What is Shoprocket?
Shoprocket is an ecommerce platform that allows users to quickly and easily add an online store to an existing website such as WooCommerce or Webflow.
Shoprocket is a headless ecommerce platform that doesn’t compromise on speed, which is something other solutions in this space suffer from, especially when it comes to WordPress.
This all sounds great, but is Shoprocket any good?
Total out of 5
14-Day Free Trial
EcommerceGold is reader supported and we may earn a commission from products or services purchased through links on our site at no additional cost to you, to learn more please see our affiliate disclosure.
Shoprocket Review: Quick Summary
Is Shoprocket any good? Yes, we were really impressed with Shoprocket, especially as a way of adding a fast-loading shopping cart to existing website builders, some of the things we really liked were:
- It comes with a good selection of features (which they are constantly adding to)
- It loads really quickly
- It can easily be embedded into existing websites
Shoprocket isn’t great for building an ecommerce website from scratch but this isn’t the main purpose of the platform but one thing we would like added would be customer accounts.
EcommerceGold Score
Shoprocket Pricing
Shoprocket offers 3 plans for users to choose from:
Starter
Business
Plus
Any of these plans are attractive to business owners as they don’t have to worry about:
- Product limits
- Additional transaction fees
- Turnover limits
Which are all pricing factors that many of Shoprockets competitors use and for most businesses, the Starter plan is probably going to be the most effective to get started with as it offers a good blend of competitive pricing and the number of features you get.
To try Shoprocket, they offer a 14-day free trial and if you need longer, the Lite plan is a cost-effective way to use it with paying customers and could be ideal for microbrands or influencers.
Customer Reviews
Before we get into the review, let’s take a look at what some of their existing customers thought of the platform. For this, we looked on Trustpilot, G2 and Capterra.
4.7 out of 5
4.5 out of 5
5 out of 5
Shoprockets customer reviews look great but there is only a small sample size with Trustpilot having the highest number of reviews.
Shoprocket Features
Shoprocket offers a good selection of features to help you start selling online, whether through your existing website or using their own website builder but it does depend on the plan you are on as to the number of features that you get access to and below is a summary of the features, with ones only being available in the Business or Plus plans being marked with an *.
Shoprocket Ecommerce Features
- Sell Physical products, Digital downloads or Services – sell a variety of different product types with a 5GB limit per digital file
- Inventory Tracking – for all products, including product variations
- Product Options & Variations – add product options and/or variations to all product types
- Multi-Currency Support – enable multiple currencies and offers real-time conversion rates
- Multi-Language Support – display your store in multiple languages, will automatically detect your customer’s preferred language
- Custom Fields – add options to let customers personalize their products
- License Keys – sell license keys for software
- Automated Webhooks – set endpoints in your dashboard to send data to your chosen tool(s)
- API Access*
- Automated Tax Calculations* – automatically set tax rates depending on your location
There are also a selection of ecommerce tools that will be coming soon to the Shoprocket platform, including Subscriptions and Zapier integration.
Shoprocket Marketing Tools
Shoprocket has a decent selection of built-in marketing tools, including:
- Automatic Discounts – create discounts that are applied if certain parameters are met, such as buy X get Y
- Discount Coupons – create discount codes for customers and marketing campaigns
- Sale Promotion – choose which products and/or categories are to be included in your sale and set the start and end date for the sale
- Abandoned Cart Emails* – automatically send emails to customers who have abandoned their shopping cart
There are also some marketing features that will be coming to the Shoprocket platform soon, including Gift Cards, Selling on Facebook and Instagram, Email Marketing, Facebook and Google ads.
One thing we did notice when trying out Shoprocket was a seeming lack of SEO tools in relation to product and category pages.
Shoprocket Payment Gateways
Shoprocket allows you to accept a variety of different payment options but this is all done through three payment gateways, which are
- PayPal Checkout – allows you to accept PayPal, Venmo and Credit Card payments
- Stripe – allows you to accept Credit Card, Apple Pay, Google Pay and Afterpay amongst many others
- PayU for Businesses in India
Shoprocket also offers a range of offline payment methods such as Cash on Delivery, Bank Transfer and Invoices.
Do Shoprocket charge transaction fees?
No, you will not be charged any transaction fees using Shoprocket.
