Shopify Review 2026: our agency's verdict

Review updated on August 20, 2026.

Our Shopify review comes down to one number: 9/10. After more than 100 stores delivered since 2018 and two brands we run ourselves on the platform, Shopify remains the solution we recommend by default to French brands. Only one criterion really falls short, and it has been the same one for two years: the quality of Shopify support.

This page was updated in August 2026 with the current official pricing, the new features from the Spring '26 Edition, and an analysis nobody else does: why the 1.3/5 rating Shopify shows on Trustpilot says absolutely nothing about the platform.

Our rating: 9/10, broken down by criterion

Here is how we rate Shopify in August 2026, criterion by criterion, based on our client projects and our own brands:

Average across the ten criteria: 9.0/10. Customer service is the only item rated below 9. This table sums up Shopify's pros and cons as we measure them in the field: everything else, from costs to conversion rate, explains why we have built our business on this platform since 2018.

Why Shopify shows 1.3/5 on Trustpilot

It is the first number you will come across when looking for a Shopify review, and it is the most misleading one on the market. As of August 19, 2026, the shopify.com page on Trustpilot shows 1.3/5 from 5,008 reviews. Enough to make you close the tab right away. Except that these reviews aren't about the platform.

We read the recent reviews one by one. They describe parcels never delivered, sellers who can't be reached, defective products, refused refunds. In other words: shoppers unhappy with a store, who rate Shopify because that is the name they saw at checkout or on their bank statement. Almost none of these reviews come from a merchant who uses the tool.

The comparison is conclusive once you look at who rates what, on the same platform and on the same date:

The pattern is obvious: every service whose name is shown to the end consumer collapses to between 1.1 and 1.4, while those only the site owner handles score above 3.5. This isn't a ranking of software quality, it is a ranking of exposure to the general public. A second, lesser-known bias: Wix and Squarespace subscribe to Trustpilot and actively invite their satisfied customers to leave reviews. Shopify doesn't, and Trustpilot itself notes on the page that the company hasn't recently invited its customers to review it. As a result, the page only collects spontaneous complaints.

Where should you look instead? Where merchants are the ones doing the rating. On G2, Shopify scores 4.4/5 from 5,130 reviews, checked on the same day, August 19, 2026. A three-point gap for the same company at the same moment: the question to ask about any Shopify review is never the score, it is who is giving it. If you want to form your own opinion, Shopify's Trustpilot page is public: read ten reviews at random and you will see.

Forums, Reddit, .myshopify.com: where to read genuine Shopify reviews

Three sources keep coming up in searches, and they are not equal. Forums and Reddit threads about Shopify give you reviews from real merchants, but almost always about a specific case: an app bug, a billing question, a dispute. Useful for settling a technical point, not enough to judge the platform as a whole. Verified review platforms like G2 or Capterra offer the opposite: a broad sample of merchants, but little detail. Trustpilot, as we have just seen, only measures exposure to the general public.

That leaves the most common misunderstanding. A .myshopify.com address is neither a sign of reliability nor a red flag for a scam: it is simply the technical domain assigned to every store when it is created, before the merchant connects their own domain name. Looking for a myshopify review therefore makes no sense. What you are looking for is a customer review of the specific store behind it, not of Shopify. We see this confusion every month, and it is exactly what feeds Trustpilot's 1.3/5.

Shopify's strengths, seen from the field

An ecosystem that grows faster than your needs

Shopify is growing so fast that it draws thousands of third-party developers, app publishers and theme creators in its wake. The contrast with our early days is striking: in 2018, we sometimes struggled to find an app for a specific functional need. In 2026, there are often dozens of highly rated alternatives for the same feature. The direct consequence for merchants: you can almost always find a ready-made solution, which limits the need for custom development and keeps both technical complexity and the associated costs under control. Our selection of apps that really make a difference also helps you avoid piling up apps for nothing.

The best-positioned platform for agentic commerce

This is the real novelty of 2026, and also our boldest stance of the year. A growing share of product searches no longer goes through Google but through ChatGPT, Perplexity or Copilot. Shopify took this turn before anyone else: a store's catalog is automatically structured and distributed to AI channels via Shopify Catalog, and purchases can now be completed directly in the conversation, with Shop Pay payment, thanks to the open Universal Commerce Protocol standard. Shopify says the product listings it distributes this way convert twice as well as data collected by scraping.

