A Shopify alternative for a shop that sells time
If you got here because a salon, a clinic or a practice does not need a checkout, you are asking the right question. A commerce platform is a lot of machine to run five pages with a phone number on them. Here is what you get instead: 40 industry starting points that open as working multi-page sites, 600 industry-and-style combinations that rebuild the layout rather than recolouring it, eleven operating modules with no second subscription behind any of them, 29 scroll and cinematic sections, two languages on one site, and not one percent taken from what the site sells. Two rows still go theirs, and they are marked.
Storefront $49 a month, Storefront Pro $79 a month. Building and previewing cost nothing and take no card; the price starts when you publish, and there is a 7-day refund. See the full price list
The 13 rows a service business should read
| What you are asking about | With Naratake | With Shopify | Who takes the row |
|---|---|---|---|
| What is actually inside one starting point | The number to ask about is not 40, it is what opens. The bakery starting point is four pages: nine priced items, a custom-cake enquiry form with a photo column, and a six-image portfolio — a working site before you have typed a word. Salon, clinic, practice, studio, restaurant and agency each open the same way, carrying the sections that trade actually uses, and laying any of 15 design styles over one rebuilds the layout rather than recolouring it. | What you are shopping for in the Theme Store is the demo, and Shopify’s own requirements for theme developers make the demo a realistic example of a merchant’s business, with professional images, real-life scenarios and original text, and no Lorem Ipsum. The same page says what happens next: demo imagery does not transfer on install. The store’s own top industries are Clothing, Beauty, Jewelry and accessories, and Home — which tells you what these were drawn for. | Ours |
| Changing the look without redoing the site | 40 industry starting points across 15 design styles is 600 different-looking sites before anyone touches a colour — and the count is not the part that matters. This is: a style here is a different set of bones, not a different coat of paint. Switching one rebuilds the hero composition, every page header, the type, the corner radius, the motion and the photo treatment, and palettes are picked per trade, so the same style over a salon and over a dental practice does not come out the same colour. The pages come back rebuilt from the starting point and your content comes with it: the menu and its prices, the reviews, the staff, the class timetable, the coupon codes and the opening hours all carry over, along with the business’s own details — name, phone, email, address, logo, social links. What does not: the headings and body text you edited inside a block, and the photos you swapped in, go back to the template’s. A single undo puts the whole switch back. So a second direction costs an afternoon of looking, plus whatever headings you had rewritten — not the menu, the prices, the reviews and the hours typed in again. | Every look there is a theme, and a theme is a thing you acquire: the Theme Store carries free and paid ones, and Shopify states that a paid theme is licensed only to the store you originally bought it for. So a second direction is a second theme. What a change of theme does to the words and pictures already in the shop is a question for Shopify’s own pages rather than ours, and it is the one to ask before a season of writing goes into a layout. | Ours |
| A site shaped like a business that sells time | The 40 industry starting points are trades, not storefronts: salon, clinic, practice, studio, restaurant, agency. Each ships the sections that trade needs already laid out — appointment booking by staff member and time slot, a class timetable with sign-up, table reservations, online ordering, quote requests, property listings — and the records land in the site’s own back office rather than in a product catalog. Ordering and reservations go live on Storefront Pro, $79 a month or $758 a year; Storefront, $49 a month or $468 a year, builds and previews them. The card is charged through your own Stripe account either way. | Shopify is a commerce platform, and the shelf it was drawn for shows in its own Theme Store: the top industries listed there (Aug 26, 2026) are Clothing, Beauty, Jewelry and accessories, and Home. How best to model an hour of a lawyer’s time or a follow-up appointment inside a product catalog is a question for Shopify’s own documentation rather than a claim we are going to make on their behalf. What we can tell you is the shape it takes here: a staff member and a time slot, not a SKU. | Ours |
