Table of Contents
- About Shopify
- Shopify Features Review
- Ease of Use
- Templates & Design
- Ecommerce Platform
- Pros of Shopify:
- User-Friendly UI
- Multiple Plug-ins
- Payment Gateways
- Shopify POS
- Support and Maintenance
- Cons of Shopify:
- Costly
- Multi-Lingual Store
- SEO
- Transaction Fees
- Benefits of Choosing Shopify for your Business
- Conclusion
Ecommerce business has increased manifold during the past several years and everyone wants a piece of this cake.
According to eMarketer, online retail sales will reach $6.17 trillion by 2023, with ecommerce taking up 22.3% of total retail sales. Building an ecommerce business from scratch is a daunting topic. It requires expertise and resources to build your business.
Shopify has been in the ecommerce development business for the past 15 years. Shopify has become one of the leading ecommerce service providers with reliable and effective solutions. Shopify has more than 800,000 online stores, offices around the globe, $63 billion worth of sales, and over 7,000 employees.
About Shopify
Shopify is a Canadian e-commerce platform company headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario. It was founded by a German citizen living in Canada who decided to sell snowboards online.
Shopify’s proprietary ecommerce platform powers websites, retail point of sale systems, and POS systems. It is used to create and manage online stores and retail point of sale systems. The company offers a wide variety of solutions to help businesses run their operations smoothly and increase sales.
Shopify Features Review
Ease of Use
Developing and creating an ecommerce store on Shopify does not require technical skills. It is fairly simple to use and anyone with a basic knowledge of the web can create an ecommerce store using Shopify. Shopify also provides various guides on how you can start your business. You can set up and launch your ecommerce store in one weekend.
Templates & Design
The software includes a variety of customization options. You can customize the layout of your store with ease. You can even customize your store’s look and feel by choosing from hundreds of themes. If you’re looking for a full-featured e-commerce solution, Shopify is the right choice for you.
Shopify’s website builder gives you the ability to customize your store’s appearance and content. Its online store builder lets you customize the look and feel of your online store to sell any kind of product. You can even sell food, drinks, and sports. You can also sell your products using an online store. But before you start selling, you must first create a product to sell. In a matter of 15 minutes, you can set up your store.
Shopify theme detector enables you to identify the theme used by other ecommerce portals. That way your ambit of theme selection widens.
Ecommerce Platform
Shopify ecommerce platform is a good choice for both small and large businesses. It is a simple to use ecommerce platform but at the same time, it is extremely powerful with its tools and analytics. Shopify is capable of handling a large number of transactions with ease. If your business is enterprise-level, then you should consider Shopify Plus.
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Pros of Shopify
User-Friendly UI
The UI of Shopify is very user-friendly. It’s not complicated to use, and you can start a free trial and then decide whether you’d like to use the software for your e-commerce store or your physical store. In addition, the POS hardware available with Shopify allows you to run your e-commerce store at your physical location. Moreover, it comes with a robust POS solution, which will allow you to manage sales at multiple locations, such as a retail location.
Multiple Plug-ins
Shopify also comes with a multitude of plug-ins. Shopify offers nearly 4000 different plugins in the app store, and over 1500 of them are completely free. The plug-ins include chatbots, social media apps, and bookkeeping tools.
Payment Gateways
Shopify integrates payment gateways in your ecommerce store so that a customer can easily pay and check out. These payment gateways come with advanced security features to safeguard the key details of your customers. Shopify lets users build a store where PayPal can be used to extend the reach of business across borders. If you’re starting from scratch, you can easily add on a payment processor. If you’re transferring from another platform, you can do it yourself. The interface is a breeze to use, and you can customize it to suit your business.
Shopify POS
Apart from online, users can sell their products in a traditional way face-to-face. It is possible to integrate Shopify Point of Sale (POS) with your ecommerce store. It adds tons of functionality to your business by effectively managing inventory, products, and pricing.
Support and Maintenance
Unlike open-source platforms like woo commerce and Magento, Shopify has 24*7 support and maintenance services. Shopify responds to the queries of its users within a few hours. There is always a technical team in the backend waiting to answer your queries.
Cons of Shopify
Costly
Shopify is a subscription-based service with a base plan of 29 USD per month. The basic plan does not include all the features. If you want more features and more customization, you’ll have to pay more.
Multi-lingual Store
Setting up a multi-lingual store is very difficult and requires technical expertise. If you want to sell your products in different countries or regions, setting up a store with support for multiple languages is necessary. That’s where Shopify lags.
SEO
SEO optimization is a field in which Shopify lacks expertise. It does not let you edit the URL structures. Apart from this, Shopify automatically generates a sitemap of your store so you can’t change it.
Transaction Fees
Shopify charges extra fees for ecommerce transactions if you use Shopify Payments. These expenses can add up quickly and affect your profitability.
Benefits Of Choosing Shopify For Your Business
Shopify is a powerful ecommerce platform. It has a score of 4.5 out of 5 and is packed with useful tools. It includes tax and shipping calculations, which makes it a valuable tool for eCommerce. It is fairly expensive, especially if you want to sell digital goods or dropship products. If you’re looking for a cost-effective, dropshipping or digital goods solution, Shopify is worth considering.
Below are the benefits of choosing Shopify as your ecommerce platform:
- Quick and easy setup
- Attractive online stores
- Extend with apps
- Reliability and security
- Effective customer support
- Excellent loading speed
- Mobile responsiveness
- Powerful marketing tools
Conclusion
Shopify ecommerce platform comes with tons of benefits and lots of great features that make it a sought-after ecommerce solution for a wide range of businesses. It is a premier choice for lots of entrepreneurs and developers.
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Deepak Wadhwani has over 20 years experience in software/wireless technologies. He has worked with Fortune 500 companies including Intuit, ESRI, Qualcomm, Sprint, Verizon, Vodafone, Nortel, Microsoft and Oracle in over 60 countries. Deepak has worked on Internet marketing projects in San Diego, Los Angeles, Orange Country, Denver, Nashville, Kansas City, New York, San Francisco and Huntsville. Deepak has been a founder of technology Startups for one of the first Cityguides, yellow pages online and web based enterprise solutions. He is an internet marketing and technology expert & co-founder for a San Diego Internet marketing company.
