Shopify

Shopify is a hosted ecommerce platform. A merchant gets a storefront, a checkout, payment processing, inventory, and order management without operating any of it, and the platform handles the security and compliance work that accepting card payments requires. The product's scale comes from its app ecosystem. Anything the platform does not do natively — a loyalty programme, a subscription option, a review system, a warehouse integration — is available as an app, which means the platform can be extended without the merchant writing code. Themes control the storefront, and a headless mode exposes the commerce APIs for a custom frontend. The tradeoff is cost at scale and the constraint of a hosted model. Transaction fees apply when a third-party payment provider is used, app subscriptions add up, and the checkout cannot be fully customised outside the platform's extension points. Merchants with unusual requirements sometimes move to a headless platform to get that control back.