“This means your store either won’t match the rest of your website or, even worse, will look just like every other store hosted by the provider. ”

does not apply in the case of Shopify.

note: I’m neither a customer nor affilliated with Shopify. I use Mephisto for blogging, and it uses the same templating system as Shopify (the people who developed Shopify released their templating system, Liquid, to the Open Source community.)

This is one of the biggest hurdles I have seen for businesses starting out online. All to often people want the all-in-one at the price of the doing it yourself.

I personally almost always lean on the side of doing it yourself. When people put the required effort into learning everything they need, they often come out with a better result, and undoubtedly more knowledge. But, it definitely takes the right person to pull it off. There are so many businesses that fail, because those people tried to do it themselves and just didn’t have the patience / ability / motivation or whatever else to get things going. These same people often fail with a pre-made solution, but it just takes a little while longer and the result is often blamed on other things.

Whatever the case, getting the site up and running smoothly, is only a small piece of the pie to becoming successful. Most will realize that making the site is the easy part once they get into it.

Each business should definitely look into all the options, and do what makes the most sense for their specific business.