I am new to Shopify and in the process of building my first store on the 14-day trial. After doing a lot of work, all the integrations with accounting, Amazon Pay, and other things, I thought that setting up shipping would be the easy part. I am astonished that the shipping functionality is so limited. With the Basic plan, it is “one box fits all”, which I can’t imagine suits anyone’s needs. It’s truly pathetic and I can’t believe that it can’t even provide the most basic functionality. Why wouldn’t you simply enter the box size and weight for each product in their respective product profiles? I could see the added functionality of packaging multiple items in the same/different sized box or some other decision tree calculations for a multi-line item order as being an “advanced” feature and costing extra. Even eBay can calculate shipping from all major carriers for free based on the weight and package size you enter. And Shopify can’t? So each product can’t have it’s own associated box size? Really? Come on now. I am really disappointed so far and considering dumping this before the 14-days are up. I never thought to investigate this functionality when comparing ecommerce platforms.
As I have gone through each step of setting up this online store, I feel nickel-and-dimed to death. Shopify should change their slogan to: “There’s an app for that.” Seriously, looking at the Shopify offering from an outsiders perspective, how can a “fully featured” ecommerce product have a thriving third-party app store just to enable basic functionality like this. Paying extra for themes that third-party developers are selling is something that enticed me to pick Shopify and makes sense. Paying for a third-party app that handles basic shipping information and calculations is just absurd and unacceptable. Lastly, service providers like UPS provide robust API kits for developers. So it’s not like this is a herculean task to add this. I hope that Shopify reads these posts and improves their product instead of enhancing their app store.