So we’ve just had the pleasure of building my first Shopify application for a client project.  Am I impressed?  Very.  Very, very impressed.

For e-commerce sites I have built in the past I’ve reached for WordPress and a range of e-commerce plug-ins I either recommend to clients based on their individual requirements.  Generally the sites I have built were bespoke sites for small organisations or individuals.  The solutions have always worked well and been successful.  Wordpress is a great solution and so well supported that is generally a no-brainer for me to recommend.

The latest commission from a client however gave me a little pause for thought as it was basically of a different scale altogether.  The client was a small one-man shop with limited internet experience and absolutely no previous experience of running any on-line systems yet there is a potential for the quantity of products to explode in quantity.  Obviously the performance of any web site is a combination of many factors from the code, the hosting infrastructure and the visitors internet connection to name just a few.  There are lots of ways of keeping WordPress performing well but there is a lot of custom configuration and infrastructure that is needed to turn a blogging engine into an e-commerce system and I didn’t want to overload the client with concerns.

Given this situation I decided to look over the various options for dedicated e-commerce platforms.  I looked over Velution, Big-Commerce and Shopify.  All are really very good platforms but we opted for Shopify as it worked out the cheapest and simplest for this particular project.  Buying into the Shopify system gives absolutely everything you need, right out of the box.  Even SSL is included as standard on the base plans which is really good.

Development of the custom theme was more or less complete within a day and setting up the rest of the back-end configuration was extremely simple.  We’re currently still working through this with the client but it is going really well and they are feeling really confident in their usage of the solution already.  So lenssniper has another happy customer.

If you’re looking for an on-line e-commerce system it’s well worth looking at Shopify and if you need assistance in getting your site designed and built, check out my lenssniper business and drop us a line.

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