Chris Jennings

When news first broke of Shopify, I was ecstatic. A fully functioning, hosted shopping cart solution was a godsend for me as a web designer. I have several clients who thank me often for switching them over to such a robust, yet painfully simple ecommerce solution. After seeing the success that they’ve had, I have been quietly building a store of my own using Shopify.

Today I logged in to find out that: 1. The stats that are usually on my dashboard are missing, 2. the option to add a coupon is greyed out and there is now a link beside of it saying “upgrade your account.”

… I was at a lost for words. After further inspection, I was now listed as a “trial member” instead of simply having a free account. I was outraged. I wasn’t warned, offered an upgrade… nothing.

Here’s What’s New

For everyone that hadn’t activated their account before August 11th, 2007 you are now a trial member. You have 5 free orders to process before you are forced to upgrade. Those that had an activated account were granted a “grandfathered” tier in which everything stayed the same… unless they need SKU’s for more than 1000 products, then they will be forced to upgrade and pay the new monthly rate.

Here are the new tiers:

• Trial - $0/month - No coupons, 1 Block of Storage, 5 Max SKU’s, No Stats, 0% Transaction Fee, Can’t use own domain name.
• Basic - $24/month - No coupons, 1 Block of Storage, 1000 Max SKU’s, Basic Stats, 2% Transaction Fee
• Professional - $54/month, Unlimited Coupons, 4 Blocks of Storage, 2,500 Max SKU’s, Advanced Stats, 1% Transaction Fee
• Enterprise - $299/month (wtf!), Unlimited Coupons, 8 Blocks of Storage, 10,000 Max SKU’s, Advanced Stats, 0.5% Transaction Fee.

As you can see, things have changed. The lovable Shopify.com that I brag about to all of my colleagues and clients about is no more. To get the same features I was getting for free, I now have to pay $59 a month for.

Update - There is hope for some.

There is hope for those who had signed up before August 11th, 2007 but had not activated the payment gateway. Today I sent the following message using the Shopify support system:

Shopify, I have carefully been planning my launch for the past few weeks and I log in today to find out that since I didn’t activate my account, I haven’t been “grandfathered”. I feel that I too have been a loyal customer by simply telling my colleagues how amazing your free service has been so far.

I don’t think this is fair and would like to request that I be grandfathered as well. This is not what I signed up for, nor what I was promised - nor what I have been working on for weeks. I hope you all have the integrity to make this right.

Please help me resolve this.

Shortly thereafter I received an email saying that I was granted a “grandfathered” account. This shows integrity (and saves me $60/month), however, what about those people who we’ve all been raving to about the “free” Shopify???

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Get the book here.

As you may have noticed, I have installed a new theme for this blog. To be honest, I was sick of the previous version before I finished designing it.

I’ve been sick of a lot of things lately; school, work, design, the weather… pretty much everything except ze. (thanks devin for introducing us.)

Things are a bit crazy now in my world… to say the least. My last day of 9-5 at my current job is November 3rd, I thought i’d be a bit more excited than this. In reality, i’m scared to death. I have jumped on to the back of every good idea i’ve had in the last few months, hoping that one may carry me through this. I’d love to hear some words of encouragement!

On a lighter note, I was recently asked to join the team over at Shiftcore Studios. Shiftcore is made up of a few of my close friends in the music industry. My role there will be to provide logistics and design with a dash of CMS. I will also be handling outsourcing when necessary.

I’ve made a decision to be more focused and more organized - step 1: clean house.

Here are a few things that I am working on at the moment:

TonalWar is Total War - SECRET!
Squurl.com - Rapid Domain Search, nearing completion.
Yopos.com - Young Professionals Community… to the next level.

I’ve got a few more things cooking up, check em’ out.