What Does Shopify Do?
Shopify is a dedicated ecommerce platform that allows business owners to build beautiful, feature packed online stores. Shopify is the gold standard when it comes to ecommerce platforms.
Use their store builder to bring your ecommerce vision to life without any coding expertise needed. Their curated theme store provides hundreds of flexible themes to make sure that your site is beautiful and high functioning.
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Shopify’s ecommerce platform also has tonnes of options for customization and feature add-ons.
With third-party apps, you can add in-depth analytics to your store, automate welcome emails to your customers, improve SEO, add loyalty programs, request and incentivize referrals, streamline your return process and a whole lot more.
Why We Love Shopify
There’s a whole lot to love about the Shopify platform.
Ease of Use
First off, it’s dead easy to start from nothing and create a beautiful online store. The site builder is easy enough to use that only moderate tech experience is needed to create an excellent online store.
Once your site is built, the platform continues to be simple to use as you add new products, change prices, customize shipping costs, implement sales taxes, track inventory and hold site-wide sales and discounts.
User Experience
To go along with the ease of use, the user experience is top notch.
Store owners can easily navigate Shopify’s backend to make updates as needed. More importantly, customers have the slickest online shopping experience.
Shopify reduces all of the friction points from getting potential customers to your site, to checking out the merchandise and then on to the check-out experience.
You’ve probably been a customer on a Shopify-built store before and may not have realized it. I always find that making purchases on Shopify sites is the most streamlined experience. One click to add to cart and then my information is typically remembered by Shopify so all I have to do is approve the payment and the purchase is completed.
Support
Shopify’s 24/7 customer support is responsive and can offer a helping hand anytime you’re stuck or having issues with your site.
Reducing down-time is so important with ecommerce and Shopify knows it. They’re available to get you back up and running as quickly as possible.
Flexibility and Scalability
Shopify’s platform is a great choice if you’re just getting started with online selling. It’s easy to set up and simple to operate.
It also provides a lot of flexibility within the core ecommerce platform so that it’s even a great choice for large businesses. You can start your store on Shopify and scale it into a large enterprise without having to worry about changing ecommerce platforms along the way.
Use Cases for Shopify
Shopify is well known for its ecommerce platform, but there are options for bricks and mortar sales as well as integrating into existing websites.
Ecommerce Sales
Shopify is a flexible online store platform that can be customized to suit ecommerce businesses of many shapes and sizes.
Common shopify stores include:
- Home and decor
- Jewelry and accessories
- Food and drink
- Clothing and fashion
- Crafts and books
- Electronics
- Artwork
- Merchandise
Anything (legal) that you can dream up, you can probably sell it through a Shopify store.
Bricks and Mortar
Shopify also has a point of sale offering that includes everything needed to sell in person.
It’s backed by the same platform as ecommerce stores so you can easily sell things at a bricks and mortar location and have an online presence as well.
Integrate with Existing Website
If you already have an existing web presence and want to start selling online, you can integrate Shopify’s “buy button” and allow customers to buy directly from your existing site.
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Sell on Social
You can also use Shopify to promote and sell your goods through social media. Your goods appear on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google or eBay and everything is tracked via Shopify’s backend.
This allows you to add additional sales channels to your existing online store.
Shopify Pricing
Shopify’s costs are mainly broken down into a monthly subscription fee for using the Shopify platform and some potential start-up costs if you want a premium theme.
Monthly Subscription
Shopify has three tiers of monthly subscriptions for using their ecommerce platform.
- Basic $38 per month - gets you an online store, unlimited products and everything you need to get a store up and running.
- Shopify $99 per month - builds on the basic plan and is best for growing businesses that are selling online and in person.
- Advanced $389 per month - is best for scaling businesses that are really taking online sales to the next level and require advanced reporting.
Themes
You can use any of the free themes that Shopify offers to build your store. Or you can opt for some of the more feature-rich premium themes with a one-time purchase.
Premium themes run anywhere from $100USD to $350 USD for a one-time purchase.
In our experience, if you’re serious about your online store, it can’t hurt to start with a premium theme. This helps you get going with added features and a standout design.
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