Why B2C brands love Shopify: the pros and cons

We’ve done our research reading Reddit forums to peer reviews and conversations with people using Shopify stores as well as our experiences with B2C brands to really understand why B2C love using Shopify for their stores.

We’ve been champions of Craft CMS and Commerce for a decade (we love it) and it works perfectly for totally bespoke stores and experiences, designed around a business's exact requirements. However, Shopify, is ideal for our commerce clients with smaller stores and less need for complex backends and infrastructures. Just like everything else, it has its pros and cons, and these were the most talked about...

Shopify has a frictionless, low entry-barrier

One of the biggest draws of Shopify is that it makes commerce accessible to everyone, especially non techy founders and small teams who don’t necessarily have the technical know-how and expertise to build their store from scratch. 

Shopify has everything a brand needs to create a reliable store to sell online and scale in the future. It makes it perfect for brands just starting out on their commerce journey as a founder and start-up brand. Its ease of use and ability to have a store up and running in hours, means brands can focus on marketing and turning over revenue without a big upfront investment.

On the G2 review platform, Shopify has over 3K 5-star reviews where its users consistently praise its ease of use and intuitive interface. 

The quantity and quality of app integrations

Reviewers love that they can connect most of the Shopify apps without needing to touch or know anything about code, and all of the apps have their own star rating with hundreds of reviews on the Shopify app store. 

There are apps made by Shopify (many of which are free) and hundreds of others categorised by well known brands and integrations as well as by what a user is trying to achieve (selling products, store management, etc.)

What’s more, there are excellent Shopify customer reviews, such as Kelley Baker Brows, who uses the free Shop app on the store, stating, “Shop helped us raise our average order value by 15%. It has also given our customers more flexibility to pay, which has made an impact for us this year.”

Reliability, infrastructure and security

Most merchants don’t want to have to worry about hosting, site performance, security or any potential downtime of their store: they just want to sell.  As Shopify is a fully hosted commerce, it handles hosting as part of the platform.

For B2C brands where uptime means everything because downtime is lost opportunities and revenue, Shopify makes it easy to drive high volumes of traffic and flash sales without the worry of overloading the server. 

Shopify explicitly documents that stores are PCI compliant by default and for many B2C brands, this reduces the burden that comes with ensuring websites are secure when Shopify is already managing risk through SSL certificates and fraud prevention tools.

Biggest cons: costs accumulating, limited customisation, limited features without further modifications. 

Pricing is one of its biggest downsides:  the cost adds up

Extra costs with Shopify build up over time: the additional transaction fees (if you’re not using Shopify payments), the subscription plan not feeling affordable to some and paying for more apps or developer time for customisation to achieve better optimisation were the biggest downsides in pricing. 

Reading peer reviews, the overall costs rise quickly as a business scales and this can feel difficult and unsustainable for smaller businesses. 

Limited features and customisation was often mentioned 

Unless on higher tiers in payment plans or having a developer on-hand, peers mentioned that more advanced features were limited in checkout flows and backend customisation for ease of authoring experience.

There were businesses who had more complex pricing structures and product workflows who found it frustrating that custom development or more third-party apps were needed to achieve their user and payment flows online. 

A store that evolves with business scale and maturity

As brands evolve, build communities and often increase their product portfolio, Shopify’s out-the-box themes sometimes start to hold businesses back with limitations to the design and functionality. 

A lot of reviews highlighted that the more advanced a store became, the more they had to rely on third-party apps or custom development to give their store the functionality it needed as their businesses grew. This was especially true for founder startups who are using their own resources to grow and whilst they understand it’s an investment, they’d like more customisation that’s accessible to them as non-technical people. 

Overall, Shopify remains the #1 commerce for brands to get straight into selling products online in an easily accessible way. Despite the cons highlighted, most reviews still praised Shopify: great for beginners, the most reliable online store, an all in one solution and an overall great impression of what was immediately available. It gives brands confidence who are new to market confidence and most found their customer support responsive and helpful when they hit an obstacle. 

However, if brands do want to make adjustments to themes to further grow their business, that’s when custom features and functionality are added by Shopify developers to create more bespoke experiences attuned to a brand’s audience.

Custom development takes a Shopify theme’s foundation and shapes it into something more commercially driven and inline with users, how they search, navigate and buy online. 

With Shopify store modifications, we design and build components that are reusable, scalable and visually aligned with your brand’s identity. It means:

• faster future development
• better design consistency
• a storefront that evolves as your brand evolves

The more we research Shopify, the more we realise how we can support B2C brands who’re finding themselves ready to scale their digital presence but without the technical in-house means to develop better functionality and design.

Get More Vits is the UK's number one selling vitamin drink and after a discovery workshop to understand Get More Vits' proposition and goals for the new site, Abstrakt started a digital transformation for their Shopify commerce.