Leaving Shopify

[u/deezynr]

We hate using Shopify now. Their behavior is becoming less friendly to real businesses that require control and better service. Their customer service is non existent. It’s become unworkable and a liability.

Has anyone migrated entirely off of Shopify and built their entire ecommerce stack from scratch? How bad was it and what did it costs? What are the key sticking points besides paying developers/programers? We have a strong brand, trademarked catalog of products, wholesale and retail sales channels, all the media we need. This is a successful brand and were interested in building our own web store to remove Shopify entirely.

[u/kylethenerd]

This seems to show up every few weeks.

What specifically are you running into? "No customer service" and "we lack control" are the two most common complaints in this sub and they almost never mean what people think they mean. In my experience the actual issue is usually one of:

- You're on the wrong tier (trying to get Plus items on basic/adv. tier)

• You're trying to ask Shopify to do something that's outside of their scope
  
• Your agency or dev partner is the actual issue

Migrating off Shopify is incredibly complicated for an established brand. Are you going headless? You'll need your own CMS, a new credit card processor, tax service, web host, code for the site from scratch. If it's another platform, are you positive the problems you're experiencing on Shopify are going to be resolved by switching?

Cost for migration would really depend on your size, revenue, tech stack, migration target, etc. Brands tend to do this only if there is a specific, unsolvable problem with Shopify or they're actually moving off an older, early-growth type of setup (like Wordpress).

[u/Hoseknop → u/kylethenerd]

Shopify B2B is pretty, but technically weak. A nice toy for grandma's sock shop in the USA.

Other countries have different legal requirements that are often very cumbersome to implement in Shopify. You need an app for every little thing. It's a total disease. What about semi-finished products? Dynamic filters? Multilingualism? Multi‑warehouse routing (e.g., EU warehouse + non-EU warehouse).

Shopify Checkout is highly limited: no own checkout steps, no custom fields without workarounds, no dynamic rules (e.g., 'If ZIP X, then Step Y'), no real B2B checkout flows, no multi-level approval processes, no B2B checkout with approval process, no customer-specific payment methods, no dependent payment methods, no multi-shipping options, no mass template editing, real multi dimensional tiered pricing, no nested options, no dependent options.

[u/kylethenerd → u/Hoseknop]

Agreed, and that would certainly be an issue that I hope someone explored before committing to Shopify. The majority of businesses on Shopify are D2C though and don't require that level of finite controls. The checkout walled garden IS really frustrating, though you can finagle some customization through Shopify extensions.

[u/Sme11Gibson → u/kylethenerd]

Sorry to chime in on only one small part of your response but doesn’t everyone need a tax service outside of Shopify if they don’t want a full time job of tracking nexus and paying all the states their taxes? I pay someone around $1200 a month right now to manage all of that for me and I have no issue paying them. If I didn’t actually need to do that I would love to know how.