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Shopify is a popular website builder that specializes in helping users create robust online stores for their businesses. Our in-depth research found that Shopify is the best ecommerce website builder on the market, offering social media selling, Point of Sale (POS) compatibility, and a near limitless app library to expand functionality.
Still, it’s not perfect for everyone. Our testing revealed a relatively steep learning curve for Shopify and lackluster design features, so it’s not the best choice for those building a website for the first time.
Its pricey packages and transaction fees for those not using Shopify Payments make it a lot less affordable than leading web builders like Wix and Squarespace, too.
Read on as our review puts the builder under a lens to help you decide if Shopify is worth it for you.
Key Takeaways
- Shopify is the best ecommerce website builder on the market, with plans starting at $29 per month and going up to $299 per month. It does not offer a free plan, but customers can get a 3-day free trial.
- Shopify boasts an excellent suite of sales features, including support for over 100 payment gateways, a native payment processor known as Shopify Payments, and seamless POS integration.
- Because of its wide array of features, the platform can be difficult to use for website builder novices. If ease of use is your priority, we would recommend Wix.
- Shopify has a number of AI tools, such as Shopify Magic and Shopify Sidekick, as well as several available add-ons, both paid and free.
Pros
- Add unlimited products with your own CSV
- Customizable member areas
- Intuitive product adding experience for beginners
- AI site builder can have you live in seconds
Cons
- Monthly fees for POS system integration
- Scheduling and booking requires add-on
- No tutorials for setup, tough for beginners
- Limited SEO settings available
- Basic Plan: $29/month
- Shopify Plan: $79/month
- Advanced Plan: $299/month
Shopify Quick Fact-File
Before we dive into the details, here are some factors that can help you decide if Shopify’s a good fit for you at a glance.
- Pricing: Shopify’s plans start at $29 per month, but its average price is much higher than similar ecommerce builders
- Ecommerce: Shopify offers the best sales features of any other ecommerce builder we tested, making it a competitive choice for online stores
- Design: Shopify has a strong set of design features, and we rated it 3.9/5 in our latest round of testing because of its flexible design options. However, for the most design-focused users, we would recommend Squarespace, which we rated 4/5, thanks to its gorgeous choice of templates
- Support: Shopify offers 24/7 customer support via email and live chatbot for customers on all of its plans
- Ease of use: Shopify interface is a little clunkier and not as intuitive as its rivals Wix and Squarespace, making it less ideal for beginners or teams with limited tech skills
Read on if you’d like to learn more about our best-performing ecommerce builder.
Or, take our website builder quiz to receive recommendations based on your specific criteria.
What's New for Shopify in May 2025?
- Sidekick, Shopify’s AI-powered commerce assistant, is now able to generate custom images based on text prompts.
- A new returns processing feature has been rolled out – now, returned items only impact your financial reporting when you confirm they have been physically received.
Shopify Review: Key Features
Shopify’s feature suite is exhaustive. Here’s a round-up of its key capabilities, and how they weigh up against the competition.
Design
Shopify may not be as design-focused as other builders like Squarespace, but our researchers concluded the platform packs in every tool you need to build a unique, polished ecommerce site.
Shopify offers 13 free and 237 paid slick, mobile-responsible themes. All themes are fully customizable and come in a variety of colors and styles. However, this pales in comparison to the 900+ templates available on Wix, and overall, we found the number of free templates to be disappointing.
Admittedly, its design flexibility lags behind builders like Squarespace, which offers a granular level of customization with its fluid editor.
See how both ecommerce builders weigh up head-to-head in our Shopify vs Squarespace comparison.
Not only did Shopify offer us a wide range of themes to choose from, but we were able to choose one based on the many in-depth categories available. Source: Tech.co testing
Sales features
Shopify is a platform that was designed to sell, with an unmatched selection of sales features that made it the best among those we tested. The platform supports over 100 payment gateways – including PayPal, Amazon, and Apple Pay – letting customers pay in whichever way suits them.
Thanks to the platform’s multi-channel integration, vendors can maximize their revenue streams through other channels like Amazon, Facebook, and Instagram.
The ecommerce builder also offers its own payment processor, Shopify Payments, with lower transaction fees, and localized pricing for overseas buyers.
We were able to effectively track our inventory with Shopify’s more advanced sales features. Source: Tech.co testing
POS compatibility
For those selling in-store and in-person, Shopify also has the edge over its competition thanks to its seamless integration with its point-of-sale (POS) system, Shopify POS.
