@Derek,

Wow.. someone is having a bad day.

As a designer, or as I like to refer to them, those who draw pretty pictures, you have no idea how complicated software like Shopify is.

It’s like you taking your car to the garage to have your oil changed and then proudly declaring that you’re qualified to rebuild your engine.. two very different things.

Can you point out to the whole Shopify community here, these other solutions that are so much better and easier for people to use.. please.. can you .. please…

:)

Mhm, I was going to say…

Derek – I recommend you go to your shop admin interface and click on the “changelog” link at the bottom. You will find it an interesting read.

The reason you don’t get “updates” is that things are being improved all the time, with no big bells & whistles going off. We don’t have to get off the train at the border because we’re changing gauges; we just keep right on moving.

Just take this changelog entry from Nov.22 as an example:

Carts don’t have to be re-filled with items when a user decides to use the back button on the last step of the checkout anymore.

This is something that was requested a few times, the guys from JP went out and satisfied that request, but there was no big announcement, there was no thank you from anyone, and basically it just passed by completely unnoticed.

This is how things get done here.

Yes, and they do choose whose request they work on, in keeping with their own priorities and vision for their business. Which is not only legitimate but commendable. And I say this even though some of my own feature requests are now over a year old, and I don’t know whether I’ll ever get what I want. But I also realize I’m not the only customer around here, and possibly not one of the most important ones :).

And shopify is still the only e-commerce system I’d recommend.

HunkyBill and Christina said most of what I would have already.

I’ll just add this.

There are lots of things that I’d love to see in Shopify, but that doesn’t mean no work is being done on it or that the changes made aren’t good ones. It doesn’t mean even that the updates I want aren’t being worked on.

Part of what makes shopify so good is that Jaded Pixel is a small company where the principals can still frequent the message boards and give direct feedback. If they pushed out updates any faster than they do, the quality of the updates and the percentage of uptime for the service would suffer directly.

They would also have to hire more staff, which inevitably leads to a decline in quality control, etc, etc.

Cut ‘em a little slack, they put out a pretty darn good product for what we pay for it and the list of features that have been rolled out since the launch is actually pretty impressive. They work plenty hard up there.

Yea, a bad day spending an hour instead of 2 minutes entering one product because Shopify doesn’t support something as simple as product variant groups. My users now have the drop down from hell which they likely won’t want to use and thus not buy the product.

I suppose my beef is that they seem to be putting their efforts towards smaller items instead of core necessities. I had another thing which I wanted to do in Shopify. I searched the forums and saw that someone requested it back in Nov 2006. Tobi replied saying it was coming early 2007. We are almost in 2008 and the feature doesn’t work. I found more posts throughout the forum where Shopify programmers continually ask the community for hacks to get things to work within the current, limited system instead of saying “Hey, that’s a good idea – lets add that to our list”.

Shopify is a small group of programmers that continually work on stuff. So is 37signals – yet they have many products with massive feature additions (not just minor updates) much more regularly. They are good, but they should strive to be a lot better.

I checked out the Update Log – they seem to average an update every 5 days or so. Most of the updates are minor, and all additions are for payment gateways I’ve never heard of.

@HunkyBill… I am a designer now, however I used to be a programmer – that’s how I first got into the web. However, I found I make more money as a designer. I have developed a web-based website management system for soccer tournaments in less than 3 months myself. So I do know a bit about programming, time, scaling issues, etc. Also, Shopify is an extremely easy to use system – but it doesn’t have much to use since it lacks so many essential features (which I have come to realize after using more frequently). If you need what Shopify currently offers, it is hands down the best system out there.

@Christina – “And shopify is still the only e-commerce system I’d recommend.” Are you serious? What if a customer wanted features that just aren’t possible in Shopify such as customer reviews, rating system, email to a friend – there is no way you could recommend Shopify as the right solution for that client. You definitely can’t say those features are not useful. As I have said, Shopify is great – if you only need the limited features Shopify has. I really, REALLY want to recommend Shopify to every client because I love the templating system (God knows Zen Cart, X-Cart, etc are a nightmare to customize) but that just isn’t possible. Today I just realized that there are even fewer clients I can recommend Shopify to.

