A 2023 Summary Of Shopify's UK Reviews

Shopify is one of the largest ecommerce platforms in the UK and is used by tens of thousands of UK businesses. It is the largest software as a service provider for ecommerce. But how well do its users and ecommerce specialists rate its functionality and customer service?.

Shopify Reviews on Trustpilot

Trustpilot is one of the best known review websites and a place where anyone who has a genuine buying experience with a company can leave their own review. Many ecommerce platforms score well on Trustpilot for customer service and functionality, but Shopify scores particularly badly.

At the time of writing this article, Shopify.co.uk has 704 reviews on Trustpilot but only an average score of 1.4/5.0 making it one of the worst ecommerce services reviewed on Trustpilot and the worst of the ecommerce platforms.

Shopify haven't claimed their Trustpilot profile and a few of their collections of websites are reviewed on Trustpilot, we've put in the average scores for each profile below.

What are Trustpilot reviewers complaining about?

Looking through the reviews many merchants complain about Shopify shutting their websites down without any prior warning or notification. This is possibly where those merchants are selling products/services that whilst not illegal, are against Shopify's terms and conditions. For example, merchants selling CBD or vaping products.

Many users also complain that when using Shopify payments they find that remittances (of money paid by their customers to the merchant) have been suspended or heavily delayed whilst Shopify "investigate". Its difficult to judge the exact circumstances of reviews like this, and whilst Shopify do have the ability to claim their Trustpilot profile and reply to the reviews they've chosen not to.

Many of the reviews also complain about poor customer service from Shopify. Many mention that the Shopify support team have been unable, or unwilling, to answer questions that they have. They complain that they've often been directed to a third party to get support, such as the Shopify app developer.

Shopify Reviews on G2

G2 is a software review platform, more specialised towards online services than Trustpilot. Shopify has claimed their profile on G2, perhaps because they have favourable ratings on their.

At the time of writing, Shopify has 3,938 reviews on G2 and scores an impressive 4.4/5.0 stars.

G2 provides more information about Shopify's services and has more detailed reviews than are available on Trustpilot. Some users have chosen to post video reviews as well.

On G2, the reviews are mostly positive with users praising Shopify's platform, functionality and features and also the customer service that's offered by the support team. Its strange that the reviews on Trustpilot and G2 can be so different but one possible explanation might perhaps be found in the fact that Shopify have claimed their G2 profile and perhaps prefer to direct happy customers to this platform to leave a positive review, and allow negative reviews to accumulate on Trustpilot - but this is just a guess.

A similar pattern can be found with other ecommerce platforms as well. For example, BigCommerce's Trustpilot profile is also unclaimed and they are rated as 1.9/5.0 from 342 reviews - whereas on G2 they have 417 reviews and score 4.2/5.0. Its probably advisable for prospective Shopify customers to read a range of reviews on both Trustpilot and G2 to get a fair assessment of real customer experiences.

Shopify Reviews on other websites

Websites like ecommerceceo.com and ecommerce-platforms.com host detailed product reviews of Shopify that have been conducted by a specialist ecommerce/software review professional.

It should be noted that, in the most part, these reviews are paid for or sponsored by Shopify in some way and the websites receive a commission when a new user signs up for an account on Shopify as a result of having read the review and clicked through to the Shopify website. But we can assume that the commercial relationship that exists between the review company and Shopify does not affect the overall review given of the ecommerce platform itself.

It's also worth noting that both of these sites allow visitors to leave their own reviews about Shopify. On ecommerceceo.com, the user rating is just 2.3/5.0 (from 36 reviews) but the review score is 4.2/5.0 - indicating that users of Shopify rate the platform and customer support much lower than the review website itself does.

Conclusions

There is a clearly a disparity between Shopify's reviews on professional websites, where an author has written an in-depth review examining the features and functionality of Shopify's platform - and the reviews Shopify receives on websites like Trustpilot.

Wherever Shopify user reviews are available they, are a mixed-bag at best but mostly poor. When users of Shopify review the platform and customer experience they often complain about bad customer service, various problems using the service or platform, and general problems. Whereas when review websites/professional review Shopify they praise the functionality available, the features on offer and the range of apps and integrations available.

It should be noted that many online reviews from professionals are probably written with the aim of attracting readers to sign up for a Shopify account, build a Shopify store and start paying Shopify a monthly fee - because that's how the review websites earn money (i.e. they earn a commission for each new user they refer to Shopify). We'd therefore always advise users to read reviews with this in mind.

Shopify reviews very often don't mention the true cost of Shopify. They might advertise the headline £25/month rate but they don't talk about transaction fees, app charges or theme costs.

You can read more about these hidden costs in our article, how much does Shopify cost?, where we examine these points in more detail.

We've also set out the differences between our own platform, ShopWired in comparison with Shopify, in our main article ShopWired - the UK alternative to Shopify.

Another popular platform in the UK is EKM, we've reviewed EKM vs Shopify too which you can read here.