Hi,
Firstly, this is just the ramblings of one disgruntled customer - there are many others who have experienced the lies and deceit that I'm going to explain, below.
If you don't have a large inventory, this probably isn't relevant to you, but it will give you an insight into the company you're looking to give your hard earned cash to.
If you do have a large inventory, there are some things that you should know.
On the pricing \ plans page it states "Unlimited Products". This isn't necessarily true.
They have duplicitously missed out an asterisk and a footnote here. Unlimited products is only true if you are uploading directly from the Shopify webpage. If you are using an API there is a limit, but you don't find out about this until you reach it. In this time, you've spent months of learning and building the website.
So, after months of hard work and time, you receive an error message telling you that you've gone over your 50K variant limit. Contrary to the "Unlimited products" statement, you can now only list 1000 variations a day. What do you do if you're not even close to uploading your full inventory?
There are three options.
1. You can ask for an extension, which seems hard to get when reading the comments of others that have been mis-sold this product.
2. You can throw away all your hard work and start again on a platform like Wordpress.
3. As we chose to do, you can pay for Shopify+. This is $2,300 a month for a minimum of a year (we only had to pay for the year, but now you have to pay for a three year term).
Let's say that you feel pot-committed and decide to go for the Shopify+ option. It's a lot of money, but it will get the job done right? Yes and no. It will give you time to upload your full inventory, but then you will want to drop down to a cheaper plan.
This is where the next deceit comes in.
Again, from the pricing and plans page, you'll see that it states "Unlimited web hosting" and "unlimited bandwidth and storage". This is another lie.
You've dropped down to the lower tier pricing plan, and you're just adding a few new products each day. All of a sudden you'll get error message - "you've exceeded your storage limit". You will probably contact Shopify and tell them that the all the plans state unlimited storage. You'll then be told that unlimited storage doesn't mean unlimited storage. Confused? Me too.
As the error message had only just appeared, it would seem reasonable to think that if you upgrade to the next plan the error message would be removed. It might not be.
You might contact customer support and explain the situation, but they won't be able to tell you what your current storage is. Yes, you read that correctly. They know that you've exceeded the "unlimited storage", but they won't be able to tell you by how much. They will tell you to delete some products or upgrade the plan, further. Without going onto Shopify+ again, you just won't know how many product you should delete or which other plan to try.
So, "unlimited products" aren't unlimited, and there is, infact, a storage limit. But hey, how can you have unlimited products if you can't add an image?
Since I began this journey of being bent-over, Shopify have amended the description written below the "Unlimited products" heading. I can't remember exactly what it was before, but they've changed it to "Sell as many products and services as you want". This isn't what "unlimited products" typically means - so it seems that they've done this to create a kind of plausible deniability value. The title suggest one thing, but the description, another. I mean, why say that we can sell as many products as we want? That's a simple given.
Despite the fact that so many people have complained about the mis-selling of the product, Shopify have done nothing to be more transparent, which has to be considered proof of a willfulness to deceive.
To summarise, Shopify use a lot of deception \ smoke and mirrors to get you to sign up, and then sting you with the hidden costs or limitations once you've put so much time and effort into growing your business.
It's one big trap.
If only one person reads this and doesn't have to go through what so many others have been through, it will be worth it.
Maybe, if enough people complained to Trading Standards, something could be done about this.
