Of course as a Shopify “partner” your perspective revolves around the need to protect your own income flow from whatever subscription based apps you yourself sell that address shopify’s intentional shortcomings, so pardon me if I don’t engage in a long debate about the philosophy of what an e-commerce provider should and shouldn’t do, I have a more immediate need: functionality. Something as simple as creating a page on my site that is not viewable unless you have the URL for that page. I consider that basic functionality as it was something I was easily able to achieve when I did all my own coding for my site before switching to shopify, where that functionality is locked behind a paywall. The bottom line is, whenever I search for functionality to address an issue or to add a needed feature the answer always comes back: Shell out more money to rent that functionality from someone else, waste hours, days or even weeks sorting out how to “do it yourself” or buzz off.
I signed up for Shopify under the impression that I was engaging with a platform that is dedicated to helping streamline both my front-facing online store and my back end website management which would leave me more time to increase customer engagement and retention and secure increased conversion rates. What I increasingly find myself engaged with is a platform that is dedicated to providing basic functionality and an artificial marketplace where 3rd party devs can rent everything else back to me while Shopify takes a cut of the income and doesn’t have to do any of the actual work. This is not the experience I expected and the fact that I’m still using Shopify is only a result of my own lack of motivation to dedicate the time to switching to another service. But every time I try to implement a feature on my website and find the same old “You should look at this app for $10/mo!” reply I’m reminded to update my “to do” list.