It’s easy to get up and running if you want a basic store
It has the best bulk product import feature I’ve ever seen (and I worked with dozens of ecommerce software)
Fast load times
You don’t have to worry about security, updates etc.
It has built-in blogging software (though very basic and limited)
Cons:
It doesn’t support drop down menus out of the box and workaround that they provide often doesn’t work without custom coding
Cost - Their pricing plans are a bit misleading. I will never forget my disappointment when I encountered for the first time that they count every variant as a product. So, you have 1 product in 10 sizes and 10 colors - you already need more than a basic plan which offers 100 “products”.
They charge transaction fees
You are limited to 3 options per product and 100 variants per product
No FTP access
These are just some random thoughts, since you didn’t specify what things are important to you or what type of store are you going to build.
Overall, I like Shopify and would recommend it. It certainly isn’t for everyone and you have to give up on some flexibility, but in return you get decent all-in-one platform to work with.
Nice reply, and thanks for the detailed list. I haven’t used Shopify, but have looked over their site. It’s handy to have feedback like this from actual users of the system.
Shopify allows creating additional custom fields for products but they are very simple (standard). For example, when I needed to create a radiobutton field or a custom select field for a product I could not. That’s the reason I stoped using Shopify.