My two previous blog posts this week have been about why I chose Shopify as my Ecommerce platform. FYI – those were not sponsored posts, but express how I truly feel about Shopify after using other Ecommerce platforms.

Having said that, there are three pet peeves that I have with Shopify that I want to warn other merchants about. And I’m outlining them so that perhaps Shopify will respond. If they would resolve these issues, I would be thrilled and I am sure other online merchants would be as well.

jun121st

Here are my issues with Shopify:

1 Invoicing: You CANNOT send a customer an invoice within the Shopify system. Seems like this would be a simple thing to implement.

At least 1/3 of my customers require that I submit an invoice for payment because their organization doesn’t allow them to order online. I also have customers who,because they are buying in bulk, I am extending quantity discount or break on the shipping. They also require an invoice but there is no way to do within Shopify.

It would save me a boatload of time (and keep better track of my inventory ) if I could invoice customers within the Shopify system instead of having to do it within Quickbooks.

2 Shipping Some of my products are fulfilled with drop-shippers. While there are fantastic  tools within Shopify that makes managing drop shipping easy, the one area where they fail is with flat rate shipping.

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In order to offer flat rate shipping within Shopify, I have to use one of their third party apps which costs me a whopping additional $49 a month for their app! Flat rate shipping was a feature that I did NOT have to pay for when I was with Big Commerce, the 2nd most popular Ecommerce platform.

3 Chargebacks

 The Shopify forum is full of complaints from Shopify users about their experience with how Shopify handles chargebacks when they are the credit card processor for your online orders.

I rarely (knock on wood) get chargebacks but, when I had my first one last month since opening my Shopify store in December, it was a nightmare trying to get it resolved. Plus I kept getting conflicting information from the Shopify support team.

I have had much better support with resolving chargebacks with Paypal or authorize.net.  I am hoping this was an aberration, but if not I am going to return to authorize.net.

Another disadvantage of using Shopify’s credit card processing is that it takes 2 -3 days before your money is deposited in your account. Every other company I used — authorize.net, Paypal, The Square and Wells Fargo, deposits my money the next day.

Do you feel the same say about Shopify or have other issues to address? Join me in taking advantage of opportunity to tell Shopify staff face your issues at their retail tour.

The retail tour is when a team from Shopify goes to select cities throughout the US (SF, Austin, Denver, Philadelphia etc) for a week-long visit. The purpose of their visit is to hold FREE seminars on specific topics geared to help online merchants increase sales and run their business more efficiently.

And you get an chance to set up a appointment to have a one on one meeting with a Shopify guru to ask any question you want. Check with Shopify to see is their retail tour is coming to a town near you sometime soon.

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