Ksenia Zvereva: With Shopify's simplicity, are there any challenges, like customisation or infrastructure, that customers and developers should keep in mind when building with it?
Simon Freimoser: While there definitely are challenges, it’s always a matter of how you tackle them, right? I would say there are both customization and infrastructure challenges. But ultimately, a Shopify project is almost 50% mindset work. Yes, the customisation capabilities seem to be limited at a first glance and in-depth customisation might only be possible with extensive knowledge of Liquid, their APIs, or even Hydrogen, which is part of their own headless framework. At the end of the day though, asking the question whether a customisation is necessary and evaluating its impact versus the necessary effort, often does the trick.
Another hotly discussed topic is Shopify’s heavy dependency on its app ecosystem and the sheer amount of apps to choose from. But Shopify has worked to improve this. Shopify has now integrated its core functionality into its app stack. While other functionalities still require third parties, there’s a clear direction on which apps and providers are best in their field. Yes, they can get quite pricey, but it’s also comparably easy to quickly drive up the return on investment.
When looking at the total cost of ownership of a Shopify store, we often see the overall costs of a store increasing. But, simultaneously, we see profits rising in multiples of the amount invested. This shows that solely looking at the cost might pose a challenge in the short term but quickly gets put into perspective when businesses can benefit from the total gains from those initial investment costs.
This is similar to Shopify's infrastructure challenges. As an API-first platform, it sometimes requires microservices or middleware to settle specific requirements or migrate certain data points. While this seems cumbersome, we've seen various cases where this approach resulted in a slimmer and more transparent middleware stack, which solved many historical issues on the side.
So the challenge here is to get merchants to employ a middleware – most of them have a dark past with this tooling – and to prove that it has changed throughout the years and is now very different from its previous reputation as black-boxed sorcery.
Tico van Beurden: Shopify’s infrastructure is excellent, and they take care of many things so you and your client can focus on what you should be doing. Hosting is on Shopify, so you don’t need to figure that out, and with a 99.99% uptime, there’s nothing to worry about there. Shopify also has a built-in CDN, which automatically compresses images and offers them in different sizes for the user. Shopify’s templating language is ecommerce focused, so it gives you the majority of the properties that you need out of the box. This allows you to build a modern website with just a default Shopify Plan.
However, since Shopify takes care of infrastructure, some things are impossible on its native platform. For example, you can’t change the URL structure. This is a hot topic for businesses switching platforms as it dramatically impacts SEO. As a developer, the challenge is to find a creative solution for your clients while staying as close to the native behaviour of the platform as possible. Customising and hacking your way around the platform will create technical debt in the future.
Ksenia Zvereva: While Shopify handles the hosting, security, and maintenance, allowing developers to focus on building, it seems there are still some aspects to be mindful of.
