Simple, Robust E-Commerce Products
Shopify is an Ottawa, Ontario-based merchant account provider that specializes in e-commerce solutions for small businesses. Founded in 2005, the company offers a broad range of services for online businesses, including debit and credit card processing through an online shopping cart, website creation and customization, marketing and SEO solutions, payment gateway integration, and an app store with a large number of additional features. Tobias Lütke has been the company’s CEO since 2008.
Integrated Payment Processing
In mid-2013, Shopify launched its own payment processing platform called Shopify Payments, which is powered by Stripe and is the primary payment option advertised by the company. Merchants can set up their own merchant accounts and payment gateways through third parties (such as PayPal or Authorize.net) and integrate these accounts into Shopify, but they will be subject to additional transaction fees. The company also offers an in-store point of sale (POS) system compatible with the iPad for merchants with retail locations.
Standout Features
The Shopify app store offers a huge base of add-ons and plugins for merchants, and an early 2013 rollout of Shopify 2.0 also brought with it some new and interesting features. All of the company’s merchants will receive support for over 70 payment gateways, an SSL-secured shopping cart, their own domain name, and unlimited bandwidth. Merchants who sign up for Shopify Payments will receive real-time payment tracking and a chargeback recovery service, which alerts merchants to chargebacks, provides customer contact information, and even prepares customized order information to help merchants dispute chargebacks. As for the Shopify app store, additional features available to all merchants include accounting integration, email marketing integration, digital download support, rewards programs, and social media integration.
Mobile Phone Payments
The company also offers a service called Shopify Mobile, which allows its users to accept payments using an iPhone and a mobile card reader. Shopify Mobile is available to existing Shopify customers at no extra cost except for a variable per-transaction fee.
Shopify Review Table of Contents
- Costs & Contract: Shopify offers multiple pricing plans that operate on a month-to-month basis and do not charge an early termination fee.
- Complaints & Service: Shopify has received more than 50 public complaints.
- BBB Rating: Shopify has an “A+” rating with the Better Business Bureau and has received 255 complaints and 75 reviews in the past three years. The company has been accredited by the BBB since 2012.
- Sales & Marketing: Shopify does not hire independent sales agents and has not received any complaints about its sales practices.
- Rates & Fees: How Merchants Got The Best Rates With Shopify
17 Responses
I am so angry now!!!! After more than one year using the shopify I felt so unhappy . I had a international shipping cost $60 to Canada, I fill all information online for custom label, everything was fine. Do you know when you do international shipping label online, you cant leave any blank custom information. So I printed out the label and sent to my customer. For my surprise after 25 days I got the package back, the problem was no description about the product! I called the shopify support, they told me looks like the specific description font was the problem, and because I am the merchant I am the responsible to check the label. Whatttt??? If everything online was right, why I have to check after printed out? So I loss $60, Shopify don’t give any credit, I am so disappointed after at all was my first issues and nobody cares about it. I do normally international shipping and never had this problem. This is how shopify appreciated their customers.
Shopify stole my domain name. I have tried everything from filing complaints with US and Canada BBB, to no avail; Complaint.biz; Tucows; APlus. This is the email I received from [email protected] Shopify telling me I no longer own it. I owned it since early 2019. I started with Shopify in 2020. I am looking for someone or company that can assist me in starting a class action lawsuit against them. Proof they did it is below from Freya in their risk management department:
Freya (Shopify)
Jun 24, 2021, 20:52 EDT
Hello RJ,
Thank you for your reply. You are more than welcome to take this up with our legal team: legalatshopfydotcom.
However, we did refund the domain to you, which means you do no longer own it. The domain does expire January 21st, 2022 which is when it will be available for purchase again from any buyer.
Regards,
Freya
Risk Analyst | Shopify
Total Bull**** Company ! Zero character !
Zero Customer service!
No Phone Number!
My prediction, Will Not be around long !
Stay Clear if this c Company !
Not good
Deceptive promotion get you signup and not deliver.
I closed my jewelry store in New Jersey and had lots of unsold items left after going out of business sale. I put them up on Shopify at 5% over cost/wholesale to cover expenses. Took forever with lots of live chats to get it set up more or less right. Less right are descriptions far below item image on some of the items.
