Shopify

Shopify is a commerce platform that lets businesses sell online, in person and across social and other channels from one admin. Shopify hosts the store, runs the checkout and handles products, inventory, orders and customers. Store owners add features through the Shopify App Store and change the storefront through themes.

For brands that want a fully custom front end, Shopify offers Hydrogen, which Shopify describes as its headless toolkit. Hydrogen adds Shopify commerce building blocks to a framework the team already uses, and Shopify provides starter storefronts built with React Router or Next.js.

What Shopify handles

• Hosted storefront, checkout and payments
• Products, variants, collections and inventory
• Theme customization and an app ecosystem
• Sales channels including social and Google
• Headless storefronts through Hydrogen and the Storefront API

Theme store or headless?

Most stores run on a Shopify theme. Themes are faster to launch, work with most apps out of the box and let staff edit sections in the theme editor. A headless Hydrogen storefront makes sense when a brand needs custom layouts, content from a separate CMS or performance and design control that a theme cannot provide. Headless builds take more development work and need developers to maintain them.

Product data and marketing

Shopify product data drives marketing well beyond the store. Clean titles, descriptions, images and identifiers feed Google Merchant Center for Shopping ads and free listings. Order and customer data powers email and SMS flows in Klaviyo. Conversion tracking in GA4 and the ad platforms shows which campaigns produce sales.

Shopify fits brands that want a hosted platform with less server upkeep and a large app ecosystem. Businesses that want full control of hosting and data may prefer WooCommerce.