My experience with Shopify Integration

EDIT: We have since sold this business and the new owners moved their site over to Shopify.

Hi,

I thought I should share a bit of feedback on the pros and cons of using the Shopify Buy Button as a temporary e-Commerce solutions in the hopes of highlighting some key expectations/hopes for the upcoming Webflow eCommerce release.

The project I created is: https://www.welovelocal.nz - it is a side project I am working on with my partner. We sell gift boxes curated with locally made products like peanut butter, cordial and so on.

Firstly the pros of using the Shopify Buy Button:

- It’s cheap: For $9 per month you can get Shopify lite which is all you need to turn your Webflow website into an eCommerce site. We don’t do any subscription services or any of that fancy stuff, so the integration is fine for our purposes.

The Shopify Admin panel interface is slick: As easy as Webflow makes it easy for non-developers to create beautiful mobile responsive website, Shopify makes it easy for non-business people to set up an online business. My partner who never set up a business in the past finds the interface super slick too and understands how it works. I hope you have something in the pipeline for this, Webflow :wink:

The integration is super simple: If you watch the tutorial on how to integrate Shopify with your Webflow CMS there is really no reason why you can’t get an eCommerce site in Webflow up and running. It’s super easy to copy and paste in the code to run Shopify, and the little bit of manual coding required for your products_ids is a one-off task that is super manageable.

The cons (and my hopes for Webflow eCommerce):

  • Tracking anything with the BuyButton is hard (in GA or in Shopify) (if you do paid advertising, you will hate this)- Tracking eCommerce behaviour through Webflow and Shopify is close to impossible. As soon as people “add to cart” I can’t see what’s going on, which makes it impossible for me to implement traditional eCommerce marketing strategies like retargeting, sending “abandon cart” emails etc. - It’s not a deal breaker for We Love Local, but it certainly is for other projects - especially client work. I need to be able to understand how people behave on my site in order to make the changes I think will improve the overall performance of the store. You will struggle doing that with the Buy Button integration.

-No email engagement i briefly touched on this in the previous, but I have no way of managing the email workflow which makes everything pretty manual and time consuming. I am hoping Webflow eCommerce has that sorted.

-Only one-off product sales Again, doesn’t directly apply to We Love Local, but I have had to turn down some projects that required recurring payments. I am going to give Plasso a crack soon to see how that works, but only being able to use the Shopify integration to sell one-off products limits what you can sell quite a bit. It also doesn’t allow for digital downloads and upsells etc.

Those are my two cents for people wondering if they should use the Shopify integration.

Cheeeeeers,
Connor

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Thanks for sharing, very insightful. I am in a similar situation, but as I sell low volume and on a case-by-case basis I do not need inventory management, so I opted for a PayPal button instead.

Also waiting for Webflow Ecommerce though! :grimacing:

I concur with all of your points and would like to add one.

- It’s not easy to customize the design of the Shopify buy buttons or shopping cart. Other than the basic controls given inside of Shopify, it requires custom coding CSS adjustments. This becomes harder because the class names are not always obvious. Plus there’s the annoyance of adjusting the code then saving the html embed and publishing to see the changes. This is a huge time suck and contrast to Webflow’s visual coding paradigm.

This a problem that Webflow Ecommerce will no doubt solve and get right.

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I wonder if we should be exporting webflow designs to shopify themes? Anyone done this? Seems like it would be a better shop owner experience. Eg no extra hosting or platform for the client.

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@HammerOz It does sound like a good idea. I’m waiting to see what Udesly comes out with. Anyone else have first hand experience with their other products?

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Yes, this will be interesting. Grid in shoplify pages here we come.

@HammerOz Only a day after our chat, they’ve released it into the wild.

Hey @matthewpmunger. Thanks for the heads up. I am going to test this out. It’s worth noting that you can only use the shopify side of this adapter on a paid udesley plan.

I have no idea how this works yet. I wonder how or if it deals with other collections beyond products. Only one way to find out. I don’t think users will be able to edit page content in shopify. It is done in webflow. So does the client get the editor experience ? A lot to assess.

Yes @HammerOz lots of things to weigh. The process seems very straight forward though. It does seem like the biggest losses will be no Webflow Editor for clients and exporting/converting for site changes. Will need to definitely lay out a pro/con list for doing a conversion versus embed.

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Hey @matthewpmunger ,

Did you get a chance to go through Udelsy. Also there is a facebook pixel integration now so will that help with your marketing problems now @finlayconn

We also integrated Shopify with Webflow and it’s awesome!

We’ve integrated the buttons from Shopify to pull the prices through and to include the ‘add to cart feature’, we then edited the button code to feed in the prices to the listing boxes on the landing pages. This means we can control all product prices direct from Shopify!

It works well here in the office too - The sales team use Shopify, the marketing team use Webflow. So far it’s worked great!

Here’s a little peek - https://www.luxurytraintickets.com/

UPDATE: We have now stopped using Shopify and instead moved over to @foxy

While Shopify worked great, and will work great if you have a basic store, for us we needed more flexibility with the purchase forms and we wanted to take control of the design of the checkout.

We are very very VERY happy with Foxy. Integration was no more difficult than Shopify but everything can now be controlled from within Webflow, meaning no back and forth between Shopify.

For us Foxy just works better.

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I had this problem as well until I upgraded my account and enabled enhanced e-commerce. Now I’m able to see transactions in analytics and facebook. I was already able to do e-mailings via Shopify (abandoned cart, custom flows, etc.)

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Hi, what Shopify plan are you using? Is it possible to integrate the “buy button” with every Shopify plan? Would be great to get some more insights on this.

@Olexi

Before I was able to do this with Shopify Lite. Via a workaround, I could enter the Shopify store preferences where I could enter the ID’s (Analytics and Facebook).

Recently I had to upgrade to Shopify Basic because it stopped working in Lite.

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How did you do that? I would love to know.

All the design in Webflow.
Add products to Shopify.
Create Shopify ‘Buttons’ which pull through price, buy button and the cart.
Tweak the code to show what you want.

For example on ‘landing pages’ with listings of products, we only wanted to show the price, not the buy button. Doing this was easy, simply edit the Shopify code to show the button from ‘true’ to ‘false’. Took a couple of tries but now it’s setup it’s super easy.

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Ah I get you so all the prices shown are just buy buttons with most of the info hidden?

If they are all html embeds how do you change the styling? Is that within the code or can you do it through the normal Webflow methods?

That’s it!

The stying us done in the html of the button, so separate from Webflow.

I’m trying to export a theme for Shopify and I’m getting stuck on one last error on the Product Page. Seems I’ can’t figure out which element to tag item=option-wrapper on Add To Cart. Any insights?

@AJansen Looking to implement shopify with webflow for the first time myself. By the sounds of it with the buy button integration we still get all the benefits of the shopify features, namely: cart abandoned cart emails, shopify analytics dashboards, discount codes?

Does it also let you embed facebook pixel and google analytics seamlessly between the webflow and shopify sides of the store?

Thank you for your insight!