Shoprocket Shipping Options
Shoprocket currently offers 3 main shipping options, which are:
- Manual Rates – this is where you manually set your shipping rates and there are four options available:
- Fixed Price – this is a flat rate shipping fee
- Fixed Price + Rate per lb – this is a flat rate based on a weight allowance + an additional charge for every lb over that allowance
- Charge by Weight Range – set different charges based on your specified weight ranges
- Charge by Order Subtotal Range (after discounts) – this is where you set the shipping rates based on the subtotal of their order and you can set your own ranges
- Local Pick-up – allow customers to pick the product up from your physical premises
- Free Delivery – if you want to offer free delivery, you can easily do so with the pre-made free delivery option
Shoprocket will be introducing Auto-calculated shipping rates in the future, which will pull rates from your chosen shipping partner.
Shoprocket Reporting and Analytics
Shoprocket offers a good selection of reports for you to analyze, there is a daily order report in the main dashboard but it is the reports in the analytics section where the true data is found and as standard the reports include:
- Total Sales
- Total Orders
- Total Sessions
- Recovered Orders
- Orders by Source (Embed, links, social etc)
- Orders by Country
- Popular Products
- Conversion Rates
- Average Order Value
You can also set up tracking for Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook Pixel, Twitter Tracking, Pinterest Tag and Snapchat Pixel, which covers most third-party platforms you would need tracking data for!
Shoprocket Website Builder
While Shoprockets main focus is enabling ecommerce on other platforms and website builders, they do also offer a hosted storefront, which allows you to build a very basic online store.
In terms of theme selection, there is a single base template and the customizer allows some changes but is quite limited in terms of design as you can only really:
- Change the logo and header image
- Change the product page with things like image ratio and what info is displayed
- Change colors
- Input custom CSS
The lack of any kind of page builder or true customization tools means that Shoprocket isn’t great as a standalone website builder but most users probably won’t be using it for this anyway as its true strength lies as an ecommerce tool for other website builders.
The website builder is also limited when it comes to adding content to the store as there are no options for adding informational pages or a blog to your store and the SEO settings are very basic.
Shoprocket Support
Shoprocket offers 24/7 support via live chat on the Starter, Business and Plus plans and from our experience, then response times have been very good.
You can also drop them an email using the [email protected] email address, they also have their own discord server, which is a unique way of providing a community forum.
In addition to live support, they also have a help section filled with guides and a YouTube channel with video tutorials, which is a great way to learn about the platform.
Shoprocket Web Hosting
Due to the way Shoprocket works, we can’t do our usual performance testing as there are too many variables in place to do accurate testing but we have found some information regarding the hosting environment that Shoprocket uses:
- Amazon Web Services, which is PCI Level 1 DSS certified
- Global CDN
- SSL on all Shoprocket pages (you will still need an SSL on your own site and be running on the https protocol)
- Unlimited Storage & Bandwidth on the Starter, Business and Plus plans
And while we can’t do our usual testing, we did test the Shoprocket demo store and embedded this onto our demo WordPress site (which is not optimized) testing both the desktop and mobile performance.
Desktop Load Time:
1 Second
PageSpeed Score: 100/100
Mobile Load Time:
0.9 Seconds
PageSpeed Score: 92/100
Desktop Load Time:
2 Seconds
PageSpeed Score: 96/100
Mobile Load Time:
2.4 Seconds
PageSpeed Score: 61/100
So Shoprocket definitely loads quickly and there wasn’t any notable effect on speed for our unoptimized WordPress site.
How Easy is Shoprocket to Use?
Features are one thing, being easy to use is another! That is why, when we test a platform, we also look at how easy it is to use across 3 main areas:
- Getting Started
- Inventory Management
- Order Management
We are also going to take a quick look at how easy it is to integrate Shoprocket with the world’s most popular website builder, WordPress.
Getting Started
Getting started with Shoprocket is very easy, just go to the Shoprocket homepage and click on register and you will be taken through their onboarding process, which basically asks for some basic information about where your business is currently at and basic business info such as name, address and email.
Once you have completed the sign-up process, you will be taken through to the admin dashboard and on your first sign-in you will be greeted by the Shoprocket start guide but before you get to this, they have a great quick guided tour of the dashboard, which helps you learn where different things are.
The start guide is simple but contains all the steps you need to set up in order to start selling, such as:
- Creating your first product
- Setting up your payment gateways
- Setting up your shipping
- Configuring your taxes
And the same guided tour appears whenever you follow one of the start-up prompts, which is a nice touch and makes the process of getting up to speed with the platform much faster.
