There are some things about the average car that we take for granted. It has more than two wheels, a steering wheel, forward-facing seats, an engine, and a storage compartment. It will have controls and levers and a braking system. If a vehicle does not have all of these it is unlikely to be defined as a car.

Likewise, an e-commerce website has some features that make it what it is. A product database, a checkout, shipping rates, collections or categories, a homepage, etc.

Building a Shopify website is very analogous to building a new model of modern car.

The Platform

You start with the platform. In car terms a platform is a shared chassis design that many models in a company use – they may even be shared between companies. A Volkswagen Golf, a Seat Leon, an Audi A3, and a Skoda Octavia all share the MQB Evo platform from Volkswagen Group.

Shopify is an e-commerce platform. Like a car platform it is designed for a purpose and to be shared among many brands and users. Like a car platform it prescribes some features that cannot be changed – the MQB Evo car platform is front-wheel drive and front-engine while Shopify is cloud hosted and paid for by subscription. You can’t change this. A Volkswagen Golf cannot be rear engine, and you cannot host Shopify on your own server. Some aspects of the MQB platform are set in stone and cannot be modified like the front axle and pedal box, and some aspects of Shopify are set in stone like the way the checkout works and some limitations on how you categorise and display products.

The Engine

When you have chosen your car platform you next chose an engine. Of course, cars come with many engines, but for each model in the range choices are made. The engine must fit the platform of course and then you get to choose all the ancillaries like the starter motor, the fuel delivery, the cooling system, the oil pump. The same engine can be configured many ways.

In Shopify the engine is the parts under the hood (i.e. the backend) that make your store unique to you. When building a Shopify website we get what we are given to some extent, but we also get to modify it and change it with a combination of the sales channel (POS vs online – a bit like diesel or electric), the settings such as VAT rates, markets, and shipping rates (a bit like tuning an engine), and apps for making bundles and upsells (the ancillaries).

Building the engine is a huge part of a Shopify expert’s job. Here is where you affect reliability, performance, economy, and power.

The Body

To an average consumer the Volkswagen Golf and the Seat Leon are not the same car. But we know now they have the same platform and the same engine(s). So why are they marketed and sold to different people and by different brands? They have a different body shell and design. One speaks the language of Volkswagen with sharp Germanic lines, and the other has some Spanish flair and a more fluid look and feel. They are both available in estate or hatchback variants and they come in endless colours and “trims”.

In Shopify terms the theme is the body of your website. Most Shopify developers tend to start with a commercial theme from the Shopify theme store, although you can certainly build one from scratch. The theme gives you options to choose from when building your homepage and product pages – options like sliders, text boxes, hero images, icon sets, newsletter sign-ups. Think of these as the doors, bonnets, mirrors, alloy wheels, and badges.

These can be tweaked, given different colours and fonts, moved around, and branded to your company style, but they always must work with the platform and the engine. You can’t [really] build a lorry on the VW Golf platform, and you can’t [really] build a dedicated event ticketing system on the Shopify platform.

Like a steering wheel in a car the checkout in Shopify is not going to change much. A steering wheel will be round(ish) and placed in front of the driver and the checkout in Shopify will always follow the same format on every website. This is because it works. Some things in Shopify are there because of convention. The cart icon is almost always on the top right of the page, just like in most cars the indicator stalk is on the left side of the steering wheel. Does that mean it can’t me moved? No – some Japanese cars have the indicator on the right and if you really want the cart icon on the left, we can do it, but why would you?

Conclusion

People often say “All cars are the same these days.” Yes, they are. Very much so, and all Shopify websites are the same as well. It’s the beauty of Shopify – they train your consumer how to buy by putting them through the same process on every single site. In the same way as you can hop into any rental car in the world and know how to drive it and where to get fuel for it.

But also, every car is very different these days. Computers and robots in the car factories mean that manufacturers can quickly and cheaply turn out almost infinite design variations on a single platform. The garage still knows how to fix them, and the driver still knows how to drive them, as ultimately, they are “all the same”, but there are infinite options for colours, wheel designs, interior materials, bonnet shapes, plastic trims, and even handling and ride comfort. Wikipedia tells me that underneath a Ford Tourneo Connect – a small business van – is the same car as an Audi Q6 – a full-size SUV, and they are both still based on the Volkswagen MQB Evo platform that the Golf uses.

Shopify is the exact same. Every site we build uses the same platform and engine, but we tweak the ancillaries and create new and bold body designs that make your website unique.