You have a plan to create an online store and are considering which eCommerce platform suits you. Finding a good eCommerce software is not easy because of the characters of each platform. In this article, we will take a look at Shopify Reviews, the popular eCommerce platform, to indicate its highlight features.
What is Shopify?
Shopify is a leading eCommerce platform that allows you to create an online shopping website that integrates with social networking, post products, cart and payment features, order processing. This platform offers all of the business tools you need in one, familiar place.
The store owner can also sell in physical locations using Shopify POS, the point of sale app, and accompanying hardware. This platform has been trusted by powerhouse brands such as Tesla, Google, Red Bull, Nestle, Kanye West, Rebecca Minkoff, Kylie Cosmetics, and many more.
Shopify Financial Results in 2020
The Internet – February 17, 2021 – Shopify Inc announced the full-year 2020 financial results to Shopify. The total revenue was $2.929.5 million, an 86% increase over 2019. Within this, Subscription Solutions revenue grew 41% to $908.8 million, while Merchant Solutions revenue grew 116% to $2.020.7 million.
Harley Finkelstein, Shopify’s President: “We are doubling down on creating a frictionless path to successful entrepreneurship, as we continue to build a future-proof commerce solution to serve generations to come.”
Shopify’s Competitor and its Market Share
When analyzing the global eCommerce-platform market, it becomes apparent that a few front runners command a solid slice of the market. Their seemingly undisputed leadership does not truly portray the market and its ever-evolving trends. The Shopify share is 20%, according to BuiltWith, with the current power of over 1000.0000 businesses worldwide. Top 1 is Woocomerce with 28%, Magento owns almost 8% of the global eCommerce market.
How does Shopify work?
Shopify is an eCommerce platform that hosts your online store. It helps organize the layout of your store’s appearance through themes. You can name your business, add products, and collect payments within minutes. So, how to start an online store with Shopify? This platform also offers a 14-days trial that you can create your eCommerce business through easy clicks.
Shopify Pricing & Features
This platform provides you with multiple options, therefore you can choose one that fits your budget.
- Shopify Lite – $9 per month
- Basic Shopify – $29 per month
- Shopify – $79per month
- Advanced Shopify – $299 per month
- Shopify Plus – custom pricing
- There is also a free trial available, which lasts for 14 days.
All plans include monthly and yearly payment options, and merchants can upgrade or downgrade their accounts at any time without any additional fees. Additional fees apply to make the most out of Shopify’s point of sale feature, which lets you sell goods in a physical location. So then, there are 3 options that we want to recommend to your choice. The comparison that we made below to details of Shopify Pricing Plans.
| Features | Basic Shopify | Shopify | Advanced Shopify |
| Online Store | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Unlimited products | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Staff accounts | 2 | 5 | 15 |
| 24/7 support | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Sales Channels | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Inventory locations | up to 4 | up to 5 | up to 8 |
| Manual order creation | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Discount codes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Free SSL certificate | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Abandoned cart recovery | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Gift cards | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Reports | – | Standard | Advanced |
| Third-party calculated shipping rates | – | – | Yes |
Shopify is an all-in-one solution that offers you numerous features which help you build and manage your online store. Certainly, this platform was designed for everyone that does not require any experience in creating a website to get a fully functioning online store. You can easily set up it via simple steps.
Shopify Theme Store
It includes both free and paid themes that are designed by experts to suit your style and the features of your eCommerce store. The themes seem tidy, elegant, and attractive. Getting yourself a good option from Shopify Theme Store that ensures more chances of customers coming back for more and thus generates more revenues.
If you’re unsure whether investing around $180 on a premium theme is the right decision, you can get the best Shopify free themes to see how that works for your store. Additionally, Dropshipping is the ideal business idea when you begin to run your online store because of its benefits. There are various the best Shopify dropshipping themes that you can consider to design your front store.
Shopify App Store
With a total of 7000+ apps, Shopify App Store breaks all the limits to what you can make of your eCommerce site. When you use Dropshipping features, you have to need the help of the App Store, there are a lot of apps for this, for instance, Obelo Apps.
Other than that, you can browse the App Store for connecting to social media platforms to further promote your business and increase traffic to your site. Shopify provides many best Shopify apps for beginners, you can apply and set up your online website through easy steps. Moreover, it also offers the best Shopify apps to increase sales that you can improve your business.
