Why I moved my shop and blog from Shopify to WordPress

I moved my website from Shopify to WordPress hosted in AWS (Lightspeed). There were many reasons why, but the two biggest reasons were the blogging capability and spam management.

WordPress has been my go to for years for blogs and when I started my first one back in Japan, it was WordPress on a local Japanese hosting service. WordPress is easy, intuitive and just does what I need it to.

With art sales in mind when I setup my artist site jeremyburton.au up, I decided to go with what seemed like the best choice at the time, Shopify. It has blogging and is rated generally as the best ecommerce platform.

It was easy to setup, you can register domains names in it and for the most part, it was a seamless process. The setup was easy and I thought I’d found a great solution, I even signed up for their affiliate program and learnt how code the templates. Creating products in it was fairly straight forward, it handled digital downloads too (no need for Gumroad etc) and I eventually got to the stage of having multilingual product pages setup for my books.

Blogging in Shopify

The issues I eventually ran into were mainly small, but then the blogging started to really frustrate me. Although it’s quick to knock out an article, any kind of custom layout and fine design control just isn’t possible. The blogging functions have no template control, so there’s no way to control how images and copy flow in the article.

Being spoilt previously for so long with WordPress, Shopify’s blog system started to drive me crazy. Quality content for everyone is different, but I love a good blog human-written by someone explaining their passion, trip of a lifetime or an amazing thing they’re selling.

Writing things out for me is not just about selling art or other products, but about documenting my journey and clearing my brain. I love writing and clearing that head space, it’s so freeing.

So there, that’s the first major reason Shopify started to turn me off. Another minor one was how products are managed the backend. Bulk actions are really not there yet and there were lots of other little niggly things.

A native integration with Google Analytics would be great, and the ability to use Site Kit.

Spam Management

So, everything was going fine with Shopify until one day I started getting targeted by a bot that would create three new customer accounts a day. So like anyone would, I deleted them and I started closing access off slowly, turning off registration forms and whatever I could find. I even tried disabling account creation but the bots would get past that too.

The bots started purchasing digital products using fake credit cards. The trick was they would then claim the product undelivered (of course it was delivered, it was a digital download) and then claim a chargeback to Shopify.

With low volume, it was annoying but manageable. But it went on and on and so it was time for some support. So I reached out to Shopify, after all, we’re paying $50+ AUD per month. Surely they would have a solution.

Their answer was, yes you can fix this by buying 3rd party anti-fraud plugins.

Yeah, naur. I’m not paying more money for unsecured plugins to fix security issues with your core product. Who you’re being hit by bots, it makes it very difficult to manage real purchases and focus on growth.

So as the spam and annoying fraud purchases continued to trickle through one day, I’d had enough. Time to shift back to a platform I’d have control over and would scale for the next 10 years.

Moving to WordPress / Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Time to relearn AWS and get back to WordPress. I’ve previously administered services hosted in AWS so was somewhat familiar with it and decided to spend the time jumping back in.

The major business issue to solve when you’re hosting your own website is how to manage the ecommerce. There are plenty of alternatives to Shopify like Squarespace, WooCommerce and others that you can just switch on and start. But if you’re hosting your own, then you need to integrate a card / cart service.

If you sell digital or physical products, you’ll likely end up needing to integrate things like shipping, post, weight calculators and payment management. There’s lots of options and some work well, some will limit you and you find that out by doing research.

For me, WooCommerce for WordPress was the solution for managing purchases and is has connections to Stripe, PayPal etc.

I used Printumo for my on-demand canvas prints. They have integrations for Shopify and Etsy available, with WooCommerce, Squarespace, Amazon etc coming soon. I think generally that’s what you’ll find with any kind on-deman service, if they support anything they’ll likely have Shopify and maybe one or two others.

So do your research on what services you need to connect to if you’re considering going this route of hosting on AWS.

Challenges

Challenges I came up against were:

• Technical aspects of relearning AWS. It wasn’t so bad, I had it all working in a couple months (technical level medium)
• Transferring my domains to AWS from GoDaddy and others. Honestly the process, the automated emails from AWS and Route53 (AWS domain manager) was pretty confusing. One of my domains was disabled because I missed one of the automated emails
• Setting up WooCommerce was a bit of work. I tested PayPal and in the end went with Stripe for payments, it was just easier
• Migrating all of the content out of Shopify to WordPress. Honestly, I just started fresh in the end because the imports would get all garbled. It would be a nightmare tbh to migrate a large commerce site from Shopify to something else

Conclusion

When I was using Shopify, I was recommending it as an easy solution for people who were just starting or looking to change platforms. If you don’t have any experience in building websites, or ecommerce – it makes sense to use something like Squarespace. They’re just easier.

But if you’re looking to have more control over how your content is managed and the technical aspects, WordPress + AWS is a good solution.

My site is not fully there yet, and life has taken over for a bit. Moving the sites wasn’t too bad really in the end, and I’m sooo much happier! No more spam and I can get back to writing and focusing on my art instead of fighting the platform.