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Rehumanizing The Shopify Experience
Don’t get me wrong — Shopify is an utterly fantastic platform. While I don’t have ample experience with too many others and will have to admit that I was swooned by the immaculate customer service, it’s clear that Shopify reigns supreme in the top echelon of e-commerce platforms.
A large reason behind Shopify’s efficacy is in its uber easy-to-use, templated and cookie-cutter approach to making e-commerce wholly accessible for innumerable users. It’s versatile, dynamic, simple and incredibly easygoing. That being said, such a far and wide reaching approach comes at a costly sacrifice — the ability to personalize, to humanize an increasingly synthetic experience between merchant and consumer.
While Shopify offers ample customization ability, those who don’t want to pay for an upgraded theme have less than a dozen templates to choose from — each with its own variants. But it’s not really about the lack of free themes. It’s about how everything it oriented towards selling a product rather than selling a brand, selling merchandise rather than a lifestyle.
Now, I’ll be the first to confess than I’m exaggerating just a bit. Shopify does great with its importation of imagery, blogs, social media channels, product organization, etc. But when it comes to humanizing the shopping experience for the consumer, something’s lacking.
