Is Shopify Worth It in 2024? An In-Depth Look

As we move into 2024, many in the e-commerce world are asking: Is Shopify worth it? Shopify is known for helping countless entrepreneurs launch and grow their online businesses. For years, Shopify has been leading this business. However, with new technologies and a competitive market, it's time to reassess its value.

In this brief analysis, we'll explore whether Shopify remains the top e-commerce platform. We'll look at its latest features, benefits, and any potential drawbacks to help you determine if Shopify is the right choice for your business in 2024. 

Is Shopify worth it in 2024?

Yes, Shopify is still worth it for businesses in 2024. With its robust features, scalability, and market presence, Shopify continues to be one of the best choices for building an online store.

Shopify serves millions of merchants across 175 countries, supporting around 4.7 million online stores. This extensive reach showcases its reliability and stability as a trusted e-commerce platform. 

However, whether Shopify is worth it to you depends on your specific business needs, budget, and growth objectives. By carefully evaluating these factors, you can determine if Shopify is the one for you.

Pros and Cons Shopify 

Shopify is widely known for its user-friendly interface and robust features, making it a popular option. Yet, every platform has its advantages and drawbacks.

Feature	Pros	Cons
Ease of use	Intuitive UI, easy to use for everyone	Limited customization for users without coding knowledge. Shopify utilizes an in-house coding language called Liquid, which may require additional learning time.
Scalability	Suitable for businesses of all sizes, from small to large	Fees can be high for high-volume businesses
App Store	Huge app store with over 7,000 apps to add features to your store	An Ecosystem reliant on third-party apps and services
Security	Strong security features to protect your store and customer data	Need to monitor and update security patches regularly
Omnichannel selling	Sell through multiple channels like websites, social media, and online marketplaces	Need an effective marketing strategy to attract customers
SEO Capabilities	Built-in SEO tools cover basic optimization needs such as meta titles and descriptions.	Customization options for URL structure and advanced SEO settings are limited.
Inventory Management	Efficient tracking and management across multiple locations.	Third-party apps are necessary to access more advanced inventory features.
Payment Solutions	Integrated ecosystem offering various payment methods.	Extra charges apply when utilizing external payment gateways.

Shopify: An in-depth review

To better understand and get a more accurate answer about Shopify, join me for a more in-depth review below:

Shopify pricing 

There are 4 main Shopify pricing plans:

• Basic – $25 per month
• Shopify – $65 per month
• Advanced — $399 per month
• Shopify Plus — customizable pricing but starts at $2,300 per month.
• and 3 additional Shopify plans:
• Starter - $5 per month
• Retail -  $89 per month
• Enterprise commerce - Custom pricing

In addition, some other costs need to be considered when using Shopify:

Additional Shopify costs

Themes: While some free Shopify themes are available. You need to buy premium themes to stand out. They are priced between $180 and $400. You can also hire a Shopify developer to get a personalized Shopify theme.

Shopify Apps: Free apps exist, but premium ones, offering valuable features, come at a cost ranging from $5 to $100 each.

Payment Processing: Shopify integrates with many payment gateways like Stripe and PayPal, which charge transaction fees. These fees typically range from 2.9% + $0.30 to 3.9% + $0.30.

Shopify Transaction Fees: If you opt for a payment provider other than Shopify Payments, additional transaction fees apply. These range from 2% for the Basic plan to 0.6% for the Advanced plan.

Domains: You can buy a Shopify domain for around $15/year or acquire one from a different provider.

Email Hosting: Shopify doesn’t offer email hosting. If you want a custom email address matching your domain, you’ll need an external email hosting service. However, you can set up unlimited forwarding email addresses for free.

Marketing and Advertising: Driving traffic to your store may involve expenses for email marketing, content creation, and paid advertising on platforms like Google Ads, Instagram, and Facebook.

Check out this article for more details about Shopify pricing: Shopify pricing 2024: Which plans are for you?

Shopify’s ease of use

Shopify stands out for its ease of use, which make it a top choice for launching and managing online stores. Even those with no e-commerce experience can quickly set up and customize their store. Shopify prioritizes simplicity, offering the most basic personalized setup instructions. There is a variety of themes for every skill level.

Set up is quick and easy

Shopify offers a quick and straightforward setup. Even people with no prior ecommerce experience can launch an online store.

Its intuitive design allows users to start adding products, customizing their store, and begin selling with minimal setup time.

By prioritizing ease of access and simplicity, Shopify is an ideal choice for beginners to enter the ecommerce space without dealing with complex setup.

Shopify website builder

Shopify offers a full range of easy-to-use tools and settings to customize your website. Customization is really simple with just 1 click or drag and drop. You can change colors, fonts, layouts, images, etc. to suit your needs and highlight your brand.

