Shopify is one of the biggest e-commerce platforms, having 600,000 businesses powered. Do you want to know what this platform is and why is it the best to use? Here is our guidance for you.
Shopify is a Canadian e-commerce company headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario and was started in 2006. The platform gives a home to more hundreds of thousands of online stores. The active users’ number is more than 1 million now and the total gross merchandise volume exceeds $55 billion. It powers entrepreneurs all over the world and grows bigger and bigger.
The company has all features an online store needs and also has thousands of applications that help make everything easier. To use this platform no IT knowledge is required, and it’s perfect for beginners and experts alike. You can create a fully customizable website, online store, and blog, you have unlimited bandwidth, product inventory, and customer data, you have the opportunity to sell on the newest sales channels. Shopify accepts credit cards instantly with Shopify Payments, and they have 24/7 help. All these things with Shopify but it’s not everything so far. By the way, you can try it for free for 14 days.
Are you new to e-commerce? Don’t you know where to start? Open a Shopify online store, this guide will help with the basics for sure and if you want to make product management easier Syncee Shopify application is here for you too. This article is made to give you a quick and useful review about Shopify.
Why choose Shopify?
Shopify is the friend of online store owners. It is an all-in-one, turn-key e-commerce solution. On this platform, you can run any kind of online store, no matter what products you want to sell until it’s legal of course. You can let your imagination fly.
Why is Shopify so popular? Because it’s easy to use, it’s one of the most user-friendly e-commerce platforms. It’s a viable option to choose Shopify as a retailer no matter that you had a physical store before and now you want to move or you are just about to enter the field of commerce. The other thing is: whether you sell online, on social media, in-store, or out of the trunk of your car, Shopify has you covered. This e-commerce software is successful because of properties like rationality, stability, resiliency, and because of the fact that they have a serious development team.
Shopify works with the biggest companies like Red Bull or Tesla but next to the big companies there are a lot of smaller ones too – also think about those who run their online store from their bedroom.
So it’s never been easier to start an e-commerce business; but now Shopify handles everything from marketing and payments, to secure checkout and shipping. Now you can focus on the things you love.
It’s easy to set up and run a Shopify store If you are not into technical skills and details, you will get every help from the company. It’s completely hosted.
Point of sale
Sell on your Shopify website or sell on a social media platform. The main field of Shopify is when you sell on a fully set up online store, but with the company, there’s another, additional solution: your products can be bought via Facebook, Pinterest or other sites like WordPress.
Applications
Applications are the BIGGEST PRO of Shopify. There are hundreds of applications that you can choose from on Shopify’s App Store. It’s really useful because you can find everything you need in this market to manage your Shopify account. With the applications, everything can be easy from design to marketing steps. Most of the apps are quite cheap but if you meet expensive ones probably they worth it. But for as much as you can read a description of each software, you can decide whether the one you want to choose is good for you or not. But Shopify provides safe services.
Secure service
Shopify handles security well, everything is well-protected from your data to every web page.
Speedy service
When we are talking about the fact that Shopify has a speedy service we not only say that the 24/7 customer service/support does its job fast and in high-quality. We also say that Shopify and the stores’ pages load fast, the customers don’t have to wait long seconds when they click on anything. The company has an insource payment method too, so you don’t have to work with a third-party vendor, this also makes your store run faster.
If you have questions about Shopify, you can search for the solutions on Shopify’s own platform in a huge database. There are many paragraphs in the Frequently Asked Questions page, there’s a forum for customer-written content, there’s a fast live customers support solution for messages and call support too and so on. So you don’t have to worry about stopping at a problem. The support is reasonable.
Design
Besides adding products to your store you can also customize the website’s design with ease. You can do it on your own or you can choose from hundreds of free built-in, quality professional Shopify themes too so that you don’t have to worry much about the design. So no design skills are needed. Most of Shopify’s ready-to-use themes are mobile friendly, they are responsive: it means no matter what gadget you use or what is the size of the window on your computer’s screen, the design will conform to those, it will be readable and neat. Themes are fully customizable, it can reflect fully the personality of your business.
Customization
If you want to customize anything on your website, store, you don’t have to worry if you know just a little of web programming. It will be easy to customize.
However it’s not a multi-language platform, you can’t make it possible to set the store in English and then to German for example. If you want your online store being available in more languages, you have to do a new store/site to each language, but don’t worry, it will count as one store, to put it simply. But it will be another site.
Marketing with Shopify
As for marketing, Shopify provides the essential methods, nothing special, but that can be enough if you know what you are doing, and you can be creative in this field too. Shopify lets you work well with marketing and gives you essential tools for that, and you are able to create good landing pages with these elements. It does good marketing for SEO, AdWords, and others.
