Have you wondered why “Shopify Alternatives” is a steadily trending search term since January 2021? The timing is no coincidence. With Shopify’s 2021-01 API release, the eCommerce community is talking about what they can do to have more flexibility and more autonomy without compromising their business strategy due to Shopify’s limitations. The biggest hit to merchant strategy with the latest release was the Shopify checkout takeover. See the excerpt below from the Shopify terms of use that outline their latest changes:
If you’re searching for “Shopify Alternatives,” you may be aware of the previous options for the checkout experience which empowered third-party vendors to plug into the Shopify API and provide a seamless downstream experience for a variety of pivotal functions: recurring billing, advanced transaction routing, upsell testing, subscription offer configuration, dunning strategy, and more.
Shopify cut off an ecosystem of specialized solutions built with merchant flexibility and performance in mind (see Option B above), thus forcing merchants to use the Shopify Checkout experience exclusively. With significantly limited features standing on its own, merchants are unhappy with Shopify Checkout and are seeking Shopify alternatives as a result. Here are their top 6 reasons for switching.
Top 6 Reasons to Consider Shopify Alternatives:
1. Lack of Payment Routing Flexibility
As a scaling eCommerce business, flexibility in your payments provider becomes increasingly important. Most scaling merchants want to have more than one payment processor so they can negotiate their rates, have a direct relationship, and most importantly to mitigate the financial risk of having all their eggs in one basket. To accomplish this, you need a system that supports logic-based rules to route payments to multiple payment processors. The January 2021 API changes remove the ability for merchants to take over the checkout and force merchants to rely on one Shopify white-labeled merchant processing account.
2. Limited Upsell Testing
When Shopify took over the checkout process a whole landscape of strategy was taken away from the eCommerce merchant. Cart abandonment, dynamic upsell strategy, post-cart upsell and more are vital conversion rate optimization testing grounds to increase Average Order Value (AOV) with every purchase. In an attempt to offer these features, Shopify requires you use external apps to achieve these strategies, but the end result is disjointed customer data from disparate platforms (along with additional expenses). Leading merchants are finding they would rather have a singular headless commerce solution to optimize their front-end experience.
3. Restricted Subscription Offer Settings
Different merchants need different subscription offer configuration schedules based on the average consumption rate of their product type. Many folks are considering Shopify alternatives because they need to test different subscription schedules outside of just monthly, quarterly, and bi-annual shipments. Not offering flexibility in your offer schedule could result in a spike in customer cancellations.
4. One-size-fits-all Dunning strategy
Again, Shopify will try to force merchants to rely on apps that don’t allow for strategic testing of dunning collection strategies. Sublytics customers have recovered up to 20% of their revenue through strategically testing their Dunning campaigns. Like any other campaign – leading merchants want accurate, unified data and the ability to A/B test cadences to see which combinations work best for reducing passive churn.
5. Limited Speed and Performance Control
eCommerce merchants should be targeting a checkout page load speed of under 2 seconds. If you’re looking to optimize the notoriously slow Shopify checkout pages, you’ll have to upgrade to Shopify plus where even then you’ll be limited in your optimizations. You want full control over every lever you can pull by focusing on your eCommerce conversion rate optimization strategy. Don’t get stuck with bloated 4 second cart and checkout page load times that result in lost sales. You don’t have time for slow page load times, it’s time to consider Shopify alternatives.
6. Disjointed User Experience
When you’re investing time and effort into your end-to-end eCommerce solution you will want to make sure that the lifeline of your business is safe and sound. The moment an order is placed, a complex series of back-end actions take place to make sure your cash is collected safely and the correct product gets to your customer on time. With no unified vision in mind, there is no way to efficiently troubleshoot any critical issues that arise in your store because your business relies on multiple apps built by different businesses that were never designed to function together cohesively. With the sheer mass of Shopify, the ever growing combination of apps and multiple support centers , you’re left with no central point for support.
There is a lot to consider in seeking the right end-to-end eCommerce solution for your business, and the thought of switching should raise a lot of questions. Contact Sublytics today if you’re ready to learn about your options, determine a data migration strategy, take back control of your checkout, and seamlessly switch from Shopify. Scale your eCommerce business with a white-glove dedicated customer success team, here to help you every step of the way.
