Why consider Shopify over your current custom platform?

Costly Customisations

One of the biggest limitations of custom eCommerce platforms is that all customisations are either the responsibility of your developers (internal or external).

This means that if you want to make any changes to your online experience, you have to go through your development team, which can be a time-consuming and frustrating process. Given the rapid change of technology, and consumer's expectations, speed to market can be critical for growth, and delays can be costly.

In contrast, Shopify offers unparalleled flexibility when it comes to customisation. With Shopify, businesses can work with their agency's designers and developers, or better yet your own in-house team, to create your own customisations and add-ons without needing to go through the platform owner, Shopify.

Little to No R&D or Innovation

Shopify is a public company, trading in 175 countries with 11,600 employees globally.

Their focus is on empowering entrepreneurs and democratising e-commerce, with R&D and innovation at the heart of everything they do. Their market cap is $106 Billion, which gives Shopify's customers access to one of the most aggressive commerce roadmaps in the market.

Compare that to your custom platform, where the onus is on you to drive this roadmap forward.

What if, tomorrow, Meta suddenly made a change that critically impacted your store’s Facebook product feed?

Someone would need to fix the issue, and who should it be? You, personally? Your agency at their urgent hourly rate? Or would you prefer your platform provider anticipated the change and addressed it ahead of time and behind the scenes, within the costs you already pay, before you even became aware of it as a potential issue?

Technical Stability vs Technical Debt

It can happen to any business, but it’s a far more common occurance with custom platforms, where it’s entirely your responsibility to manage your technical stability and technical debt.

Spending time, energy and money to keep core code in line with industry best practices, servers up to date, compliance issues resolved and the customer experience bug-free is critical, but often it’s moved down the priority list for more exciting, customer-facing or revenue-generating initiatives.

What you’re then stuck with is a site that’s wildly outdated, putting your business at risk.

What happens if the server update you thought you could skip, ended up being essential when you suddenly receive an influx of traffic and the infrastructure can’t handle it?

What about that front-end change you made where you heavily modified some core code to achieve, that’s now getting in the way of deploying an essential feature because of too many code conflicts?

Shopify has built its global reputation on the stability of its infrastructure, guaranteeing 99.98% uptime. You can’t make those guarantees if you’re not very confident in the architecture is built on.