Overview of Shopify
Shopify is one e site builder, which helps businesses and people to build their online store. However, before getting stuck in Shopify, let us just clarify what this ‘eCommerce site builder’ is:
This eCommerce web builder is the online platform that assists people with different levels of technical competency to build their eCommerce website.
- You do not have to know to code
- You do not have to spend a fortune in hiring the web developer
- You do not even have to wait for IT person to make updates and changes
What’s Shopify and How It Works?
Suppose you are looking to sell your products on the internet but do not have much experience in web development and coding, no need to worry. Shopify provides the comprehensive eCommerce website builder complete with many templates that are ready to go out of the box.
Shopify sign up is very simple, and it offers 14day of the trial offer, thus merchants may test out this platform and see if it is a right fit for them. The Shopify templates are easy to customize with logos, images, videos and text to complement your company’s or business look. When your theme is selected, you may start selling immediately with this platform’s shopping carts.
Monthly Starting Cost $29.00
- Includes the website builder with many premium and FREE Shopify themes
- Completely hosted packages with unlimited storage, bandwidth, and products
- Simple-to-use Stripe Payments for simple processing of the transactions
- Many eCommerce features, which includes discount codes
- New and existing domain and FREE MyShopify.com domain
Shopify integrates over 70 payment transaction gateways with the checkouts in over 50 languages that makes it very simple to sell the products to the customers across the world. With the content management tools and intuitive store and complete marketing suite with the multiple features, like abandoned cart recovery & search engine optimization, there is no wonder many businesses are making use of this platform to get the products in hands of customers.
Selling On Shopify
Right from the food to drink and fashion to fine art, Shopify enables the users to sell any kind of product. The temporary tattoos, fine art, coffee, food and clothing are just some merchandise getting sold on the Shopify websites. No matter whether it is the digital or physical product or service, merchants will be able to list this on sale. With over 377,000 storefronts that are powered by Shopify, the consumers can find your products getting sold over many different categories, from crafts to home decor and books.
Shopify Helping to Grow Your Store Online
Because Shopify provides a comprehensive marketing suite, the businesses are actually finding it very simple to scale as well as get it in front of the new audiences. This platform offers search engine optimization features, such as customizable headlines, Meta tags and titles, thus eCommerce websites will rank very high in the search results. The customers can post the SEO-friendly merchandise or product reviews that work a lot of wonders for building the business’s credibility.
Shopify provides a comprehensive marketing solution that is complete with some amazing features like cart recovery tools and email campaigns.
Shopify merchants will be able to leverage the email marketing campaigns with the MailChimp and provide coupons and gift cards to attract as well as maintain their loyal customer bases. You will find Google advertising programs & full integration with some major social media marketing platforms work for reaching the Shopify sites as well as drive good revenue.
Shopify Payments Options
Not just can consumers use major credit cards when checking out on the Shopify website; however, merchants also can make use of Shopify’s POS system for accepting the credit card payments in-store or any location.
Shopify payment system allows the merchants to accept the credit cards at the store and on a go with low transaction fees. With Shopify card reader, the businesses will be able to enjoy the low rates —to 2.4% — on all the credit card transactions. This POS system will sync the payment details with the orders, and giving the merchants visibility in incoming revenue. Shopify generates chargeback responses so that businesses will recover lost sales.
Shopify Pricing Plans
Shopify pricing largely depends on the type of business that you are running. For the new businesses, the Basic Shopify at $29 a month offers all features that entrepreneurs want to open up their shop on internet. Their basic plan offers 2 staff accounts, the unlimited storage & product listings, 24/7 support, free SSL certificate as well as fraud analysis, among few other features.
| Basic Shopify | Shopify | Advanced Shopify | |
| Monthly Price | $29 | $79 | $299 |
| Transaction Fees | 2.9% + $0.30 | 2.6% + $0.30 | 2.4% + $0.30 |
| In-Person Transaction Fees | 2.7% | 2.5% | 2.4% |
For the established online eCommerce businesses, $79 a month of the standard plan of Shopify is good for generating the brand loyalty programs, which leverage the promotional tools like coupons and gift cards. The plan as well comes with the shopping cart tool that works a lot of wonders to go back to the undecided customers & regain the lost revenue.
In Detail Pricing
Basic Shopify at $26
You can sell unlimited products and Shopify may charge 2% of transaction fee till you use the Shopify Payments.
Shopify $71
With some eCommerce features such as gift cards & abandoned cart recovery the transaction fees will be 1% till you use the Shopify Payments.
Advanced Shopify at $266
Get the advanced reports & automatically calculate the shipping rates. The transaction fees will be 0.5% till you use the Shopify Payments.
