Introduction
What is e-commerce?
The complete sum of business transactions that occur on the internet is termed as e-commerce. Commonly known as electronic commerce, it involves purchasing as well as selling various products online. Even though we mostly know that e-commerce involves online buying and selling of products, the whole universe of e-commerce has various other activities as well.
It can be said that any electronic business transaction is known as e-commerce. The e-commerce industry has noticed an exponential growth with the growing importance of the internet as a medium of commercial enterprise. The biggest benefit of e-commerce is, it has removed all the time as well as geographical limitations, streamlining of different operations, thus leading to reduced costs and risen convenience.
With the advent of the concept of e-commerce, the first and the foremost thing which became important is e-commerce software.
E-commerce software
E-commerce software is the primary engine, that helps in the growth of the online store. E-commerce software makes it quick and easy to manage the inventory, properly calculate tax, and manage an enormous number of other tasks needed by a store.
Shopify is one of the best e-commerce platforms. It handles everything necessary to run a smooth e-commerce website and provides customers with an easy-to-use interface.
Shopify features different tools, which help different businesses to operate online stores as well as sell their products. Also, Shopify has different tools that are specially meant for offline retail.
Today most business owners consider it the best e-commerce solution. You can also check out Wix or Weebly for your online store. Make sure to read our Wix vs Weebly comparison as well!
Table of Contents
How does Shopify work?
Looking for a platform to sell your latest hand-designed outfits or jewellery? Are you a musician who looks forward to a platform so that you can sell your mixtapes.
Shopify can help achieve your targets. Every year Shopify helps a huge number of entrepreneurs around the globe to sell their products.
Even if you have the best product in the market, it is still important to have an idea of different services that help to grow your business. With Shopify, you can easily sell both digital and physical items.
Digital items
Most of the digital items include various eBooks, audio downloads, lightroom presets, especially for photographers, different types of clothing patterns, email templates, etc.
Physical items
Physical items can be anything handmade, any manufactured goods, or something, which can be shipped. Some of the examples of physical items include dresses, jewellery items, gift boxes, etc.
Different services
When emphasizing on Shopify review, it is impossible to ignore the amazing services and consultations, which Shopify offers. Whether you are a dentist or an interior designer, customers can easily make online bookings via your Shopify store.
Memberships
Another useful feature that Shopify offers is different subscription levels. Imagine if you are an owner of a Zumba studio – subscription levels can help you easily sell membership.
Also, Shopify provides an option for member-only access to your website.
Variety of prdoucts
With Shopify, you can easily sell or buy digital or physical items, pay rent, as well as make a booking for different lessons or events.
Anything you can think of selling, Shopify makes it possible.
Shopify features
Now, as you know what Shopify is, it is time to discuss some exclusive features it provides for making online stores. Some of the features of Shopify are listed below:
- It helps to set up a stunning and responsive store quickly and easily. Shopify provides a large number of professional and beautiful themes, which makes setting up your online store a delight.
- While hosting an online store with Shopify, you don’t have to worry about the technical part of maintaining your store. Shopify keeps the servers safe and updated with most of the latest software.
- Excellent around the clock support.
- Helps to recover abandoned shopping carts and emails those to clients, to land a possible sale.
- Easy importing and exporting of the catalogues, using CSV files
- Many effective and useful marketing features, like payment gateways, automatic taxes, etc
Advantages of using Shopify
With plenty of exclusive features, Shopify comes with many advantages that help the customers to build successful online stores.
With Shopify, it is easy to increase sells without putting in too much effort. Here are some of the advantages a customer can get by using Shopify.
Quick cart recovery
The rate of abandonment cart recovery online is about 68.81% which means that most of the customers do add products in the carts, but do not order them. This means that your company is on the verge of missing a massive number of sales.
You can check this simply by visiting the ‘Orders’ section and then checking the ‘Abandoned Checkouts’ on the dashboard of Shopify.
From there you can view the list of customers that kept the items in the basket but did not put in an order. With the help of Shopify, you can email those clients to encourage them to put in an order.
Read our detailed Shopify review to find out more about quick cart recovery.
Automatic shipping price calculation
One of the most important aspects of keeping an online store running effectively is making a detailed calculation of the shipping costs.
Underestimating this can make you suffer from a huge loss of profit. On the other hand, if you overestimate the cost of shipping, you would eventually scare the customers away with high prices.
Shopify provides a feature for easily finding out the actual shipping cost for each customer depending on the size and weight of the product. You can get the actual price for major shipping carriers like UPS, USPS, and FedEx.
Easy payments with Shopify POS
Do you have a real-world store next to the online store as well? You might find Shopify’s Point of Sale useful.
The point of sale provides functionality for taking real-world payments with the help of a card reader. The sales remain auto-linked to the online Shopify account, which makes tour inventory easily manageable since it’s the same in your online and real-world stores.