| The parts that actually run the business | Eleven of them, in the box: online ordering, table reservations, appointment booking by staff member and time slot, a class timetable, an order tracker, property listings, quote requests, a coupon banner and three menu layouts. Nothing to install, no second subscription behind any of them, and every record lands in the site’s own back office. Ordering and reservations go live on Storefront Pro, $79 a month or $758 a year; Storefront, $49 a month or $468 a year, builds and previews them. | Shopify answers the booking question by pointing at the App Store — its own blog says Shopify has a number of appointment scheduling tools available there, and that you add one of these apps to get appointment scheduling on your store. Each of the nine it lists is a separate app from a separate developer that you choose, install and keep working, and the App Store’s own seven categories — sales channels, finding products, selling products, orders and shipping, store design, marketing and conversion, store management — have no booking or reservations shelf in them at all. Restaurants go the same route: the app the App Store front page features for that turns your online store into a restaurant or coffee shop. | Ours |
| Motion on the page | Every piece of it lands finished: 29 scroll and cinematic sections, among them video that scrubs as you scroll, parallax, a scroll-told story, a horizontal scroller, a film strip, a cinema reel, a marquee, an image that reveals as it comes up, a scroll progress bar. A 3D hero and an animated background ship alongside them. One attribute sets the intensity for the whole site — subtle, lively, cinematic, or off altogether — across ten entrance signatures: rise, fade, slide, zoom, blur, clip, flip, letterbox, iris and swing. Change your mind once and every section follows. The words are readable with JavaScript off, and a visitor whose system asks for less motion gets the site holding still. | Shopify’s theme settings documentation has one Animations group in it. You can switch on Reveal sections on scroll, which fades a section in as you reach it and is on by default, and you can pick one of two hover effects: Vertical lift, which moves the element up, and 3D lift, which floats it forward with a shine passing across it. That is the animation the theme editor is documented to give you — checkboxes, not timings you author. | Ours |
| What is in the editor before you install anything | 111 components and 15 design styles, every one of them in the editor and included. Menus, galleries, pricing tables, FAQs, enquiry forms with a photo column, maps, testimonials, timetables, ordering, booking and the back office that receives them are the same box — no marketplace, no second bill, and nobody else’s terms of service attached to your site. A design style rebuilds the layout rather than recolouring it, so changing your mind about the whole look is a choice rather than a rebuild. | Shopify builds pages from sections and blocks, and its documentation describes a block as text, buttons, a single image, a collage of images or links. The published ceilings are 25 sections per template and 1,250 blocks across a template. The same page is explicit about the part that matters when you are comparing: which sections and blocks you actually get depends on the theme you bought and on its version, so the editor you end up with is the one that came with the design. | Ours |
| How far you can push one element | Dragging a block onto a page is the doorway, not the product. What is behind it: 44 style properties on any single node, each of them settable four times over — desktop, tablet, mobile, and again for hover — which is 176 adjustable points on one element. Vertical CJK text for a hanging-scroll heading, a neon glow in a colour you choose, frosted-glass backdrop blur, a two-colour gradient at the angle you set, a tilt up to 45° either way, sticky positioning, z-index, and a per-node entrance of fade, slide, zoom or blur. Per-breakpoint hover states, in a visual editor, with no CSS to write and no layout system to learn first — and the same set of controls whichever starting point you began from. | Sections and blocks, described precisely: a block is text, buttons, a single image, a collage of images or links, and the published limits are 25 sections per template with 1,250 blocks across it. The sentence that decides how far you can push anything is on the same page — which sections and blocks you actually get depends on the theme you bought and on its version. The controls you end up with arrived with the design. | Ours |
