Shopify is an easy-to-use application for online retailers and also comes with a Point Of Sale (POS) app for payment of goods in physical locations. It offers merchants the ability to create a multi-channel experience that helps showcase the brand. With this subscription-based platform, you can create a website and use their shopping cart solution to sell, ship, and manage your products.
It comes with a range of tools that helps you to analyze every aspect of your online store. With these tools, users can design customized online experiences for customers and maximize the Return on Investment (ROI) on their marketing spending. The technology also helps cut costs across the board by automating customer relationship management, inventory management, transactions, and more.
Is Shopify Good for Small Businesses
Shopify comes with a full suite of features that helps you launch and manage your online store. It also doesn't require any coding for users to start using it and requires no software installation or hosting services. It is also cost-effective with plans rag from $29 to $299/month, and there are no additional transaction fees if you use Shopify Payments. The basic plan comes with features that include abandoned cart recovery, gift cards, discount creation, fraud analysis, the ability to sell in a whopping 133 currencies, and the ability to assign inventory to retail stores, warehouses, or other locations you store products.
It is best known for its ease of use and modern web design feature. Additional perks include the ability to include unlimited products, a custom domain, its custom Shopify Payment that lets you accept credit cards (in addition to PayPal payments) without setting up a third-party payment gateway, customer support, and more. Additional plans are also available if you need more users and advanced features for growing businesses which is good news if you are experiencing growth. This is all in addition to capabilities to sell on social media such as Facebook, generate reports and analytics, and even mobile access.
How does Shopify Work
Shopify works using the Software as a service (SaaS) model through a monthly subscription. It is a cloud-based solution, meaning you don't have to worry about upgrading or maintaining software or web servers. This gives you the flexibility to access and run your business from anywhere with an internet connection. With Shopify, you can customize the look and feel of your online store with the online store builder and themes. Users can own a Shopify store in as little as 15 minutes.
With it, e-commerce businesses can create their website and use an in-built shopping cart solution to sell products. You also have the ability to create and customize an online store; sell in multiple places, including web, mobile, social media, online marketplaces, brick-and-mortar locations, and pop-ups, and manage products, inventory, payments, and shipping. In terms of security, with Shopify, you can keep payment info and business data safe as Shopify Payments is PCI compliant and supports 3D Secure checkouts. Shopify Payments helps eliminate the hassle of setting up a third-party payment provider or merchant account as it is automatically set up to accept all major payment methods as soon as you create your Shopify store.
What Can I Sell on Shopify
Shopify offers solutions to sell not only physical products but also services, memberships, event tickets, classes, digital cards, and even accept donations. Moreover, there is no limit to the number of products and services that you sell online. If you trade in intangible products Shopify is a great option to sell your products online. If you don't have any products and services you can opt to start a dropshipping enterprise.
Its dropshipping solution allows you to sell products without actually holding on to any inventory whatsoever. You can purchase products individually from a manufacturer, wholesaler, or other supplier and ship them directly to your customer.
When you decide to sell a product, you simply send an order directly to your chosen supplier who on their part will ship the product for you, process the payment, and then send you the difference between the charge they make for the product and the price you charge.
Pros of Using a Shopify Store for Your Business
Shopify comes with a set of tools that helps ease your e-commerce efforts. Besides creating additional revenue and accessing more customers for your business through online sales, it also offers the following benefits.
Ease of Use
Shopify helps you sell goods or services with a minimal amount of configuration. It comes with an intuitive drag-and-drop editor where you can edit the look of your online store homepage without the need for any coding. It offers a good alternative for those who want a complete solution, with no technicalities related to site development and hosting. If you want more control over the look and feel of your homepage you have the option to edit your site using code as well.
Mobile-Friendly Designs for Your Online Store
The benefits of having an online store are that it allows for a rapid buying/selling process and ease in terms of finding the best product for customers. Online stores operate 24/7, allowing customers to get online any of the day and buy products and services. This has led to more and more customers moving from the traditional brick-and-mortar store to buying goods and services on the Internet.
Shopify comes with a mobile-friendly design that helps customers use their mobile devices to shop at your e-commerce store. Shopify's mobile responsive themes help draw more customers to your store from the palm of their hands. By installing the Shopify app, you can log in to your account and start running your store from your mobile device. Shopify's app runs both on iPhone or Android devices.
