Why do we not jump on the Shopify bandwagon? 3 big reasons to own your stack

Shopify is a hot topic at the moment in the world of e-commerce as it allows many business owners to quickly get started with selling online, with a slick and smooth online interface and many integrations which almost feels too good to be true. While at Invisible Dragon, we use WooCommerce for the majority of our e-commerce requirements, we feel like there are some big points about Shopify which may cause a large increase in costs to small businesses and you may think twice about allowing a singular company to own what could be the entirety of your business!

1: Own your platform

When you use Shopify, you have to pay Shopify no matter what. If Shopify retires a feature your entire business relies upon, tough. If Shopify decides to re-arrange features into new plans and now demands twice as much money, tough. If Shopify decides your business is too risky, or some new export law between US based companies and wherever you’re located comes into play, tough.

While Shopify makes a profit these days, it is still at the mercy of the stock market no matter what corner of the globe you are in. While with WooCommerce, and ourselves, we are still at the mercy of global markets, there is a level of shielding in place. With it being installable software, in much the same way of stuff like Microsoft Office of old coming on a CD, WooCommerce can be effectively installed on most web hosting platforms by a wide range of different suppliers.

With WooCommerce being open-source, this means that if there’s some bespoke requirement, we can search and locate exactly where in all of the code powering your store and change how it operates to better suit your business needs. With Shopify, every developer is limited to the functionality available within themes and through the API – some of which is locked behind different pricing tiers.

This also means, if Invisible Dragon built your WooCommerce site, but then for some reason or another you no longer are able to, or wish to conduct business with ourselves, you would be able to move your website to another provider, or even move this to an in-house dedicated team. All without having to make a major platform shift – you would still be using WooCommerce no matter where you go!

2: No revenue sharing

Shopify demands you pay a percentage to them for all sales no matter what, on top of hosting your website. For a small business, this can really into profit margins, especially as there is no likelihood of the costs to decrease in the future.

So while you could shop around and find a much cheaper card processing deal, or even find a card processor which works more for your industry (Adult and restricted businesses especially!) you still end up adding an extra 0.6% minimum (at the time of writing) to your processing charges! With WooCommerce, apart from potentially a cost involved for getting an integration working between your payment provider and Woo (we can help with this – even writing bespoke integrations!).

At Invisible Dragon, we recommend using Stripe directly who are the company who Shopify Payments runs through anyway, we also have a network of suppliers we can reach out towards who assist with bespoke acquiring solutions which can reduce the cost of card transactions and also accept high risk businesses of all kinds (so long as it’s legal – we can help find you a card provider)

3: It’s Expensive!

Shopify starts at £19/month, if you pay for a year up-front, otherwise it’s £25/month. For a small business getting started, this can be pretty difficult. This is before you even start wanting to experiment with things. While budget hosting can make WooCommerce slow, it’s cheaper than ever to get super-fast hosting at an affordable cost for your business.

Most WooComerce hosts also allow for you to create a copy of your website as a “staging version” to allow for new features and functionality to be tested and verified working before rolling out onto your live website with real customers – with Shopify this functionality is locked behind Shopify Plus which starts at $2,300 a month!

Minor items include staff accounts having £0 additional charge on Woo, which reduces the likelihood of sharing passwords between staff members which you absolutely should not be doing.

A large omission too is B2B or trade-based portals – with Woo there is a lot of options available for this and don’t require Shopify Plus, or additional monthly costs which can add up quickly – especially when B2B might only be a market you are wishing to trial. Even without our help, there are plenty of off-the-shelf WooCommerce trade plugins which can allow you to experiment with trade offerings, see what works and if there is a market there for your customers, and if not, the plugin can be removed without worrying about massive costs involved.

Conclusion

In conclusion we’ve ran through 3 big reasons we don’t offer Shopify – and while this may change in the future as there are some upsides to Shopify, we believe in owning and having control over costs and owning your own platform. Putting all of your eggs in one tech giant usually doesn’t end well, and diversity on the internet is important!

If you’d like to enquire about what we can do for either migrating from Shopify, consultation on e-commerce platforms or about getting a WooCommerce based shop for your business, please get in touch today.