I had to log into my account again to turn off the emails for this thread so I thought I would provide an update before leaving for good.
I hadn’t launched my store yet so I decided to jump ship before investing any more time in Shopify. Almost all my questions were met with something like: “buy this app that costs more than the plan…” and when I read this forum all the users that had the same questions I did on various issues all noted that nothing ever gets fixed or improved. From Shopify’s perspective, it’s genius. They don’t have to employ programmers to make their platform work, and instead, get paid by third-party developers to put their software on their app store. I wish I thought of a business where my employees paid me…
I am sure this will get my post deleted, but I switched to Shift4Shop (formerly 3dcart). Their top tier plan is “free”, as long as you use their payment provider exclusively, giving them ~3% revenue on all your sales. You are probably already doing that now here on Shopify (+apps +your monthly sub fees). I had to drop Amazon Pay but oh well. The templates on Shift4Shop leave a lot to be desired at this point but can be customized and will hopefully get better over time. They let you add as many box sizes as you want and specify a % fill (how much of the box that can hold product to account for padding. If you add the dimensions of your products in as well, it will calculate what box(es) you need to use. Integrations for all the major shipping providers are provided with the free plan and it provides real time shipping rates (I have only set up UPS so far and it works). For me, Shift4Shop was superior package at a much lower price point (basically free). Switching platforms was my solution to all the problems and limitations I encountered on Shopify.
Shopify: You aren’t going to be able to profit from both your users and app developers forever. You should address this obvious conflict of interest. Given that you won’t exist without the users, it’s seems obvious who you should pick. Maybe watch Tron and get the lesson…