Shopify Review

Shopify appears to primarily market itself through its website, through its growing online customer base, and through strategic partnerships. The company does employ a sales team to handle inbound inquiries, but it does not appear to engage in telemarketing or in-person sales. We have located a handful of Shopify complaints that mention misleading or deceptive advertising by the company, but upon further investigation, these complainants seem to have simply been confused or dissatisfied with the service they received.

Although the Shopify website does not seem to intentionally obscure its contract terms, it is not entirely clear about its pricing structure. The company’s “Pricing” (see Shopify.com) page lists a series of transaction fees that vary depending on whether merchants are signed up for Lite, Basic, Standard, Advanced, or Plus pricing. These fees are only applicable to merchants who are signed up for a merchant account/payment gateway through Shopify Payments. Merchants who have integrated a third-party payment processor with the Shopify platform will pay 2% plus their third-party transaction fees on the Basic tier, 1% plus their third-party transaction fees on Standard, and 0.5% plus their third-party transaction fees on Advanced. Since Shopify Payments is now the company’s default merchant account, it’s likely that most new merchants will not encounter these additional charges, but the merchants who are subject to them will not be able to determine this simply from the company’s Pricing page.

While the company does not offer much in the way of the minimalist, pay-as-you-go pricing found with most Shopify competitors, it does return a lot of value for its various monthly pricing plans. All Shopify plans are month-to-month contracts with no setup fees or early termination fees, and PCI Compliance fees are built into the company’s monthly rates. Merchants can pay $9/month (Lite), $29/month (Basic), $79/month (Standard), $299/month (Advanced), or a customized amount for large merchants under the Plus pricing plan. Shopify’s transaction fees and added features are generally proportional to the monthly expenses paid by the merchant. As noted in the Sales & Marketing Tactics section of this review, the company will charge additional percentages on transactions processed through non-Shopify Payments processors.

Shopify also offers a hardware package for retailers that costs an additional $40 per month. This package includes an iPad stand, barcode scanner, EMV and swipe card reader, cash drawer, and receipt printer. Per-transaction pricing for this POS app is equal to that of the merchant’s e-commerce per-transaction pricing, with the lone exception of 2.9% plus $0.30 for keyed-in payments for all pricing plans. The Shopify POS system includes inventory syncing, analytics, email receipts, multiple staff accounts, customer tracking, syncing between online and retail stores, and additional apps. Retail merchants should be aware that the Spotify POS app does not currently support tipping. Overall, Shopify’s pricing delivers a large amount of features for the price charged, and there are very few online complaints about the company’s pricing.

Shopify offers phone, email, and live chat support to all tiers of service. We are currently able to locate a handful of negative Shopify reviews that outright accuse the company of being a ripoff or a scam, but the issues mentioned by these complainants do not appear to be widespread or especially problematic. The 40 or so available complaints list fund holds, difficulty cancelling service, billing issues, chargeback problems, and trouble operating the company’s service. Company representatives responded to some of these complaints in a timely fashion and offered to resolve the issues, although it is unknown how the complaints were ultimately settled. Generally speaking, it does not appear as if there is any one persistent problem with Shopify’s products, and the company’s readily available customer support staff is a major plus in this category.

Note: We have adjusted this company’s BBB rating according to our own standards. To better understand why we adjust BBB ratings, please see our Rating Criteria.

Shopify has been accredited with the Better Business Bureau since 2012 and is currently showing an “A+” rating on the BBB website. The company has had 61 complaints filed against it in the last three years. Twenty-five complaints were related to billing and collection disputes, 29 were due to problems with the product or service, and seven had to do with advertising issues. Shopify successfully resolved 19 of these complaints, while the remaining 42 either were resolved to the dissatisfaction of the merchant or did not receive a final response from the merchant. This marks a significant increase in complaints from the time of our last review, and we have accordingly adjusted the BBB’s rating to a “B.”