Why build a Shopify store?  Maybe you’ve just come up with a new product or service and want to see if people will buy it?  You don’t want to go door-to-door around the neighborhood asking people if they are interested or would buy your product or service.  Maybe you want to reach a whole new audience to try and scale to targeted audiences within your industry.  Deciding what platform to use can be difficult to narrow down.  Especially if you don’t have experience in this field.  This is where Shopify can get your products or services out in the digital world to help do some of the heavy lifting.

Shopify is a software that you pay to use for business owners that want to sell their products or services to anyone around the world.  It is an ecommerce store that merchants can create a website using their built in shopping cart and also allows the merchant to choose the payment processor.  One of the better tools it offers is its management process.  It tracks inventory, creates shipping labels, writes descriptions and processes orders.  Not only does it give you an avenue to sell your products or services, it’s as if you are hiring an online manager as well. 

One of the reasons why Shopify is leading its niche is because it is an all in one package.  Design, mobile and desktop, product management, payment management, support, etc.  There is no need to integrate other services or applications you may need to run an online store, Shopify has it all.  They have made the process simple and easy to use.  No complicated customizing process or design issues everything is seamless.  The templates they supply can fit all wants and needs to fit exactly what you have imagined.  Color schemes, fonts, images, links, borders, calendars, ordering, payments etc.  Which makes it easy for those who don’t know anything about making ecommerce stores.  All you need is a vision of what you want and how it should flow.  The usability and functionality between pages is exactly what you need.  If you have any questions or concerns or problems that arise it has a chat service at all times to help you with anything you might need.

Remember there are no sales without marketing.  If you don’t market your products or services people simply won’t find it.  Promote your store through social media.  Think about purchasing ads on social media to increase revenue.  Always collect emails when someone visits your site and plan to have emails sent to engage with customers.  Email marketing can be highly effective especially if you throw in some promo codes, discounts, summer sales, etc. you get the point.  Even consider a blog or optimizing your site by using SEO.  Shopify offers marketing features that can help grow your business.  Other features like Google ad credits, email marketing to help target a larger audience. Analytic tools give you insights to understand your customers and why they came to your site. 

Now let’s get to payments.  You might be wondering how you get paid from shopify.  Great question!  Shopify uses third-party providers to process your transactions.  The fees these providers charge is not up to Shopify.  When someone buys your product the sale amount goes directly into your Shopify account.  Shopify stores are integrated with multiple different payment providers, such as, shopify pay, amazon pay, paypal, apple pay and google pay.  Shopify is able to reach a wider audience to make it more efficient during the checkout process for its users that have certain preferences.  The pay period for when you get paid is typically up to you.  If you use a payment schedule, Shopify always honors that schedule and allows you to track when you get paid, how much you make per order, how long for the funds to get into your account.  Shopify makes the payment process easy to understand across the board and is appealing to all users.  

You’re probably wondering how much does Shopify cost?  Here’s a breakdown of the pricing for each plan:

  • Lite Plan – $9/month 
  • Basic Shopify Plan – $29/month 
  • Shopify Plan – $79/month
  • Advanced Shopify Plan – $299/month 
  • Shopify Plus Plan – start around $2,000/month 

 

Shopify also provides a 14-day free trial.  Free trials are always important when selecting any platform or service to use.  It gives you time to get to know the product.  Getting a feel for how you might set things up where you want to effectively put things into place for your store.  Fully understanding how Shopify works and what it can do within that trial period is important.

Another helpful tool Shopify offers is Amazon & eBay integration.  You can effectively start dropshipping with amazon through Shopify.  Your products will sync up with Shopify through the orders page.  You can see exactly where your products were sold whether through Amazon or Shopify.  You have to fulfill the orders through Shopify not Amazon.  This is the same case for eBay.  Everything is tracked and managed through the Shopify admin so it makes it much easier to manage because everything is on one platform.  You can even sell on FaceBook.  FaceBook can be a huge advantage to getting your products or services out there.  If you choose to market your store organically or even with Ads, facebook is a great platform to use.  eBay and Amazon, everything is tracked through Shopify so it makes it easy to manage.

Our experience building a shopify store was as easy as it can be, especially for someone that doesnt have experience with Shopify’s platform.  As long as you know what you want, and where you want it things should run smoothly.  We took our time deciding what platform to use.  After doing our research on a bunch of different ecommerce sites we decided to go with Shopify and couldn’t be more pleased with our choice.  Everything we wanted was right there and easy to implement.  From color schemes to processors to even managing inventory has been so refreshing.  

We chose Shopify simply because of the features and different integrations with other platforms that Shopify has to offer.  We hope that everything provided here helps you decide or reassures you on your choice to use Shopify for your ecommerce store.  We wanted to share our experience with you because we know it can be hard to narrow things down.  Although we didn’t go in depth or talk about specific tools to get you started with Shopify.  Simply because Shopify provides you with all the information you need.  We wanted to give you some clarity into our opinions and thought process on why we recommend Shopify for anyone.