Sponsored by

Hello and welcome to another edition of MarTech Toolkit. In this week’s edition, what the heck is going on with Shopify?!

But first, a word from our sponsor this week…

Subscribe to Thumbstop, a must-read newsletter for mastering the art and science of shipping more winning ads. 

Past issues include: 

⚡The Barry Hott Ugly Ads Edition which revealed the science of getting past people’s subconscious ad blockers.

⚡ The Sarah Levinger Psychology-Based Creative Edition showing how to properly use emotion and brain science in your advertising.

⚡The Alex Cooper A-to-Z of Ad Production Edition giving teams a relentlessly practical guide to ideation and iteration. 

Plus, we’ve covered things like how HexClad's Head of Growth Connor Rolain runs his creative strategy flywheel, how to properly back into a MER goal, contribution margin tutorials, and advanced ad analysis techniques. 

During the busy Q4 shopping season, Shopify’s already had a high profile outages, costing sellers millions in revenue in the leadup to Black Friday.

This downtime (for close to an hour for some) caused some rethinking about platform dependence on Shopify…

Shopify has democratized ecommerce for the masses AND this is so true. Shopify is brittle. Long term, successful brands must at some point consider controlling their own destiny with a custom or alternative platform.

With this in mind, I thought it fitting to do a rundown of the current Shopify competitive landscape.

What are the legit Shopify alternatives today? And what are the trade offs?

“The Old Guard” Shopify Alternatives

First, there’s the names you probably already know about. They’ve all adapted some though with Shopify’s rise and each does offer some compelling tradeoffs.

1. BigCommerce: BigCommerce used to be neck and neck with Shopify and quietly had their IPO (much less fanfare) recently. Importantly, they’ve ceded the “small business” market as I reported in a previous newsletter, instead focusing on the mid to enterprise level mature ecommerce stores. Why consider BigCommerce? They are now hyper-focused on “big store” problems like flexible API calls (above Shopify’s 100 SKU cap), are more SEO-friendly with fully customizable URLs, and better flat-rate pricing.

2. WooCommerce: As a longtime WordPress power user, WooCommerce is a natural fit for me. For the uninitiated, it takes a bit more to learn than Shopify (or even BigCommerce), but if you’ve ever played around with WordPress OR can invest just a bit of time, WooCommerce has MORE flexibility and is much cheaper in most every instance. It’s also open-source, so it’s the ultimate antidote to Shopify downtime. You control your own servers.

There ARE other options in the “old and established” category like Magento, Opencart, etc.. but personally I don’t think they’ve truly kept up with Shopify.

Subscribe to Thumbstop, a must-read newsletter for mastering the art and science of shipping more winning ads. 

Past issues include: 

⚡The Barry Hott Ugly Ads Edition which revealed the science of getting past people’s subconscious ad blockers.

⚡ The Sarah Levinger Psychology-Based Creative Edition showing how to properly use emotion and brain science in your advertising.

⚡The Alex Cooper A-to-Z of Ad Production Edition giving teams a relentlessly practical guide to ideation and iteration. 

Plus, we’ve covered things like how HexClad's Head of Growth Connor Rolain runs his creative strategy flywheel, how to properly back into a MER goal, contribution margin tutorials, and advanced ad analysis techniques. 

“The Upstarts”: Newer Shopify Competitors

These are probably names you haven’t heard of OR don’t know much about. This will be an interesting space to watch in the years ahead.

1. Builder.ai: No-code + AI = game changer. Or at least that’s how Builder.ai is positioning themselves. I’ll be honest that they are one of the better no-code solutions I’ve tried and it’s an easy way to build quick and customizable solutions for your product map.

2. Ecwid: Not really THAT new (founded in 2009) but Ecwid has been hanging around the rim long enough to have some solid use cases against Shopify. If Shopify is more affordable than BigCommerce and more approachable than WooCommerce, Ecwid is both less expensive AND more approachable than Shopify. I particularly like it as a quick add-on store for established websites and it works great for WordPress and other CMS platforms.

3. Sellfy: For digital creators or merch brands, Sellfy is the more purpose built option with a more affordable sales based pricing plan starting at just $29/month. More than a simple shopping cart, less than a complicated inventory platform.

4. Webflow: If you are feeling limited by Shopify’s design options, Webflow is a “style forward” option for crafting stunning sites that are fairly fast, too. While it’s technically “low code”, Webflow does take some getting used to and you may need some dev or design support.

News & Reviews from Around the Web

Here’s a digest of our latest reviews and news that piqued my interest:

• Top Sortly Alternatives for Inventory Management: If you’ve considered using Sortly (or used it currently), these are some top competitors worth checking out to overcome Sortly’s shortcomings.

• Smart Scout Review: I’ve always used Jungle Scout for Amazon product research, but Smart Scout is making moves and looks to be a strong new product research suite for any business with exposure to Amazon.

That’s it for this week! Thank you for reading.