Shopify
What it is
A hosted platform for selling physical products online. Shopify runs the servers and the checkout; your team runs the catalogue and the campaigns.
What it’s good at
A shop live and taking payments in weeks, with no engineering hire. An app ecosystem that covers most of what a growing shop needs. A checkout Shopify maintains and your team cannot touch, so nobody breaks it mid-campaign.
What it costs to own
Apps accumulate. Each one adds a subscription and a script to the page. Each one is a dependency on a developer you have never met. Page speed decays as the stack grows, so your e-commerce manager owns the app list and prunes it quarterly. Theme customization drifts from the upgrade path: after enough edits, updating the theme means redoing them, and a developer stays on call for it.
When it’s a poor fit
Your buyers configure the product and the price follows the configuration. Your sales team agrees a price per customer or per contract. Or the catalogue carries logic a shelf model cannot hold: dependencies between products, or variant structures past the platform’s ceiling. With any of these, teams tend to fight the platform monthly, paying developers to approximate how they sell.
What it sits beside
It replaces a custom shop build and the commerce plugins on WordPress. It is usually bought alongside Klaviyo, with paid channels feeding it and GA4 measuring it. The known friction: Shopify’s reports and GA4 disagree on revenue, so one of them usually ends up named the single source of truth before a board meeting asks why.
My experience
I have mostly used Shopify for products picked from a shelf and paid for on the spot, and that is where I have seen the platform work best.