There isn't ways to have a custom checkout (one page) with this system and subscriptions are not natively built in, relying on a third party ecosystem.
Theme development is also arcane and not the standard way web developers build a simple website.
Oh and they disallow you to use Stripe for your store and you have to go through Shopify payments instead.
Theme development is the same as any other system. It's very similar to a Drupal or Wordpress commerce. I am not sure I fully see what you mean.
Obviously they don't allow you to use another payment processor, why would they? They make money by having people use their payment processor. There is no benefit to them allowing people to bypass this and implement their own payment system.
The custom checkout can be a con, but it's also a pro. It allows your customers to feel at home in a native environment. Not having to deal with every ecommerce site completely different checkout system.
On top of that, there are applications that can have this payment flow except you need permission to accept outside payments. Shopify only gives this to established companies.
Late last year, they also got rid of unlisted applications and now all applications have to be approved even if you don't want it in their app store.
Shopify is building its moat and getting more and more restrictive. I'm very glad we abstracted all of the operations out of Shopify directly and now can use any platform or even Stripe directly. If you want to build an e-commerce store with Shopify still, use the $9/month plan and use Shopify just as a CMS and integrate with payments separately.
if your app fails their ludicrous testing (one was failed as our icon had wrong font from website) they ban any submission for few months, don't allow integration with other ecommerce platforms, don't allow shopify orders to be cross platform, don't allow non-shopify payments.
And they always nickel and dime their users including Shopify payments. You think Amazon is bad? Wait till you get on Shopify
A single page modal checkout on the same page is the way to go these days, even Stripe's new checkout is unfortunately doing the same thing with not keeping the user on the same page.
With a lot of US-only retailers the only way to find out they won’t ship outside the US is to try and checkout and look for a country drop down.
And the ones that will ship, shipping for a small parcel can range from inconsequential (free/$10) through punishing ($80) to absurd ($300).
I don’t need an exact amount, but there can be a couple order of magnitude difference between stores when trying to ship to Canada and often no way to determine they even will at all without going through the checkout flow.
* - May vary depending on your level of experience with GraphQL
But not natively within Shopify's UI, You have to use 3rd party apps have to make use of this API. For merchants this is useless to them if they don't want to use a 3rd party app for this feature.
Last time I checked most of the shopify apps out there are not suited to this.
When you create a billing attempt against a subscription, it creates a Shopify order that is tied to that subscription. You could definitely have the order be tied to a digital product.
While you could definitely make it work for a membership system, I think I'd recommend literally anything else. Happy to elaborate or answer any specific questions you might have.
If you want something out of the box, there are tools like Memberful, Gumroad, etc that take quite a vig on top of the payment processing.
It would get to a point where I am giving thousands of pounds to Gumroad to lock myself in. How customisable is it, can it do Apple / Google Pay?
I would like to see this standard described and what level of agreement you get.