Style over substance?
Shopify is fantastic at marketing their platform. They utilise their 100+ Partner Agencies and leverage the success of multinational brands that use their platform. As a result, smaller businesses can become blinkered and easily miss Shopify’s many drawbacks.
Features come with a price tag
If you want anything more than a basic eCommerce site, you will need to have deep pockets to be able to afford all the additional features. That means having to pay for the more advanced platform plus additional apps.
Limited ecosystem
This could be a positive, as some people want something that is easy and simple, but if you are looking for something that is more than a basic platform with limited functionality, a true enterprise-level platform, you’re going to have to pay around £24,000 a year. This is just not achievable, for the majority of eCommerce businesses, and too stifling for those medium-sized businesses that want to take the next step of growth.
Annoying URL structure
Shopify structure their URLs poorly, so they aren’t ideal for SEO and seem to have unnecessary “junk” added to them. You can’t edit it, and you can’t have a custom URL. For example, see below, there is no need to add the “/pages” into the URL as it provides no real value.

Limited category levels
Shopify does not support multi-level categories beyond the initial two. This may not be so important to the entry-level businesses but for the companies that sell a vast range of products, this could be a huge limitation.
Professional reporting
The more insightful reporting is excluded from the Basic Shopify package, so you’ll need to pay a minimum of $79 a month to have this functionality. This is one of the most discouraging aspects of the Shopify platform. Professional reporting shouldn’t be limited to those with deeper pockets. Businesses with small budgets really need the benefits of reporting to help their business grow.
Shopify’s own coding language – Liquid
Liquid uses a combination of tags, objects and filters to load dynamic content. They are used inside Liquid template files, which are the files that make up a theme. This means that if you want these to be customised, you will have to pay an incremental price. Yet again, these are more costs to factor into the overall website spend.