Shopify is one of the world’s leading eCommerce website builders, which helps people to set up their own virtual store and not have just one of the millions of pages in a marketplace.
Despite being a user-friendly platform aimed at no coders and beginners, Shopify is powerful.
Shopify is an appropriate option for all sizes of virtual stores regardless of the business niche. It has an intuitive tool for anyone looking to dabble in eCommerce, whether the user searches for a side hustle or aims to set up an online empire! Shopify features everything necessary for both scenarios, including comprehensive analytics, user-oriented layouts, various in-built tools, and an impressive app store for thousands of integrations.
Let’s examine Shopify and find out what it can offer you and whether or not Shopify is your perfect pick.
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Ease of Use
Shopify eCommerce site builder is an understandable platform with simple navigation and an intuitive editor. And yet, it’s definitely not the easiest one on the block.
On one side, it’s easy to use because it doesn’t require a user to know how to code or build custom pages quickly. On the other hand, it may appear a bit difficult for those who have absolutely no idea of how an online store should perform or how they must build one.
Therefore, if you have no practice building a site, Shopify recommends starting with a free theme. All free Shopify themes are normally the easiest to build on as they feature simple modules and can provide quite a decent user experience for your site visitors at the same time.
A good online store with the bare minimum in terms of functionality can be built within ten or fifteen minutes. But if you crave your own big eCommerce site, a well-designed and compelling store without any help from a developer, be prepared to invest more time and effort.
Shopify Features
Shopify includes unmetered products and bandwidth, staff accounts, and fraud analysis in all its plans except the introductory one. Indeed, these are all great features. But for a more robust online store and success, you definitely need more. Shopify proudly introduces tons of valuable tools, and we shall disclose them now.
Dashboard
Shopify features an intuitive dashboard, making it easy to get the site up and running quickly. And yet, certain areas of functionality require time. It provides a gentle slope into designing an eCommerce site and helpful prompts to guide a user throughout the site-building process.
Shopify’s dashboard is clear and accurate, with no irrelevant tools or buttons. The left-side menu gives access to all primary functions you may need as an online store owner. It’s the area where you can manage your products’ edits. You can add products to your itinerary, handle shipping, create discount codes, etc.
Additionally, the dashboard allows you to change your site’s theme to redesign the storefront. Remember that the submitted content won’t be preserved if you replace the already-used theme with a new one.
The dashboard allows expanding the created site’s possibilities since any third-party eCommerce tool is easily incorporated right from the dashboard. Simply click +Add apps, and an immense array of options will appear, like reward and billing programs.
Store Editor
Shopify features a smooth and simple-to-use editor. However, you will come to this conclusion only after figuring out all the functions. What seems clunky and unintuitive at first will soon become obvious.
What makes Shopify editor inconvenient is the disconnect between the site’s backend and front end. You must switch between the front end to make aesthetic changes and the site backend to tweak the product display.
The website editing dashboard doesn’t require coding. A drag-and-drop editor lets you drag any element from the menu and drop it in an appropriate place on the site. And yet, the built-in text editor allows users to alter CSS or HTML.
eCommerce
Shopify boasts an impressive array of sales tools and features, from abandoned cart delivery to robust analytics and multi-channel integration. They serve great for establishing small to enterprise-level online stores and eCommerce sites, providing everything a customer may need for a high user experience.
- Shopify provides a comprehensive array of settings to adjust your shipping options. A Shopify user has such functionality as amending shipping rates based on location, order value, weight, and even print shipping labels. Additionally, by upgrading your subscription to Advanced Shopify Plan, you will unlock third-party calculated shipping rates, thus, informing your customers about the current courier prices at checkout.
- Recently, Shopify announced expanding its shipping functionality with Shop Promise to provide Shopify users with a two-day delivery option and easy returns at no extra cost to the customer. The feature will most likely become available at the end of the year.
- All Shopify plans include the abandoned cart recovery feature out-of-the-box. You can incorporate discount codes and set manual or automatic emails. Actually, this feature is of great importance for any business, especially when it can win back up to 15% of lapsed customers.
- As for product management tools, here you get a full-blown package! The available tools allow tracking stock levels, updating product listings, monitoring orders, and performing plenty of other functions. Furthermore, the platform suggests setting automatic stock level tracking and marking the run-out products as sold out.
- If you aim to sell various products, it will be easy with Shopify. You can offer plenty of product variations, such as materials, colors, shapes, and sizes, as well as set diverse weights and prices for the same product. Your customers will always find it easy to browse the variations classified by type, category, price, etc.
