Shopify Features: What's Actually Built In and What Needs an App

What Counts as a "Shopify Feature"

Almost every "Shopify features" article online mixes three very different categories into a single bullet list, which is why so many merchants either underestimate what's in the box or install apps for things Shopify already does. Before walking the inventory, it helps to define the three buckets the rest of this article uses on every line.

With those buckets fixed, the rest of the article walks Shopify category by category, naming exactly which bucket each feature falls into. If a feature isn't labelled plan-gated or app-only, treat it as universal.

Storefront & Theme System

Shopify's storefront isn't a website builder bolted onto an admin — it's a Liquid-rendered, CDN-served front end that the same theme files power across desktop and mobile, edited through a section-based editor. The four cards below cover the parts most merchants actually use.

For deeper customisation paths beyond what the theme editor allows, see our guides on how Shopify themes work, the new Horizon theme, and the custom design walkthrough — each unpacks the trade-offs between theme editing, Liquid edits and full custom builds.

Products, Inventory & Catalog

Shopify's product model is one of the most-used parts of the platform, and the table below maps every native catalog feature against what it does and where plan availability matters. Most rows are universal — the gating concentrates in B2B catalogs and the location count.

Checkout & Payments

Checkout is the most heavily-engineered part of Shopify and the feature competitors find hardest to match. Conversion-rate data Shopify publishes consistently shows Shop Pay outperforming guest checkout — the four cards below break down what every store gets without any add-ons.

The legacy route is closed either way. checkout.liquid stopped working for in-checkout pages on August 13, 2024, and was sunset for the Thank you and Order status pages on August 28, 2025. Automatic upgrades of Plus stores began in January 2026, and stores that didn't upgrade by the August 26, 2026 deadline were upgraded automatically.

Shopify Payments is the lever that determines your effective take rate: every store on a third-party gateway pays an extra 0.2%–2% transaction fee depending on plan. For the full economics see our Shopify Payments guide and how Shopify pays you.

Sales Channels

A "channel" in Shopify means anywhere you can list and sell the same products from your one catalog. Every channel below is managed from the main admin with shared inventory, orders and customer records — no separate stores, no synced spreadsheets. Which channels to add and how publishing a product to each one works is covered in our guide to Shopify sales channels.

Marketing & Customer Engagement

Most stores install Klaviyo or Mailchimp out of habit, not necessity. The native marketing suite handles email, automations, discounts, forms and live chat on the four main plans, with 10,000 free emails a month — and is genuinely good enough that early-stage stores can defer paid tools for months.

International Selling — Shopify Markets

Shopify Markets turns one Shopify store into a multi-region storefront. Every plan can sell in local currencies, translate the storefront into multiple languages, configure per-country pricing rules, route shoppers to local subfolders or country-specific top-level domains, and collect duties and import taxes at checkout. None of this requires a second store or a separate plan.

The paid extension — Managed Markets — adds merchant-of-record handling, so Global-e becomes the merchant of record: it provides the tax registration, remits tax to local authorities and manages duties and import tax — provided you buy labels from a Managed Markets shipping service — in exchange for a percentage fee per international order. Worth it when international order complexity outweighs the per-order fee, not before.

Point of Sale (POS)

Shopify's POS system isn't a separate product — it's the same admin, the same products, the same customer database, accessed through the iOS or Android POS app. Card readers, the Tap to Pay integration on iPhone, and unified online+in-person reporting all ship with the included in-person selling features. For a single-location store, that's enough; for multi-location retail, POS Pro adds:

• Daily sales reports and in-app retail store analytics.
• Inventory in the POS app — receive inventory, send inventory and adjust inventory quantities.
• Unified exchanges across channels (return online, exchange in-store).
• Staff roles and permissions, saved and emailed carts, ship-to-home and ship-from-store fulfilment.
• Pickup in store and local delivery from the POS app — POS Pro covers handling these orders in the POS app, and local delivery orders can be created and managed from Shopify POS; offering them as checkout options is set up in the Shopify admin.

On Shopify Plus, the first 20 POS Pro locations are included. The full ROI math for the POS Pro upgrade — when the per-location fee pays back through reduced shrinkage, staff productivity and saved app costs — is in our POS Pro analysis.

Shipping & Fulfillment

Shipping is one of Shopify's quietly strongest native categories. Every plan gets negotiated carrier discounts (on the US pricing page the ceiling is now the same on every plan, while the Canadian page still steps it up by tier), label printing without leaving the admin, and a rate engine that supports calculated, table, free-shipping-threshold and zone-based rules.