Some additional plans: Lite plan for selling on social media can be bought for over $9 per month. Shopify as well offers the enterprise plan (or Plus) for the big online stores –it is not very cheap since it begins at $2.000 per month.
We will show the monthly costs for the yearly subscriptions. The domain name costs additional (and starting at just $14 a year for .com), but will be added by Shopify or external registrar. Suppose you can, it is recommendable that you use the Shopify’s payment gateway since this can save you from extra charges. It is currently available only in Puerto Rico, USA, the UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland, Singapore and New Zealand. Also, note that the transaction fees will not get charged for the manual payment methods (bank transfer, cash on delivery, and more).
Businesses reached a point where this makes a little sense for scaling will take benefit of the Shopify’s $299 a month of the advanced plan. This pricing option has all benefits of basic & standard Shopify packages but includes features like the advanced report builder & third-party shipping rates. The advanced plan comes with the top Shopify shipping discount as well as lowest credit card charges.
Know More About Shopify Lite
For only $9 a month, the online merchants will be able to set up their Shopify Lite for selling on the social media, personally, or existing website. With this service, the Shopify Lite entrepreneurs will showcase as well as sell goods on Facebook’s new Shop segment.
Shopify Lite allows the merchants to add the Buy Now buttons for existing websites as well as track the sales via Facebook chat.
The messenger & chat are well supported on both the stores online and the Facebook business pages. The features allow the customers to purchase products in chat as well as track their orders in the real-time.
Shopify Lite gives the merchant’s ability to add the Buy Now buttons on their product images and transform the existing websites in thriving eCommerce businesses. With the POS app, the merchants will be able to sell & accept the payments anywhere.
Shopify Plus
Shopify is not only for the small and the medium businesses — and Shopify Plus offers the completely hosted and SaaS eCommerce campaign for the enterprise-level & fast-growing merchants in the relatively low rate when compared to the traditional enterprise-grade of eCommerce solutions.
The Shopify Plus merchants can enjoy the unlimited sales, products and visitors with the platform’s over 29,000 CPU cores & 13 PB of storage. Shopify website builder dedicates the Success Managers to each Shopify Plus account for helping to strategize the marketing efforts as well as improve the customer experiences.
Shopify Plus marketing platform is scalable as well as help any business to build effective eCommerce systems with the features, which includes:
- Over 99.99% uptime
- Unlimited bandwidth & transactions
- Over 1,000 apps
- Four million hits every second
- Over 10,000 checkouts a minute
- Level 1 pf PCI DSS compliant
- 40 plus migration tools
The industry giants, right from Google to LA Lakers can take benefit of Shopify Plus due to many benefits and tools.
Shopify Language
For the code-savvy merchants and those using development teams, you need to know that Shopify is actually written in open-source, the Ruby-based template liquid. Shopify’s blog quite often presents the liquid best practices thus merchants will make the customizations to the templates as well as fix issues after websites to go live. The programmers will make use of Liquid for adding functionality to the templates without starting on with the new theme. Language is simple for the seasoned web developers to pick up; Shopify facilitates to learn the basics through the valuable help centre.
Shopify Theme to Choose From
Suppose you stumble over the beautiful Shopify website and wish to base your website’s theme on design, it is easy to find out which template is getting used. All you need to do to check out this theme name is to visit the website, right-click as well as choose an Inspect option.
It is simple to check out which theme of Shopify the website is making use of by clicking & inspecting script element.
In an inspection box, just find and click at the script tag. It can expand your tag, and you can view its theme name. The technique is used before setting up the eCommerce website to make sure you are selecting the theme, which is right for the business.
Templates and Design
Shopify isn’t short on the templates and generally, they look professional and modern. They are very responsive that means they will look good at any device – and Google really loves this last point. Sadly, they just offer some of the free templates (around 10) – I actually wished they had some more of them.
But, suppose you have the budget, you may buy their paid themes and get one developed you from many the experts.
In terms of the template customization, Shopify will get this right and I find it very simple to personalize the store templates. Changing the global styles is a walk in a park (for example fonts, colours, and social media buttons) and with theme editor menu. The cooler is also a way they allow you to add, remove and move the sections up & down with some clicks. This shortcoming is that you’re limited to an available section of the template.
Features of Shopify eCommerce
However, let us cut to this chase and review the Shopify’s eCommerce features.]
Managing Products
Products are added very easily by using Shopify’s interface and you can also import the products through CSV file –the last option is very useful for the large stores online.
Sidenote: It is possible to import & export pieces of data such as customer lists, orders and reviews by using the CSV files. Filling in the product information is very intuitive (title, description, videos or images, price and SEO options). Lastly, collections (or category) will get assigned to keep the store tidy online. SKU (or stock-keeping unit) & inventory tracking features allow you to manage the stock very efficiently and also prevent you in selling it out of the stock items.
