[dubcanada]

While I agree with the first and second point.

Theme development is the same as any other system. It's very similar to a Drupal or Wordpress commerce. I am not sure I fully see what you mean.

Obviously they don't allow you to use another payment processor, why would they? They make money by having people use their payment processor. There is no benefit to them allowing people to bypass this and implement their own payment system.

The custom checkout can be a con, but it's also a pro. It allows your customers to feel at home in a native environment. Not having to deal with every ecommerce site completely different checkout system.

[theturtletalks]

The Shopify Billing API is extremely restrictive. Our application works with all e-commerce platforms (BigCommerce, Magento, Woocommerce, etc). We charge 1 monthly fee so a user can connect all of their shops. How are we supposed to charge the user if the first shop they connect is not Shopify? What if the 2nd shop is Shopify and they have already paid using Stripe? Shopify says they won't approve our application. Guess they don't like it when applications support more than just Shopify.

On top of that, there are applications that can have this payment flow except you need permission to accept outside payments. Shopify only gives this to established companies.

Late last year, they also got rid of unlisted applications and now all applications have to be approved even if you don't want it in their app store.

Shopify is building its moat and getting more and more restrictive. I'm very glad we abstracted all of the operations out of Shopify directly and now can use any platform or even Stripe directly. If you want to build an e-commerce store with Shopify still, use the $9/month plan and use Shopify just as a CMS and integrate with payments separately.

[ganeshkrishnan]

This was exactly the same problem for us. Worse, we were integrating Amazon and Shopify testers wanted our Amazon keys for their testing. Our users have already paid with Stripe and we are not allowed to use Shopify app since payments are not Shopify Payment.

if your app fails their ludicrous testing (one was failed as our icon had wrong font from website) they ban any submission for few months, don't allow integration with other ecommerce platforms, don't allow shopify orders to be cross platform, don't allow non-shopify payments.

And they always nickel and dime their users including Shopify payments. You think Amazon is bad? Wait till you get on Shopify

[colesantiago]

With one site I developed with Shopify, I have a huge cart abandonment rate because of that 3 step checkout, even with the accelerated checkouts like Apple/Google Pay.

A single page modal checkout on the same page is the way to go these days, even Stripe's new checkout is unfortunately doing the same thing with not keeping the user on the same page.

[Cerium]

One thing with Shopify that drives the high abandonment rate is that shipping rates are usually not calculated until the second page of checkout. On many stores the only way to get a shipping estimate is to add something to a cart and get to the second page of checkout.

[jimnotgym]

And that suggests to me that these are not the kind of abandonments that are going to be avoided by redesigning your checkout. This user weld simply bounce somewhere else instead. It is trivial to put a shipping estimate on the product pages, and make customers bounce there instead...but they will still bounce

[bombcar]

This is huge - and annoying. I like to avoid Amazon when I can, but if I can't figure out what shipping is going to cost until the cart is almost finished being checked out, I'll bounce.

[base]

In small business stores most users checkout as guests, so the website only has enough info to provide a shipping estimate after they have your address.

[nucleardog]

At least let me pick a country or something and give me a ballpark.

With a lot of US-only retailers the only way to find out they won’t ship outside the US is to try and checkout and look for a country drop down.

And the ones that will ship, shipping for a small parcel can range from inconsequential (free/$10) through punishing ($80) to absurd ($300).

I don’t need an exact amount, but there can be a couple order of magnitude difference between stores when trying to ship to Canada and often no way to determine they even will at all without going through the checkout flow.

[bombcar]

Exactly - and in the USA I just need a “zip code = estimate” so I know if I’m looking at $10 or $50.