Customer Accounts, Orders & Returns

Customer and order management is the operational backbone most merchants touch every day, and almost all of it ships in the box:

• New customer accounts — passwordless, one-time-code login that surfaces orders, subscriptions, gift cards, store credit, addresses and loyalty (if an app is installed) on a Shop-styled account page. The older password-based version is now legacy customer accounts: since February 2026 it is closed to new stores and to existing stores that were not already using it, and Shopify has said it will stop providing feature updates and technical support for it, with a final sunset date to be announced later in 2026 (as of September 2026). If your store still runs the legacy version, our customer accounts migration guide covers what breaks and how to switch.
• Customer profiles & segments — lifetime value, last-order date, channel of acquisition, predicted-spend tier, plus filterable segments used by Email, automations and discounts.
• Draft orders — manually create orders, send invoices, apply custom discounts and capture payment offline; standard for made-to-order, quoted and one-off wholesale work that sits outside a B2B catalog.
• Order editing — add or remove line items, change quantities and re-charge or refund the delta on already-placed orders without cancelling.
• Self-serve return portal — customers request returns from the new account page; merchants approve, send return labels (via Shopify Shipping, domestic US or Canadian orders only), restock and refund — no app required; which return and cancellation settings to switch on is its own walkthrough.
• Refunds, partial refunds & store credit — issue back to original payment, partial amounts, or as native store credit that auto-applies at next checkout.
• Customer notes, tags & timeline — every interaction (orders, refunds, support replies, email opens) appears on a single timeline per customer.

Built-In AI: Sidekick & AI-Powered Tools

Shopify builds AI into the admin rather than selling it as an add-on. Sidekick is the AI assistant in the admin: chat with it to get guidance, generate content and complete tasks, or click the generate-text icon to have it write text in blog posts, online store pages, product descriptions, Shopify Messaging emails and the theme editor. Other AI features are built into specific workflows — suggested replies and instant-answer suggestions in Shopify Inbox, replacing an image background with a color in the file editor, and suggested product categories.

Shopify's pricing table lists Sidekick as included on Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus, and Shopify says Sidekick's features and usage limits vary by plan; its Help Center says many of the other AI features come at no additional cost, though availability can vary by plan, device and language. No Shopify page we read in October 2026 gives numeric usage limits.

Which of these outputs you can trust as-is, which need a human edit, and how to read the AI's confidence on figures is a subject of its own — see our dedicated guide to what Shopify's built-in AI reliably does without editing.

Automation & First-Party Utility Apps

Two things sit between "core admin" and "third-party app store" that most evaluators miss. The first is Shopify Flow, an event-driven workflow engine that fires on triggers (new order, inventory threshold, customer tag added, refund issued) and runs actions (tag a customer, send an email, call a webhook, hide a product, post to Slack, buy a Shopify Shipping label). Pre-built templates cover fraud holds, VIP tagging, low-stock alerts and reorder reminders.

Once Plus-only, Flow is now included on the Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus plans, with two feature gates left: the Send HTTP Request action behind that webhook call needs Grow, Advanced or Plus, and tasks from custom partner apps remain Plus-only. Run volume isn't a feature gate, but it does follow your plan's API limits.

The second is the first-party utility-app cluster — Shopify-built apps that aren't bundled in the core UI but are free to install, supported by Shopify and feel native once installed:

• Search & Discovery — search filters, faceted navigation, product recommendations and product boosts in storefront search results; synonym groups appear on its App Store listing but not in its current help pages. Setting up filters and boosts step by step is in our Search & Discovery app guide.
• Translate & Adapt — manual and AI-assisted translations for storefront, products, navigation and email content, paired with Markets.
• Shopify Forms — wholesale, B2B-application and lead-capture forms, with tagging and customer segments on the Shopify side and email sending through an app such as Shopify Messaging; what the free app rules out is what decides whether you also pay a form builder.
• Shopify Collabs — Shopify-built creator/affiliate program management with link tracking and commission rules; commissions are added to your Shopify bill with a 2.9% processing fee on each automatic commission payment and paid out through PayPal or bank transfer to creators who have activated automatic payouts. Whether Collabs, an affiliate app or plain discount codes fits your store is weighed in our Collabs vs affiliate app guide; for US audiences, whether those creators have to disclose the partnership is an FTC question.
• Shopify Bundles — fixed and multipack bundles with automatic inventory decrementing.
• Shopify Inbox & Marketing — already noted above, both first-party.

Analytics & Reporting

Most stores read four numbers a day — sessions, conversion rate, AOV, revenue — and Shopify's dashboards cover all of them on every plan. What the built-in reports leave thin is cohort and lifetime-value depth, so the teams that need those are choosing an app, not a plan.

For depth across the analytics surface (including the Live View map, finance reports and where plan tier does and does not change what you can build) our dedicated Shopify Analytics guide walks every report type.