This integrated ecommerce POS platform gives business owners a complete overview of their processes by storing inventory, sales, and customer data in one centralized dashboard.
Shopify is compatible with its own POS systems, as well as other third-party integrations. Source: Shopify
App Store
Perhaps the most valuable feature of Shopify is the App Store, a platform that offers a wide variety of services and third-party integrations to make your site even more functional than simple Shopify features.
You can connect your email, your CRM, even your social accounts to turn Shopify into an all-in-one hub for your business.
The Shopify App Store allowed us to expand our site with additional functionalities and third-party integrations. Source: Tech.co testing
AI features
Every business software in the world is adding AI features to its platform, and Shopify is not one to be left behind. The website builder has added a wide range of new AI-powered tools that can help you build a website faster and better for your business.
For one, there’s Shopify Magic, the suite of free AI features that can help you generate copy, produce images, and generally add to the value of your online store.
Additionally, there is Shopify Sidekick, an AI chatbot that is connected to all your ecommerce data and provides you with personalized support for running your online store.
However, if you are searching for a website builder with advanced AI tools, we would recommend Wix, as it offers a lot more features, including AI guided SEO support, that Shopify does not.
While Shopify AI helped us write descriptions for products directly on the site, our researchers thought there needed to be better visibility of AI tools. Source: Tech.co testing
Help & support
Shopify offers 24/7 phone and live chat support, making it easy for users to resolve issues without long wait times. The platform also offers support via social media and email and tons of useful video and GIF tutorials, a helpful tool for beginners to get started.
These support tools make the builder more suitable for website-building beginners and those who have just switched to the platform that may have been deterred by its relatively high learning curve.
The help assistant in Shopify provided us with step-by-step instructions to solve our issues. Source: Tech.co testing
SEO features
Shopify offers a decent selection of options to optimize your site, including meta descriptions, title tag customization, and an automated XML Sitemap. As a result of these SEO features and more, our researchers gave it a 5/5 during testing for this category.
There is also the addition of the Ecommerce Booster, the result of a partnership between Shopify and SEO software Semrush. The app is able to review the pages of your online store, and suggest any SEO fixes that could make you sell better. We found this tool to be a great feature for growing businesses.
| Plan | Price paid annually The price per month you'll pay if you choose to be billed annually | Price paid monthly The price per month you'll pay if you choose to be billed monthly | Transaction fee if not using Shopify Payments | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| | | | ||
| $39/month ($1 for first three months) | $105/month ($1 for first three months) | $399/month ($1 for first three months) | ||
| 2% | 1% | 0.6% |
Shopify offers five different packages for businesses: Starter, Basic, Shopify, Advanced, and Plus.
Unlike the rest of Shopify’s plans, its cheapest tier, Starter, plan isn’t a fully-fledged web builder. Instead, it supports merchants with pre-existing sites to sell across channels like social media and messaging apps.
This makes Shopify’s Basic plan the provider’s cheapest web-building tier, at $29 per month, paid annually, or $39 per month paid monthly.
While this starting price is reasonable, it lacks basic hardware support, has stringent user account limits, and offers fewer features than comparable entry-level plans by competitors Wix and Squarespace.
Its online transaction rate of 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction bumps up the price of the tier too, especially for businesses with high turnovers.
While Shopify Plus is reserved for enterprise-level businesses, the provider’s Shopify, and Advanced plan are great options for small businesses wanting to take advantage of Shopify’s powerful sales toolkit.
Yet, with a price tag of $79 per month and $299 per month respectively, they’re both a lot pricier than similar plans from competitors, which is why budget-conscious businesses should probably look elsewhere.
There is however the option to use Shopify for $1 a month for three months on select plans. But once this runs out, you’ll have to be willing to pay up to continue using Shopify’s services.
Learn more about the platform’s cost in our Shopify website builder pricing guide.
Does Shopify have a Free Plan?
No, Shopify doesn’t offer a free plan. However, for users wanting to test out the service before committing, Shopify does offer a limited 3-day free trial.
While it’s a downgrade from its previous length of 14 days, it’s still enough to get a taste of the software.
Looking for a complimentary solution? Check out our guide to the best free website builders here.
How Does Shopify Compare to Other Providers?
Shopify is the best ecommerce website builder we researched – but that doesn’t mean there aren’t worthy contenders out here.