I’ve been following Shopify since it first started way back when. It really feels like they have been resting on their laurels lately and not trying to improve their product, but just add to it (and by that I mean payment gateways). After going through the forums I read a lot of people asking for the same thing over and over, dates going back a year, and yet nothing has happened. I guess in my mind, adding a core feature like product variant groups (I bring this one up repeatedly because it was really killed Shopify for me today) is something that would bring in more new customers and make more existing customers happy.

— Last edited 05:48AM, Dec 12, 2007

What other shopping carts have you tried? I’m just curious as to what else is out there that I might not have heard of.

I fully agree with Derek.

I’m switching to Magento (http://www.magentocommerce.com/) when the first stable version is released in Q1 2008.

Derek -

Yes, I am serious.

To me, the one main criterion for quality is flexibility, and that’s what we get with Shopify, as opposed to other systems. Flexibility is a “feature” that may perhaps not be as noticeable as an “email to friend” button, but in the hierarchy of things, the former can give rise to the latter, but not vice versa. And so, even if there are features that seem to be missing, you can either code them in yourself (email to friend), or add specialized third-party features (such as powerreviews for a review/rating feature, formassembly for forms/contact and so on). And some of these features may even be added on and integrated in the future, but if they are, it will be done in a cautious, intelligent way.

It would have been very easy for the Jaded Pixel crew just to clone one of those Soviet collective-farm size shopping carts which are not just difficult but impossible to customize completely. I’ve tried, I think it was the severely misnomed ZenCart, downloaded the Excel sheet(!!) describing the code files, and then proceeded to attempt to change them to my specs. Ha! I drilled down and cleaned up around 5 levels deep and then found that even the core code (better left untouched) was still spewing HTML from PHP. And that’s supposedly one of the user-friendlier ones! Rigidity manifest. Yes, it’s got all the features, and they come at the price of total sclerosis: you know the system will never improve; it is unsalvageable. So as far as I’m concerned, you can forget all those carts; programmers using them are condemning themselves to inbuilt obsolescence and heavy maintenance.

In contrast to this, what we have with Shopify is a very light, elegant system, which is far more intelligently coded; and the Jaded Pixel crew have been very consistent and deliberate about maintaining this beauty and strength and not giving in to calls for more features without evaluating how these would fit into the system without rigidifying it. And it is precisely this approach which allows Shopify to keep a high degree of mobility and adaptability, hence unbounded hopes for the future :).

The drawback is that it makes for a certain minimalism at times; and I understand your frame of mind. I’ve also on occasion been severely frustrated at not being able to do what I wanted, to the point of almost throwing in the towel. My perpetual complaint is the weakness of liquid as a templating language; let me reword: liquid is powerful enough, but along the principle that ignorance is dangerous we’re not being given all that power, but deliberately (I suspect) kept on a short leash. So I qvetch.

Your main complaint is not about a “feature”, however, but about one of the basic structural characteristics of this system: the flat data architecture, which translates into a lack of variant groups. This is something that cannot just be “added”: it would require a rethink of the system as a whole. As Tobi has publicly admitted that he hates relational databases, I don’t think we can expect a traditional, hierarchical architecture anytime soon. I agree with you in saying that, in the current implementation, this is a major limitation of the Shopify system: variant groups (color/size) are one of the most requested umm…features, and their absence can be severely restrictive for some shops for which such a hierarchical structure is vital, to the point where Shopify would perhaps not be recommended. However, I pity those shops because I wouldn’t know what to recommend to them instead, – hence my first comment still stands.

Some hacks have been developed to circumvent the variant difficulty. Hunky Bill has a javascript solution which is apparently greatly appreciated. I’ve developed another one in liquid, but I haven’t publicized it yet, because it’s quite labour-intensive and feels somewhat clunky on the admin end.