Once you have completed the start guide, you will be redirected to the main Shoprocket admin homepage, which includes a snapshot of daily sales and links to the latest Shoprocket news and posts.
The dashboard itself is very well laid out and the main sidebar navigation menu is well-labeled, making it easy to move from one section of the dashboard to another.
The dashboard also includes a live chat icon and links to their Discord and Twitter.
Inventory Management
For inventory management, we look at three main areas:
- Creating a new product
- Organizing your inventory
- Managing your inventory
Creating a new product on Shoprocket is very simple and they have gone for a tabbed layout for the page, with tabs for individual sections, including:
- General – for most of your product info, such as title, description prices
- Media
- Inventory
- Options
- Variations
And these are logically laid out and very easy to use and there is one very interesting feature relating to the product description as you can use AI to generate a description for you based on your chosen keywords for that product and while you are free to just go with the AI creation, we recommend editing it to add your own unique flair to it but it does make writing descriptions a lot easier.
There is also a tab called tabs and this lets you create additional tabs to go alongside your product description, so if you want to have a tab just for specifications, you can create that in here.
It is also very easy to configure the add new product page for digital products as you can simply turn off shipping with a single click and then add the digital product or license key.
When it comes to organizing your products, Shoprocket works on a category system but unfortunately only allows for a single level of categories, which might be limiting for some websites that may want to have subcategories.
There is also no option to add a description to your category pages, which isn’t great from an SEO perspective.
When it comes to inventory management, Shoprocket does offer a bulk editor that allows you to quickly update the:
- Product name
- Category
- Price
- Quantity (if the product has variations then this has to be done on a product-by-product basis)
And this makes it really easy to keep your inventory up to date and other changes that need to be made outside of these four options is done by going in and editing the product listing.
Order Management
Shoprocket has made it very easy to manage your orders and offers some bulk tools that allows you to:
- Filter orders by status
- Update order statuses
- Print packing slips
- Download invoices
- Export order information
This makes the order management process very simple and you can also edit orders individually by clicking on them but overall the order management is very good.
Embedding Shoprocket
Shoprockets focus is on being embeddable ecommerce, basically using Shoprocket to add ecommerce to existing websites but how easy is this to do?
Well, Shoprocket has made the process very simple and you can generate the code in just a few clicks and this is done by going to Sales Channels → Existing Website and you can choose to embed:
- Buy Button/View Product – this is ideal for adding to existing product pages
- Single Product – this is ideal for adding to a blog post or landing page
- Multiple Products – this allows you to basically add a full shop to a page
- Shopping Cart – this is code that you can add to your site’s header or footer to ensure that the cart remains active on all of your site’s pages
Choose whichever option is best for you and you will then be able to customize your chosen embed and there different options for each type but some general customization includes:
- Elements that are shown
- Styles
- Typography
- Colors
Once you are happy with the way that your embed is looking, click the Get Embed code in the top right of the screen and you will be given two options for your code:
- Beautify – this gives you full access to the code, should you wish to change it at a later date
- Minify – this gives you an optimized version of the code, which is better for performance
They also include links to guides on how to embed the code into some of the popular web builders but if you were to do this with WordPress, you would simply create a new page or edit an existing one, add the HTML box and paste the code, which would add the embed to your page.
Very easy and simple to do but if you want the checkout active on every page, make sure to add the Shopping cart code to your stores header or footer.
Conclusion
Shoprocket
Is Shoprocket Any Good?
Yes, we really like Shoprocket as it offers a very easy way to add an online store to an existing website, that loads quickly and is also easy for both you and your customers to use.
The core features are good and there are plenty of features that are on the coming soon list, which will only improve the platform and make it easier for you to market your store.
The only thing when it comes to marketing is the lack of SEO features that Shoprocket offers, which could make ranking your store in search a challenge, this combined with the limited website builder means that Shoprocket isn’t the best ecommerce platform for building an online store from scratch.
Shoprocket Pros:
Shoprocket Cons:
If you are looking for a quick and easy way to add an online store to your existing website with a good selection of features, then we would definitely recommend trying Shoprocket.
Shoprocket Alternatives
Hi, I'm Paul, the Owner and Founder of EcommerceGold.
I ran my own Ecommerce Business for over 7 years and now help others start their own online retail empires!