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Shopify pros and cons (2025)

Reading Time: 13 minutes

Ecommerce has become competitive, and choosing the right platform can make or break your online business. That’s why understanding Shopify pros and cons isn’t just helpful — it’s critical for business owners and entrepreneurs.

Shopify is a widely popular ecommerce platform that powers millions of online stores worldwide. Carefully considering its advantages and disadvantages is essential for businesses with limited budgets and ambitious goals.

The pros help you understand how Shopify can drive business growth. Meanwhile, the cons prepare you for potential issues that could impact your bottom line, like app costs or customization limits.

In this article, we’ll give a balanced overview of the pros and cons of Shopify. We’ll explore seamless third-party integrations that enhance store functionality and potential pricing concerns that might impact your bottom line.

Knowing the Shopify advantages and disadvantages helps you make informed business decisions, even if you’re just launching your first online store.

Build stronger customer relationships with email automation workflows for Shopify from Omnisend

Shopify pros and cons: Key takeaways

Before we get started, here’s a quick overview of the Shopify pros and cons in 2025. This overview will provide a clear insight into how Shopify can align with or potentially pose challenges to your business needs.

  • Shopify’s intuitive interface lets you quickly set up and manage your store, even with little to no technical expertise
  • The platform offers 8,000+ apps that extend its functionality, including everything from payment gateways to email marketing tools like Omnisend
  • Shopify scales easily with small and expanding businesses to accommodate growing traffic and inventory
  • It integrates seamlessly with platforms like Instagram, Facebook, eBay, and Amazon, allowing you to sell across multiple channels
  • With round-the-clock customer support, Shopify ensures you get help when needed
  • Shopify’s responsive themes automatically adjust to any screen size, ensuring a smooth shopping experience across devices
  • The platform enhances security with SSL certificates and PCI compliance, protecting customer data
  • Additional apps and transaction fees can add up, especially if you’re on lower-tier plans
  • This Shopify review mentions that some advanced features require paid third-party apps
  • More extensive customizations may need coding or higher-tier plans, as basic themes offer minimal flexibility
  • Once you’ve built your store on Shopify, migrating to another platform can be complex and time-consuming as data migration and URL structures may require tech-based knowledge

Pros of using Shopify

Exploring Shopify pros and cons, we discovered numerous features that make ecommerce accessible, scalable, and profitable. From small businesses to enterprise-level operations, Shopify offers compelling advantages that can significantly impact your online business.

So, let’s look at the key benefits of using Shopify:

  1. Ease of use
  2. Comprehensive app ecosystem
  3. Scalability
  4. Multiple sales channels
  5. 24/7 customer support
  6. SEO and marketing tools
  7. Mobile optimization
  8. Secure and reliable

1. Ease of use

One of Shopify’s greatest strengths is its user-friendly interface. According to this guide on how to start a Shopify store, you can easily set up and manage your online store even if you have little to no technical knowledge.

The best part is that the platform provides comprehensive tutorials and step-by-step guides. Plus, you get a personalized setup guide like this:

shopify pros and cons - setting up
Image via Shopify

There’s more! Shopify’s intuitive interface allows you to navigate the platform easily, whether customizing your storefront or adding products to your catalog.

As if that’s not enough, you get access to some of the best Shopify themes. You can create a unique online presence tailored to your brand.

The platform also comes with a drag-and-drop editor. This visual editor lets you change your website layout, colors, and design without codes. You can create a professional-looking store without hiring a developer by clicking and dragging elements into place.

You can also add sections to different parts of your store, like the footers, featured collections, image banners, and headers, right from the website builder homepage.

shopify pros and cons - home page customization
Image via Shopify

2. Comprehensive app ecosystem

When weighing the Shopify pros and cons, consider how app dependencies and subscription fees align with your goals and budget. 

Shopify’s App Store offers 8000+ apps that extend the platform’s core functionality.

You can add features like email marketing, inventory management, customer service, product reviews, and more without needing custom development. These features can help boost sales, streamline shipping processes, or automate tasks.

You don’t need technical expertise, but you’ll need to integrate the apps into the Shopify store. All you have to do is choose from the list of available apps in the app store.

The platform takes a modular approach with these apps. So, you can start with functionality and gradually add more advanced tools as your business scales.

The best part is that most of these apps are easy to use, mobile-friendly, and automated. However, you need to find the right app that fits your business needs. For instance, Omnisend is one of the best Shopify apps and a top-rated email and SMS marketing automation solution for ecommerce stores. 

Omnisend integrates seamlessly with Shopify, allowing you to engage customers through personalized email campaigns and automated workflows. From nurturing leads to re-engaging past customers, Omnisend’s automation capability can help you increase conversions and build long-term customer loyalty.