Initially, some images were huge, blown up ridiculously large. After a number of chats I was told that this was so because the default image proportions are set to square so say, a long necklace, comes out square with the width and height the same resulting in a monstrous image way out of proportion to most other images. It took a number of chats for someone to tell me that I could set the image to unsquare and that did it for the image sizes. But still there are image descriptions far below the image for a number of products. Couldn’t get them to solve that one so I left it as is. The fix would be simple: allow images to be dragged in place and dewscriptions in a standard text box which could also be dragged in place. This is standard for web software.
I discovered that my gemstone earrings collection was not visible among the other collections. Took me quite a while to sort that one out. Why when I create a collection it isn’t automatically added to the other collections when saved is mystifying to me. .A friend with a store that sells used books and records in my town tried to set up a site on Shopify and he said it was so nonintuitive he gave up, and he’s a pretty smart guy. The Shopify store url is also mystifying, no http:// or www. Hyphens between the words in your store name followed by .myshopify.com. I registered my store name as a .com domain with Hostgator after all these Shopify problems just in case it didn’t work out. I’ve been dealing with the public for 40 years and have done 2 web sites from scratch myself and if I tell you it’s non-intuitive, it is. I’m an old guy now and I don’t need this aggravation.
I had a similar experience to Miss T and Shane. They have withheld my payments to me for over 2 weeks. They hold the funds, then ask you to provide documentation regarding manufacturing etc. They were very vague with what documents that thy needed, so I attached my manufacturing agreement. I heard back a few days later that the information was not what they needed. This is still on going and now they are forcing me to use another payment processor, dues to ‘risk’. Which in my opinion is absurd. They are not for the small business person. I hope people actually read this review and understand that there is something more going on with them behind the scenes. They are driving the small business person out. Beware!
Marmar,
This overview offers guidance on how to make a payment processor release funds being held. We also offer insight into how to navigate being a high risk merchant.
We had someone hack our Shopify store and because they don’t have two step authentication like our other payment processors the hacker easily changed our account number to theirs and was putting all of our deposits into a bunch of diff accounts. Once we found this out we had been frauded for over 100k and Shopify blames Stripe and Stripe blamed Shopify both said there was nothing they could do. BEWARE they offer NO protection to their customers. We are switching payment processors and getting a lawyer.
This post will help: Best E-Commerce Merchant Accounts
-Phillip
Healithop at Shopify took my $90 order and I did not get the product from China. When I went to the original order site on Shopify, Healithop URL was no longer working. When I called and talked to Shopify, they said that they could not resolve money paid to Healithop [email protected]. I’m out $90. Shopify has no support for Fraud and no responsibility if the vendor fails.
We have been with Shopify for about one year and it’s been pretty good… until now. Two days ago they started holding our payments without an explanation. We tried and tried to get an explanation and they refused to give one. Finally we received an email about on day after they notified us of the hold on our payments. They said that we might be selling unlicensed products and that they needed to verify that the products are licensed. I have no problem with that and provided the requested information, but they shouldn’t have held payments without checking with us first, and they shouldn’t hold payments for products that are not even in question. This is absurd!
Now, more than 48 hours after they started holding our payments and more than 24 hours after I provided the information they requested, they are still holding our payments… and no end in sight.
We have bills to pay and no way to pay them. We are a relatively new small business without any excess cash flow and no cash reserves to handle a situation like this. Shopify is seriously damaging our business. Their actions are completely inexcusable and are borderline criminal in my opinion.
I will leave negative feedback and complaints about them on ever forum I can find.
This post will help: How to Make Your Payment Processor Release Your Money
-Phillip
Be very careful with Shopify if you think you may want to use the site. I joined in Sept 18 to have a processor for some customers credit cards. Huge mistake!
When signing up and creating an account one is asked the general information they would need to collect and pay you your funds. Then when i sent out an invoice to be paid, they collected the $162.32 and a week later the funds showed in my account. After that i sent four more invoices out between Oct 3 and Oct 8. The total of those invoices is $2490 and change. This prompted them to take the funds hostage and demand basically everything one would need to successfully steal my identity. Along with my banking info, they would have a pretty complete package.
