as a small wholesale business owner I was shocked that I have to pay $300 a month to Shopify system that lacks a million things and then I need to pay 30-50 dollars a month for each plugin and it was my job to figure out how they will work with each other. I am not even talking about support and where I should get it from after spending around $500/month on the whole 'solution'. Instead of paying $6k per year or close to $20k for 3 years I got my own ecommerce system custom built.
"$20k for 3 years" instead of 3 years of custom development costs is nothing... sure it's expensive but that's positioned in a marketplace where the alternatives are far more expensive for the average non-technical e-commerce store owner.
If $6k per year is a big expense for you then obviously this isn't the service for you, but enough people are willing to pay that where they are a billion dollar per yr in revenue company.
If some half-baked open-source PHP ecommerce platform with a p/t solo developer over a couple yrs is sufficient to run your business, that's fine. But that was always an option before Shopify existed too and they probably found they weren't interested in that subsection of the market.
half baked open source thingy costs $50 a month, im talking about fully custom solution that actually can handle business cases that Shopify can not. such as this product is shipped by itself in a box. that product is actually a combination of the other 3 products. and give accurate shipping quote for an order is 3 boxes 37 pounds each not 1 big 111 pound box. you will need 17 different apps plugged into shopify to get this to work. and yeah you are right, there is a million generic stores that ship apparell and other random crap doesn't have specific inventory and shipping needs and thats Shopify's market. for anything more advanced you need to shell out $2000 per month for Shopify Plus. And let me guess your response to that will be "any serious business can afford that". its like businesses have hand over their cash to Shopify so that can claim to be a serious business. Shopify is a rip-off and clearly abuses their market dominance in the cases like with MailChimp
I'm sure there are plenty of cheaper options. That's not really the point. I was only comparing it to custom development combined with a high quality service. You usually have to pay more for quality in the SaaS world, even more so than PaaS which is more of a commodity product than an ecommerce platform.
yeah it most likely will cost something like 33% upfront, 33% on new features and modifications and 33% fixing bugs, upkeep etc. again, if your business operation is simple then yeah squarespace/shopify/whatever will do the job but if its a little more complex and you need tens of plugins to get it to work then you might as well shop around to see how much is the quote for a custom solution that fits your needs.
You don’t “have to” pay anything. You chose to. Also, the processing discount afforded by the $300/mo plan only begins to make sense if you’re doing $1 million or more per year in gross sales.