| Who takes a cut of what the site sells | Not us. We take no percentage of an order, a booking or a deposit, on any plan, ever — the subscription is the whole bill we send. The card is charged through your own Stripe account: your keys, Stripe’s own rate billed by Stripe, and the money lands in your account without passing through us. Your Stripe account, your keys, your payout — which is why no percentage of the sale can reach us, on any plan. | Two layers, and both are printed on their own pricing page. One is the card processing rate through Shopify Payments, which steps down as you move up the plans. The other is a line that page itself calls third-party transaction fees — Shopify’s own cut on the sales you put through somebody else’s processor, charged on top of whatever that processor already takes. We are not reprinting either set of numbers, because a rate card is theirs to change and ours to get wrong; read the current ones on their pricing page, linked below. The shape is the part that does not move: whichever way the card goes, a percentage of the sale is part of the arrangement, every month, for as long as the shop is open. | Ours |
| Taking the site with you | LocalSite Studio — our desktop line, bought once — writes the whole site out as a Next.js project: pages, styles and assets as ordinary source in a folder, plus the database and back office when the site stores orders, bookings or enquiries. The code belongs to the client, it runs on any host you point it at, and none of it needs an account here. On the cloud line the same source download is on Storefront Pro; the $49 Storefront plan does not include it. | A theme can be downloaded as a .zip, and Shopify says plainly what is not in it: your products, collections, menus, pages, blog posts, images or the other files in your Content library. The archive is emailed to a staff account rather than handed to you in the browser. And a paid theme is licensed only to the store you originally bought it for — so holding the file is not the same as being free to use it somewhere else. | Ours |
| What is left if you stop paying | On the desktop line: the folder, and it keeps working wherever it is hosted. On our cloud line the honest answer is the same as theirs — stop paying and the hosted site stops. The difference is that we sell the door out, on Storefront Pro, and it is a door inside the same product family rather than a migration to a stranger. | The store is the subscription. Stop paying and the storefront, the admin and the checkout stop being yours to run. Nothing on the pages we read describes a way to take the shop off Shopify and host it yourself. | Ours |
| Taking a card with nothing to wire up | Only with your own Stripe account. You save your Stripe secret and publishable keys in workspace settings, and Stripe pays you directly — no onboarding we run for you, and no point at which we hold your money. It is still an account you have to go and open, and on launch day that is work you do and they do not. | Built in. Shopify Payments is part of the product, the online rate is published against each plan, and there is nothing to connect before you take the first order. On launch day that is work they have done and we have not, and the row is theirs. What it costs is the percentage in the row above, on every sale, for as long as the shop is open; ours is one evening of Stripe setup and then never a percentage again. | Theirs |
| Actually selling and shipping products | This row is Shopify’s. Stock across locations, shipping, tax and cross-border selling are its trade. What we sell instead is a site for a business that sells time — a chair, a room, an hour — booked by staff member and time slot, with the record landing in the site’s own database and back office, and no commission on it from us. | The whole product, and the plans are drawn around it: Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus, with staff accounts going from none included on Basic to five on Grow and fifteen on Advanced (Aug 26, 2026). If you ship boxes, all of that machinery is working for you. If you do not, it is what most of the subscription is paying for, sitting under a site that never touches it. | Theirs |
| What it costs | Printed rather than pointed at: Storefront is $49 a month or $468 a year, and Storefront Pro — the plan that runs ordering and bookings on a published site, and the only one that includes the source download — is $79 a month or $758 a year. One custom domain is included on both. There is no percentage on top of it, which is the whole point of the row above. | At the time of writing (Aug 26, 2026) Shopify published Basic at $29 a month billed yearly ($39 monthly), Grow at $79 ($105), Advanced at $299 ($399), and Plus starting at $2,300 a month. Basic lists additional staff accounts as not included; five come with Grow and fifteen with Advanced. Worth knowing what the money buys, because most of it is commerce machinery — and the card percentage rides on top of whichever tier you land on. | Even |
Everything said about Shopify on this page was last checked on Aug 26, 2026. Plans, prices and features change without telling us — confirm them on Shopify’s own pages before you decide anything.
What Shopify is shaped for
Shopify is bigger and older than us, and in three places that shows: a shop that ships products, one that wants its counter hardware from the same supplier, and one built out of installed apps. Here is where.