Going even further, for those with technical expertise or specific design requirements, Shopify offers deeper customization options through the Liquid template language. This allows you to modify every aspect of your store's design and functionality.

 

Shopify themes

Shopify themes are essential for creating great online stores. Themes dictate the look, feel, and structure of your website.

Shopify Theme Store: Users can easily find themes by business type or style in the Shopify Theme Store using the drop-down menu. 

Free themes provide a professional look: New businesses or those with limited budgets can start with one of the 13 free themes available. These free theme are a great option for beginners.

Vast customization options: Shopify themes offer many customization options. These themes can align with various brand styles and ethos, whether it's boutique fashion, tech gadgets, or homemade goods.

Focus on User Experience (UX): Shopify themes prioritize user experience with intuitive navigation and responsive design. This ensures seamless browsing and shopping across desktop, tablet, and mobile devices.

Regular updates and support: Themes from the Shopify Theme Store receive regular updates and technical support. Shopify stores are kept up-to-date with the latest web standards and e-commerce features.

Designed for sales: Shopify themes are tailored for e-commerce. They offer essential features and integrations. They include payment gateways, inventory management tools, and marketing platforms. Prices for Shopify themes range from $140 to $400, depending on the features and functionalities offered.

Demo versions available: Users can preview themes with a demo version before making a decision, ensuring it meets their requirements and preferences.

Product management

Working with product variants and options in Shopify:

Product variants and options in Shopify are currently limited to 100 variants with up to 3 options per product. However, Shopify plans to increase this limit to 2,000 variations soon. Third-party apps can extend these limits, albeit at a cost.

Using Shopify product categories

Shopify simplifies product categorization by creating manual and automated collections. Automated collections efficiently categorize products based on rules, ideal for large inventories. 

Selling digital products

For selling digital products like eBooks or music, Shopify provides the Digital Downloads App, allowing automatic delivery of download links post-checkout. The platform imposes a generous 5GB file size limit, and third-party apps can be used for larger files.

Custom fields and file uploads

Shopify allows for custom collection of information from customers. You need to add custom HTML coding to do this.

To upload files at checkout or provide options for customer-submitted files, you'll need to use a third-party app or pay for compatible features.

Shipping products

Shopify offers various shipping options, including free, flat, price-based, weight-based, local delivery, and calculated rates. Users can set up rules based on price or weight and cover different shipping zones. Shopify Shipping provides real-time estimates and discounts in some countries. Certain plans enable third-party options.

Shopify integrations

Social media

For social media, you can use Shopify Buy Buttons to sell products on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok.

• Facebook: Sell products through a Facebook Shop.
• Instagram: Tag products in your Instagram posts and stories, allowing users to shop directly from the app.
• TikTok: Shopify’s partnership with TikTok allows the creation of shoppable ads.

Shopify Marketplace Connect app

The Shopify Marketplace Connect app links your product catalog to major marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart (U.S. only), eBay, and Etsy. This streamlines order, listing, and inventory management directly from your Shopify admin panel.

Any changes made within your store are instantly updated across all connected platforms. This ensures consistent and efficient e-commerce management.

Building a multilingual website with Shopify

Shopify allows selling in multiple languages, excluding the 'Starter' plan, with up to 20 translated versions of your store. Multilingual selling adds language 'folders' to your domain (e.g., myshop.com/fr, myshop.com/de) or 'international domains' (e.g., myshop.fr, myshop.de). 

While all free themes include a language selector, paid themes may vary, so it's essential to check before buying if multilingual selling is a priority.

Accepting multiple currencies in Shopify

Shopify Markets allows you to define selling areas based on countries or groups of countries. Users can easily manage currencies, languages, local domains, and payment processors. 

Automatic currency conversion based on visitors' IP addresses enhances user experience and can boost conversion rates. 

However, there are limitations, such as duties and taxes only available on expensive plans and a three-market limit on lower-tier plans. 

Creating more markets requires upgrading to a higher plan or paying additional fees. Currency conversion relies on Shopify Payments. Third-party apps are needed for countries without Shopify Payments support.

Despite the limitations, Shopify's multi-currency selling feature remains efficient.

Abandoned cart recovery

Shopify's abandoned cart recovery feature identifies visitors who abandon their purchases and emails them incentives, such as discount codes, to complete their purchases. 

This functionality is included in nearly all Shopify plans. Shopify allows customization of recovery messages based on different abandonment scenarios, providing flexibility through editable workflows.

