Site & Workflow · E-commerce
Shopify
The platform that made a complete online store a matter of configuration.
Affiliate link.
Shopify is a commerce platform founded in 2006, now used by over a million businesses. The core product is a hosted online store — product catalog, checkout, payments, and fulfillment in one managed environment. The self-hosted alternative requires assembling and maintaining each of those layers separately. Shopify removes that overhead at the cost of owning the infrastructure yourself.
For a studio selling physical or digital products, the relevant tradeoff is hosting versus ownership. Shopify handles the payment infrastructure, SSL, CDN, and fraud tools out of the box. The platform fee is the price of not dealing with those pieces independently.
Editorial pass pending — body copy to be refined before launch.
What they make
- Online Store
- Hosted storefront, custom domain, theme editor, digital and physical products
- Payments
- Shopify Payments, Shop Pay, multi-currency checkout
- Point of Sale
- Shopify POS — hardware and software for in-person retail
- Apps
- 8,000+ app ecosystem for extending store functionality
The platform that made a complete online store a matter of configuration.
Affiliate link.
