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:
- Itâs 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 donât 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
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 canât get an eCommerce site in Webflow up and running. Itâs 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 âadd to cartâ I canât see whatâs going on, which makes it impossible for me to implement traditional eCommerce marketing strategies like retargeting, sending âabandon cartâ emails etc. - Itâs 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, doesnât 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 doesnât allow for digital downloads and upsells etc.
Those are my two cents for people wondering if they should use the Shopify integration.
Cheeeeeers,
Connor