As for design again, Shopify does its job really well. The basic design is easily improvable, you have a lot of neat templates to choose from Shopify’s theme system and you can also hire somebody to improve this to a higher level.
Data file
Shopify works with .csv files as for the products’ data of the online stores. Shopify allows you to import product data only from a .csv file. With data files, you can bulk upload products easily to your online store, and it’s also handy if you want to migrate data from another platform. If you work with a supplier you either have to ask for a .csv data feed file or you can work with Syncee application. With Syncee it doesn’t matter what is the extension of the file (csv, xml, xls(x), json, txt) it can upload and update your products and it will provide you more additional features. Ths is why we say that you can work with any supplier you want, you can see that Shopify – with their own applications – has a solution to everything.
Fees
You have to pay a certain percentage of sales to Shopify when you sell any products. So the company charges a transaction fee for every sale unless you use Shopify Payment. But it’s obvious when you choose a platform that can provide you a lot of helpful things that you have additional expenses.
Payment Gateways
Unless you use Shopify Payments, Shopify charges a transaction fee for every sale you make with your online store, no matter what type of pricing plan you choose. You can do credit card processing via Shopify Payments or a third party payment gateway by the way. Shopify stores can be integrated with more than 100 payment gateways and the system accepts different currencies. So you can accept payments directly with Shopify without the hassle of a payment gateway. The best is if you use Shopify’s solution.
SEO
If it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Shopify you have to know that this platform allows customizable tags, meta description, and every necessary code. It’s a good choice. The SEO is improved here. And you can make it so much easier with SEO & marketing tools, apps.
What is SEO in general? Search engine optimization is the process of affecting the online visibility of a website or a web page in a web search engine’s unpaid results – often referred to as “natural”, “organic”, or “earned” results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a website appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users; these visitors can then be converted into customers. [Ortiz-Cordova, A. and Jansen, B. J. (2012)] You can convert this definition to online stores and products too, Shopify has the appropriate menu and form to fill at the right place in your store settings surface.
Easy-to-use platform
You don’t have to be an IT genius to use Shopify. Even if you need help, you’ll get that from the customer service.
What else you can do with Shopify…
- Manage your inventory (manually)
- Create webpage and blog
- Track customer and order details
- View analytics
- You have abandoned cart recovery
- Organize products into categories
- Quick & easy to set up & use
- Discount code engine
- Set up multiple staff log in with different permission levels
- Set up customer accounts
- Sorting customers (by location etc) to understand them more
- Fully customize your online store
- Add new sales channels in seconds
- Unlimited product and inventory management
- Fulfill orders in a single step
So, everything is in one place!
Pricing
There are three Shopify plans you can pick from. When you start your 14-day free trial, you don’t have to worry about what will be after the end of the two weeks because no credit card required so you can make sure there won’t be any consequences as for deducting money. The monthly fees are user-friendly:
- Basic Shopify – $28/month: All the basics for starting a new business.
- Shopify – $79/month: Everything you need for a growing business.
- Advanced Shopify – $299/month: Advanced features for scaling your business.
There is another level called Shopify Plus. This is an enterprise-grade solution for high volume merchants and large businesses.
Another solution is the Shopify Lite but it is a bit different from the others. It costs $9 per month. You can sell on Facebook and chat with your customers on Messenger, add products to any website or blog, and accept credit card payments.
When you choose the ‘Shopify’ plan you have three additional features for the monthly fee: gift cards (you can expand your customer base and boost holiday sales with physical or digital gift cards), professional, reports and abandoned cart recovery. And if you subscribe to ‘Advanced Shopify’ plan, besides what you get for the other plans, you will have an advanced report builder and third-party shipping rates. It stands for: show calculated rates through carriers like UPS, FedEx or third party shipping apps at checkout.
What every Shopify plan provides you? You can read some of these below but please note that other features depend on what plan you choose, and I didn’t list all information, so for more please proceed to the website itself (for info about transaction fees, credit card rates and other things like these).
- 2, 5 or 15 staff accounts
- unlimited number of products
- unlimited file storage
- +$49 retail package
- good Shopify Shipping discount
- print shipping labels
- 24/7 support
- fraud analysis
- manual order creation
- discount codes
- website and blog
- free SSL certificate
Buy already created Shopify stores
Shopify has a particular marketplace called Shopify Exchange where people can sell and buy already created stores, businesses. So if you don’t want to establish a new business there’s this option for you to buy one from this platform. There are online stores that have already had good revenue and traffic – those are more expansive – but there is a lot that is just a few-days-old and do not have anything special in its history so far.
Try Shopify free for 14 days. No risk, and no credit card required.
Syncee application and Shopify
Your online store can be better with Syncee. It is a top-rated Shopify application. You can add your products easily to your store with it and Syncee will manage the product import and update for you, and you can look for products and suppliers in Syncee Marketplace.
