What is Shopify?
Shopify is an e-commerce platform first, and a content management system (CMS) second.
It powers nearly 11% of the ecommerce market — which is no small feat. Big-name brands like PepsiCo, Nestlé, Tesla, Whole Foods, and Schwinn all use Shopify. So it’s legit.
For our creative team, Shopify was new territory. We’d always been a strictly WordPress-dev shop, so this project was our first real dive into the Shopify ecosystem.
Spoiler: we learned a lot, fast.
First Impressions: The Good
✅ The theme builder is intuitive.
Shopify’s theme builder makes it super easy to get pages up quickly. Rapid prototyping was a breeze.
✅ Perfect for small ecommerce businesses.
It does what it was built to do, and it does it well: manage online stores. If you need a clean, cookie-cutter solution with minimal effort, Shopify’s your guy.
✅ The Focal theme (shoutout) is solid.
We used Focal, and right out of the gate it felt polished. Pages loaded fast, transitions were smooth, and the client was thrilled with the upgrade to Shopify 2.0 from their old site.
Now the Tradeoffs
⚠️ Custom templates for every unique page.
Here’s where things got clunky. If you want different layouts across your site, you need to create a new template for every single page, then manually assign it. The WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor? Basically useless in this workflow. Empty fields. No visual feedback. It’s a chore.
⚠️ Lack of built-in dynamic features.
No out-of-the-box product suggestions. Cart upsells? Also a miss. Shopify nails the basics, but features you’d expect from a modern ecommerce platform are noticeably absent unless you want to shell out for extra apps.
⚠️ Limitations around content.
You can only include a certain amount of content per section, which feels unnecessarily limiting — especially when you’re used to the flexibility of WordPress.
The Most Frustrating Stuff
🚫 Locked URL structure.
You cannot edit page URLs beyond a certain point. That means you’re stuck with Shopify’s built-in slugs like /pages/about-us — even if you want something cleaner like /about. Bad news for SEO. And sanity.
🚫 Customization is… lacking.
If you’re a developer or designer who craves full control, get ready to be frustrated. You will hit walls. Often.
🚫 It’s not WordPress — and that’s OK (but also not OK).
We approached this like we would a WordPress build, and that was probably our biggest mistake. Shopify isn’t WordPress, and trying to make it behave like it is… well, it never stood a chance.
Yes, WordPress would’ve been the better tool for this project. But Shopify was a client request, and ultimately, that’s the deciding vote.
Final Thoughts
Shopify is built for a specific kind of user — and if you’re that user, it’s a great tool. But if you’re coming from a background of custom builds, flexible CMS setups, and developer-first thinking… expect a learning curve, and a few limitations that might drive you up a wall.
Would I use Shopify again? Maybe. Only if I had a really good reason to do so.
Thinking about Shopify for your next project? I’m open to having a chat.
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