Excellent Shopify Support
With Shopify's e-commerce platform you get round-the-clock customer support. Support comes from experts that are available 24/7 through email, live chat, or phone to help resolve any issues that may arise. Through Shopify Learn you get access to free tutorials, online courses, and webinars to get a better understanding of online sales.
Ability to Use Your Own Domain Name
With Shopify you can use your own domain name, you can connect it to Shopify from your store's admin. In case you don't have a domain name, you can either buy a domain name through Shopify or a third-party provider.
Social Media Integration
With Shopify, you can not only sell on the web but through social media, online marketplaces, brick-and-mortar locations, and pop-up shops. To boost your marketing and sales you can integrate Shopify with Facebook and Instagram to reach your target audience as well.
Amazing Themes
With Shopify, you can customize or build the look and feel of your store by chag the website theme to suit your branding needs. Shopify's Theme Store offers a collection of over 70 premium and free e-commerce templates. Among Shopify's best selling points is the availability of high-quality visual Shopify themes. Shopify offers diverse shop templates, of which a number of them are available for free. The templates are compatible with products, clothing and fashion, electronics, art, and other types of e-commerce sites.
These themes can be tweaked without requiring HTML or CSS knowledge and allow you to upload logos, change fonts, colors, and more. Users can also customize the layout of their homepage, add banners, slideshows, and more.
Dropshipper Friendly
Shopify touts to provide users with a lower-risk approach for dropshipping. What is Shopify dropshipping Simply put Shopify dropshipping lets you sell products by using a supplier that holds the inventory and ships the product for you. Through it, you can find a product to sell, find a dropshipping supplier, build your e-commerce store, upload your products onto your site, and launch and start marketing your dropshipping store.
Fantastic Plugins
Shopify offers users the option to extend the online site functionality of their online store through plugins. The Shopify App Store comes with a collection of free and premium plugins that help you to add more specialized features to your e-commerce store.
Built-In Payment Tools
With Shopify, you can enable your customers to make payments in a variety of ways. You can process payments through credit cards by using Shopify Payments or a third-party provider. Other options that allow customers to pay online include PayPal, Pay, Google Pay, and Apple Pay. You also have the option to accept alternative methods of payment like cryptocurrency.
SEO Marketing Tools
Shopify online stores have SEO built-in with features to help you optimize your content for greater impact. With this tool, some SEO is taken care of automatically as auto-generated canonical tags are added to pages to prevent duplicate content from appearing in search results. Your website's sitemap.xml and robots.txt files are automatically generated, and themes automatically generate title tags that include your store name. Also, themes are required to have social media linking and sharing options to make it easier for you to market your store. You can also optimize your content using features built into Shopify. For example, you can edit the title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs for blog posts, webpages, products, and collections.
Abandoned Cart Notifications
Shopify comes with built-in abandoned cart tools with some basic features to help you with abandoned cart recovery. You can review abandoned carts one by one, and send an abandoned cart email manually or automatically. You can also send a personalized email to a particular customer about their abandoned cart. From the Abandoned Checkouts screen you just click on the checkout number you want to recover and click Send a cart recovery email. Then just enter whatever message you want and click Review email to review and send your email.
Cons of Using Shopify for Your Business
Like any application, Shopify can fall short on some aspects. For example, Shopify charges a monthly fee to use the platform while open source solutions are free to , some of the cons of Shopify may include
Theme Customization Challenges
The most common type of Shopify theme issue is probably compatibility with HTML, CSS, or jаvascript code. Often these issues relate to how different browsers, operating systems, and devices display your Shopify theme's design and layout.
Transaction Fees
Although most shopping carts have dropped their transaction fees entirely over the years, Shopify has retained its 0.5% to 2.0% fees transaction fees. Users however have the option to have Shopify waive these fees when you accept payments through Shopify Payments.
Expensive Add Ons
Though Shopify offers almost every basic feature, it does lack many advanced features that e-commerce businesses might need. To get these advanced features you will need to purchase add-ons. In some cases, the cost of add-ons can significantly increase your monthly subscription fees.
Content Management Issues
Some issues related to content management when it comes to Shopify include the inability to edit tag pages; duplicate content; duplicate page titles; forced URL structure; and limits on page titles and meta descriptions.
Who this course is for
Brand new e-commerce sellers who want to b using Shopify
Entrepeneurs who are interested in setting up their own e-commerce store with Shopify