Using Shopify to Build a SaaS Product. Is It Crazy?
The other day I was reading this blog post called ‘Shopify Hacks 2 — Quick and Dirty Recurring SaaS Product’ about how you could use Shopify to support the subscription-side of your SaaS. Call it Shopify for SaaS.
It’s a brilliant idea on paper. You get one of the most powerful e-commerce platforms, basically, the Ferrari of e-commerce SaaS, with a webpage builder, plus contact forms, plus CRM and with some app extension, you can add-on the subscription management part. And you get what is possibly the best B2B app ecosystem. Why bother integrating the APIs of the Stripe, Chargify, Recurly of this world when you can just monetise your SaaS with a drag & drop e-commerce platform with no code or low code?
So let’s go?
As per the title, it’s a hack and no… it’s not really going to work. Shopify is fundamentally made for one-time orders, one-time purchase for physical products. The shiniest Ferrari is still a pretty awful boat. Even if you delegate the management of the recurring payment schedule to another app hooked to Shopify (which are usually made for physical products with shipments like Recharge), you are bound to run into issues. SaaS products are fundamentally digital products, which requires login and access management capabilities — features that don’t exist in Shopify. To build a typical SaaS website such as Product, Pricing, Sign-up, Login, you would already be pushing quite hard the boundaries of Shopify (and it can’t be done without custom code). But now think about the authenticated experience of your subscriber. Account management pages with billing and customer details, potentially with renewal, upgrade, downgrade, payment updates, cancellation prevention flow, all of it needing the be heavily customised with code. With no promise to really work in the end.
You won’t be able to do pretty common models in SaaS like free trials, usage-based charges, or stepped pricing easily. Last but not least, SaaS can be sold worldwide, from day 1. Shopify stores can handle multi-currencies with some setup but it tends to break other integrations. And a shop can only handle one language at a time.
Let’s get real
So while the problem has been well identified, another approach is needed. And that’s where Limio Subscription Commerce Platform comes in.
We make it easy for you to build a state-of-the-art SaaS purchasing experience, allow you to flexibly sell subscriptions online and offline, and to manage the full subscriber lifecycle with shiny self-service with a no-code or low code approach.
It’s pretty clear the SaaS world is hungry for solutions that don’t require to code and integrate. But if you are building a real SaaS business, you’ll have a better shot at it with Limio than Shopify so get in touch 😉