Customer profiles for finding out best buyers
If you ask your customers to register before making a purchase, it becomes possible to monitor the information about your customers as well as their purchasing history.
Based on this information you can make better recommendations to customers from different groups. You can group people by age, sex, country, etc. You can even make dedicated campaigns to those groups.
Account management with Shopify is simple, as is sending customers custom emails. You can track how to customer got to your site and what products is he or she interested in. This all helps with recommendations.
Utilizing discount codes
Heavy discounts and rebates are always helpful when it comes to increasing sales and revenue. Shopify also has this advantage and the most effective way of doing this is using the ‘Bulk discount’ option. If you use these, then it helps in generating the discount codes, percentage rebate as well as free shipping.
Synchronizing Shopify with Facebook
In case your business has a huge Facebook presence, it becomes easy for you to recreate the whole shop on Facebook by using the “shop” tab. Customers can add products to cart and you can redirect them to your checkout page when they are finished.
This feature assures that you can convert your followers into customers much more easily. If you use an API, then your inventory will be synchronized and you do not have to worry extra about it. You can easily manage things from one place.
Avoid inventory with Dropshipping facility
Dropshipping is another effective method of running an online store, and the best part of it is, you do not have to own any inventory.
When the customer purchases a product from your store, it’s directed to a third-party supplier, who is responsible for shipping the product. Usually, you have a fixed price from a third-party supplier, and the more expensive you sell the product the more you earn.
If you want to set this in Shopify, make sure that you are using a dropshipping application. This application helps you to make a partnership with any supplier so it’s easy for you to manage everything from one place.
Easy tracking with analytics and reports
Analytics are extremely important for every online store. Statistics help you keep track of how the online store is working. Analytics maintains a record of the number of visitors who visit your store, the time they are giving to your website, etc.
With Shopify, you can easily keep a record of the number of visitors, and all the other necessary statistics that can help your business to grow.
Why Use Shopify?
Shopify offers out of the box solutions, which make online commerce easy.
Here are some of the reasons why to use Shopify over other e-commerce solutions.
Things work collaboratively
Shopify is a complete e-commerce solution. Everything is built by a single company which guarantees that everything works smoothly.
Just like other platforms, Shopify assists with building the website, payments as well as shopping cart so that everything is in sync.
Plenty of payment gateways
One of the most awkward parts of maintaining an online store is the handling of payments. The problem with payments is that there are so many different gateways – like credit cards, PayPal and crypto.
Shopify supports a wide range of payment gateways and makes handling payments easy for you.
Proper backend administration
Creating and maintaining an online store requires investing a huge amount of time in the backend. It’s important for serving various customers, who require different features. Setting it all up in the backend takes an enormous amount of time and effort.
Shopify comes with an easy backend system so that all the administrative work becomes easy, thus letting you work peacefully. Setting your store up with Shopify saves you a lot of time and headaches. After all, Shopify specializes in making the creation of online stores easy.
Expert support
Shopify has amazing customer support. If you run into a problem, you will get help. What’s good about Shopify’s support is that they provide it 24/7 – you can get around the clock support via phone or live chat.
Also with Shopify, you don’t have to worry about the lack of knowledge. They have a great help centre, a forum and video tutorials.
A huge community of developers
Shopify encourages the designers, developers as well as the consultants to learn about their platform.
With the help of the huge community of developers, Shopify can help you out with custom add-ons, custom design, and even marketing help.
Efficiently handles a large inventory
Shopify can efficiently and easily handle huge inventories. Handling your inventory is quite simple with Shopify because of its easy-to-use and intuitive design.
Avoid the server costs
If you are building your online store from the ground up you might experience a problem with servers. Which one to choose and how much to invest are the most common questions that come in mind.
With Shopify, everything related to servers is handled for you. Shopify provides different plans for different needs. If your requirements grow you can always upgrade to a better plan.
Discounts are given on annual plans
If you are sure that your store is going to be a success – well why wouldn’t it be – then it’s reasonable for you to choose an annual or even biennial plan.
Shopify offers huge discounts on the annual as well as biennial plans. You can save a fortune by not choosing a monthly plan.
Security is given importance
Shopify has grown into one of the largest tools for creating an online store. It means they have money and staff to invest in security as well.
With Shopify, you don’t have to worry about security, let them worry for you. Everything that is a threat for you is neutralized by Shopify. If there is a problem, they are probably already working on the solution.
Conclusion
Shopify is a complete solution for creating and maintaining a successful e-commerce website. It can handle everything there is to handle from inventory to payments.
In my honest opinion, Shopify is the best tool for creating your online store today.
I hope this insight into Shopify, gave you an idea of what Shopify is capable of doing for you.
If you are in for an in-depth review, read our Shopify review as well.