But these are hacks, and I think that sooner or later, JP is indeed going to have to seriously look into providing for integrated product hierarchies or live with permanently frustrated customers: it does seem quite surrealistic to tell someone: Shopify is an unprecedented, fantastically flexible system,...but of course you can’t choose a colour and a size at the same time!

Personally, I believe that none of us (as far as I can see) have been particularly creative in using the tags for structuring our shops, and I think there’s great potential there; I’m quite (though not 100%) confident that with more liquid capability and a few tweaks to the admin side, I could build up a template with efficient hierarchical product categories without any changes to the data structure. But then, so could Tobi & crew, hehe.

For example, it’s precisely this flat tag-based architecture, I believe, which made it possible for JP to build the Shopify marketplace. Have you looked at that recently? It’s amazing!! To my knowledge, no other e-commerce system has something like that. So, I think it’s extremely unfair to accuse JP of resting on their laurels. The mere fact that they’ve just conducted a customer survey to find out exactly what it is we want is proof to the contrary.

OK, I’m going to stop here.
And in the meantime, to help you get over your frustrations, here’s my Shopify mantra, which you can feel free to adopt:

I can’t do everything I want, but I don’t have to do anything I don’t want.

That actually applies to quite a number of things in my life – and I like it that way, considering the alternatives.

@Christina: Right on…

@Derek: If you spent 1 hour trying to add a Product to Shopify, I would suggest you outsource those tasks to someone more adept. Time is money my friend, we can’t all be experts at all things, and maybe as you say, you make more money drawing pretty pictures than dealing with scripts and logic.

@Anders: Go for Magneto my friend. For you, of course you must own your own servers and are an expert system administrator, competent with 24/7 monitoring of your database, backups, DNS, email and keeping things patched, PHP5 programming, javascript programming and SQL optimizations, Magneto is perfect!!!

@2TheComplainersGang =>

The whole point of Shopify is to provide a very cheap, simple system for people to sell their stuff..if you don’t get it, can’t figure it out, or have fun using it as it is.. stop complaining and go hang with the ZenCart, OSCommerce, Magento crowds.. and good luck to you… all this complaining makes it sound like you are actually paying a lot of money for something when you are NOT paying a dime…

Since when did being offered something like Shopify, to use for free, qualify you to whine and complain and slag, as if you’re the CEO of some multinational company and your profits are tanking due to a lazy and incompetent workforce. Civil discourse is much more productive. Peace.

— Last edited 03:46PM, Dec 12, 2007

@HunkyBill: plonk

I’m sorry that it seems that way. In reality we are busy as a beehive behind the scenes, its sad that this is not clear from the outside.

We are trying our best to work on the most important features but as our recent survey shows if you ask hundreds of people for Shopify’s missing killer feature you end up with almost zero duplication. Everyone wants different features and its for us to figure out ( the recent survey helps immensely ) what our customers really want. One thing which is clear from our survey is that it does not match up with the vocal requests on this forum.

Of course this is a commonly discussed phenomenon. Take for example this quite:

You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.
—Steve Jobs

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t ask your customers but no one asked us to create the Shopify Marketplace, yet many people’s sales improved since its creation.

Regarding the 37signals comparison: Their applications are excellent, we use almost every single one of them ( not tada list ) but the complexity of all their works combined is not half that of Shopify. They are just a lot better at marketing.
We often considered to queue up our features and than release them in big chunks like they do so that we can write spiffy articles and screencasts and the like, but this is not what our customers really need. In reality we deploy changes to Shopify several times a day. Those are often tiny changes to copy writing and sometimes massive chunks of code like the assets system. More often than not its behind the scenes stuff like dealing with bugs in payment gateways.

Anyways, the decision on whether or not to use Shopfiy should be made with the features which are already there, not the ones which are yet to come. If Shopify wasn’t a good fit for you without the features you hope we add than why did you go for it in first place?

