Lessons and questions from Shopify (lecture 2)

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

October 8, 2008 [3309 views]

In this session we will review what you did with Shopify and consider whether you explored deeply enough. Most of you clearly benefited from using the software but some of you expect a lot more from the system. I wonder what this says about your own systems development skills.

What did you like?

• Ease of use
• Customisation
• Speed of prototyping
• Powerful system
• Cost, free to try
• Allows experimentation

Some of you thought that its simplicity made it trivial. I think you need to look beneath the surface and see what else is possible. It is much more powerful than you think and points in a serious direction for modern computing.

What problems did you have?

• Credit card validation of account
• Understanding and editing themes
• Seems to be very restricted. This suggests that it has not been fully explored
• “I could not work out how to upload the homepage”. You need to understand how to learn about a new system through the forums and wiki documentation provided.
• Payment integration
• Understanding shipping and taxes
• Accidently deleting certain pages and assets
• Making the store private while it is under development.
• Categorisation of products
• Editing tools, why is there no WYSIWYG editor?
• Designing was harder than it looked

Limitations you identified

Some of you had clearly looked further than others.

• Cost. $299 seems expensive for a full store. Perhaps you need to think about other commercial solutions and whether they would be cheaper.
• Design limitations. Without customisation your site will look like other people’s
• Open Source solution would have a greater number of add-on modules
• Service needs a greater number of tutorials
• Missing spell checkers, tables and coloured text. You need to look at the documentation because these are possible but not trivial
• No customer accounts
• No recommendation engine
• Is the service fully secure?
• No media player or image zoom
• The look and feel is amateurish

Suitability for ecommerce projects

You were very split on the answers to this question.

• Suitable for small businesses
• Suitable for prototyping of more complex projects
• With customisation could be useful for many projects but perhaps the work involved would be similar to development from scratch
• Would not be useful for someone who knew about development. I think you underestimate the work involved in developing a “better” solution.
• Can be used to create a highly professional looking site
• What guarantee do Shopify give that the site will be available at all times?

Why might large companies not use Shopify?

• Transaction fees
• Big companies need bespoke solutions that really match their branding and customer service
• Concern about hosting sensitive data
• Potential complexity of systems integration (warehousing, availability, CRM)
• Template restrictions. I don’t think these are real. All systems require templates and Liquid is an extremely powerful templating language.
• Limitation on numbers of products
• Lack of control
• If Shopify goes wrong this might damage their reputation
• Lack of customer functionality (recommendations, wishlists, giftcards, send to a friend etc)
• Product model is too restrictive (no functionality for groups, sets, gift cards, split ordering etc)

Questions raised by the activity

1. Why is Shopify not Open Source?
2. Why does Shopify charge a transaction fee?
3. How does Liquid work?
4. How widely is it used?
5. How scalable is the Shopify system?
6. How do you choose a payment gateway?
7. How can we make a Shopify site good enough for our final year project?
8. How do I use my own domain name?
9. How can we market our Shopify sites?
10. How can we mash this up with other software?
11. What are the alternatives to Shopify?
12. How much does a site really cost?
13. How can we integrate video into Shopify?

Other questions

1. How much are we meant to write for these activities?
2. Are we going to build an ecommerce site from scratch?
3. What will we cover in this module?
4. Will we be learning PHP/MySQL?
5. Why are there so many students?
6. Can we focus more on the technical side of ecommerce?
7. Will you show us how to implement mashups?
8. Please explain the assessment for this module? Why is there no case study?

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