Of course the GURU’s tried to assure me that my personal identity was “safe”. I’m pretty sure Yahoo, some major banking institutions, our government and a host of others could “assure” that the info they had was “safe” too, until it wasn’t.
I looked around a bit to find that Shopify’s main IP address is actually shared with 90,427 other sites. I’m pretty sure they would not be contacting me to “assure” me that they will safeguard my personal info. I flat refuse to put the front and back of my DL online, nor a copy of my passport to them or anyone else. The more i dig, the more it becomes apparent that this “organization” at it’s core is not really about processing payments at all. They lure people in then hijack their money to force the person to give them every necessary detail of one’s identity to complete the package.
I have my thoughts on what they do with this info after bullying people into giving it to them but for now I’ll see how that compares in the near future to what the FTC finds. I’ll certainly help them all i can.
If you ask the GURU’s who is requesting this info, they like to try to make you believe its your bank. Simply go to your bank first as i did and you will find that has no truth in it at all. Why would it? The bank knows exactly who their customers are, after all they get that proof of id at time the account is opened.
Stay far far away friend.
From The Editor
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I have read several of these comments and I agree with most of them. In the beginning I was excited about this app. It was fast, efficient, and the easiest app to use when transferring or receiving funds. I even referred several friends because of the convenience that I initially had with this app. Then I guess the saying “it sounds to good to be true” really showed it’s ugly head. It has gone on three weeks and I still haven’t received some funds a friend sent me using the cash app. It was requested 4/11/18 and was taken out of his account the very next day 4/12/18. However, the funds are still not in my account to this day. As others have stated their only form of communication is through email and they have constantly copied and pasted the same correspondence putting my bank at fault for not receiving the funds. I have asked for a supervisor and that is when the correspondence ceased. I’ve sent them emails back to back and no one has replied since. It has literally turned into a nightmare and my funds have either been stolen from this company or lost somewhere and their “support team” has not provided a resolve or restitution for my funds! Someone mentioned that it’s a good app until there’s a problem but I would have to disagree. It’s fraudulent when an app is a hit or miss withholding their consumer’s funds! I will never use this app again once my funds are received!
Terrible. They withhold payments after a while and make you intensely prove and provide documents that you are a real legal company. The team that deal with that are only contactable via email..takes forever to resolve. They then made a mistake & made my account unable to cancel or refund orders. Which resulted in several chargebacks which cost me money as well extremely unhappy customers! The guru actually said he had never seen anything like that before. Soon after I was able to issue refunds but I never heard from shopify about this. I just took it as they realised their mistake & corrected it as though it never happened as it was their error. No apology or any kind of acknowledgement it just started working again after 2 weeks broken! Oh..guess what..my account worked nicely for 3 weeks but the payments account is now on hold again due to receiving chargebacks at the time shopify with held over 3000gbp the week leading upto xmas & straight after that unable to
Issue refunds…you see where I’m going with this? I have a backlog of orders & shopify withhold the payments with no say on when they will release. I may as well shut the business now. Cheers Shopify
After Square failed to pay out over $4,000 in sales and refused to provide any explanation, we switched to Shopify for POS as we had the web program. We LOVE IT! So easy and simple and ties in the retail to the web sales and tracks inventory so well. Always get tech support (a bit of a wait on the phone) talking to a REAL person who really knows the program! I am thrilled!!
Hi Lisa,
Please reply to this comment with your business name and location in order to authenticate your testimonial. Thanks!
Ordered and paid via PayPal. My Discover card has been charged, BUT no delivery of purchase. Have filled out a form with them, BUT NO REPLY. Not feeling very happy with this company. Will never order again because of lack of customer service. Will report to BBB and let PayPal deal with this.. I GIVE UP.
Sounds like a problem with the vendor more than Shopify itself. Can you describe the situation in more detail?
Asking because I’m curious how many BBB complaints involve things that Shopify can/should fix vs the number of complaints that should have been filed against the store owner.
Thanks.