The Shopify Store is packed full of useful tools and apps for companies that want to increase sales. Therefore, this is why a lot of merchants rely on this platform for their eCommerce ventures. Let’s count down the top apps for your eCommerce store.
- Oberlo – Dropshipping app
- Kit – Media Marketing App
- Printful – Print on demand Dropshipping App
- Hubspot CRM – set up your sales and marketing strategy
- Seguno – Email Marketing App
- Plug in SEO – SEO power tools for traffic & sales
- Form Builder – Custom Form, Feedback, Easy Payment, Donation, Order
- Product Reviews – The simplest way to share your customer’s experience
- Smile – Design a loyalty program with points, referrals & VIP rewards
- Shopify POS – Unify Online and in-person sale
Shopify Point of sale
It’s a particularly strong feature that deserves special mention and helps it stand out from its competitors. Shopify’s POS hardware lets you use the platform to sell in physical locations, using your IOS or Android device. In the Shopify point of sale reviews article, we detailed more highlight features and benefits.
Besides, the Shopify POS lite was integrated into Shopify Plans and covered the basics. You need to pay for a Shopify POS Pro add-on to get the most out of the point of sale.
With the Shopify POS system, you can now accept payments and create receipts in your store, all while tracking your daily sales and controlling your inventory. This provides various opportunities for your consumers. However, if your store is still limited when using it, you can look at the Shopify POS alternative to find out the good one.
Shopify Payment
Offering over 100 payment providers including Paypal, Amazon Pay, Apple Pay… and charges a transaction fee (2.5% to 0.5% depending on your plan). Shopify payment is a free payment gateway and accepts payment in multiple currencies. The benefits when using it and the way to set up, we clarified in the Shopify Payment Reviews.
Providing high flexibility when it comes to shipping. You can configure your shipping rates. With the Advanced Shopify plan, you can also unlock the third-party calculated shipping rates.
Shopify SEO & Marketing
It’s difficult to do anything about the first three factors when you’re new to selling online. Building a brand’s reputation and getting other websites to connect to yours takes time. In terms of content strategy, you can think long-term.
Shopify’s SEO is an effective feature. It’s adequate, intuitive and it gives the right tool to optimize content. Many things can influence how high your online store appears in search results:
- Editing robots.txt.liquid
- Adding keywords
- Optimizing site structure
- Finding and submitting your sitemap
- Hiding a page from search engines
It also has a range of plugins like Plugin SEO, SEO plus, and SEO Booster that can help you to boost your sales.
Shopify offers integration of your site and mobile app with social network platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. You can also have the option to sell directly on social platforms.
Moreover, when you run your Dropshipping Store, it will assist your products and services will be noticed on social media or appear on Google search. The Shopify Dropshipping SEO guide will provide you with all of the information about how to rank in the Top 1.
You may build and manage marketing campaigns for promotions from Shopify’s Marketing page. On the Marketing page, you’ll find suggestions for improving your marketing strategy.
When you create a marketing activity or automation in Shopify, you may store it as a draft and publish it later, allowing you to plan ahead of time for your marketing.
Shopify Reporting and Analytics
Shopify also offers a decent range of reporting tools, which can be upgraded with higher plans. It will give you from a real-time overview of key factors to detailed sales and customer reports, or a deep analysis.
Shopify’s analytics and statistics can help you learn a lot about your sales and customers. The sorts of analytics and insights available to you are also archivable with the help of apps.
To acquire additional insights and grow your business, you may also use third-party analytics services like Google Analytics.
In 2021, continuing to improve the Shopify analytics and Reports full features to support multi-channel business that allows seeing an overview of key metrics for all of the stores in one central place.
Shopify Multi-channel & Omnichannel
With various technology available today, customers can find the goods that their need via multi-channel. So, Shopify provides merchants with a total of 8 sale channels including Facebook, Instagram, Amazon,… By connecting with Shopify omnichannel commerce, you can easily monitor all of your products, order, and customer in just one place. Selling on multichannel and omnichannel might not be an easy task, but through it, you can have a strong presence in your market includes the marketplace, social media, marketing apps, and online communities.
Shopify Shipping & Fulfillment
To deliver orders to your customer with fulfillment faster, Shopify offers your store the built services. Shopify Shipping & Fulfillment can support you to solve all of the shipping problems such as unlimited international shipping, affordable rates, shipment tracking, delayed delivery, customer data, inventory levels all in one place. Though, in several cases, the store owner still faces some obstacles. So, come to this resource to learn how to disable Shopify Shipping?