- 01You sell physical things and ship them. Stock across locations, labels, tax and cross-border are the entire product on their side, and that is the trade Shopify was built for.
- 02You want the counter hardware and the retail stack from one supplier, with the website hung off it. Ours is the reverse shape: the register is inside the website, running in a browser on hardware you bring, and the card reader is one you connect to your own Stripe account.
- 03You want to add features by installing them. Their App Store advertised over 16,000 apps when we checked (Aug 26, 2026); here everything we ship is already in the editor and in the price, with nobody else’s terms of service attached to your site.
When we are the better answer
Come over when the thing you are buying is a website rather than a commerce platform.
- 01Your business sells time — a chair, a room, an appointment, an hour — and you would rather it were not modeled as a product with a SKU and a shipping weight.
- 02The site you need is the site: the pages, the photographs, the opening hours and the phone number, starting from a layout drawn for your trade instead of a storefront you have to undress first.
- 03You would rather not hand a percentage of every booking to the company that hosts your website. We take none, on any plan, and the card runs through your own Stripe account.
Plain about the fit
Who this is built for
Two shapes of business, and Shopify is built for one of them. If you sell physical things and ship them — stock across locations, labels, tax, cross-border — that is the trade it was made for. If you want features you add by installing them from a marketplace, they have one; everything we ship is in the editor and in the price, with nobody else’s release schedule attached to your site. For everyone else the trade runs the other way: 40 industry starting points that open as working multi-page sites, 600 industry-and-style combinations that rebuild the layout rather than recolouring it, eleven operating modules writing into your own back office, 111 components, 29 scroll and cinematic sections, two languages on one site, no percentage taken from anything you sell, and the whole site as Next.js source on Storefront Pro or from the desktop app. The part to read twice: ordering and bookings go live on Storefront Pro — $79 a month or $758 a year; Storefront, $49 a month or $468 a year, builds and previews them, and the card behind either one runs through a Stripe account you open yourself.
Questions people actually ask
Is Shopify the wrong choice for a salon or a clinic?
It is not the wrong product, it is the wrong shape. Shopify is built around products, orders and fulfillment, and its plans are priced around that. It becomes the wrong purchase when what you needed was five pages, a gallery and a phone number — and you are paying a subscription plus a percentage for orders, inventory and fulfillment to sit unused underneath them.
Can I take my store off Shopify?
Your theme, not your shop. Shopify lets you download a theme as a .zip and says outright what the file leaves behind: your products, collections, menus, pages, blog posts and images. A paid theme, it adds, is licensed only to the store you bought it for. The catalog, the admin and the checkout stay where they are. Our export is a different kind of thing — the whole site as a Next.js project in a folder, with your content in it, yours to host anywhere.
Can Naratake take bookings and payments for my business today?
On Storefront Pro, yes — ordering and bookings run on the published site and the records land in the site’s own database and back office. On the $49 Storefront plan you can build both and preview them, but they do not go live. The money is separate from both: you save your own Stripe keys and Stripe pays you directly, which is precisely why no percentage of the sale can reach us — we are not in the payment path. That is one evening of setup, once, against a percentage of every sale for as long as the shop is open.
Start from a layout that already looks like your trade
Open the starting points and find yours — salon, clinic, practice, studio, restaurant. The plans and what each one includes are on the pricing page. And if the code has to be yours at the end, LocalSite Studio is the other half of this.
What we checked
The pages this comparison was read from, all of them on Shopify’s own site.
- Shopify plans and pricing
- The Shopify App Store
- The Shopify Theme Store
- Shopify Help Center — theme settings, including animations
- Shopify Help Center — sections and blocks
- The Shopify blog — appointment booking apps
- Shopify Help Center — downloading themes
- Shopify for developers — theme store requirements
Shopify is a trademark of Shopify Inc. Naratake is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to Shopify Inc., and this page is not official Shopify content.