- Shopify supports as many as over 100 payment gateways, including its brand Shopify Payments option (best for selling in multiple currencies) and several popular ones like Apple Pay, Amazon Pay, Stripe, and others. Note that unless you are using Shopify Payments, you will face transaction fees.
- Another benefit of Shopify online store builder is the multi-channel integration. Spreading your sales is highly essential for any business. For instance, around 50% of people search for a product they wish to buy on marketplaces. And selling your products across different online channels will certainly expand your brand’s reach and set up a broader customer base.
- Shopify suggests selling on such marketplaces as eBay and Amazon, as well as Instagram and Facebook social media platforms.
- With Shopify, it’s possible to sell physical and digital goods in the same online store. However, remember to uncheck the shipping checkbox when you add a digital product or service to bring some difference between the types of products. This is done by integrating Shopify Digital Downloads app or any other appropriate free app.
- By providing a built-in automatic tax calculation, Shopify greatly facilitates running an online store, shipping to various states or countries, running marketplace campaigns, and fully engaging with your stock inventory. Shopify uses default sales tax rates to perform automatic tax calculations.
- Although available through an app and not an in-built feature, Shopify’s POS can help you combine your online and offline stores. You can offer store credit, create order notes, accept major credit cards, sell gift cards, etc. The system syncs the app and the online store to reveal you from being glued to your PC. Your orders and the whole inventory will always be up to date.
- Shopify also supports dropshipping, yet via a third-party app rather than an in-built feature. The most recommended choices are DSers, Printful, and Spocket.
Landing Pages
A landing page is an inseparable part of any efficient marketing plan. Landing pages can be much more effective at encouraging customers to purchase than any standard product page. With Shopify, your landing pages get indexed in search engines. When customers look for anything relevant to your product copy, your landing page has a solid potential to appear in the highest positions in organic search results.
However, Shopify doesn’t offer you an out-of-the-box drag-and-drop landing page builder. Instead, you have two variants – to hire a developer to code a template or incorporate the landing page via a third-party app. The latter will be a paid one.
Making a Blog on Shopify
Though available, blogging isn’t the company’s strongest point. Shopify’s blogging module lets you create posts, choose tags and categories, upload photos and other media files, and allow comments under the posts. It also gives you blog-specific SEO and an RSS feed.
Anyway, there are plenty of features missing in Shopify’s blogging functionality that would otherwise help you run an influential blog. The gaps are blogging analytics, social bookmarking, archive functionality, and search features. If blogging is a bit on the side and eCommerce is at the heart of your business, these omissions won’t affect your website’s productivity.
Shopify Integrations
Shopify features an extended App Store full of valuable store add-ons. These include hundreds of both paid and free plugins and apps. You can literally come across an app for anything you may need to generate more sales or simply grow your business.
Apps are separated into categories to find them easily. The available sections include Orders & Shipping, Selling Products, Store Design, Marketing & Conversion, Finding Products, and Store Management. Shopify’s App Store is perhaps one of the strongest points of the company.
Design and Templates
Shopify’s design options and themes can only be described as great! All the themes are professionally designed, richly packed with customization options, fully mobile responsive, and come in various styles.
Overall, there are 120 themes, only 11 of which are free. It’s not that the free options are not attractive. They all look sleek and clear yet have an identical design and feel. Furthermore, the free options are not as feature-risk as the paid ones. They only have mega menus, quick views, stock counters, and sticky headers. Additionally, all these 11 themes can provide catalogs with only up to 199 products.
As for Shopify paid themes, these are super powerful and amazingly designed. Prices range from $180 to $350, yet the themes are worth every dollar spent. They are all classified into Business Equipment and Supplies, Outdoor and Garden, Sports and Recreation, and a series of other categories.
The website builder provides every theme with various color schemes and styles for users to find the right tone for their brand. They all have amazing features that can make any store highly productive and effective. The provided features cover search engine optimization, free updates, customizable content sections on the home page, social media icons, free stock photos by Burst, etc. Besides these, every theme has its own set of features like live search, quick view, etc.
Shopify themes are mobile responsive and automatically reformat to fit desktop, mobile, and tablet screens. Mobile responsiveness is crucial for any website nowadays since around 62% of people prefer mobile shopping rather than searching for a product on a PC.
And what makes the entire collection not only so amazing but also convenient is the preview option. All 120 themes are available for a desktop and mobile preview in the demo mode before you choose or buy them.
