the store owner when users do this and virtually nothing to stop a disgruntled customer or scammer from doing this aggressively.
If Shopify sucks so much, why do people use it?
Whilst there are a number of high-profile sites that use Shopify, they generally already have a big brand presence. Logan Paul’s Prime, JB HiFi, LTT Store, Who Gives a Crap, Aje, Culture Kings, and Koh.
These guys already have a lot of money to spare. Making it easier for them to simply outsource and put the responsibility on a high-end service.
And… The kicker….
Shopify also pays influencers to promote their service, leading to an added motivation for influencers to promote and push the popularity of the platform.
Alternatives to Shopify
Obviously some bias here, but WooCommerce is still the goto alternative for Shopify. It’s cheap to buy hosting, set up and run. However, with the cheap cost, there always some downsides which are mainly short term, but in the long run, it is far more profitable, fewer headaches outside of your control, and the most important thing – options.
Options to change hosts, change developers, upgrade, downgrade, integrate. Anything for wherever your business is going.
Other options include:
All are self-hosted platforms, which is what we recommend as this always gives you the greatest number of options in the future.
Is Shopify Really That Bad?
If you’re a hobbyist or running a small store, Shopify can be a decent option. But for serious businesses looking to scale and want to keep your margins thicc (it’s what the cool kids say), it’s a costly, restrictive, and SEO-unfriendly platform that will eventually hold you back.
Before you jump into Shopify, consider your long-term business goals and whether you’re willing to pay the Shopify tax just for a quick and “easy” setup. You might find that true ownership, scalability, and flexibility are worth a little extra effort upfront.
TLDR: Shopify is great to get started quickly, but long term, there are pain points you never would have expected to come across.
