Ecommerce design, development and entrepreneurship have intrigued me for years, so after an immersive 9 month experience in US/China cross-border eCommerce, I felt the desire to pursue the industry closer to home, and in a language I could better understand. Naturally, I jumped at the opportunity to join the team at 1 Digital Agency. As a rookie anywhere it’s important to be a sponge, absorbing all the new terminology and procedures around you, but it’s also helpful to take a few things head on, no holds barred and see where you end up. What better way to understand Shopify than to build my first store?
There are a few things you will want to complete before building a store, such as your product images and general site content like the About Us page, return policy and terms of use. It can be discouraging to hit big road blocks like these just as you’re getting started. After a little preparation, the best way to get a feel for the platform is to dive right into it. It’s key to remember that virtually anything you do within the editor or dashboard can be undone just as if you were editing a spreadsheet. After a lot of experimenting several features stood out to me.
Positives
- Work Flow: Within 5 minutes from landing on the Shopify homepage, I had opened a new account and uploaded the first product for sale on my site. Because my products vary minimally from one to the next, I was able to take advantage of the duplicate feature, allowing me to quickly upload about 30 products. By adding my products first, I was able to see what my own images looked like within Shopify’s themes, rather than having to guess based on sample photos of completely unrelated products.
- Order Management: There’s a lot of work to be done in the pre-launch phase if you want to hit the ground running smoothly. As long as you take the time to answer the questions around order notifications, return policies, and payment processing, Shopify’s order management system removes the stress of fulfilling orders. The key here is the prep work before the site goes live.
- Shopify Payments: By default, your store will use the Shopify Payments feature, which accepts all major cards without the need of integrating any third party payment gateways. A sort of turn-key solution for payment processing that you can feel secure about if you don’t want to or need to put much thought into that. Simply put, it is nice to set up something as vital as payments in the matter of 10 minutes, and move on knowing your customers can feel secure making purchases on your site.
- Content Creation: Whether you have someone that handles your content or you do it on your own, you want this part to be simple, if only because it needs to be updated often, and Shopify makes sure of that. The content editor feels as natural as your everyday emails. Familiar symbols in familiar places, easy to save although not always automatic (learned that the hard way), and easy to add images/videos to enhance the appeal.
Negatives
- Editing within theme: Once I was working within the React theme, I was a little frustrated with the lack of freedom to add new elements to the pages. Granted, I am a newbie with no coding experience and it could be said that less is more when it comes to design options, but it felt like the shackles were a little too tight for me. There were points in the process when I simply wanted to add something to the page, be it a text box or an image just to see what it looks like, and it was not obvious to me how to do this.
- Product Options: Products generally come with options like color and size. When uploading a new product, Shopify walked me through all of these options with ease, and to be fair any option I required was available. However, when I needed to add a new option to a previously saved product I was forced to find a workaround. Unfortunately, that workaround meant adding the product all over again and including the new option before saving.
Summary
What to Actually Test During Any Platform Trial
The point of a free trial is not a tour of the screens — it is a stress test against your real business before you commit. Load the trial with your hardest case: your most complex product (most variants, a bundle, a subscription), your real shipping rules, and your actual tax situation. A platform that handles your messiest scenario cleanly will handle the easy ones; one that needs a workaround on day one will need a dozen in production. The "had to re-add the product to change an option" friction noted above is exactly the kind of thing a deliberate trial surfaces before it becomes a daily annoyance.
Customization Limits and the Theme System
The frustration in the original review — wanting to drop a text box or image onto a page and not finding it obvious — is the central trade-off of a hosted platform: you trade deep layout freedom for speed and stability. Before committing, test how far the theme editor goes for the changes you actually need, and understand that going beyond it means theme code (Shopify themes are built with the Liquid templating language) or an app. The more platform-specific customization you add, the higher the cost of switching later, so weigh that early rather than after launch.
SEO Control and True Monthly Cost
An easy admin is pleasant; SEO control and real cost decide the outcome. During the trial, confirm you can set custom URLs, title tags, and meta descriptions, that it generates a sitemap and supports 301 redirects, and how it handles filtered collection URLs. Separately, total the real monthly cost: base plan plus the specific apps your store needs plus payment-processing or transaction fees (using the platform's own payment product typically avoids the extra transaction fee). The sticker price is rarely the number that matters; the fully-configured cost is.
Editorial note: this is a first-person account of the Shopify trial as the onboarding flow, dashboard, and theme system appeared at the time of writing (around 2015). Shopify has since redesigned onboarding, plans, and its theme architecture (modern themes use the Online Store 2.0 / Liquid system rather than the older theme referenced), so the specific screens and steps described are a historical snapshot. The trial-evaluation principles added above — test your hardest case, probe customization limits, check SEO control and true total cost — are platform-agnostic and remain the right way to evaluate any ecommerce trial today.
Inevitably, questions will arise when the site is live, but as I built my store I couldn’t help but think Shopify has covered everything they could possibly think of. I could imagine the development teams at Shopify sitting in a room and bringing up any and every question that a rookie might think of while building their first store. The process flowed in a way that seemed to answer the next question on my mind. Although I was not managing a live site, I could still appreciate the simplicity of creating a new discount code, tracking prospects, and following a variety of key reports. For a first-timer, without an experienced design and development team behind me, Shopify took me from A to Z in the matter of days.