In practice, a Shopify merchant is present in these channels without writing a line of code or buying a module. On PrestaShop or WooCommerce, it is a technical project you have to fund. We have not seen any other vendor close this gap in 2026, and today it is the number one argument we give brands that are still hesitating. To understand what this changes strategically, our guide to agentic commerce details the mechanisms.

Native features that keep evolving

The native feature set grows twice a year, with each Shopify Edition, without the subscription price going up. The Spring '26 Edition alone brought more than 150 new features. The most telling example remains international selling: you no longer need Shopify Plus to sell abroad. Shopify Markets handles catalogs by market, multi-currency and local tax rules, and lets you adapt the theme experience market by market. Gone are the days when you had to clone and localize entire stores.

Two developments stood out in our projects this year: native B2B, now included in the standard plans (more on this below), and point of sale, with Shopify POS unifying online and in-store in a complete, robust checkout system.

Unbeatable administrative simplicity

Shopify means one point of contact and a single invoice at the end of the month. Hosting, security, payments, platform: everything is built in. This administrative simplicity seems trivial on paper, but it makes a real difference to business owners every day, especially compared with the pile of service providers that open source platforms require.

The best conversion rate on the market

This is our most telling data point: in 100% of the migrations our agency has carried out, the new Shopify store converts better than the old platform. Without exception since 2018. For its part, Shopify claims a checkout that converts on average 15% better than other platforms. The funnel is continuously optimized by entire teams dedicated to conversion, with Shop Pay as an accelerator, whose gross merchandise volume grew 53% year over year in the second quarter of 2026. No individual merchant, and no agency, can compete with this optimization effort pooled across millions of stores. We detail the levers in our guide to the 25 conversion levers.

Easy to learn for everyone

You don't need to be technical to understand and run a Shopify store. Most of our clients handle their day-to-day e-commerce completely on their own after a few hours of training. And the point comparisons never mention: even for an agency, taking over a store built by another agency is no problem at all. Nobody, on the other hand, wants to inherit a poorly documented Magento or PrestaShop site. This portability protects merchants: you are never locked in with your provider.

Shopify's real drawbacks

Customer service in clear decline, our real disappointment

This is the weak spot, and we say it all the more freely because we are a partner of the platform. Shopify is growing so fast that headcount is exploding and team turnover is high. In our early days, there was a real startup feel: tight-knit teams, all experts, and it wasn't hard to set up a video call with a technical lead for a demo. Today, Shopify has become a big machine. Even as a Plus agency, we no longer have a dedicated contact. Support often misses the point, and you can tell the subject isn't mastered: on complex technical cases, our team now has more expertise than most of the people we deal with at Shopify.

We have covered this separately, with our measured resolution times and the story of a case that cost us five days: see how to reach this support anyway, and above all what to do when it isn't enough.

The official support tiers confirm this experience. On Basic and Grow, support is limited to live chat. Advanced gives access to so-called enhanced chat. 24/7 priority phone support is reserved for the Plus plan. We sometimes stay stuck for several days on a platform-side issue, which was unthinkable just two years ago. It is this criterion, and this one alone, that costs the overall score a point. It is also why our clients go through our dedicated technical support rather than Shopify chat.

Limits that are still real

Three limits deserve an honest mention, because they are not going to change:

• Checkout is only fully customizable on Shopify Plus. Below that, you configure, you don't rewrite. For 95% of brands, it is a non-issue; for a very specific funnel, it is a dealbreaker.
• You depend on a proprietary vendor. It is the price of a platform that never goes down, and we accept it, but you should know it: you don't own the platform's code, only your theme and your data.
• Native translation remains limited. The free Translate & Adapt app only auto-translates two languages; any additional ones have to be entered by hand. For an ambitious multilingual rollout, you need to budget for a third-party solution like Weglot.

What is no longer a drawback in 2026

Most of the comparisons you will read repeat outdated criticisms. Two deserve correcting.

