We have been an online business for close to 20 years. After hearing all the hype around Shopify, we moved our sizable business over to Shopify Plus under a 3-year contract. We spent a good portion of 12 months getting everything ready for the migration, speaking to numerous Shopify sales reps, engineers and our onboarding manager all who confirmed that Shopify had the ability to do what we needed it to do. We gave them a long list of functions and were assured that either Shopify could do it natively or there was an app that could do it. Basic functions you'd expect an e-commerce platform to be able to do such as calculate shipping and order dispatch, product bundling and product variations, syncing to Google Shopping, syncing with MYOB to manage inventory levels etc all couldn't be done. It sounds so basic it is ridiculous to think that an e-commerce platform which is so widely used cannot perform such basic functions. It's like it's a basic system that works great if you're selling light weight products and can offer free shipping or use Australia Post, but anything oversize it can't handle. We tried numerous apps but it seems that each time we thought we figured out a workaround for 1 issue, another issue was created. After visibility and sales tanking and pleading with Shopify to let us out of our contract (and them declining) we had no choice but to cut our losses (we're talking mid 6 figures). We were faced with the choice of losing our business and laying off 15 staff, or rebuild our site back on the platform we were using previously and hope we can turn things around. Shopify's support once they had the signed contract was non-existent. They made promises and said their system plus apps could do everything we wanted, but once we were locked into a $2,000pm USD contract for 3 years, they didn't want to help. We are taking the matter to the ACCC. We've already lost enough without being locked into paying Shopify for another 24 months. Surely, the ability to generate an accurate shipping quote, dispatch orders, feed products into Google Shopping and integrate with MYOB is the bare basics of what an e-comm platform should be able to provide.
