Our honest Shopify review 2025: Is it still the king of ecommerce?

If you’re thinking about starting an online store, Shopify is probably the first name that pops into your head. It powers millions of businesses, from tiny side hustles run from a kitchen table to massive brands like Gymshark and Mattel. It’s become the default choice for a reason. But with so many new players in the game, is all that hype still deserved in 2025?

This isn’t going to be just another surface-level Shopify review that repeats the same old marketing points. We’re going to dig in and give you an honest look at what it’s really like to run a business on the platform. We’ll cover the features that make it great, break down the pricing so you know the true cost, and talk about the one area that often gets ignored: customer support.

So, whether you’re a brand-new entrepreneur sketching out your ideas or an established store owner feeling some serious growing pains, this one’s for you.

What is Shopify? An overview

At its heart, Shopify is a hosted, all-in-one ecommerce platform. The best way to think about it is like renting a fully-equipped retail space in a busy mall. You pay a monthly fee, and for that, you get the software, the hosting, and the tools to run your online business, all managed right from your web browser.

The big promise is simplicity. Shopify aims to give you everything you need to build a store, sell your products everywhere (on your website, on social media, even in person with a point-of-sale system), and take payments without ever having to touch a line of code.

Core features

Shopify’s reputation was built on its incredibly powerful, sales-first toolkit. It's designed from the ground up to help you sell things, and it does a fantastic job of that. Let's break down the main components you'll be working with.

Store setup and design

Your store's design is the first thing your customers will see, so it has to be good. Shopify gives you a couple of ways to get started. You can pick from about 24 free themes, which are all clean, modern, and look great on mobile. They’re a solid starting point, but let's be honest, it’s not a huge selection, especially when competitors like Wix offer hundreds of free options.

If you want your store to stand out, you’ll probably find yourself browsing the premium theme store, which has over 800 options. They look great, but they come with a price tag, typically ranging from $100 to $500 for a one-time purchase.

Once you have a theme, you'll use Shopify's section-based editor to customize your pages. It’s pretty intuitive for building standard layouts, letting you add, remove, and shuffle pre-made blocks of content. But if you’re hoping for a true drag-and-drop experience like you’d get with Squarespace, you might feel a bit boxed in. Making a truly unique design often requires getting your hands dirty with code.

To give you a head start, Shopify has started rolling out AI tools like Shopify Magic, which can help generate a basic theme layout and write some product descriptions. It’s a nice feature for getting a first draft up quickly, but it’s not quite as sophisticated as some of the dedicated AI website builders out there.

Product and inventory management

This is where Shopify truly excels. Adding products is simple and straightforward. However, you might hit a wall pretty quickly with something called product variants. You can only create variants based on three options (like size, color, and material), and you're capped at 100 total combinations. If you sell something complex, like custom furniture or jewelry with lots of options, this can be a real problem. The standard workaround? You guessed it, a third-party app, which adds yet another recurring charge to your monthly bill.

Shopify also handles digital products well, giving you a generous 5GB file limit per product. It’s a bit strange that you have to install a separate (but free) app to enable this, but it works smoothly once it's set up. The platform is also a powerhouse for dropshipping, thanks to a massive app store that connects you with services like DSers and Printful in just a few clicks.

The inventory tracking is robust, too. You can manage your stock across multiple warehouses or retail locations, up to 10 on most plans, and a whopping 200 if you upgrade to Shopify Plus.

Payments and checkout

Getting paid should be the easy part, and Shopify makes it pretty clear how they want you to do it. The cheapest and easiest option is to use Shopify Payments, their own payment processor, which is powered by Stripe. If you use it, Shopify waives its own transaction fees, meaning you only pay the standard credit card processing rate.

You can use over 100 other payment gateways if you prefer, but there’s a big catch. If you go that route, Shopify will charge you an additional transaction fee on top of what your chosen gateway charges. This fee ranges from 0.6% to 2.0% of every single sale. For businesses in countries where Shopify Payments isn't available, this can be a painful and unavoidable cost.

The good news is that Shopify’s checkout process is one of the best in the business. It’s meticulously optimized to get people to complete their purchase and includes features like Shop Pay, which lets returning customers check out with a single click.

Plan	Online Credit Card Rate (via Shopify Payments)	Additional Fee (3rd Party Gateway)
Basic	2.9% + 30¢	2.0%
Grow	2.7% + 30¢	1.0%
Advanced	2.5% + 30¢	0.6%

The not-so-great parts: Support and marketing

While Shopify absolutely nails the mechanics of selling, the more human side of running a business, supporting both yourself and your customers, is where things get a bit more complicated. This is where the slick, all-in-one promise starts to feel a little strained.

Shopify's support for merchants: A mixed bag

On paper, Shopify offers 24/7 support through live chat on most plans, with phone support being reserved for the high-tier Shopify Plus users. That sounds pretty good, right?

