Ecommerce platform

Shopify

Also covers Shopify Plus.

Choose it when you want to sell quickly and let somebody else own uptime, payments and PCI. Reconsider when your pricing is different for every customer.

Shopify removes an entire category of work from your plate: servers, patching, PCI scope, checkout security. For most businesses that trade is obviously worth it.

The question is not whether Shopify is good. It is whether the things it does not do are things your business needs.

Reviewed August 22, 2026.

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What it is good at

You are not running a platform
No servers, no patch windows, no PCI scope on checkout. The hours you would spend maintaining Adobe Commerce go into selling instead, and that is a real saving rather than a marketing one.
Checkout is the best in the business
It converts, it is relentlessly tested at a scale nobody else has, and you are not allowed to break it. That last part is a feature.
Time to live is measured in weeks
A straightforward store can be trading in weeks. On Adobe Commerce the same store is a project.

Where it falls short

Complex B2B pricing fights the model

Per-customer price lists, contract pricing and approval workflows are possible on Shopify Plus B2B, and they are noticeably less flexible than what Adobe Commerce does natively. Past a certain complexity you are building around the platform rather than with it.

Wrong for:
Distributors whose price is negotiated per account and changes per contract.
What helps:
Shopify Plus B2B covers a lot of it now. The honest test is to take your three most awkward pricing scenarios to a build and see if they survive.

The app bill is the real platform cost

Capability you would get natively elsewhere arrives as apps, each with a monthly fee, its own update cycle and its own opinion about checkout. Ten apps is a second platform cost and a second failure surface.

Wrong for:
Teams that budget the platform fee and forget the stack that has to sit on top of it.
What helps:
Price the apps you actually need during evaluation, not after launch. It changes the comparison more often than people expect.

You are a tenant

You cannot change checkout beyond what the platform allows, you cannot self-host, and pricing and policy changes are not yours to make.

Wrong for:
Businesses that need to own the source or run a checkout nobody else has.
What helps:
For most merchants this is a good trade. It is only a problem if the constraint sits exactly where your differentiation does.

Who should choose it

Right for

  • Brands and D2C sellers who want to launch fast and stay lean
  • B2B sellers whose pricing is consistent or lightly tiered
  • Teams with no appetite for owning infrastructure
  • Stores where conversion matters more than deep customisation

Wrong for

  • Per-contract pricing negotiated account by account
  • Catalogs whose structure needs custom data modelling
  • Anyone who needs to own and self-host the code

What it costs

Build
$35k–120k
Platform / year
$30k–40k
Per integration
$6k–20k
Maintenance / year
$12k–30k

These are planning estimates, not quotes. Real costs depend on your data, custom features, integrations, and team. Use the ranges to budget and compare, then talk to us for a scoped number.

Model your own numbers against your revenue and catalog size.

Our record with it

Hours
747
Clients
12
Since
2018

We build on it, integrate with it, and have moved a store onto it from Magento, so we can tell you honestly which direction that trade runs for you.

A Magento to Shopify migration we ran

Questions about Shopify

Can Shopify handle B2B?

Yes, and with real limits. Shopify Plus B2B supports company accounts, catalogs and price lists. Where it struggles is deeply negotiated per-account pricing and multi-step approval workflows, which Adobe Commerce handles natively.

Is Shopify cheaper than Adobe Commerce?

Usually, and less than the sticker difference suggests. The platform fee is lower and the maintenance burden is much lower, but apps add a recurring cost that is easy to leave out of a comparison.

Should I move from Magento to Shopify?

It depends on why Magento is hurting. If it is maintenance burden and you do not use the B2B depth, moving is often right. If your pricing rules or catalog structure are the reason you are on Magento, you will rebuild them as apps and be no better off.

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Tell us what you're building.

Answer a few quick questions about your store and what's holding you back, and we'll come to the call already knowing your setup and where we'd start. We build ecommerce and custom web apps for B2B manufacturers, distributors, and marketplaces, with deep Adobe Commerce and Magento expertise.

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