Shopify Review: All the Pros & Cons You Need to Know as a Dropshipper

When it comes to dropshipping platforms, Shopify remains one of the most popular options. With it, you can easily come up with an online store and start selling products in hours.

Since there are plenty of alternatives out there (like Wix, Magento, and BigCommerce), a lot of newbies get confused while starting their dropshipping store. Therefore, in this Shopify review, I will quickly cover its pros and cons so that you can easily make up your mind.

What Is Shopify All About

To start with our Shopify review, let’s cover some basics. In the simplest terms, Shopify is a hosted eCommerce platform that will let you create and manage your dropshipping store.

It provides beginner-friendly solutions to create your own online store using its existing themes and other customization features. In this way, you can start selling your products or services without any technical hassle. Nevertheless, if you are a developer, then you can also access Liquid, HTML, and CSS tools to customize your store.

Shopify Pros: Some of its Showstopping Features

Now that we have covered the basics, let’s dive in and get to know about some of the most prominent features and advantages of Shopify.

Ease of Use

This has to be one of the most prominent benefits of using Shopify. After all, there is a reason why over 500,000 active stores are powered by Shopify with a collective revenue of more than $40 billion.

Shopify provides a clean and user-friendly interface, letting almost anyone come up with an online store. While working on this Shopify review, I tried the platform and didn’t encounter any hassles in between.

The content management system of Shopify is based on a WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) editor that would let you create intuitive stores in no time. Apart from that, Shopify has also introduced Online Store 2.0. Using it, you can customize your store’s interface with simple drag and drop actions.

Also, with the Shopify page builder tool, you can readily use its building blocks and page sections. As of now, there are 13 free themes that you can use in Shopify. Though, there is a wide range of paid themes and third-party Shopify page builder apps that you can further explore.

Extremely Secure and Fast

Another prominent advantage that you will get with Shopify is its sturdy inbuilt security infrastructure. Unlike WooCommerce or Drupal, you don’t have to use third-party tools as Shopify has undertaken PCI compliance to help you secure and back up your data.

You can either use a content backup tool to do the same or directly export your data to CSV files from your account. Besides that, you can also implement two-factor authentication to further strengthen your Shopify account.

Customer Support and LMS

Another good thing about Shopify is its fast and responsive customer support. You can reach out to a Shopify customer representative via chat, email, or call 24 hours a day. Shopify also has a thriving online community where you can discuss vital things and get feedback from other users.

If you are new to Shopify, then you can also explore its learning management system. Here, you can get to know about all the major features of Shopify and learn more about dropshipping.

Product Cataloging

Our Shopify review would be incomplete without listing all the amazing features the tool provides for cataloging. Shopify has a decent inbuilt system to apply minor edits to your images. For instance, you can crop, flip, rotate, and resize your product images on the native interface of Shopify.

You can also come up with product variants on Shopify based on different things like size, color, material, and so on. There is a provision to have up to 100 variants for a single product. Needless to say, Shopify also lets us completely customize the listing of products by editing their title, meta, description, and so on.

What More

You can also explore a couple of other features in Shopify, including the following:

• Unlike other platforms, you can accept payments from different countries and in several supported currencies.
• It has an excellent abandoned cart detection and recovery tool for lead conversion.
• Tons of customization options to come up with a unique storefront.
• The Shopify App Store is quite decent and has thousands of free and paid apps in different categories.
• With its advanced subscription, you can get access to tons of reports for sales, marketing, finance, data search, and more.
• Several inbuilt and add-on features like Shopify blogging, Shopify Shipping, Shopify Markets, and so on.

Shopify Cons: What Could be Better

Just like every other eCommerce platform, Shopify also has a few limitations. Therefore, before you buy its subscription, make sure that you consider this vital section of our Shopify review in mind.

Product Categorization

This is one of the core components on which Shopify can work. While there is a provision to categorize products based on tags and filters, these options are quite limited. As your store would expand, you might find it hard to categorize your product listings.

Limited SEO and Marketing Features

While Shopify has all the basic SEO and marketing features for a new store, it might not meet your advanced needs. You can set up meta and alt components for your product listing. Though, compared to other platforms (like WordPress, which has tons of SEO plugins and options), Shopify seems to fall short on this.

Other Limitations

Besides that, you can encounter a couple of other limitations in Shopify, including the following:

• Complicated solutions for adding custom fields.
• Shopify’s premium subscription can be a bit expensive in the long run.
• Its basic account users can’t access any insights or reports.
• Its integrated payment option (Shopify Payments) doesn’t work in several countries.
• Shopify’s email marketing feature needs more updates.
• The Shopify app store has limited free apps (compared to WordPress).

Shopify Alternatives

You might want to overcome the above-listed limitations or could be looking for a more affordable alternative to Shopify. In this case, you can consider exploring the following options:

• Wix
• WooCommerce
• BigCommerce
• Magento
• PinnacleCart
• Shift4Shop
• MemberPress
• Weebly
• Web

Shopify Pricing

Before we wrap up our Shopify review, let’s quickly have a look at the overall pricing and plans of the tool. As of now, Shopify offers a free trial duration of up to 14 days. Once it’s over, you have to upgrade your account to either of the following plans:

Basic [$29 monthly]

This is the starter plan of Shopify that is mostly recommended to new store owners. While it supports the hosting of multiple products, you can manage up to 2 staff accounts and 4 inventory locations. The transaction fee is 2% and there’s no feature to generate reports.

Shopify [$79 monthly]

This plan is ideal for expanding the business of an already established store. Apart from all the features of the Basic plan, this will reduce the transaction fee to 1%. You will get access to all the standard reports and can manage up to 5 staff accounts.

Advanced [$299 monthly]

This is the most power-packed plan of Shopify that is mostly used by big store owners. You will get all the features of the Shopify plan and can manage up to 8 staff accounts. The transaction fee is reduced to just 0.5% with access to advanced reports and tons of other features.

DSers - Empower your Shopify Store

As you can see from our Shopify review that the tool can easily help you create your store’s frontend. Though, to find all kinds of products to sell and manage your stocks, a reliable tool like DSers would be the best companion to your Shopify store.

• DSers is fully compatible with Shopify and tons of other platforms like WooCommerce and Wix.
• It is the official AliExpress dropshipping tool, hosting thousands of suppliers from different parts of the world in numerous categories.
• DSers also provides a unique Supplier Optimizer feature that would let you pick the most profitable and reliable supplier in seconds.
• Using DSers you can order products in a bulk, manage bundle products, map variants, manage your stocks, and do so much more.
• With its advanced features like the automatic updates of order statuses and syncing of tracking numbers, you can easily make the most of your time.

Final Words

This brings us to the end of this extensive Shopify review. To make things easier for you, I have included Shopify’s pros, cons, pricing, and every other essential detail here. If you are just starting out your dropshipping journey, then Shopify can be an ideal platform.

Though, as you would expand, it can be a bit expensive to maintain all the high-end features of your store with Shopify. Go ahead and explore Shopify for free to have a hands-on experience of it and integrate your store with DSers to get optimized results.