It has its pluses and minuses for sure.
First, I would say that there are a number of three-letter acronyms that matter to an e-commerce store and SEO is at best the second most important.
#1 and #2 in #3 in my book are PCI, DSS and CDE.
So I've built a couple of Shopify shops and you make some fairly significant compromises, but you offload almost all of your entire PCI DSS responsibility because Shopify is responsible for 99% the CDE. I say 99% because dumb shopkeepers are still susceptible to social engineering, to taking orders over the phone and writing CC numbers on pieces of paper that are not kept secure and so on.
If people are looking at Shopify versus Big Commerce versus Squarespace versus any other hosted solution, that's one thing. If they are looking at a hosted solution versus one that runs on their own server and they think they become PCI compliant by taking CC info in an iframe and it's all good, they don't know what they are talking about.
So let's assume you've already thought through the PCI DSS implications of competing solutions and you are up to the task of ensuring PCI compliance on any solution you choose. Now we can talk about SEO.
Basically, here's the deal with Shopify
- the code that's output to the page is up to you. H1s, H2s, meta titles, lean code, responsive... that's all exposed. Shopify uses the Liquid scripting language and there is very little of the output you cannot control
- the URL structure is the one quibble. You can't really have a structure like
/widgets/blue/small/small-blue-widget-123/
You are going to have
/collections/widgets
/collections/blue
/collections/small
/product/small-blue-widget-123
I'm not saying that's a bad thing. A frequent cause of dupe content in stores is that, in this case, you end up with
/widgets/blue/small/small-blue-widget-123/
/widgets/blue/small-blue-widget-123/
/widgets/small/small-blue-widget-123/
/widgets/small-blue-widget-123/
/small/small-blue-widget-123/
etc
So I think the way Shopify does it is actually good. But if you have a schema you really want, you won't be able to do that.
Also, and this really bugs me, Shopify does not expose the REQUEST_URI to Liquid, so you can't fire triggers based on the request page. You have to do that with Javascript.
That said, when you build products, you can build as many templates as you want, so you most certainly can affect output based on a product (or collection or page or blog post - they can all have as many templates as you need and you simply select from a dropdown from the product/collection/article/blog post edit screen.
One last thing on URLs. By default, when a collection lists products, they use URLs like
collection/widgets/product/small-blue-widget-123
If your product is in multiple collections (small, blue and widgets) you are going to end up with multiple URLs for the same thing. These all get a rel=canonical to /product/small-blue-widget-123, but I prefer to edit the collections templates and get rid of that nonsense.
What else...
301s are very easy on a page by page basis, but of course you can't do regex rewrites/redirects
You are automatically using the Shopify CDN, so response times are good in my experience.
There is an entire "app" universe. Most cost extra. You need to scope your project to know what your true monthly cost will be. Do you need Quickbooks integration? That's an extra third-party app.
I've built stores with OSCommerce (way, way back - don't even think about it today), Ubercart (also past its expiration; don't think about it) and Shopify. I would characterize the difference between Ubercart and Shopify this way:
- Ubercart is based on Drupal. With modest coding skills (i.e. mine), you can hook into the Drupal API and do almost anything. Craziest conditions you can think of. Done. But of course, then you come across the basic feature that has a bug, you go to the issue queue and the issue is three years old and runs to 350 messages and there are 6 patches that don't work. So the five minutes of installing the feature now turns into 40 hours of debugging, submitting patches, waiting for community approval and fixing the conflict with your other module. Yup, it's all possible, but nobody guarantees that the advertised features work. Dealing with bugs and conflicts adds literally 50% to any Drupal project unless it's just like the last one you did (and they never are).
- Shopify you are always running up against things you can't do because it's not exposed in Liquid or the API. But if it *is* exposed, it just works. Always works. I've read about bugs in Shopify, but never actually encountered one.