We think Shopify kicks ass in its current shape for the majority of cases and we constantly add more features which make it kick ass in less common use cases. Variant groups are an example of something which seems utterly important when you sell certain products but isn’t interesting at all if you sell one off jewelry.

Also don’t forget that we also have to keep Shopify running which is no small feat. All the shopify stores combined get an insane amount of traffic. There are sophisticated caching systems in shopify which need constant tweaking and there is a lot of hardware which can fail at any time and so on. The changelog is not the full story. Contrary to Yahoo Stores Shopify had no issues at all dealing with cyber monday and black friday sales. Yesterday there were some hick ups at 1 am EST which were related to a store having products with over 6k variants. We optimized Shopify for the case and now the issue is solved for everyone. This is how our daily business looks like.

@Anders: 100 geek points for knowing plonk . I’m around the internet for ever but had to wikipedia it :)

— Last edited 05:43PM, Dec 12, 2007

Shopify kicks ass in it’s current form for what it provides. I guess I disagree with how you choose your priorities for future improvements/additions. I personally feel it is not missing a “killer feature” but a lot of basic ones which are available in every other cart system. Although Shopify’s system is really easy to get setup and customize the look of, when it’s missing basic things it makes it hard to recommend it as the right solution for clients. If you need a quick website setup with basic features for a small upfront cost – Shopify is ideal.

— Last edited 06:42PM, Dec 12, 2007

By the way, I do still like Shopify. In fact, for the current project I’m working on I started in Zen Cart (because the client already has his site run by it) but convinced him to use Shopify instead. Unfortunately I didn’t realize there were no variant groups and with his products have 3 things to select from (color/size/badge), each with up to 5 different things to select – it quickly adds to up 50+ options and creates the drop down from hell for users to find the right combination they are looking for.

This discussion brings up good points on both sides. Shopify is ideal for most ecommerce situations. You really need to sit down with your clients and discuss their needs and expectations in order to ascertain whether Shopify is going to be the right choice for them. There are some things it’s lacking which have been pointed out time and time again. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any timeframe for implementing these or any indication that they will ever be implemented.

Take for instance the shipping module. Yes, it’s very flexible and allows you to set up basically any shipping situation you can imagine. But on the downside it’s so flexible that there really is no structure to setting it up, nor sufficient documentation of the options and how to go about arranging them. The average user has no idea how to set it up and even as a designer, I struggle with the shipping function.

@HunkyBill: I don’t know about anyone else, but I take offense to you categorizing design as nothing more then “drawing pretty pictures”. I’m not equating it to programming, but there’s a lot more involved then you seem to be giving us credit for. Designers like myself design the sites and also hand-code the structure behind them. It’s not exactly a cake-walk…

— Last edited 08:28PM, Dec 12, 2007

@meashman

Relax… I write here for fun, as an involved member of the community. Why take everything so seriously. You honestly think I am trying to offend you, or any other designer out there… Do I have to put a little smiley beside every little jibe to make sure I don’t hurt anyone’s feelings.

My posts by and large are to the point and are there to help others. I get a lot of email thanking me. When I dare to have a little fun.. you get offended.

As a hard core programmer I have to work hand in hand with designers all the time. I have seen it all my friend. I am unable to draw pretty pictures, I am stick-man maestro.

I think the world of web applications is quite rightly divided into two camps.. those who code, and those who draw… so what.. it’s not a put down.. it just is.. if you can code and draw.. great.

Nowadays you cannot work as a designer unless you understand CSS thoroughly (or your sites probably suck a little in terms of size and browser compliance) and to understand CSS you must be pretty darn smart. So there…

I give you all the due credit you deserve…

Peace an Love my friend… it’s all about sunshine…

Sorry if I over reacted…I do that sometimes! It’s hard to distinguish from a few words on the screen what the intent is behind them. I would still like to point out that Designers do a lot more then draw pretty pictures.

But that’s not really the issue at hand…so I apologize for getting the thread off topic.