We recently built a website using Shopify for our wonderful friend and colleague Sonya, for her new label Sonya Swim. It had been a while since we had done serious work using Shopify, so we were surprised to see there was still no native gallery option.

Shopify is one of the best online shopping platforms, and we have had clients have their shop setup and never ask for help after they use it a few times. For purely selling, it’s excellent.

The issue is that it doesn’t seem to do a lot of things WordPress takes for granted (understandably), so if you wanted to post articles and do fancy blog posts, it isn’t the best option. The other gripe we have is with the galleries – you can either pay a monthly fee for a third party plugin to handle your photos, use third party gallery code, or have your images hosted on another site and sync back to Shopify.

Sonya’s website has magnificent product photos from runway shows, so it went without saying that we needed a decent solution to showcase them. We initially used a paid Shopify Plugin, but the cost was based on the number of separate galleries you wanted to display, so we turned to our favourite video/image hosting platform Cincopa. For a one off payment of $99USD you can have it host a reasonable amount of images with a decent amount of traffic per month.

Its such a pity that Shopify hasn’t looked into native image galleries over the years, but maybe by 2050, they will have done something about it.