In addition to Shopify’s native apps, the platform supports plugins from third-party developers. For instance, you can add a countdown timer app to create urgency on your website and drive conversions.

From nurturing leads to re-engaging customers, grow your sales with Omnisend’s email automation

3. Scalability

One of Shopify’s compelling advantages is its ability to grow with your business. You can start small and expand as you expand without migrating to a new platform.

With Shopify, you experience a smooth transition from managing a limited number of orders to efficiently processing thousands of transactions daily. While this option incurs an additional cost, it allows you to manage a fully functional store without disruption.

If you’re starting small, Shopify’s basic plans provide the essential features to establish and grow an online presence. As your business increases in size, the platform easily accommodates higher volumes of traffic and orders, as well as more complex operations.

Conversely, you can upgrade to Shopify Plus as a larger enterprise or a rapidly growing business. Here, you get advanced features like dedicated support, increased customization options, additional staff accounts, and higher API call limits.

Additionally, you get access to exclusive features like Shopify flow for automation and Script editor for customized checkout experiences.

It also has multi-currency and multi-language capabilities, making it an excellent choice if you want to expand globally.

4. Multiple sales channels

Shopify smoothly integrates with multiple sales channels, allowing you to expand your reach beyond your online storefront. You can easily sell your products across social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. 

This integration lets customers buy products directly from your social media posts. You can also leverage these platforms’ extensive user bases to enhance your outreach and increase audience engagement.

In addition to social media, the platform offers built-in integration with marketplaces like eBay and Amazon. These integrations allow you to sync your inventory, manage orders, and reach a global audience on these platforms without third-party solutions.

For instance, the Shopify Amazon integration makes listing and selling your products on Amazon easy. This streamlines your operations by syncing stock levels and orders between the platforms.

Beyond marketplaces, Shopify facilitates omnichannel retail through point-of-sale systems. This is especially useful for brick-and-mortar stores with “buy online pick up in store” capabilities.

Even better, Shopify’s channel management system automatically syncs inventory levels, product information, and pricing across all connected platforms. This solves the complexity of multi-channel selling and reduces the risk of inventory discrepancies or overselling.

5. 24/7 customer support

Shopify’s round-the-clock customer support ensures that operational challenges or technical issues never slow your business down. 

This comprehensive support system includes live chat, phone, and email support, available 24/7. This makes Shopify particularly valuable if you operate across different time zones.

Additionally, Shopify’s support staff are experts in both the technical and business aspects of ecommerce. These support agents assist with everything from basic store setup questions to complex API integration issues. This ensures clear, actionable solutions rather than generic responses.

In addition, the platform maintains an extensive help center.

shopify pros and cons - help center
Image via Shopify

You can find detailed documentation, video tutorials, and an active community forum with experiences and solutions from other merchants. This means you’ll find the right resources where you prefer immediate assistance or self-directed problem-solving.

Even better, Shopify’s paid plans include access to an emergency response team. The team addresses critical and urgent issues that affect your store operations, helping minimize potential revenue loss from technical disruptions.

6. SEO and marketing tools

Shopify has built-in SEO and marketing tools providing basic SEO features to improve your store’s visibility. 

Even more, you can track your performance in search engine rankings. The platform’s SEO framework automatically generates canonical tags, robot.txt files, and sitemap.xml files. This creates a solid technical foundation for search engine optimization.

That’s not all! Shopify gives you control over crucial SEO elements. These include customizable title tags, meta descriptions, alt text for images and header tag hierarchies, and URL structures for blog posts, products, and collections. These elements help position your store to excel in SEO best practices.

Additionally, Shopify has an analytics dashboard that provides comprehensive insights into marketing performance. You can track metrics like customer behavior patterns, traffic sources, and conversion rates.

Plus, with a seamless Google Analytics 4 integration, you get deeper insights into customer journeys and campaign effectiveness. These insights enable you to fine-tune your marketing strategies for better results.

The best part is that you can leverage SEO apps available in Shopify’s App Store to enhance your store’s SEO capabilities. These apps provide advanced tools to help improve search visibility and drive organic traffic.

For instance, Plug In SEO offers automated SEO checks, keyword tracking, and suggestions for improving page speed, title tags, and meta descriptions. SEO Manager also provides automatic metadata and alt-text optimization.

It also offers Smart SEO, which helps generate structured data markup for products. This feature increases the likelihood of your content featuring in rich snippets on search engine results pages.

Beyond traditional SEO tools, the platform offers features like automatic structured data markup for products, enhancing rich snippet appearances in search results.

The platform’s built-in social media integration tools also help you maintain consistent messaging across multiple channels. You can combine these capabilities with customizable XML sitemaps and automated 301 redirects. 

