4 ms·

What frustrates you about Shopify that you wish could be better?

dizzystar 8y ago
Everything. It's just awful. All apps break, costing incredible money, hyperactive policies that toss sellers under the bus, they blame everyone else and nothing is their fault. Well, okay, every developer is a moron and Shopify is perfect.
elvirs 8y ago
for example not being able to specify that this product weighs 80 pounds and is shipped in two separate pieces. Shipping 1 large box costs less than shipping 2 boxes half the size and this was making us lose money on automatically calculated UPS shipping fees
- heyerol 8y ago
  I agree it's frustrating. I have founded a company that develops only B2B ecommerce solutions and it's much more complicated than B2C. There are soooo many different combinations of how you can do certain thing, and in most cases you need to adapt the software to existing process instead of improving it. There was a comment that most of these solutions are slow, know you know why. We do a lot of integrations with ERP systems and that is another big headache. Their support, not working software, bad or no API support, and their hidden fees are just awful. Then you realize that there are about 10-15 big ERP players in the world, and about 20000 smaller ones (probably every small village has one ERP provider).
  - elvirs 8y ago
    what's the company name? if its not a big secret since you created a throwaway just to post this reply:)
btown 8y ago
One of the worst and most indicative things about the Shopify developer ecosystem is that there is no first-class support for source control - of any type - in Shopify's online theme editing system. It is expected that if you wish to integrate any nontrivial application, you'll give access to your full admin panel to low-paid, marginally-English-speaking integration techs at the app developers, and they will edit your live theme code. Woe to anyone trying to integrate two such applications at once - what usually happens is one app's devs will give up mid process due to the interference of the other, and leave you high and dry. I've had to "rescue" botched integrations by pulling down historical theme versions, manually diffing them, and retroactively committing changes into an offline Git repository just to make sense of who touched what. It's impossible to customize the information collected at checkout, including structured shipping instructions, so there are various hacks around doing this on the cart page. It's impossible to customize pricing for certain classes of logged in users, beyond simple discounts that wreak havoc on your accountants trying to get effective line item prices into their systems. Adding structured data to any objects requires parsing description text in the template language and makes you wish you had the flexibility of the Salesforce API... and just typing that sentence makes me shudder. For those without the training or resources to build a full-stack modern website, Shopify is far better than the alternative of adding shopping cart widgets to Wordpress or Squarespace. But it's far from perfect, and its capabilities as a frontend platform have stagnated: https://developers.shopify.com/api-changelog https://developers.shopify.com/api-changelog . Knowing what I know now, I'd recommend that anyone with full-stack experience jump directly to https://spreecommerce.org/ https://spreecommerce.org/ or http://getsaleor.com/ http://getsaleor.com/ - a higher learning curve, but when you inevitably hit the ceiling of Shopify's capabilities you'll wish you'd used one of those.
- disantlor 8y ago
  just use shopify slate and github
  - btown 8y ago
    We already do for our core theme development... but I have never seen an app integration team be willing to use anything other than the native interface.
jazoom 8y ago
Shopify lied to me while I was evaluating it and said if I signed up for a subscription then they'd allow me to fix the colour of the checkout button. They host the checkout process on their own site and automatically swapped the text colour to the opposite of the rest of my site. After I signed up they basically said tough sh!t, they don't actually have a way to change the button text colour.
- ggreenbe 8y ago
  Shopify plus allow you to adjust the checkout styling and template.
  - jazoom 8y ago
    I wasn't going to pay hundreds of dollars per month to change the colour of a button. I did mention that when they said some rubbish about it being for security etc. If it's insecure then why allow it if I pay more? But yeah, you're right. I guess they lied to me twice. To be clear, they did say they'd change it for me if I signed up to any plan.

Everything. It's just awful. All apps break, costing incredible money, hyperactive policies that toss sellers under the bus, they blame everyone else and nothing is their fault. Well, okay, every developer is a moron and Shopify is perfect.

elvirs 8y ago

for example not being able to specify that this product weighs 80 pounds and is shipped in two separate pieces. Shipping 1 large box costs less than shipping 2 boxes half the size and this was making us lose money on automatically calculated UPS shipping fees

heyerol 8y ago
I agree it's frustrating. I have founded a company that develops only B2B ecommerce solutions and it's much more complicated than B2C. There are soooo many different combinations of how you can do certain thing, and in most cases you need to adapt the software to existing process instead of improving it. There was a comment that most of these solutions are slow, know you know why. We do a lot of integrations with ERP systems and that is another big headache. Their support, not working software, bad or no API support, and their hidden fees are just awful. Then you realize that there are about 10-15 big ERP players in the world, and about 20000 smaller ones (probably every small village has one ERP provider).
- elvirs 8y ago
  what's the company name? if its not a big secret since you created a throwaway just to post this reply:)

btown 8y ago

One of the worst and most indicative things about the Shopify developer ecosystem is that there is no first-class support for source control - of any type - in Shopify's online theme editing system. It is expected that if you wish to integrate any nontrivial application, you'll give access to your full admin panel to low-paid, marginally-English-speaking integration techs at the app developers, and they will edit your live theme code. Woe to anyone trying to integrate two such applications at once - what usually happens is one app's devs will give up mid process due to the interference of the other, and leave you high and dry. I've had to "rescue" botched integrations by pulling down historical theme versions, manually diffing them, and retroactively committing changes into an offline Git repository just to make sense of who touched what. It's impossible to customize the information collected at checkout, including structured shipping instructions, so there are various hacks around doing this on the cart page. It's impossible to customize pricing for certain classes of logged in users, beyond simple discounts that wreak havoc on your accountants trying to get effective line item prices into their systems. Adding structured data to any objects requires parsing description text in the template language and makes you wish you had the flexibility of the Salesforce API... and just typing that sentence makes me shudder. For those without the training or resources to build a full-stack modern website, Shopify is far better than the alternative of adding shopping cart widgets to Wordpress or Squarespace. But it's far from perfect, and its capabilities as a frontend platform have stagnated: https://developers.shopify.com/api-changelog https://developers.shopify.com/api-changelog . Knowing what I know now, I'd recommend that anyone with full-stack experience jump directly to https://spreecommerce.org/ https://spreecommerce.org/ or http://getsaleor.com/ http://getsaleor.com/ - a higher learning curve, but when you inevitably hit the ceiling of Shopify's capabilities you'll wish you'd used one of those.

disantlor 8y ago
just use shopify slate and github
- btown 8y ago
  We already do for our core theme development... but I have never seen an app integration team be willing to use anything other than the native interface.

jazoom 8y ago

Shopify lied to me while I was evaluating it and said if I signed up for a subscription then they'd allow me to fix the colour of the checkout button. They host the checkout process on their own site and automatically swapped the text colour to the opposite of the rest of my site. After I signed up they basically said tough sh!t, they don't actually have a way to change the button text colour.

ggreenbe 8y ago
Shopify plus allow you to adjust the checkout styling and template.
- jazoom 8y ago
  I wasn't going to pay hundreds of dollars per month to change the colour of a button. I did mention that when they said some rubbish about it being for security etc. If it's insecure then why allow it if I pay more? But yeah, you're right. I guess they lied to me twice. To be clear, they did say they'd change it for me if I signed up to any plan.