Square Online is another quality ecommerce builder with seamless POS integrations. Square’s integrated booking tools and generous free plan– a perk that Shopify lacks – makes it especially appealing to businesses with smaller budgets who need to manage appointments and clients.
BigCommerce is a comparable ecommerce website builder with top-tier inventory management features but our researchers rated it quite low in terms of design flexibility. It does offer zero transaction fees on all plans, though, so it could help you save a bit of money in the long run.
If you aren’t building an online store, Wix should be on your radar. The platform is packed with unbeatable web-building features and has a shallow learning curve for beginners, while Squarespace offers the best design features of any builder we researched. See how Shopify fairs against its competition below:
| Test score Our score is based on independent assessments of ease of use, features, ecommerce functionality and value for money | Price The most affordable plan that offers ecommerce functionality. | Priciest Ecommerce Plan (per month) | Digital Product Sales | Service Sales | Sales Features Based on our research: number and quality of sales features | Value for Money Based on our research: feature offering vs average price plan price | Ease of Use Based on our research: customer and user testimonials | Try Click to check for deals, discounts and tiers of plans | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BEST OVERALL  |  |  |  |  | ||||||
| Square Online | ||||||||||
| 4.7 | 4.8 | 3.9 | 4.7 | 4.5 | ||||||
| $79/month |
| |||||||||
| | | | | | ||||||
| | | | | | ||||||
| 4.4 | 4.4 | 4.1 | 4.0 | 4.2 | ||||||
| 1.1 | 4.0 | 5.0 | 5.0 | 4.0 | ||||||
| 4.0 | 4.0 | 3.0 | 5.0 | 3.0 | ||||||
| See Deals | Claim 10% off | See Deals | See Deals | See Deals |
We take our impartial research and analysis seriously, so you can have complete confidence that we’re giving you the clearest, most useful product recommendations.
After conducting an initial exploration to identify the most relevant, popular, and established tools in the market, we put them through their paces with hands-on testing to see their real strengths and weaknesses. In this case, we put 12 website builder products to the test across 283 areas of investigation.
Based on years of market and user needs research, we’ve established an ecommerce website builder testing methodology that scores each product in seven main categories of investigation and 33 subcategories; this covers everything from customer feedback to design, ease of use, and more.
Our main testing categories for ecommerce website builders are:
- Website Functionality: the capabilities and features offered by a website builder, e.g. blog functionality, SEO capability, and marketing capacity.
- Sales Features: the sales-focused tools a builder offers, including payment features, POS integrations, AR & VR integrations, check-out options, and more.
- Design Features: the aesthetic appeal and visual layout of a website created using a website builder. It encompasses aspects such as page templates and customizable themes.
- Reputation: external customer opinion. This is the feedback and ratings given by customers who have used a particular website builder – the market position and reputation a website builder holds.
- User Experience: how user-friendly and intuitive a website builder is for people with varying levels of technical expertise.
- Pricing and Value for Money: the balance between the cost of a website builder and the benefits it provides. It considers factors such as pricing plans, subscription models, and available features.
- Help and Support: the assistance and resources available to users when they encounter issues or need guidance while using a website builder.
When it comes to calculating a product’s final score, not all testing areas are weighted evenly, as we know some aspects matter more to our readers than others, which are simply “nice to have.” For example, when assessing the best ecommerce builders, we weigh sales features more heavily than other categories.
After hundreds of hours, our process is complete, and the results should ensure you can find the best solution for your needs. We also have a number of full-time in-house researchers, who re-run this testing process regularly, to ensure our results remain reflective of the present day.
Verdict: Is Shopify worth it?
Shopify is the best ecommerce builder we’ve tested, so yes, it’s definitely worth it – especially for ecommerce businesses looking to scale up their operations.
With its top-tier sales and inventory management capabilities, as well as a seemingly endless list of useful integrations, it’s probably the best-equipped website builder for online store owners looking to sell big.
However, to access many of these features – including advanced analytics tools and gift card options – you’ll have to opt for one of Shopify’s pricier packages, which are relatively experienced compared to the rest of the industry.
Smaller businesses may also be deterred by Shopify’s transaction fees too, which are much steeper on cheaper tiers.
If you’re not willing to fork out or can make do without sales features, we’d recommend using Wix instead, as the builder offers better value, more competent design and web-building capabilities, and you’re able to sell products on all of its offerings aside from its cheapest plan.
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