This ensures your store maintains strong search visibility while effectively improving and monitoring your marketing strategies.

7. Mobile optimization 

Every theme in Shopify’s marketplace is designed to provide an optimized shopping experience across all devices. 

These responsive themes automatically adjust layouts, image sizes, and navigation elements to match different screen sizes without compromising aesthetic appeal or functionality.

What’s more, the platform’s mobile optimization extends beyond basic responsiveness. It incorporates important features like touch-friendly navigation, accelerated mobile pages (AMP), and optimized checkout processes designed for smartphone users.

It provides essential features like mobile-optimized cart recovery emails and simplified checkout forms that work efficiently with mobile keyboards. The platform offers payment solutions specifically for mobile users, such as one-touch payment systems and digital wallets.

Progressive loading techniques and automatic image optimization also prioritize loading times, ensuring swift page loads even on slower internet connections.

As well as this, the platform has a native mobile app that allows you to manage your store on the go. You can handle everything from inventory updates to order processing from your smartphone.

According to Statista, smartphones made up about 77% of retail site traffic globally in the second quarter of 2025. These mobile optimization features can help you take advantage of that and increase your revenue.

8. Secure and reliable

Shopify takes security and reliability seriously by maintaining Level 1 PCI DSS compliance — the highest level of certification available for handling credit card information. This security extends across the entire platform, from payment processing to data storage, ensuring comprehensive protection for you and your customers.

Additionally, the platform’s security framework includes SSL encryption across all stores and advanced fraud detection systems. It also offers regular security audits to identify and address potential vulnerabilities.

With this level of protection, you can build trust with customers. They’re more likely to complete a purchase without worrying about data security.

Shopify Payments, the platform’s native payment processing system, incorporates advanced risk analysis tools. It also supports various secure payment methods, such as local payment options, digital wallets, and credit cards.

The platform has automated backup systems and disaster recovery protocols that protect your data. You also get regular security updates that defend against cyber threats.

This security compliance extends to international regulations and standards like GDPR and CCPA requirements. With this, you can operate globally while maintaining customer trust.

This comprehensive security allows you to focus on growing your business. Rest assured that your store’s security meets the highest industry standards. If you need better features, download more apps like NoSpy or Kendra Shield from Shopify’s store.

Cons of using Shopify

Like any other ecommerce solution, Shopify has limitations that might impact your business operations.

So, in this section, we’ll explore some of the key drawbacks to help you make an informed choice for your business:

  1. Transaction fees
  2. App dependency
  3. Limited customization options on lower plans
  4. Difficult customizations
  5. No email hosting
  6. Limited blog features
  7. Difficult to exit

1. Transaction fees

One of the more significant considerations when using Shopify is its fee structure. The platform offers four main plans for different business sizes:

  • Basic: $39/month
  • Shopify: $105/month
  • Advanced: $399/month
  • Plus: $2,300/month
shopify pros and cons - pricing
Image via Shopify

Here’s the catch: these subscription fees aren’t the only costs you’ll pay for.

Shopify charges additional transaction fees on every sale unless you use its native payment processor, Shopify Payments. These fees range from 2% on its Basic plan to 0.2% on its Plus plan. 

While Shopify Payments helps you avoid these transaction fees, it might not suit every business model. Depending on your business type or location, you may need to use alternative payment gateways. This means you’ll have to accept both Shopify’s transaction fees and the payment processor’s fees.

Some users may consider Shopify to be more affordable than platforms like Magento. The Magento vs Shopify comparison gives you an idea of how both platforms stack up against each other in terms of pricing and fees.

It’s always better to factor these costs into your pricing strategy or upgrade to higher tier plans as your sales volume increases to reduce the percentage of fees.

2. App dependency

One of Shopify’s strongest features is its extensive app ecosystem. However, you may need to invest in multiple paid apps to get full functionality and meet your specific needs.

This means you’ll rely on third-party apps to access features like detailed inventory management, product reviews, customer loyalty programs, and advanced reporting.

Many of these third-party apps come with subscription fees, which can quickly add to your costs, especially for a small business. Also, expenses can accumulate when considering the basic Shopify subscription, the app, and transaction fees.

The good thing is that you can avoid this by carefully prioritizing essential apps and looking out for free alternatives. 

Even more, you can strategically determine the best time to integrate the necessary apps. Start with a few important ones, then gradually expand your tools based on the ROI.

3. Limited customization options on lower plans

Shopify is known for its ease of use and streamlined setup. However, one limitation is its basic plans’ design flexibility and customization options.

The platform’s drag-and-drop editor allows for basic customization. However, you need coding knowledge for more advanced modifications, such as changing the structure of a product page, fully customizing your store layout, or adjusting checkout features.

The theme’s fixed structure may be limiting. You’re also limited on how much you can edit HTML/CSS or add custom sections.

