Shopify "Free" Trial

If you have ever researched drop shipping or even making your own online store, you have most likely come across Shopify and saw that they offer a pretty nice 14 day free trial period. Yes it really is free, you don't have to put any type of payment information in to get the free trial, but is the free trial really free and will it make you want to pay for the plans that they offer? We will soon find out in this article and it may surprise you a little bit or not.

First off, Shopify is a subscription-based software that allows anyone to set up an online store and sell their products. They are based out of Canada, but anyone can set up a store with their software. They offer a free 14 day trial to try out the software and see if you like it enough to pay for the full service. They give you all kinds of options to set up your store as well, they even give you a list of apps that you can install on your Shopify store to make your time a little bit easier. Some of those apps are Oberlo and Printful; both of these apps are free to install on your store and they are very helpful. Oberlo lets you make an import list of products that you can sell from aliexpress and Printful lets you make custom apparel and sell that as well. There are a lot of different apps you can install, but most of them are behind the paywall.

You get a nice little dashboard that has everything from analytics to marketing and everything in-between. When you first make your store, it hand holds you through the process so you don't really mess that up. It's when you are on your own when you may need a little help because they don't really tell you how to add the apps and what not. After you import some products and what not you can edit them and the price and everything else like pictures and description of the products. On the right hand side of the items it will say that your item is active if you imported it correctly and you'd think by that it means it's all set and done and anyone can look at your store and buy some items, right?

Wrong, if you are just doing the free trial your store is not fully open to the public and they cannot just search for an item and your store will pop up. Free trial stores are put behind a password, so the only people allowed on the store are people who have the password. So you can share your store on social media with the password, but if a friend of a friend's cousin's uncle shares the store and the password wasn't brought along with that, then you just lost out on some people being able to see your store and buy your products.

I really have no idea why they would decide to do that to people. If I hadn't clicked on the online store category on the side of the page, I would have not seen that I would need to put a password for people to get into the store or go ahead and pay for a subscription right off the back to have it fully open without a password. So really you get a free trial to make a mock up store and have no one show up because it's behind a password and they expect you to pay for the subscription after that. I know the free trial is to let you look around and get used to the services, but it would be a smarter move for them to actually let you not have a password protected store, because I know if I came to a store and saw it needed a password, I would not buy from it just because it seems like a scam.

Shopify's cheapest subscription is $9/month and that's for the very basic of stores. So I know why they have that, they think that the free trial people are going to buy that subscription because of the fake ads that get run on the daily about how people are making $100k/month dropshipping and all that crap. They need to make the free trial legit free or just straight up tell people that they will need a password to give to the customers they want and not have that hidden behind a option on the menu after you spent hours putting your store together. I don't think I will be paying for the subscription since they can't tell you right off the bat they you need a passcode for customers to even look at your store or pay them right now to get that off. Thank you for reading.