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E-commerce

Shopify

Portrait of Robert Klimant, co-founder of Roelu Studio
Robert KlimantCo-founder

What is Shopify?

Shopify is a hosted e-commerce platform that gives merchants a storefront, checkout, payments, and back-office tools as a single subscription service. Brands set up a store, pick a theme, plug in apps from the Shopify App Store, and start selling without managing servers. Shopify hosts everything, processes payments via Shopify Payments or third-party gateways, and handles updates, security patches, and PCI compliance automatically.

Why it matters

Shopify is brilliant at the zero-to-ten-million stage. The checkout converts. The dashboard is sane. Apps cover most edge cases. But the same hosted model that gets you live in a week becomes the ceiling later. You pay per transaction. You inherit the theme's performance budget. You bend your data model to fit Liquid. When a brand's product, content, or merchandising logic gets specific, Shopify Plus pricing climbs and the platform starts saying no. That is when teams look at headless or composable setups — keep Shopify's checkout, own the rest. Or move entirely to something open-source.

How it works

You sign up, pick a plan, and choose a theme from the Shopify Theme Store or hire a partner to customize one. Products, variants, and inventory live in Shopify's admin. Checkout runs on Shopify's own infrastructure, which is why most brands keep it even when they go headless. Apps from the marketplace extend functionality for reviews, subscriptions, loyalty, and shipping. For more control, developers use the Storefront API to build a custom front-end in Next.js or Shopify's own Hydrogen framework, while leaving Shopify to handle the cart, payment, fraud screening, and order data. Hosting, PCI compliance, and updates are Shopify's job.

Related terms

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