Top Problems in Shopify Projects and How We Solve Them

Shopify has a reputation for being the "easy" e-commerce platform, and for the basics that is fair. You do not have to worry about hosting, security patches or a checkout that breaks after a plugin update. But in the 8 Shopify store projects we have delivered, the same kinds of problems kept coming up – and almost none of them were about the theme.

Below are the issues we saw most often, how often they appeared in our projects, and what we now do to prevent them.

How often each problem came up

We went through the feedback rounds, internal notes and chatter of every Shopify project and counted in how many projects each topic came up.

1. Payments and checkout are decided too late

Tied for the most common topic in our data. Store owners know what they want to sell, but decisions such as which payment methods to offer, whether to support cash on delivery, whether to show Klarna, or which bank details to use for transfers often come up during revisions instead of at kickoff.

On Shopify this matters because some things can only be completed by the store owner: choosing the Shopify plan, activating Shopify Payments or connecting PayPal with their own account. If that happens the week of launch, the launch waits.

How we handle it: we ask for payment decisions in the brief and send the owner a short list of what only they can activate. For cash-on-delivery markets, we plan the courier connection as its own work package rather than a detail.

2. Shipping zones and policies

Shipping settings came up again and again: shipping only to one country first, a flat shipping fee, a return window of 14 days instead of the default 30, and whether tracking emails are offered at all.

A tip from our projects: when a client wants to start with one country, we do not delete the other markets. We hide them. That way the store can open to Austria, Switzerland or the rest of Europe later with a few clicks instead of a rebuild.

3. Cookie banners and legal pages

Shopify's own cookie banner is active by default, but in one of our projects it was only configured to show for a single country. Visitors from everywhere else saw nothing. We now check the banner region settings as part of every launch.

The legal side is the other half: imprint, privacy policy, terms and returns policy must exist and be linked before the store goes live. Clients often assume the platform handles this. It does not write your legal texts.

4. Apps, integrations and plan limits

4 of our 8 Shopify projects involved connecting the store to something else: a CRM, a print-on-demand service, a local courier, a booking tool or a pixel for ads. Two lessons stand out:

• Check the plan before promising the sync. In one project, contacts and orders could not be synced to the CRM on the client's lower-tier plan. We now verify plan limits of every connected tool before quoting.
• Custom integrations need their own logic. For a cash-on-delivery courier we built a small middleware: a new Shopify order triggers a webhook, the middleware creates the shipment with the courier's API and updates the order status as the parcel moves. You can see an example of this in our Ami's Beauty case study.

5. Translations that break filters

This one surprised us the first time. Shopify's Translate & Adapt app translates products, collections, pages, menus and meta tags – but not product tags. If your collection filters are based on tags, the filters on the translated storefront return nothing.

How we fixed it: we moved the filters to a source that can be translated, so the English and German storefronts use the same filters. If you plan a bilingual store, tell us at kickoff so filters are designed that way from the start. The Racentis store is a public example with working filters in both languages.

6. Mobile layout and imagery

Mobile issues showed up in 4 of 8 projects: a menu that did not open on phones, text that wrapped awkwardly, images cropped too tightly. We catch most of this in our internal quality check before the client sees a draft, but product photography is a separate topic.

Store owners increasingly send AI-generated lifestyle images. They work well for storytelling sections, but we saw brand marks rendered incorrectly on generated clothing. Our rule now: product and collection images must show the real product. AI imagery is fine for mood, not for what the customer is buying.

7. Content that arrives late

Product descriptions, prices, variant lists and photos are the fuel of a store. In 3 of our 8 Shopify projects, missing or late content came up during revisions. The median Shopify project spent 14 days waiting on the client side in total, against a median delivery time of 44 days.

What this means for your timeline

A median Shopify project in our data had 2 revision rounds and about 29 hours of logged work. The work is rarely the bottleneck. Decisions are. The store owners who launched fastest had three things ready: payment and shipping decisions, product data in a spreadsheet, and final images.

FAQ

Where the numbers come from: our own project records in Odoo – 233 finished projects, 909 tasks and about 4941 logged hours, mostly from 2025–2026. Durations are calendar days from kickoff and we quote medians, so one unusually long project does not distort the picture.

Planning a Shopify project?

If you want a realistic plan for your own project, book a short call with our team and we will walk you through the phases, what we need from you and where projects like yours usually lose time. You can also browse finished work in our Shopify portfolio.