Creating my online store for small dog products on Shopify was a remarkably smooth and rewarding experience. Shopify's user-friendly platform guided me through each step of the setup process, making it easy even for someone without prior experience. Their range of customizable templates gave my store a professional and appealing look, and the analytics tools provided have been invaluable for tracking my store's performance and customer trends. Additionally, Shopify's 24/7 customer support was always ready to assist whenever I encountered any roadblocks. Overall, launching my business on Shopify has been a positive experience, and I would highly recommend it to anyone looking to start their own online store.
Shopify is a powerful marketing machine that has driven incredible growth. It's an excellent choice for the store owner who needs to do it themselves, on a shoestring budget, who does not sell complex products and who does not plan to run a hybrid - a store that serves multiple customer bases such as retail and wholesale.
Due to its sheer market share, there is a robust marketplace of apps that can be added to shape the store to fit most needs. There is an equally robust selection of themes and developers who can assist with any size project. They have a terrific knowledge base which I strongly recommend store owners use as it teaches the basics for e-commerce in general and online marketing. This learning should be done prior to developing a plan for your site. That will help root your project for success.
Unfortunately, it's also oversold based on name recognition even when the platform is a poor choice for a specific business. There are both policy and technical limitations that impact suitability.
Shopify stores require many apps, which adds monthly costs and can greatly slow your store down. While ALL online stores end up with some app use, because this allows you to choose the features you want and need, much of what is native in other carts like their most direct competitor, BigCommerce, is not. So you'll spend more money each month and it can be harder to get a fast site.
Among the stores that should probably NOT use Shopify:
- Sells items that are generally prohibited on the platform which includes weapons, weapon-related items, sex objects, tobacco (for some odd reason Vape is currently on the platform but for how long is anyone's guess), alcohol.
- Sells items allowed but that don't qualify for Shopify Payments which expands the above list to include supplements, CBD, vape products and other items.
- Just as above, any store that can't qualify for Shopify Payments or who has good reasons to use another payment gateway. Why? Because if you don't use their payment gateway which they profit from, they will take 1/2-2% of your gross revenues soley because you are using another gateway. For small merchants, this isn't much, for big ones it's a significant cost.
- Stores with multiple price structures or catalogs - such as those who offer VIP tiers or wholesale clients. Why not? Because you can't create true customer groups which on other platforms let you segment the catalog and content for each customer group. Groups are really important for B2B. To accomplish multiple audiences on Shopify requires either a separate app (at an added cost) or multiple storefronts, or ShopifyPlus (which is still creating multiple sites). This can greatly increase your operational costs and work efforts.
- Stores with complex products - these are items with many options, also known as configurable or customizable products. While Shopify does offer the ability to offer up to 3 options per product with a maximum of 100 skus per product, this limit is very easy to exceed. There is also no native path to add modifiers such as those one would use for personalized products (like custom embroidery. While these issues can be overcome with apps, that adds both load time and costs.
Based on our record, Shopify should be more popular than Piwigo.org. It has been mentiond 42 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.
This is not for everyone, but I host my family photos myself, most recently with this: https://piwigo.org/. I have been doing this since 2007 (started on a different software, called "gallery". Was able to migrate from gallery2 to gallery3 and now piwigo), and so far no major issues. Advantage: I can easily share photos with family, no need for iCloud, Facebook, or indeed any service- they just need a web browser... - Source: Hacker News / 6 months ago
There is also Piwigo which is open-source and can be self hosted. https://piwigo.org/. - Source: Hacker News / 9 months ago
A couple additiona maybe?: - Piwigo great for photo management. Could be used as an alternative to Google Photos - Nexcloud for file sharing. Replacement for Google Drive. Source: 12 months ago
I use https://piwigo.org/ on a old PC that I installed Linux on. Source: about 1 year ago
I have on my list to evaluate self-hosted image clouds Piwigo and Photoprism but they don't bridge the photogrammetry gap either. It might even be more time consuming if I have to download the assets I'm working on first. Source: about 1 year ago
Shopify.com vs store.link which one is better? Source: 9 months ago
With a traditional e-commerce platform like Shopify, you're locked into their ecosystem. You have to use their templates, checkout, and backend. Headless platforms like MedusaJS give you the freedom to build the front end however you want, using any framework or library. - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
For example, if you want to load firewalla.com, just allowing "firewalla.com" will not work, you will have allow shopify.com and few other stuff ... You can see what sites loaded using chrome dev mode. Source: 12 months ago
If the shipping and sales tax scares you, it may be better to sell through Etsy since it is a marketplace facilitator and is required to collect sales tax from customers when purchasing your items that are sold. People go to Etsy to find something, not sgalv02.com to find your items. I believe Shopify will help you create a site to sell on, but people don't go to shopify.com to purchase various items like they do... Source: 12 months ago
Create a online website using dukaan.io or shopify.com and then sell something.. Source: 12 months ago
PhotoPrism.app - PhotoPrism® is an AI-Powered Photos App for the Decentralized Web. It makes use of the latest technologies to tag and find pictures automatically without getting in your way. You can run it at home, on a private server, or in the cloud.
WooCommerce - A freely available eCommerce plugin that enables shop facilities on your WordPress website. Functionality enabling extensions & beautiful themes available.
Google Photos - All your photos are backed up safely, organized and labeled automatically, so you can find them fast, and share them how you like.
Magento - Magento is the eCommerce software and platform trusted by the world's leading brands. Grow your online business with Magento.
Lychee by Electerious - Lychee is an open-source, free software program for self-hosted photo management. It can be installed on the user's own server or website. The software permits the uploading and management of photos and also makes sharing photos very easy.
BigCommerce - BigCommerce provides ecommerce software solutions and shopping cart software for online businesses. Try it free and start selling your products online today!