Shopify vs Joomla ecommerce

Shopify has proven to be an ecommerce platform for actual business owners, not designers or developers. Our previous ecommerce was difficult to customize and difficult to navigate and update. Where we were saving a little money on the month to month payment, we were paying with our time and sales. With Shopify, our site is the best it's ever looked (without hiring an expensive designer), and we are finally selling our products online, which our fans have been begging for year after year!

I just found out about Shopify last week and have spent some time with it. It looks like they offer everything under one roof with apps that could give us similar functionality at a fraction of the cost of what I'm spending now.

Developing custom eCommerce solutions can often be a long and expensive process. For a small percentage-based fee, Shopify instantly provides everything needed for a basic web shop including hosting. It's a joy to use, easy to set up and the administration interface beautifully designed.

I have been absolutely blown away by Shopify. It is everything that an ecommerce platform should be. We realised that we needed something more stable and robust. Something that could scale and support our growth.

There are many things that we love about Shopify, and we feel like we are only scratching the surface of it's potential. The advantages of Shopify over Joomla ecommerce so far are:

• Shopify is a hosted solution, so I no longer have to maintain servers, apply software updates & worry about security issues.
• Shopify is a dedicated ecommerce platform, whereas Joomla ecommerce is an extension to the CMS. The problem with this is that Joomla is not actually built for ecommerce.
• Shopify themes / customisation is so simple & powerful. Joomla does have a good templating engine, but Shopify blows everything out of the water with it's liquid templating language.
• Shopify is super fast. Joomla ecommerce can be quite sluggish