Although Shopify’s themes are unique on their own, you always have the possibility to make them totally yours by customizing the chosen template to your brand voice. For instance, regardless of the selected theme, you can add your product line, replace images, rewrite the text, and create new pages.
A Shopify theme customization is carried out in two places. You must use the dashboard to manage the products and implement product edits, while the editing interface is necessary for visual customization. Particularly here, you can align your site images, feature a logo and edit text.
The editor is of the drag-and-drop type. Therefore, even an inexperienced user will find it easy to design the site and perfectly suit their brand’s style. However, for even deeper website customization, Shopify allows using CSS and HTML coding. This makes it a perfect solution for both beginners and professional developers.
Customer Support
Creating and running an online store can’t always go smoothly with no issues. Facing problems and not making it on your own is normal. And customer support is created just for that reason – to help users understand the service better and make the most of it.
Shopify’s customer support has been claimed as user-friendly and very knowledgeable. You simply can’t come across an issue and not have it solved promptly. The support team can be reached at any time of the day since they are working 24/7. Shopify is available through live chat, email, and telephone. If you need an immediate answer, it’s recommended to use the support over the phone, while not-that-urgent cases should be entrusted to the email staff, who get back within hours only.
However, if you are working on your site and need a little help, using the live chat assistance is the best option. A Shopify specialist will answer back within minutes.
Shopify Plans and Pricing
Shopify has quite good value for money. Its prices are all reasonably priced, considering the rich packages of tools included, even in the lowest core plan. And yet, we can’t omit the conjuncture of the transaction fees imposed on third-party payment gateways and the company’s strong reliance on apps. Remember these two points when you calculate how much it will cost you to set up a powerful online store with Shopify.
The company offers three pricing plans that are 25% more affordable if bought via annual plans. Those are Basic at $29/mo, Shopify priced at $79/mo and Advanced at $299/mo. All these robust eCommerce plans provide you with sales channels, POS functionality, and 24/7 support aside from the variety of features per the price of each plan.
Shopify Website Examples
Shopify has attracted millions of merchants from around the globe. Moreover, around 10% of total US eCommerce is based on Shopify! Business people from more than 170 countries rely on this company when they need powerful, flexible, and amazingly crafted websites. And all this is not without reason – Shopify developers are masters of their craft.
A few of the multiple examples of successful collaborations between Shopify and brands are
https://kyliejenner.com/,
https://secretlab.co/,
https://huel.com/.
Alternatives & Competitors
Shopify is not the only website builder designed with a focus on eCommerce. Users may opt for multi-purpose platforms that let them create projects of any type or opt for more niche-oriented software. Here are some most popular Shopify alternatives to consider:
- Wix – is a website builder to create any site from business cards to digital stores. Although it has eCommerce functionality, Shopify looks more comprehensive with multiple sales channels, advanced product management, and more effective promotion tools.
- WooCommerce – is a good solution only for WordPress users. The plugin works only with WP and requires manual settings, maintenance, and support not mentioning paid extensions, separate hosting, and domain while Shopify has them in each plan.
- Squarespace – is a worthy eCommerce software with all necessary features to deal with the project of any size. However, some features will require additional app installations like Analytics, while Shopify comes with an integrated dashboard, reports, and live view option.
- Volusion – is similar to Shopify in some aspects. While plans cost the same, for that price user may additionally get advanced cart abandonment recovery tools, tax rate calculators, and other instruments for enhanced web store performance.
- BigCommerce – is an ultimate eCommerce software that offers such features as A/B testing, a selection of shipping and store performance apps, various integrations, and extensive marketing opportunities. Although it is more expensive than Shopify, it might be a better option for rowing and scalable projects.
Check out detailed comparisons and Shopify competitors reviewed by our experts.
FAQ
Verdict: How Good Is Shopify?
Hands down, Shopify is one of the world’s leading players in the market of eCommerce builders for a great reason. With perfectly schemed mobile-optimized themes, a massive app store, an imposing suite of eCommerce features, and several reasonably priced pricing plans to meet any client’s requirements and budget, Shopify is a highly scalable platform.
This company is an excellent choice for beginners and seasoned sellers alike since it shines the most in its customer satisfaction, as well as sales and website-building features. Shopify is especially recommendable for those merchants who have huge inventories and need to scale their stores, those who need an all-in-one eCommerce solution that would support all kinds of sales (local and international, physical and digital, etc.), and those who always want their website to thrive and step with the time thanks to the large array of third-party apps.
