Stop treating Shopify like it’s just the website
Shopify is ops now
In the 2010s you could get away with treating it like the ecom team’s toy. It was the website, the promo machine, the thing ecom and marketing fussed over.
Now it’s where orders start and store sales land. It’s also where stock gets counted, which is why the rest of the business starts shouting when something goes wrong.
Some brands still haven’t clocked what that means, or who should own it. They’re making setup decisions in Shopify that should sit with ops, merch, and systems.
Shopify isn’t just for digital anymore
Go look at the decisions you’re making inside Shopify right now. Start with how you’ve set up stores, markets, and locations, because that’s where the stock rules get baked in.
Those aren’t website decisions. They’re ops decisions.
If you set up locations badly, you don’t just get a messy admin. You get stock that won’t move, transfers that become a weekly argument, and stores that end up running their own shadow process because the system doesn’t match shop‑floor reality.
POS is where this gets real
Shopify POS can run a store, but only if you design it properly before you roll it out.
The moment your stores are selling through Shopify, it’s not a channel off to the side. It’s right in the middle of how you actually run the business, and you’ll feel it when it goes wrong.
It’ll bite you. If you let this be shaped entirely by a team that lives in conversion funnels and campaign calendars, you’ll build a setup that looks great in the admin and falls over the first time stores lean on it properly. And it always breaks in the same places.
It’s not the fancy stuff; it’s the unsexy day-to-day.
It’s the size swap at the till because the right size is in the stockroom. It’s transfers and reallocation happening at short notice because trading moved. It’s a return that should be back in available stock, not sat in limbo for weeks.
When the system can’t handle stock moving in and out cleanly, you feel it in customer service. Returns drag on, stock positions don’t match reality, and then you oversell.
That turns into apology emails you never wanted to send.
It’s avoidable, but only if you treat Shopify like an ops tool, not just the site.
Shopify’s the commerce system now. Someone has to own it
But here’s the thing. If Shopify’s acting like an ops system, ops needs to shape it. That means your systems team in the room early.
It also means merchandising and finance get a say in how product data, inventory, and trading logic are set up and kept straight. Not because anyone wants to slow digital down, but because a fast website built on a weak operating setup underneath it is just an expensive way to create a mess you’ll pay for later.
We’ll have this same chat again. The brands that get this right treat Shopify decisions as ops setup, not an ecom setup job.
The real decision is where the rules live
Sound familiar? At first, running more of the operation in Shopify feels tidy.
Then you scale a bit. Add a new channel or a second warehouse, and you start baking operational rules in the wrong places.
You end up with logic spread across apps, scripts, and bits of middleware. It works right up until it doesn’t, and it usually breaks mid-promo or mid-peak.
It’s not just technical either. Shopify gets teams used to everything being editable, instantly, by whoever’s got access.
That’s brilliant until you’re trying to run stock, pricing, and catalogue rules with more discipline. Then someone makes a quick change in Shopify, and you’re stuck working out what just became the truth.
It can feel like Shopify’s moving deeper into ops. Then it gets messy, and ERP integrations turn up fast.
So don’t kid yourself that you can avoid grown-up systems forever if you’re going multi-channel, multi-location, or doing wholesale for real.
Even Shopify B2B hits limits and pushes you into workarounds.
And here’s the awkward bit. Shopify gets teams used to tools that feel like Shopify, then they log into back-office systems like an ERP and get whiplash.
That doesn’t mean the ERP’s the bad guy. It usually means you’ve reached the point where discipline beats convenience.
When Shopify needs help
If you’re nodding, don’t kick off a big ERP project out of guilt. Instead, decide where the rules live. Pick a winner.
If Shopify should lead on product and inventory, treat it that way. Put rules around it and lock down who can change what.
If an ERP is the winner, act like you mean it. Stop letting teams do quick fixes in Shopify that then have to be manually rebuilt in finance later.
Make a call and stick to it. The worst place to live is no man’s land, where everyone assumes someone else is the winner.
Quick gut-check. Look for these three signs.
Your team is constantly fixing refunds, returns, or shipping logic after the fact.
You dread promos because you don’t trust the ops flows to hold.
You’re dependent on the dev team for every operational tweak, even when the change is simple on paper.
If that’s you, Shopify isn’t the problem. Where you’ve dumped complexity is the problem.
This is where Shopify POS goes wrong for a lot of brands. Teams talk about POS as if it’s just tills and receipts, but it isn’t.
Transfers and receiving are where it either sings or falls over. That’s the difference between stores trusting the system and stores working around it.
Shopify’s inventory tooling can be enough for some setups. But if you’re swapping out a proper retail system, you’re trading depth for simplicity. That’s not wrong, but be honest about the trade-offs.
There’s a new type of Shopify partner
There’s a gap.
The market is packed with people who can build themes and chase conversion. What’s still thin on the ground is partners who can talk about Shopify like an ops system.
People who can sit with your head of merch and your finance lead and walk through how you actually run the place. Then design Shopify around it. Without turning it into a half-built flat-pack wardrobe.
This is where partners like Commerce Thinking and HighCohesion sit.
Get that right and Shopify becomes boring in the best way. The day-to-day just runs.
Shopify POS is probably the most underutilized. If you are a DTC brand and $10MM plus in GMV you should probably have a physical store. Even if it is just an outlet for expired merchandise, you can mix in prime merchandise. Nothing, and I mean nothing, can replace face to face customer relationships and how much you can learn in a 30 second checkout. And Shopify enables inventory balancing with different locations and that is key to making retail work.
But the big part is understanding that products sold in retail might come at a different cost and price point than products sold online. Retail sales carry the cost of the fixed asset of a storefront. DTC sales carry the variable cost of shipping. And it's rare that the cost of shipping per unit sold is less than the cost of a store per unit sold. The fundamental break is that the channels are the same, and they are not.
As for ERP, there still is not a good option out there, in part because ERP is about control and Shopify is about flexing to meet customers. They are often in conflict with each other. I think you are right that the backend of Shopify can do more and can be customized extensively to do more but most DTC brands are looking for simplicity, not added complexity, and extending the backend to ERP could quickly become a quagmire slowing down responsiveness to customers.
I am curious to see Shopify's future plans. If anyone can build an ERP built for flexible commerce, it's Shopify. And that might be worth exploring in the future.