Can you use Shopify for non ecommerce?

There’s so many content management system’s (CMS) out there now, there are easily over 100! It raises the question of which one you should be using and which is best for your site’s needs. You may also be wondering, can you use Shopify for non ecommerce?

Well, the short answer is yes! But you should understand what Shopify is best suited for and why it might not be the best solution for a non e-commerce store.

What is Shopify best suited for?

Shopify is a near perfect content management system for e-commerce purposes, it has so many built in features that really take your online store to the next level. It helps the store owner to get a deeper understanding of how their customers are using their store and how they could improve it.

Can you use shopify for non ecommerce? The pros of using Shopify

If you are thinking of Shopify then there are a number of pros to using the software, let’s go through them now:

Shopify Checkout

Shopify’s checkout system is fantastic, thousands of hours have gone into designing a straight forward and easy to use checkout system that has pretty low user drop outs. This is great when it comes to your conversion rates as it reduces the chances of customers pulling out of the purchase.

It’s also become really familiar to users as so many stores are now built on Shopify, this means that customers already know how to use it and it will also save some of their details across multiple websites.

Analytics

If you are wondering, Can you use shopify for non ecommerce? Then the analytics are definitely one of the reasons that you are considering using it as your CMS. Shopify has spent a great deal of time in the best way of tracking users around the site.

When you are using Shopify you can easily see which pages your customers are using and when, and for how long, giving great insight into where and why users are leaving the site. However, if this is one of the reasons you are thinking of using Shopify for non ecommerce then there are many alternatives out there such as Google Analytics.

- [ ] can you use shopify for non ecommerce - Analytics

Can you use shopify for non ecommerce? Yes, but don’t! The Cons

Whilst you can use shopify for non ecommerce, it is not recommended. At the end of the day it is built for ecommerce for a reason, everything about Shopify is tailored to selling products.

Ranking confusion

By using Shopify as your CMS, you are going to have a lot of pages that are created and not used. This can cause confusion for search engines as it’s not always clear what type of website you are wanting to market to users.

An online blog wouldn’t usually have a checkout, but if you use Shopify, then Google will see that yours does and may try and rank it for search terms relating to the selling of products rather than what your blog is explaining.

Costs involved

Shopify is not a free platform, there’s actually a monthly cost that comes with using Shopify, depending on the size of your website and number of visitors would determine which plan would be used. Shopify’s plans range from £19/month up to £249/month, but the higher plans are to reduce the cost per transaction.

If a website isn’t using the ecommerce features of Shopify then this is really quite expensive for hosting, and much cheaper plans are available. For hosting plans we recommend using Krystal for quick but well priced hosting plans.

So, Can you use shopify for non ecommerce?

Yes, but don’t! There’s so many alternatives out there that would be so much better for your website. We would recommend using WordPress where you can, it provides an easy to use, open source and most importantly free platform to manage your content.

Using WordPress would also get you access to all of the fantastic plugins that WordPress offers. It will also reduce the monthly maintenance costs that would come with using Shopify or other paid platforms.

If you are looking to set up a website, why not have a look at our guide which goes through in small, easily explained steps on how to setup a WordPress website. If you are looking at a headless approach you can read our guide on that as well.