Shopify

What it is

Shopify is a hosted shop: payments, order management, tax, shipping rules and themes all arrive finished, and you never touch a server. That is the whole trade. You give up some control and a slice of revenue, and you get something that can take money the same day.

Where it holds

The checkout. That sounds unremarkable and it is the actual reason to pick Shopify. A checkout optimised across millions of orders, which knows the right payment methods and tax rates in every country, is not something you rebuild on the side. Anyone who tries pays the difference in abandonments they never get to see.

On top of that, the ecosystem has no real rival. There is an app for almost every problem, and the newer Horizon-based themes can be reshaped largely without code.

Where it bites

Two things that appear in no sales brochure.

The apps are the real bill. The plan is the smaller line item. Four or five apps at 20 to 50 euros a month each is normal, and they add up faster than revenue grows. Before every install, it is worth asking whether a metafield and twenty lines in the theme would solve it.

You are renting. Prices and terms change without asking you, and migrating off Shopify is expensive. That is not an argument against it, but it belongs in the maths.

What it looks like when it runs

The shop is not only the till, it is the source: what happens there can trigger everything else. One order moves stock, the newsletter, the shipping service and the bookkeeping without anybody entering the same number four times. And because the templates and the data fields are open, the shop can be cut to fit the actual business, including one-off pieces and products that exist in this shape nowhere else.

What to think about before choosing it

If you sell products in any real volume, Shopify is almost always right, and the argument about fees is usually a proxy for something else. If instead you sell five products and the site mostly carries content, WordPress with a shop extension is cheaper and closer to being yours. The line does not run at a product count, it runs at whether selling is the purpose of the site or one of its features.