Most traffic lost in a replatform isn't lost to Shopify — it's lost to URLs that changed without redirects. The migration itself is straightforward. The SEO continuity is where stores get hurt.
Marketplaces bring the traffic and take the margin, the customer, and the pricing power. An own store gives all three back and hands you the traffic problem. Most Philippine sellers should run both — in a specific order.
Most people spend the trial picking colours and end it with a beautiful store that has never taken an order. Here's a schedule that gets you to a real first sale instead.
Plan comparisons list features. The decision is almost never about features — it's about the revenue point where a higher plan's lower fees pay for its higher price. That point is calculable in about five minutes.
The plan fee is the smallest and least interesting part of the answer. Here are the five cost layers that decide what the platform really takes, and the one number you should be tracking instead.
Shopify shows you revenue. Revenue isn't the score. A simple weekly profit sheet — revenue minus COGS, fees, ad spend, and fixed costs — that tells you whether scaling ads actually makes you money.
Traffic without sales has a short list of causes, and they hide in a specific order: measurement, traffic quality, offer, product page, then checkout. Here's the diagnosis sequence with the numbers that decide each step.
A no-fluff Shopify SEO checklist for Philippine stores in 2026. Technical fixes, on-page essentials, content strategy, and the local-intent plays that cut your paid traffic dependency.
Shopify Payments isn't available in the Philippines yet. Here's what actually works — GCash, Maya, PayMongo, Stripe — with real fees, checkout conversion notes, and the stack I use on my own Shopify store.
The exact 60-step checklist I use to launch Shopify stores in the Philippines — from domain to payments to ads-ready tracking. Skip the months of trial and error.
Real cost, real trade-offs, real PH context. Which platform actually wins for Filipino entrepreneurs in 2026 — and the hidden costs nobody warns you about.