Shopify runs online stores for “millions of merchants” in more than 175 countries, and $378 billion of sales went through it in 2025, according to its annual report. Plans run from Basic to Plus, and the higher ones buy lower fees and more API capacity.
There’s an app for nearly everything, more than 16,000 of them in the App Store.
Easy to build on
It’s the easiest platform on this list to start building on. The documentation is thorough, and you can create test stores, up to 250 of them, that never touch a real customer.
It doesn’t fall over, either. At the peak of Black Friday weekend 2025, Shopify handled 31.8 million API requests a minute. Your store won’t be the one that breaks it.
Reports built around the store
Shopify’s reports are built around Shopify orders. Its profit reports work from a cost per item and show gross margin, and its ABC analysis grades products on Shopify sales.
When the store is the only channel, that’s the whole picture. A business that also sells on Amazon, eBay or TikTok Shop from the same stock needs those channels’ orders and costs alongside, and that’s usually where an integration starts.
Keeping up with Shopify
Shopify releases a new API version four times a year and supports each one for at least twelve months, and its developer changelog lists every change before it lands.
New features arrive in the GraphQL API, which has been the standard for new public apps since April 2025. And since January 1, 2026, new private apps are created in the Dev Dashboard rather than the store admin.
Webhooks, with a check
Shopify can tell your other systems when an order is placed or stock moves. Its documentation recommends pairing those webhooks with reconciliation jobs that fetch the data again on a schedule, so integrations built its way do both.
Plus-only parts
Most of the API works the same on every plan. A private app that changes how checkout or discounts behave (through what Shopify calls Functions) only runs on Plus, and Plus gets ten times the API capacity of the standard plans. That matters if you sync a big catalog several times a day, and not much otherwise.
Six channels, one pool of stock
We’ve built two systems around Shopify for a UK health and beauty retailer that sells through three Shopify stores plus Amazon, eBay and TikTok Shop from the same stock. The order-level P&L takes every cost off each order, using the payment method Shopify records so a Klarna sale is charged Klarna’s fee and a Shopify Payments sale is charged Shopify’s.
The markdown engine grades every product each night on its revenue across all six channels, writes the grade back to Shopify as a tag, and cuts prices in bulk when stock runs past what its grade allows. Stock value left unsold for 90 days dropped from about 12% to 4.8%. Neither system needs Plus, and before adding another app to fill a gap like this, it’s worth counting the ones you already pay for.