Native SEO Toolkit

SEO on Shopify gets unfairly criticised: the technical basics are built in on every plan — an auto-generated sitemap.xml, a robots.txt you can edit through theme code, meta titles and descriptions on products, collections, pages, blog posts and the homepage, a URL redirects manager, canonical tags, an image CDN with an alt-text field on every image, and Product and Article structured data through the theme. Our guide to Shopify SEO optimization walks through what each one does and what you still set by hand.

One setting changed in July 2026: automatic hreflang tags across linked Markets storefronts became switchable. They stay on by default, and turning them off is documented for one situation — a store that already manages its own hreflang.

The honest limits: blog SEO controls are minimal, faceted-collection URL management requires theme work, and large multi-language sites sometimes need a translation app deeper than Translate & Adapt.

Shopify Money: Balance, Capital, Bill Pay, Tax

Few "features" lists mention these because they sit outside the storefront, but for an evaluator they're part of what "running on Shopify" actually means. The four products below are all first-party Shopify offerings:

Beyond these four, Shopify Payments also includes native chargeback and dispute handling — automatic evidence compilation and submission to the issuing bank on eligible orders.

Developer & Extensibility Platform

Even merchants who never touch code benefit from the extensibility layer, because it's how apps and agencies build the things native Shopify doesn't ship with — when in-house skills run out, hiring a Shopify developer or going down the custom development route is the typical next step. The components that matter:

• Liquid templating language — Shopify's open-source server-side template engine that powers every classic theme.
• Admin and Storefront APIs — the Admin API ships in both REST and GraphQL (see our REST-to-GraphQL migration guide), while the Storefront API is GraphQL-only; both come with versioned quarterly releases and webhook support for nearly every event.
• Shopify Functions — WebAssembly logic that runs inside checkout, discounts, shipping and payments — the replacement for Shopify Scripts, which stopped executing on June 30, 2026. Public App Store apps containing Functions work on any plan; a custom app containing Function APIs requires Plus.
• Hydrogen and Oxygen — Shopify's headless SDK for any JavaScript framework (with React Router and Next.js starters) and Shopify's edge hosting for fully custom storefronts; see the headless docs.
• Shopify CLI — local dev environment for themes, apps and Functions, with hot reload and Shopify-managed tunnels.
• App Store with 21,000+ public apps and Theme Store with 1,200+ themes.

Security, Reliability & Compliance

Shopify ships the trust infrastructure, but privacy is shared work: you're generally the controller of your customers' data, so the responsibilities that come with that role stay with you. The table maps each safeguard to where it actually applies across plans.

Plan-Gated Feature Matrix

Pricing aside, this is the table merchants actually need when comparing plans by capability. Anything not in this matrix is universal across all four tiers. If you're still weighing which tier to start on, our plan-picker guide walks the decision step-by-step.

For the underlying pricing — monthly fees, processing rates and what each plan costs in absolute dollars — see our Shopify pricing breakdown.

Whether that last column is worth the Plus fee for a larger brand is the question our Shopify Enterprise guide works through.

What Shopify Does NOT Do Well Out of the Box

No platform ships everything, and Shopify's gaps are predictable enough that experienced merchants pre-budget for them. The honest list:

• No native loyalty or rewards program — points, tiers, referrals, VIP benefits all require apps (Smile, LoyaltyLion, Yotpo, Rivo).
• Reviews collect natively but display through an app — Shopify retired its first-party Product Reviews app in 2024. Shop product reviews now let verified buyers review a product in the Shop app, but showing those reviews on your own storefront takes one of the five supported partner apps — Judge.me, Loox, Okendo, Stamped.io or Yotpo — and the synced reviews carry a Verified by Shop badge you can't remove.
• Blog engine is intentionally basic — each post can be scheduled for a set date and time and credited to a staff author, but there's no editorial workflow, calendar or queue, and SEO controls are limited. Serious content programs go headless or move to a CMS.
• Advanced subscriptions need apps — native Selling Plans handle simple recurring orders, but subscription box logic, prepaid plans, swap flows and dunning typically require Recharge, Appstle or Skio. See our subscriptions comparison.
• No multi-vendor marketplace mode — Shopify isn't designed for Amazon-style multi-seller storefronts. Marketplace apps (Shipturtle, Webkul) exist but add significant operational complexity.
• Accounting integrations are app-driven — QuickBooks, Xero and Sage sync require third-party connectors; native accounting export is limited to a CSV.
• Limited native CRM — customer profiles, segments, notes and marketing automation (Shopify Messaging, Shopify Flow) are solid, but there is still no pipeline management, no deal stages and no sales-rep workflows; that side belongs in a dedicated CRM like HubSpot, not Shopify.

The Bottom Line

For most evaluators, the takeaway is that Shopify's "features" question is almost never about whether the platform can do a thing — it's about whether the native version is enough or an app is warranted. Audit the seven native gaps above against your specific requirements; everything else is in the box on every plan, and the four-tier ladder gates depth rather than capability.

Frequently Asked Questions