In reality, the experience can be hit or miss. If you spend a little time on sites like Trustpilot, you'll see a recurring theme of frustration. Many merchants complain about getting stuck in loops with AI chatbots that can't solve real problems, or about receiving unhelpful, copy-pasted answers from support agents. While plenty of people get the help they need, a worrying number feel left in the dark when facing critical issues like a sudden payment hold or an account suspension.

Supporting your customers: Welcome to the app store

When it comes to the tools you need to support your own customers, Shopify’s answer is almost always the same: "There's an app for that." A perfect example is product reviews. For years, Shopify had its own free reviews app. Then, they discontinued it, forcing every single merchant to go out and find a third-party tool.

This creates a messy, fragmented support setup. You might have one app for reviews, another for live chat, and a third for your help center articles. Each tool has its own login, its own monthly bill, and its own separate pool of data. Nothing talks to each other, making it impossible to get a clear, single view of a customer's history.

As your store grows, this app-based approach gets expensive and seriously inefficient. Answering every customer email manually or using a basic chatbot that only understands keywords just doesn't work at scale. This is where modern AI tools offer a smarter way forward. Instead of juggling a dozen different apps, a tool like eesel AI connects directly to your Shopify store and your other knowledge sources, like your help docs. It acts as a single, smart brain that can automate answers for customers with an AI Chatbot or help your agents find answers instantly with an AI Copilot, all without making you switch away from the helpdesk you already use.

Built-in marketing and SEO tools

Shopify gives you a decent foundation to get found on Google. The SEO basics are handled well right out of the box. You can easily edit page titles and meta descriptions, and sitemaps are generated automatically. The only small quirk is a rigid URL structure that you can’t change (for example, all product pages live under a /products/ folder). It’s a minor thing, but it can be an annoyance for SEO perfectionists.

The built-in blogging tool is functional, but that’s about it. It’s fine for simple blog posts, but it feels barebones compared to a dedicated platform like WordPress or even the editor in Squarespace. Likewise, Shopify Email is a great free tool to get started with, letting you send up to 10,000 emails a month. But as your business grows and your marketing gets more sophisticated, you'll almost certainly need to upgrade to a more powerful, dedicated email marketing service.

Shopify pricing: What will it actually cost you?

The monthly price you see on Shopify’s website is just the starting line. The real cost of running your store is a combination of your monthly plan, transaction fees, and, most importantly, all those app subscriptions.

A breakdown of the Shopify plans

Shopify has three main plans, with prices based on paying for a year upfront:

• Basic: $29/month

• Grow: $79/month

• Advanced: $299/month

The main benefits of upgrading are getting more staff accounts, slightly lower transaction fees, and more detailed reporting. But you should pay close attention to the staff account limits. The Basic plan only gives you two accounts, and the Grow plan gives you five. For a growing team, this limit alone is often what pushes them into a much more expensive plan before they even need the other features.

The hidden costs of the ecosystem

The true costs really start to add up once you begin adding functionality to your store.

• Apps: So many features that come standard on other platforms require a paid app on Shopify. If you want advanced product options, subscription billing, or a good review system, you can easily add another $50 to $200 (or more) to your monthly expenses.

• Themes: While the free themes are okay, most serious businesses will buy a premium theme to get a more professional and unique look. That’s a one-time cost, but it's still an extra $100 to $500 you need to budget for.

• Transaction Fees: It’s worth saying again: if you can't or don't want to use Shopify Payments, that extra 0.6% to 2.0% fee on every single transaction can become a huge, unexpected drain on your profits.

Is Shopify the right platform for you?

After this deep-dive Shopify review, let's answer the big question: is it still the king? For core ecommerce, the answer is a resounding yes. It provides an unmatched set of tools for listing and selling products, a rock-solid infrastructure that can handle massive growth, and a fantastic point-of-sale system for physical retail. It’s a powerful engine built to do one thing: move products.

However, its weaknesses are becoming harder to ignore. The total cost can be much higher than the sticker price suggests. It forces you into a fragmented and expensive app ecosystem for essential functions like customer support, and its own support for merchants can be unreliable when you need it most.

Shopify is an excellent choice if your main goal is selling physical goods and you have the budget to customize your toolkit with the right apps. Just go into it knowing that you’ll need to figure out the customer support puzzle on your own.

Scale your Shopify support without scaling your costs

That support puzzle is exactly what we built eesel AI to solve. We give you a smart, unified way to handle the flood of customer questions that comes with running a successful Shopify store.

eesel AI is designed to be different. You can get it running in minutes, connecting to your Shopify store and helpdesk with just a click. It unifies all your knowledge, learning from your product catalog, help center, and past customer conversations to provide accurate answers that match your brand’s voice. You get complete control over what gets automated, so you can start small and grow at your own pace. Best of all, our predictable pricing with flat monthly fees means you don't get punished with per-ticket charges just because you had a busy sales month.

Ready to build a support system that’s just as powerful as your store? Try eesel AI for free.