Moreover, to implement custom shipping settings and optimize shipping rates, you need to set up the Shopify Shipping Profiles. It allows merchants selling on its platform to purchase and print shipping labels as well as track shipments for purchases.
Shopify Dropshipping
As we mentioned above, Dropshipping is a commercial business model in which eCommerce entrepreneurs sell their products without having to carry any inventory. So that, Shopify launched many ideal apps to support Dropshipping. All aspects you need to know about it, we detailed in the Shopify Dropshipping Reviews.
In this way, you just need to pay the wholesale price to the supplier, while controlling the price that your customers see in your Shopify store. In other words, when a customer places an order in your store, you purchase the products from the supplier and select how to ship the product directly to your customer. As a result, you just focus on the Shopify Dropshipping strategies to improve the quality of products and services. Moreover, choosing the best Shopify Dropshipping Suppliers can support you in delivering to your customers.
Although you can see a lot of benefits of Shopify Dropshipping, there are various alternatives you can examine to choose one. You can compare among options, such as Amazon FBA vs Shopify Dropshipping. Each tool has a unique highlight advantage that matches your business model.
Shopify Integration
One of the best things about Shopify can offer online retailers a suite of services to help them operate their online store. Once your store integrations with Shopify, you can get a high-level view of your store in one place and automatically track your products, inventory, and orders.
With Shopify Integration, you will get several benefits for your store, such as real-time information about leads, customers, sales, and payments being transferred from one app to your eCommerce and marketing applications, allowing them to work together to achieve considerably better outcomes.
Shopify Support & Community
Furthermore, you can be supported available 24/7 via phone, email, and live chat support when you contact Shopify support. Other than that, you also have access to Shopify Community and Shopify Help Center to improve search functionality, accepted solutions, participation rewards, connect with, learn from, and help eCommerce professionals around the world.
For merchants, this is the place to find solutions to their business problems. If nothing exists, you can work with a merchant to come up with a solution together.
For partners, this is an opportunity to connect with store owners and find out what services they need. Ask questions, gather feedback, and work together to create solutions
Shopify Pros and Cons
Shopify Pros
- One of the most praises of this platform is how simple it is to use. You can focus on running your business without wasting time addressing technical issues for your store.
- It’s must to say, Shopify provide several theme options that make your website look beautiful and professional for retaining customers and mobile-friendly.
- Moreover, the Shopify App Store with over 7000 apps and plugins allows you to focus on other important things. It’s easy to use and straightforward.
- Abandoned cart saving functionality is available on all plans and is quite cheap. You also have an incredibly dedicated support team with 24/7 support.
- It’s a great option for anyone interested in dropshipping with a large number of external payment gateways that can be used.
- In addition, Shopify has a ton of SEO additions to its platform, as well as other marketing tools to get more traffic to your site.
Shopify Cons
- This platform has some limitations, the additional features that can’t be unlocked strictly because of how the coding is set up.
- Customers cannot use multiple discounts, only one discount per order is available by default. Only with the Shopify Plus plan, you can use some extensions for multiple discount features.
- When you use the dropshipping app, it’s hard to be confident that the goods you’re selling are ethically produced.
- And finally, this is not a free platform to use, depending on the plan, the fee varies from 0.5% to 2% of the sales value. You also have to pay for some themes and apps, transaction fees also to run your business.
Shopify is Best Suitable With
This platform is suitable for all business owners who want to have a fully functional online store. Even though you are just getting started or looking for an all-in-one eCommerce solution to scale your business, Shopify is your best choice. Plus, there’s a 14-day free trial available, so you don’t have to commit until you’re sure that it will work for you.
Final Words
Once again, Shopify is one of the best-hosted solutions for those wishing to create an online store as it’s a highly flexible platform with a large app store, reasonable pricing plans, and an impressive range of built-in features. This platform is easier to use because of its design for everyone. You can set up a website as an expert without technical knowledge. Just implement via simple steps like entering your email address and password, filling in some information, you can sell your product on Shopify.
We hope that Shopify Reviews can provide you with a lot of crucial information you need to know about this eCommerce software. Contact Beehexa when you want to scale up your business as well as improve your success.