Shopify has a strong developer ecosystem, but it isn’t an excuse for a lack of basic functionality.

I get that Shopify attempts to be the one-stop shop for well, online shops, by providing the storefront, payment processing, blogging, newsletter, and pretty much most aspects of your marketing.

It’s a big ask to cover all of that from one platform, but as I’ve been working with clients who use the platform for their storefronts, I’ve been shocked by how much basic functionality is missing.

A very simple example is social share buttons for product pages. There simply isn’t an option to add it to a product template without coding your own (which is beyond the scope of most small business owners) or using a plugin that you have to pay a monthly subscription for.

Yes, it’s only $5 a month, but that’s 5 bucks on top of the $49 CAD ($168 if you have a POS), and processing fee of 2.8% – 3.5% plus 30 cents per sale. And that’s just the most basic plan.

Now, let’s say you need to figure out local delivery. Again, there are apps for that, and you can pay anywhere from $15 to literally hundreds a month, but nothing from Shopify. As a small business owner, you’re installing and testing multiple apps, or trying to roll your own solution by setting up radii or zip codes around multiple locations.

Zip codes may be great for calculating deliveries in a city, but try that in rural areas.

No small business owner has the time to figure it out, and most, myself included, wouldn’t easily wrap their heads around doing it.

It doesn’t stop there either. Many small businesses will end up paying for multiple apps, spending hundreds of dollars a month in subscriptions, to make up for sometimes obvious omissions from Shopify’s platform.

I’m not knocking the app store ecosystem, or the developers who make a living from it, but I am saying that Shopify may be a little too reliant on it to provide basic functionality.

By comparison, WordPress.com, Automattic’s paid version of WordPress, recently opened up the WordPress plugin ecosystem to all paid tiers. A huge number of plugins reproduce functionality that already exists within WordPress – they just do it differently, and some do it well enough to get you to pay for a license.

Getting back to social sharing buttons. There are at least two different ways to add social share buttons (without coding or creating your own), even on the basic WordPress.com platform, and literally hundreds of alternatives on the app store, many free, and many with paid tiers of their own.

But none of them are as stingy as the ones available on Shopify. WordPress plugins with paid tiers usually give you a lot of functionality, in the hopes you’ll pay for the more advanced features.

For example, a social share plugin on WordPress may give you 30 different platforms to share to, and 3 different designs. The paid tier will give you 10 designs, and some added functionality like floating buttons and click tracking.

On Shopify, you’re lucky to have 3 buttons with a watermark. And they can get away with this because Shopify doesn’t offer the base functionality.

And Shopify doesn’t offer the functionality because they are disincentivized by their app store. They make money from having someone else fix the problem.

Publishing an app will cost you $19 and 15% revenue share after the first $1,000,000 gross app revenue. There is also a 2.9% process fee on all billing, which I am sure Shopify takes at least some small part of.

It may not sound like much. How could one developer hit a million bucks in gross app revenue with a social share app? What you have to realize is that developer revenue is calculated on the cumulative revenue of all apps. All revenue from all associate developer accounts is treated as one.

With so many gaps in the main Shopify platform, even a small development team with a handful of little apps that each have a thousand customers could break the million-dollar threshold in a year or two.

And if you’re a big company like Microsoft / Google / Intuit (gross company revenue of $100,000,000 USD or more), selling an Office / Workplace or QuickBooks integration, then you are above the threshold and have to pay the 15% on all revenue.

The financial incentive for developers to give the absolute bare minimum on free tiers (to encourage sales) and for Shopify to not add basic features that they can earn a percentage off of via developer revenue is there. It may not be their plan, but it’s there.

That feels wrong to me because it’s not in the interest of the small business owner, operating on razor-thin margins to begin with, and relying on Shopify to provide what they need to operate their business.

I understand that many apps fill functionality gaps that the platform simply couldn’t provide. I’m 100% in favour of devs filling those gaps and making the money they deserve for it.

Shopify bills itself as the “world’s best commerce platform”, and it may well be. It has 29% market share, with WooCommerce, Wix and Squarespace being among the largest rivals by market share, if not a direct capability comparison. It must be doing something right.

But there are gaps that shouldn’t need filling. Yes, developers can charge for better solutions, and should be encouraged to develop and sell them, but the basic functionality should be present first.