What is Shopify and Will it Help My Business?
These days, opening an online store is simpler than ever. eCommerce means big business, and if you want to open an online store, you’ve more than likely heard of Shopify.
With a cool 457 million consumers buying on Shopify in 2020, it trails only behind heavy-hitters eBay and Amazon. So, if you’re curious to know what Shopify is, how it works, and if it will be good for your business, keep reading. The answers lie ahead!
Table of contents
What is Shopify?
Shopify was introduced to the online world in 2004 by three Canadians who created it out of their frustration when trying to buy snowboards. The aggravation with their experience inspired them to create a simple and sophisticated eCommerce platform that is highly scalable.
Online sellers see Shopify the way bloggers see WordPress – a user-friendly platform that allows you to run your website any way you wish to. In the past, companies selling consumer goods online needed to hire a team of developers and designers to create an eCommerce website. This was very costly. You had to work out how to create a shopping cart and take online payments (PayPal, Visa, etc.).
Shopify, however, makes this process very simple! It does everything for you. It offers many different themes and designs, analytics reports, as well as payment options. You can create an online shopping cart, without having to rely on a developer or have any coding knowledge yourself.
This puts the power into your own hands if you are an eCommerce business owner. It saves you both time and money and gives you access, through its simple user interface, to start running your business immediately.
What Shopify Isn’t
Although Shopify is a fantastic solution to creating your own online eCommerce business, it doesn’t automatically mean you’re going to have a massive amount of traffic landing on your site. You still need an efficient marketing plan to make it all work.
You’ll need to look at PPC (Pay-Per-Click) marketing as a solid way of getting your target audience to pay attention to your site. Using Google Ads, as well as social media ads through Facebook and Instagram or even advertising on YouTube or TikTok, are all great ways to drive traffic to your site. Uploading SEO rich blogs to your site will also help tremendously.
If you have an eCommerce business and need help from a team of Digital Strategist experts to drive traffic to your site, contact us now and we’ll be happy to help!
How Will Shopify Simplify My Business?
1. Cloud Network SaaS
Shopify is a cloud network SaaS (Software as a Service) so it’s highly reliable. Since it’s not a website that’s server-based, you won’t ever need to purchase or rent your hardware to host the server. It’s less complicated and less likely to crash!
2. User-Friendly
Shopify was created to be a simple solution to running your own eCommerce business. Its websites are built to be mobile-friendly (as a great percentage of consumers buy on mobile devices), and they have a site called Shopify Compass to help you start and scale your business.
It also has a convenient app store that allows you to add many capabilities to your site and customize it in a way that meets your brand’s needs perfectly.
3. Works with All Businesses & is Very Scalable
Shopify offers a plethora of plans with attractive features for both small and large businesses. The great thing if you are starting small is the fact that, as your business grows, you can upgrade your plan with ease without disrupting the flow of your operation through point-and-click scaling.
Shopify Plus caters to bigger businesses where they can sell in five different languages, offer more discounts, have a maximum of eight retail spots, 15 staff accounts and a whole lot more.
4. Detailed Analytics
If you’re running an eCommerce business, you need a great analytics tool to see the ins-and-outs of everyday customer purchases and the way they are interacting with your site. Shopify offers analytics and reports on all its plans.
These analytics include an overview dashboard, behaviour reports, finance reports (including taxes and payments), acquisition reports, product analysis, live view, inventory reports, marketing reports, sales reports, retail sales reports, profit reports, customers’ reports and custom reports. Not all plans have everything that analytics offers, you need to choose what’s best for your business.
5. Fantastic Pre-Built in Themes & Tools
Building an online store can be complicated if you’ve never done it before and don’t know where to begin. Often you need designers with an eye for creative detail that can create a beautiful website that matches your brand’s theme.
Shopify scraps the needs of a professional designer by offering a free built-in theme that is ready to be moulded and customized to your exact liking. However, you also will have the choice to use a multitude of other themes to suit your brand perfectly.
Shopify’s Steep Learning Curve
The only downside to Shopify is that, even though it is a user-friendly site that makes things as uncomplicated as possible, there’s still a steep learning curve.
You need to get in there by experimenting and practising until you feel your eCommerce website looks just right. There are no shortcuts here. The good news is, due to all the hours of learning you put in, if there are any problems on your site in the future, you should know how to fix them. Also, all this effort, time and patience should pay off with a successful Shopify eCommerce store.
It pays to remember though, no matter how attractive it looks, you’ll need to direct traffic to your site through effective SEO and SEM so that you make a profit!
Conclusion
With its seamless UX, great analytics tool, and a huge offering of themes and plugins, Shopify continues to be one of the largest cloud-based SaaS eCommerce platforms for online stores in the world, and it is only growing with time!
If you want to start an eCommerce business, Shopify is a great option. Once you have your online shop ready contact our team of professional Digital Strategists, and they’ll be there to ensure your target audience is reached!
