REVIEW: Shopify

I have always dreamed of owning my own shop. Admittedly in my mind there were beautiful windows displays, rows of odd products and an old fashioned cash-register perched in the corner. But this is a digital era, and being a bit of a nomad my Shopify store is probably as close and I will ever get to this dream.

I took advantage of Shopify’s 14 day free trial policy when frustrated by Fiverr taking 20% I decided to move my bio business to a new platform. To be honest Shopify was pretty easy to set up, by linking straight into my Paypal account I was able to get orders within about 10 minutes — which is pretty remarkable.

Setting up products was easy, although creating photos for items like bios or a book that hasn’t been written was a bit more challenging. Still on the design front Shopify lets you design your store using templates (it’s a little bit like Wordpress) which is both good and frustrating. I am not sure if I used the wrong template but without a lot of assets I found it quite difficult to make something that I liked, but to be honest I also didn’t spend a lot of time on it, so with a bit more effort you can probably create something quite beautiful.

But design aside, the real thing that you care about with online stores is what are the costs. Shopify’s pricing strategy is:

2.4% of the price of each item + 20p per transaction + £17.49 per month flat fee.

So it really is designed for people who are going to sell quite a bit to cover the £17.49 monthly fee.

To put it into perspective for here are some other pricing strategies:

Go Fund Me: 6.9% of each transaction + 20p transaction fee

Etsy= 3.5% of each transaction + 20c transaction fee

Big Commerce = 1.5% of each transaction + $29.95 per month

Note: Each platform charges for currency conversions but I won’t get into this.

Another note: A lot of websites like Wix or Weebly allow users to upgrade to a commercial store, but when I looked at this option for Wix (costing an extra $3 a month) I still would have had to sign up for Shopify, or a similar online storefront. I think Square space is the exception (but don’t quote me on it).

So in the end after weighing up all of the different options, I decided to opt out of the Shopify store and instead rely on the basic Paypal set up which allows me to receive funds from people and pay relatively little per item. But depending on how much you sell, and how much each item costs it definitely (pardon the pun) pays to shop around.