Shopify

Shopify is a hosted commerce platform that takes on everything between a product photo and money in the bank: storefront, checkout, payments, shipping, taxes, point of sale and the apps that fill every remaining gap. The strongest single asset is the checkout. It converts better than almost anything a team could build, it is battle-tested across millions of stores, and Shop Pay's saved-details network means a meaningful share of buyers complete a purchase in one tap having never visited the store before. Around it sit themes written in Liquid, the Hydrogen and Oxygen stack for teams that want a headless frontend, Shopify Payments, native shipping label purchase, a capable POS for physical retail, and the App Store, which is simultaneously the platform's real moat and its real cost. The honest limitation is that the plan price is the smallest line on the bill. Apps compound quickly, and a modest store commonly carries 100 to 300 dollars a month of subscriptions on top of the plan for reviews, subscriptions, bundles, upsells, email and inventory. Using a third-party payment gateway instead of Shopify Payments adds a platform fee on every order. Checkout customisation is deliberately restricted below Plus. And digital-only sellers usually find they are paying for a physical-goods platform they do not need. Pricing: Basic is 25 dollars a month billed monthly or 19 billed annually, Grow is 65 or 49, Advanced is 399 or 299, and Plus starts around 2,300 a month. The third-party gateway fee falls by plan: 2 percent on Basic, 1 percent on Grow, 0.6 percent on Advanced and 0.2 percent on Plus. The current entry offer is three days free followed by 1 dollar a month for three months, with no card required to start. The comparison set: WooCommerce is the open-source WordPress route, cheaper in licence and dearer in maintenance; BigCommerce competes directly with fewer app fees; Wix and Squarespace commerce are simpler and weaker at scale; Medusa and Saleor are the open-source headless options; Gumroad, Lemon Squeezy and Paddle are far better fits for digital products; and Etsy or Amazon rent you demand rather than sell you a store. Choose Shopify when you sell physical products and want the highest-converting checkout on the internet without building one, and budget for the apps from day one rather than being surprised in month three.