Compared to other platforms like Wix, Shopify offers few customization options. This Wix vs Shopify comparison shows you how well these two platforms fare for customization.

There are two options if you want to get advanced customization — you can upgrade to higher tier plans or hire a developer. Both solutions require significant additional costs, which can be difficult for small businesses with tight budgets.

However, you can carefully select a theme that closely fits your vision. This way, you only need to make minor adjustments within the basic editor’s capabilities. Then, you can plan for upgrades as your business grows and revenue increases.

4. Difficult customizations

Although Shopify is designed to be user-friendly, implementing more complex customizations or integrations requires technical expertise.

The platform is easily accessible for beginners. However, specialized functionality, such as modifying checkout behaviors or creating custom app integrations, requires you to be proficient in Liquid, Shopify’s coding language.

You also need JavaScript, CSS, and HTML expertise. 

These technical requirements mean you might need to hire Shopify experts or developers, adding unexpected costs to your budget. 

This complexity extends to API integrations with external systems, custom reporting solutions, or specialized inventory management features.

You might need a developer to make seemingly straightforward changes, such as creating advanced discount rules or conditional logic for product pages.

5. No email hosting

One disadvantage of Shopify is that it doesn’t provide email hosting as part of its service. Getting a personalized domain name is also an issue since Shopify only offers myshopitfystore.com to everyone, which doesn’t look authentic. 

Shopify makes it easy to create a professional online store. However, if you want to use branded email addresses like “[email protected]” or need a domain name like yourstore.com, you’ll need a third-party email hosting service.

This requires additional costs for sending emails from your domain name since Shopify only supports website and store hosting.

This is an opportunity to choose the best email hosting provider for your needs. This provider offers features like larger storage space, enhanced security, or integrated collaboration tools.

You also need to consider external email hosting when considering Shopify’s overall pricing.

6. Limited blog features

Even though Shopify offers multiple built-in features, the Shopify vs WordPress comparison suggests that Shopify’s built-in features are relatively basic compared to other platforms including WordPress.

The platform’s basic blogging functionality provides essential features for creating posts, adding tags, and categorizing content. However, it lacks the advanced functionalities dedicated blogging platforms can provide. These include enhanced SEO tools, custom post templates, and extensive plugin support.

Additionally, the commenting system may be basic compared to blogging platforms. This makes it hard to build engaged communities around your content. 

However, Shopify’s blog functionality works well for basic content marketing and product-focused articles. 

You can choose Shopify alternatives or use Shopify’s blog for product-related content. Plus, you can maintain a separate blogging platform for more comprehensive content marketing strategies.

7. Difficult to exit

One of the major disadvantages of using Shopify is the challenges associated with migrating away from the platform. If you decide to migrate to another ecommerce platform, you may find it difficult to transfer your data and set up your store and apps.

Shopify’s proprietary system makes it hard to export elements like product pages, theme customizations, and order history into platforms like WooCommerce.

The WooCommerce vs Shopify comparison mentions that you might have to rebuild your carefully crafted store design on the new platform.

Data migration is another huge challenge. While you can export product information and customer data, you might need to manually transfer or rebuild important elements. This includes page content, blog posts, and URL structures. 

Many third-party apps and customizations you rely on in Shopify may not be compatible with other platforms. You may need to search for alternatives on the new platform and reconfigure the settings. 

This migration process incurs additional cost, time, and effort, and you may need to maintain your Shopify store during the transition period. This, coupled with investing in the new platform’s setup, is double the expenses. 

So, if you’re considering a move, it’s worth planning ahead and considering the long-term implications.

​​Conclusion

So, we’ve examined Shopify pros and cons. From our analysis, the platform is, overall, a scalable solution if you’re looking for ease of use, functionality, and access to numerous apps.

Its user-friendly interface and multi-channel selling capabilities make it suitable for both small startups and large enterprises. The essential security features, multiple sales channels, and mobile optimization capabilities create a solid foundation for growth. 

However, you should carefully consider the platform’s cost structure, including transaction fees and necessary app subscriptions. While the initial setup is straightforward, you may need additional investment in higher-tier plans to get advanced customizations.

It gets better, though. You can enhance your store with apps like Omnisend. The app helps you maximize your potential through advanced marketing automation, personalized email campaigns, and better customer engagement strategies.

This helps drive more conversions, a key factor in managing a successful online store.

Get started with Omnisend today and boost your Shopify sales with ready-to-use email workflows
Karolina Petraškienė
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Karolina is a content project manager and team lead at Omnisend, where she blends creative strategy with a keen focus on competitive intelligence. Outside of work, Karolina finds balance through her love of gardening, exploring new hiking trails, biking, and raising a bunch of boys.