It was an important and ultimately simple decision, although at first I was put off by it. I never liked Shopify in the past. The reason for this is simple: they charge for absolutely everything. I never liked the idea of paying a monthly fee just to have a website with Shopify. Today I think a little differently about the subject.
1 What convinced me most of all
2 What still convinces me now3 The main advantages over WordPress
What convinced me most of all
Honestly, at first I was more convinced by the flaws of WordPress than by the advantages of Shopify. It may be just us, but on all of our WordPress websites we have had problems with loading speed. It didn’t matter if it was a shared hosting or phone number library a personal server, sooner or later the website would load slowly. We even invested money to outsource the task of optimising the loading speed. Once optimised, you had to be very careful with the plugins you installed because of course, this had a detrimental effect on all the optimisation carried out.
If you did the math on what was spent on development to optimize the loading for the website along with advanced hosting, you could have the same thing with Shopify but without the headache. That’s what made me change my mind about the issue.
What still convinces me now
I was confused about the customization possibilities with Shopify. I thought they were very limited but in reality they are not. For starters, in most cases they are not necessary either since the most relevant functionalities for us right now already exist as plugins. It’s clear that Shopify charges you for absolutely everything so these plugins also first steps to implement in your strategy cost money to use. Now it doesn’t bother me as much because I see the value behind it and I compare it to the effort it takes to achieve a similar result. We are implementing the possibility of incorporating affiliates and managing everything that is necessary with it.
The main advantages over WordPress
This is my perception and it’s true that I’m not an expert on WordPress or Shopify:
Easy to get started on a usability level to get the store up and running from scratch.
Fast loading, which is key for conversion and SEO.
Optimal for international sales to handle australia data different currencies and languages easily.
Plugins almost always exist and if they are from Shopify, on average they are much more stable than WordPress plugins.
We still have a long way to go with our online store. We want to encourage sales through the website itself. It will be interesting to see how far we can go with it.