Experimenting with Shopify: low cost ecommerce for the rest of us?

Written 28.07.08 by: Jonathan Briggs

At the OTHER media we are regularly contacted by people who have decided to start an online business. We talk for a while and establish that they have dreams of making millions but a budget of a few hundred or perhaps a couple of thousand pounds. For this they expect an individually designed site, a bespoke shopping system, content management, high search engine placement and continuous marketing. As might be expected they tend to be disappointed when they discover the real effort involved in putting together a profitable online business.

But can you build a convincing business for less than a thousand pounds? With the help of a local market trader; an account with Shopify and some long weekends we built The Market Quarter: a site selling French Food Online. The project was part of our commitment to experiment with emerging technology trends, thereby helping us to guide our clients.

Shopify is one of a range of new customisable hosted ecommerce services where for about £25 a month you can build and run an online shop. It’s very impressive but the further you go, the more you realise that a successful store has little to do with your chosen software and everything to do with how you design, build, customise and promote your business.

Starting to work with Shopify is easy; you pick a template, enter some products, add some photography, choose a payment processor and within a few hours (about 10 hours to version one) you have a rudimentary shop.

But rudimentary is the key point and indeed any one of our developers using the OTHER media’s OTHERobjects CMS can build a similar store in a similar time. It’s when design customisation, bespoke business logic, scalability and marketing become the issues (as they must) that the limitations of the hosted storebuilder become apparent. Total time to redesign and launch the current (still very basic) Market Quarter site: about 100 hours.

Shopify is hugely customisable but then so are systems written in J2EE (such as OTHERobjects CMS) if you have the time and the knowledge. It comes with a powerful templating language and by working through the tutorial wiki and support from the community it is possible to go well beyond the supplied templates. It is also possible to customise the logic and even integrate with third party systems using ‘WebHooks’ but the time involved is very comparable with development in other powerful tool sets.

Once a shop has been developed the real challenge begins; marketing it online. Although Shopify does a good job at producing SEM optimised code the work involved to build a new business from scratch to a prominent presence on the search engines is no less than it would be in any other system. Total time to date to market the site (including advertising, datafeeds, blogging, PR, link building): about 200 hours and breaking even on the small cash investment is still months away.

Shopify fills an important niche that used to be filled by Actinic Catalog and OS Commerce allowing confident individuals to rapidly build an experimental store but this is not the same as building a bespoke marketing site for a proper brand with tightly integrated ecommerce.

Can you build a store for under £1000? Certainly, if you ignore the time and effort involved and you do the work yourself. What will you make in the first 12 months? Probably less than the cost of renting the store.

What we learned?

1. Creating a bespoke look and feel that matches the offline brand is no easier using Shopify.
2. Full integration of a payment provider such as Paypal is straightforward but any tighter integration requires more technical know-how.
3. Stock control integration, automating order processing, performing shipping calculations and flexible promotions are as hard in Shopify, as they are in any other software system and this is where most of your development budget will go.
4. Promoting your site to achieve significant traffic and a good reputation does not become easier just because you have built a cheap site.

Conclusions

Would we recommend Shopify? Yes, with reservations, to a particular sort of start-up who have no budget and unlimited freetime. It is a great training ground for those wanting to learn about ecommerce. Perhaps, in time, it will become a serious competitive tool in the development market but the things it does easily are always likely to be the tip of the business development iceberg.

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