General Information:
Launched in 2006, Shopify is one of the world’s leading e-commerce platforms. Priding themselves on the hassle-free e-commerce experience, you can use their platform to create a completely customized online store to promote your brand. With over 100 beautiful and professional themes to choose from, you can launch your e-commerce without being an expert in web development (or spending top dollar for one).
What’s interesting about this platform is that they offer built-in speed and security. As an e-tailer, one of the biggest challenges in building your own store is making sure that it’s both fast and secure. Using Shopify accomplishes both of these tasks with relative ease by integrating automatically with the most popular of payment solutions, and taking care of the hosting and optimization side of e-commerce. Another bonus to using Shopify is the ease at which we can integrate Analytics to track your site hits and conversion rates.
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Shopify also includes great customer service that isn’t necessarily available when building a site from scratch. They answer quickly when problems arise, and they offer a huge database of FAQs, email/chat support, and phone support, so you can contact someone who knows what they’re doing via any channel you wish. Shopify also offers one of the best solutions for SEO: Their codes are clean, crawlable, and they offer several options to improve SEO throughout the site by implementing customized title tags, meta descriptions, and sitemaps.
Pricing:
Shopify offers three different payment plans per month that are scalable to the size of your e-commerce (and budget). There are advantages to using the Shopify and Advanced Shopify plans, like paying less per credit card purchase, and getting more staff accounts for your site. Here are a few of the features in each of their plans:
Basic: $29/Month
What’s included:
- 2 Staff Accounts
- Unlimited number of products
- Unlimited file storage
- 24/7 support
- Fraud analysis
- Manual order creation
- Discount codes
Shopify: $79/Month
What’s included:
- 5 Staff Accounts
- Unlimited number of products
- Unlimited file storage
- 24/7 support
- Fraud analysis
- Manual order creation
- Discount codes
- Gift cards
- Professional reports
- Abandoned cart recovery
Advanced: $299/Month
What’s included:
- 15 Staff Accounts
- Unlimited number of products
- Unlimited file storage
- 24/7 support
- Fraud analysis
- Manual order creation
- Discount codes
- Gift cards
- Professional reports
- Abandoned cart recovery
- Advanced report builder
- Real-time carrier shipping
There are also a few other customizable plans that you can opt for, like Shopify Lite, which allows you to sell on Facebook, accept credit card payments, and integrate buy buttons on various social media accounts for $9 per month. There are also ways to integrate in a brick-and-mortar offline, with their Retail Package, which offers hardware integration, staff PINs, etc. There are also higher volume accounts for larger stores with Shopify Plus. With an app store that allows you to further customize your online store, you can choose from both free and paid apps that will work the best for your e-commerce.
There are definitely more pros than cons when it comes to Shopify. This leader has earned its place in the e-commerce industry with it’s varied, and highly customizable store templates, multitude of online solutions adaptable from the smallest online seller to the largest corporation, and reputation for fast and highly secured sites. Shopify offers a scalable solution for every e-tailer that is well adapted to stores of any size.