You might need to sell many variants of the same product. You need to be aware that the Shopify can allow you to add the maximum of three variants (for example size, material and colour). This system then will generate all necessary combinations, or individual inventory tracking is setup. This cap is on 100 combinations (un till you use the paid app and edit the theme’s source files). On the other hand, BigCommerce supports over 600 combinations. This can be limiting for the projects with the complex products but can be sufficient for most of the store owners.
To sell the digital products (for example images, videos, and documents) with Shopify, you will have to install a (free) app that is developed by the Shopify them. Being very honest, I’m the bit surprised that it is not accessible out-of-box, however, it works.
Creating the subscription store and taking recurring payments will get costly. You will either need the app or developer for coding it for you. Some other competitors (for example Volusion and BigCommerce) do not integrate it either.
There are some projects that need custom fields thus users will leave the feedback when buying the products (for example engravings for the watches and rings). With Shopify it is not integrated natively, you will have to tweak the code (not that simple) or get app to do this job. It takes just some clicks with the BigCommerce.
Payment processors & transaction fees
Shopify has many payment processors online than another alternative –more than 100 providers. Like you may imagine, the big names like 2Checkout, Stripe, PayPal and Authorize are been included. Yes, they have their system, the Shopify Payments (that is powered by the Stripe). The biggest issues with the Shopify is they can charge some extra transaction fees in case you do not use the Shopify Payments 2 %, 1 % and 0.5 % that depends on the plan. Sadly, the Shopify Payments isn’t available in each country. Thus if you can, then do use this.
On top of this, the manual payment methods are enabled as well. For instance, the cash on delivery, money order or bank deposits and remember, on the orders, you will not need to pay any kind of commissions to the Shopify.
Companies Using Shopify
There’s not any shortage of the Shopify sites on the web, as many merchants are selling their goods through the Shopify stores online. The businesses will range in the size from small shops to the large global enterprises as well as include some popular names on the internet.
Shopify pros and cons
We hope that you have enjoyed reading the Shopify review! To finally sum up, here are some main pros & cons that we may think of to encounter when using Shopify:
Pros
- Abandoned cart saver also is available on the $29 of the basic plan; it means that the functionality is given at the considerably cheaper rate than the key competitors.
- With the ‘Lite’ plan, Shopify will represent their cheapest ways of starting to sell on the internet by using the hosted solution.
- There are not any transaction fees in case you’re happy to use built-in payment mode system that is Shopify Payments.
- It is a good option for anybody who is interested in the drop shipping.
- Lite Plan’s of Shopify ‘Buy Button’ enables you to use the Shopify for selling their products very easily on the existing website.
- This has the clean, simple-to-use interface.
- Point of sale is best and helps the Shopify to stand apart from their competitors.
- It offers a good range of free, attractive and responsive templates.
- You may extend your Shopify’s functionality thanks to their widest range of the third-party apps (though note you will need to pay using them).
- Shopify states more than 600,000 stores are built by using this platform that makes it the safe bet that company (thus your store online!) will not disappear soon.
- VAT MOSS rates automatically are calculated & applied to my Shopify site.
- Shopify handles creation & application of the product categories very well.
- Shopify also comes with the built-in blog.
- Shopify Buy Button enables you to use the Shopify with the existing website built by using another platform (example WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, and Jimdo).
- Both Android and iOS apps are offered to allow you to manage the store on a go.
- You may create the AMP versions of the product pages.
- You may avail of 2 weeks of a free trial of a product.
- You may buy the existing Shopify store by using the Shopify’s Exchange Marketplace.
Cons
- Some of the key functionality that you may expect to be offered out of the box requires the installation of the app (the notable examples will include facilitating the digital downloads, reviews and ratings).
- Whereas you may create around 100 variants of the product, these will involve over 3 product choices.
- The professional functionality is provided on expensive plans.
- Adding custom fields like text boxes and file upload options, whereas doable is complicated (involves buying the app).
- You cannot avoid the transaction fees in case you use the third-party gateway.
- Shopify Payments allows you to sell from some countries. In case you wish to sell it from another country then you will have to use the third-party payment.
- It will be good if abandoned cart saver enabled you to send one or more automated email.
- There’s not any way to ensure that the product images are shown using the same aspect ratio. It will lead to the messy presentation of the products until you have cropped your images beforehand of uploading this to Shopify.
- Cheapest plan ($9 ‘Lite’ offering) does not allow you to create the fully-featured store online.
- Getting your website to be the GDPR compliant where the cookies are concerned can involve the use of the third-party banner app.
- It is not very clear how you can access the phone support in case you stay outside of the United Kingdom, North America, New Zealand and Australia.
- It is not simple to export the blog posts.