Outgrown Shopify? Need more features and customisation?

First of all, it’s worth stating that Shopify is a brilliant product and for many it’s the perfect solution. With the low cost of entry into the marketplace and a good balance between ease of use and functionality it has helped hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide get off the ground. It can be the perfect solution.

But, what happens when you outgrow Shopify? The Shopify platform will only give so much until the level of customisation required to run your business is constrained by the platform. Other restrictions, such as the ability to expand internationally and the inability to customise a look and feel sufficiently to reflect your brand does mean that businesses outgrow Shopify. Integration with additional functionality is complex, expensive or sometimes simply not possible.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is also regularly an issue with the Shopify themes, resulting in no schema markup which helps to increase search engine clickthrough rates. Proper on-page and on-site optimisation is so important as without this then pages and products may not feature as highly on search results and ultimately the primary objective for every store owner is to maximise sale opportunities.

In terms of layout, Shopify use themes and there are various default and free ones. However, customisation can be somewhat limited, which can be a positive, but to make stores stand out and to include all the desired messaging and functionality, sometimes more is required which just can’t be achieved within the constraints of the solution.

Pricing – this is always going to be a difficult balance as the costs quickly mount up especially with some of the better plugins which are available. However, because of the low cost of setup, this is fine at first but as stores grow and the number and volume of transactions increase, the costs add up and become disproportionally expensive against the cost of alternative solutions.

Abandoned baskets, email marketing, lifecycle emails and GDPR compliance – although these features are slowly creeping in different disguises, generally there’s the reliance on many plugins, some of which can be expensive especially if integrating with some CRM tools. Considering how well lifecycle emails perform in terms of sales conversions and having a single customer view allowing proper customer targeting, this is one of the most frequent areas we find where the ceiling is reached.

However, if any of these issues, frustrations and restrictions sound too familiar; these can be overcome with the functionality from our ecommerce solution. Additionally, we are friendly people who want to help and therefore not only will we guide you through the initial process to determine whether our solution is most appropriate, but we are also on hand to recommend and consult with you as your requirements continue to change and to help your business grow. Customer service is important to your business, it’s also important to us and we are on hand for support with the platform.

Want to find out more? Have a read through our ecommerce solutions page or get in touch for a consultation.