Mon, 04 Jul 2022

A little of the shine has come off Shopify Lite, to no surprise.

Update: A lot of it has. All of the shine, in fact! It turns out the below problem was a lot more pervasive than I realized, and Shopify knew about it and just... didn't care. Avoid Shopify.

One of the niftiest things (as I mentioned in the first installment) is its ability to allow people to re-download digital purchases when there are updates. So I updated the snap tab blanks, built a big combo ZIP file, and checked the box that said "notify existing customers."

And got an email from one telling me the link didn't work.

It was a silverseams dot myshopify dot com link, which is the address I'd have if I didn't have Shopify Lite. Huh. I assumed it would be a direct-download link, but nope. And Shopify just has a check-box, no option to edit the message that goes out.

In theory, I can still send out email: there's built-in Shopify Email, which tells me "To send an email, you need to create an online store. Shopify Email will be available for all Shopify users soon." It's got a nice editor though, and I can remove all the links to my non-existent shop and replace them with the corresponding links to the website, and send a test email... just no customer emails. And I can export a CSV to use in other software or just BCC everyone and let the spam filters sort it out (the latter being what I did).

It's still not worth the extra $20/month, though maybe as things build up (the Ko-Fi subscribership is climbing 😍) I'll change my mind.