Shopify reports and analytics

Shopify’s built-in reports and analytics tools offer valuable insights. They help optimize your store’s performance. Here's a summary of key features:

Dashboard Overview

The Shopify dashboard provides a quick snapshot of sales, orders, and traffic, allowing you to monitor your business at a glance.

Sales Reports

Track sales trends, product performance, and order history. Default reports can be customized to meet specific needs.

Marketing Reports

Analyze the results of your marketing efforts. See where visitors come from (social media, search engines, email campaigns), which activities generate sales, and how many visitors follow through after seeing a campaign.

Behavior Reports

Understand visitor interactions, including traffic sources, popular pages, time spent on the site, and exit points.

Order Reports

Monitor sales transactions, order statuses, and total sales. Gain insights into customer behavior, such as repeat purchases and top-rated products.

Additional Reports

Online Store Cart Analysis

Profit Reports

Profit by Point of Sale Location

Finance

Returning Customers

Top Online Store Searches

Retail Sales by Product

Store Conversion Over Time

Acquisition Reports

Inventory Reports

Online Store Speed

Refund Rate

Shopify SEO and marketing

Is Shopify good when it comes to SEO? Yes, Shopify is good for SEO. It offers robust features comparable to other hosted site-building platforms.

Key SEO Features

• On-page SEO: Easily manage page titles, meta descriptions, headings, and alt text for content optimization.
• Robots.txt File: Control how search engines crawl your site.
• 301 Redirects: Automatically prompts and creates redirects when URLs change, preventing lost rankings due to broken links.
• Responsive Themes: Ensure your site displays well on all devices, enhancing user experience and search rankings.
• Content Delivery Network (CDN): Reduces page loading times, improving search engine rankings.
• Hosting: Reasonably fast with good performance on Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.
• Core Web Vitals: Meets Google’s performance targets for speed, responsiveness, and visual stability. A new performance dashboard helps you track and meet these requirements.

Email Marketing in Shopify: ‘Shopify Email’

Email marketing is crucial for driving sales in an online store, and Shopify's built-in tool, ‘Shopify Email,’ helps you do just that. 

Shopify Email offers segmentation, automation, and AI optimization tools for targeted email campaigns. 

With Shopify Email, users can send up to 10,000 emails per month for free. Past 10,000 emails, it will cost $1 per 1,000. Users with high sales volume benefit from even lower rates. This make Shopify a great email marketing tool.

Blogging in Shopify

Blogging is crucial for driving organic traffic to your online store. All Shopify stores provide a built-in blogging tool to help with this.

Shopify's built-in blogging tool boosts site visibility in Google search results. Yet, it lacks advanced features like post-categorization. Also, its interface feels outdated with limited functionalities such as drag-and-drop content, image captions, and easy product or form insertion.

Users often resort to HTML additions or apps to overcome these limitations. Despite its shortcomings, Shopify's blogging tool serves well for basic content creation and SEO.

Shopify SEO apps

Use SEO apps to increase organic traffic, help pages rank higher, improve page speed, etc. 

Here are some Shopify SEO apps that can help increase your organic traffic and improve your store's search engine rankings: Yoast SEO, SEO Image Optimizer Wizard, SEO Manager, Plug in SEO, Sherpas: Smart SEO,.. helps enhance your Shopify store's SEO efforts and attract more organic traffic to your website.

Shopify support

Shopify’s customer support offers 24/7 phone, chat, and email. It now limits phone support to Shopify Plus users. Standard plans offer live chat and email support, with email requiring a ‘leave a message’ form and a 24-hour response time. 

Live chat begins with an AI assistant, which some users may find frustrating. It supports a limited number of languages, with others handled via Google Translate. Users are unhappy with the removal of phone support and report slow live chat responses. Online support materials are clear but mostly text-based, lacking screenshots and videos.

Overall, these changes represent a step backward in Shopify’s customer service.

Shopify security

Shopify prioritizes security, providing robust features that protect both merchants and customers. With SSL Certificates, data transferred between your site and customers is encrypted. This provides security for sensitive information like credit card details.

Additionally, Shopify adheres to PCI compliance standards for handling card information. It also offers a cookie policy generator to enhance privacy and compliance.

Shopify's security measures allow you to focus on business growth. You can reach your full potential easily knowing that your store is safe.

Conclusion

Yes, Shopify is definitely worth it in 2024. Shopify is still a top choice for online stores. It offers seamless integration between online and physical sales, along with features for dropshipping, print-on-demand, and multi-currency sales. 

Competitive pricing, inclusive features, easy usability, and extensive app integration make it appealing. However, there are drawbacks. It charges transaction fees for third-party payment gateways. It limits product options, and restricts user accounts. 

Despite these, Shopify remains a strong option for people who want to build an online store.