Shopify doesn’t require developer skills
Shopify helps businesses market and sell their goods and services without the expensive build and development costs. You can choose among a wide range of templated shop designs and then personalise it to suit your business. Shopify makes it easy to perform the initial build with ongoing maintenance, choose from a variety of packages to suit your needs and integrate apps to help solve regular problems (e.g. reviews, accounting integrations). Shopify eCommerce websites make it easy to sell products to your online market without being a developer which is quite unique and empowering. Our experience has found however that Shopify’s off the shelf templates & solutions will involve some level of customisation from a Shopify developer or Shopify expert. The amount of development required however is significantly less than other platforms such as Magneto. Another major positive for Shopify is the safety and security offered by the Shopify platform. As a ‘closed platform’, the hassles around website hacking, data security, data integrity and maintenance are minimised. All of these are very helpful if you don’t have the development team available to manage this ongoing for you.
Whether you use Shopify or another platform provider, the requirement to make sure that you personalise your website to achieve success is critical. Unfortunately this is when you might run into some issues with Shopify. When you start to personalise you website you will begin to incur development costs, ongoing costs and other fees you probably didn’t scrutinise when creating the site. The initial setup costs might be minimal but once you start crunching the numbers including app add-ons, transaction fees and other Shopify costs you may very well have been better off paying the initial cost as a once off. It is very important therefore to do the research and calculate the Break Even Point (BEP). This will help you determine what is the right platform and solution for your business.