UPDATE MAY 19 2020: SEE Connecting Webflow and Shopify with Udesly, Git and ThemeKit FOR DETAILS. END UPDATE.
Hi Martin,
The point you make about having to rework the Shopify site after updates and the running of the entire process with each update as a good one. That was my first concern. I was worried that I would end up having to make changes in Shopify and then lose the ability to update continuously from WebFlow. So far that doesn’t seem to be the case. The update from WebFlow to Shopify literally takes two minutes. Sure it’s not as fast as hitting the publish button and WebFlow, but even if you’re doing half a dozen updates a day it’s still really nothing to slow you down. And once the site gets stable and you’re doing maybe one or two updates a day, then it’s completely manageable. As well, I haven’t yet set up source code management for Shopify, but when that’s set up the update process should be even smoother because instead of uploading the entire theme (that Udesly creates) to Shopify each time, we should be able to just unzip it into the source code working folder (automatically) and then post the updates to the theme.
Customizing the Shopify checkout has positives and negatives: The positive is yes you can have your own look and feel. The negative is that the Shopify checkout is very trusted and well known. When people hit it, they feel it’s trustworthy. This is one of the main “brilliant things” that Shopify did, in my opinion. By providing a standardized checkout look and feel they give every little startup a sense of strong trust in the checkout. We are still in the startup phase, so we are using the Shopify checkout to get exactly that sense of trust. When companies get big enough that they are trusted, it makes more sense to customize the Shopify checkout. You can get that ability to customize the checkout (and other features) by upgrading to the Plus plan at $2K/mo CAD.
Regarding Zapier, we had exactly the same idea; create orders in Webflow and send them through to Shopify. There are a few problems with that. The first problem is similar to Blendr; the Zaps are not complete and there’s no indication if they ever will be complete. The main problem is with the order details, but there are other issues with the Zaps. The other issue is with the payment processing. Should you process payments through WF or Shopify? If you process payments through WF then your Shopify will be accumulating orders without being connected to the payment processor. You lose a lot of the benefit of having the orders in Shopify, like being able to cancel an order or do partial refunds in Shopify and have the transaction flow through to the payment processor. You also lose the benefit of cost saving you can get by using Shopify payments for processing. On the other hand, you could process payments through Shopify. But then you lose the ability to enable the customer to log into your WF site and see transaction history (payments, refunds etc.) because you’ll be doing the refunds through the Shopify admin.
Another option to keep in mind is what we’re currently doing until we have the Shopify site ready to go live. We’re using the Shopify Add to Cart button embedded in the WF store. You can see this here: https://www.xialla.com/product/xialla. It works smoothly, but there are a couple of things we don’t like about it. The main problem is that on the desktop it opens a popup checkout window. The other problem is the cart style isn’t in keeping with the rest of the site. For these two reasons, I suspect we lose 20% additional customers in the checkout process.
I hope this helps you. I’ll post here again when I set up the source code management for Shopify.