First, B2B. It is no longer reserved for Shopify Plus: company profiles, volume pricing and up to three B2B catalogs have been included in the standard plans since the Spring '26 Edition, at no extra cost. In the quarter ended June 30, 2026, Shopify's B2B gross merchandise volume grew 76% year over year, which says a lot about the module's maturity. We detailed how it works in our article on B2B on Basic, Grow and Advanced.

Next, transaction fees. They are systematically presented as a hidden tax. In practice, they only apply if you decline Shopify Payments: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced. With Shopify Payments enabled, they drop to zero and you only pay the card processing fee, detailed in the next section.

How much does Shopify really cost in 2026?

A Shopify bill comes down to four items: the subscription, the payment processing fee, apps and maintenance. With annual billing, as of August 19, 2026, the subscription is €27 a month on Basic, €79 on Grow and €289 on Advanced, and the standard online card rate is 1.5% + €0.25 on Basic, 1.3% + €0.25 on Grow and 1.1% + €0.25 on Advanced. The plan-by-plan breakdown, monthly billing and the threshold at which Shopify Plus becomes worthwhile are on our dedicated Shopify pricing page. What follows answers a different question: what a store really costs, all in, once it is taking payments.

Here is what three merchant profiles we work with actually pay, based on official pricing and the app budgets we see:

The takeaway is counterintuitive, and it is the one we repeat at every meeting: the subscription accounts for only about 10% of the bill once you reach a few tens of thousands of euros in sales. The real cost item is the payment processing fee. Choosing your plan by comparing €27 and €79 is therefore flawed reasoning: moving from Basic to Grow costs €52 more in subscription and saves 0.2 points in fees, which pays off from €26,000 in sales per month. Beyond that, the higher plan pays for itself.

Maintenance is worth a closer look. We charge our Shopify clients almost nothing for application maintenance, simply because there is nothing to fix. On an equivalent PrestaShop or Magento site, a monthly maintenance contract is the norm, and it runs to thousands of euros a year. It is this invisible line that tips the total cost of ownership in Shopify's favor, far more than the subscription price. To check the amounts at the source, the official Shopify France pricing is the authoritative source.

Who is Shopify for (or not)?

Shopify is the right choice if you are launching a DTC brand, if you are migrating from an aging platform that costs you a lot in maintenance, if you are aiming for international markets, or if you want to run your store on your own without depending on a technical provider. It is our default recommendation for brands from zero to several million euros in annual revenue. Our guide to launching your store step by step shows you the way, and our migration method covers the case of an existing site.

Shopify is not the best option if your model relies on a catalog of several hundred thousand SKUs with very unusual business rules, if your business is primarily editorial with selling as a sideline, or if you have an in-house development team whose job is precisely to maintain a custom platform. In those cases, open source or headless still make sense.

What about dropshipping?

This is the question we get most often, and our view of Shopify on this topic has changed. Shopify remains technically the best tool to set up a dropshipping store in a few hours, but the tool has long since stopped being the limiting factor. Advertising acquisition costs and margin pressure are. Excellent software doesn't make up for a fragile business model: we have put numbers on the market reality in our dropshipping reality check for 2026, worth reading before you dive in.

Shopify versus the alternatives

PrestaShop, Magento, WooCommerce, Wix, WiziShop: each platform has its own playing field. Here is how we position them, having migrated stores from each of them.

Our agency's conviction is documented above, particularly on total cost of ownership, conversion and the lead taken in AI channels. French alternatives like WiziShop have the advantage of support in the local language and genuine proximity, which addresses exactly Shopify's weak spot. For a platform-by-platform analysis, read our complete comparison of e-commerce platforms. And if you decide to get support, our ranking of the best Shopify agencies in France will help you shortlist the right partner.

Final verdict

Eight years after our first projects, our Shopify review fits in one line: it is the platform we would still choose today to launch our own brands, and that is exactly what we are doing with Cabania. The 9/10 score reflects a remarkable product, let down only by support that is losing ground, and strengthened in 2026 by a serious lead in agentic commerce that we don't see at any competitor.

If you are still hesitating, start by discovering what Shopify is and how the platform works, then start your trial: within a few days you will know whether the tool is right for you. And if your project deserves support, let's talk. We put this field experience to work for brands that want to make their store a real growth driver.