Shopify Review: Is it the Best Ecommerce Platform?

Shopify powers more than 500,000 ecommerce sites, handles more than 120 million shoppers, and of these, 54% shop using mobile devices. These buyers can buy various physical products, digital products, or services from a Shopify enabled store. This gives you an idea of the performance and versatility of what many consider to be the best ecommerce platform in the market.

What Shopify Offers

Shopify’s many features makes setting up an online business so easy. You decide how you want the shop to look, load products, set prices, and open up the shop. Shopify takes care of all the hassles like managing the data, ensuring security, facilitating easy marketing, SEO etc.

Shopify – Getting Started

Set Up Shop

Have something to sell, but do not know how to design an online shop? Shopify offers a free 14 day trial. You can test the store and all the different features they have before you buy.

Set up your design with Shopify’s clean and attractive templates- there are over a 100 choices available, both free and premium. Once you have chosen your theme, you can customize it as you want. The template gives you a good way to quickly design a shop that is appealing and also functional.

Managing the Shop

You have an empty shop now. Fill it with products. One good thing about an online shop is that you do not have to worry about shelves and other fittings!

Add Products and Manage Inventory

You can add product names, images, descriptions, pricing, reorder levels etc. You can add products one by one. You can also make bulk imports of product lists from Excel, from EBay, Magento or from a CSV file.

Organize your products into different categories, using a feature called Collection. Shopify’s inventory management and the order tracking feature helps you always stay on top of your stock levels, letting you quickly replenish stock of products that are approaching reorder levels.

CMS

Shopify Content Management System makes it easy to add and delete pages to your webstore. Create a blog and manage the content with Shopify’s built-in blogging tool.

Accept and Track Orders

Accept orders, let customers add notes to orders, track the orders to see when the products are paid for, shipped, in transit, delivered etc. A fraud detection features enables your shop to identify any suspicious orders and alert you.

Customer Relationship Management

Let your website visitors buy products as guests, or ask them to create an account which gives them more features like order tracking, manage payment and addresses etc.

Track your customers buying patterns. Group your customers based on different factors like location, how much they spend etc. Tracking and grouping enables you to better manage your customer data and provide a personalized shopping experience to them.

Manage Internal User Accounts

Using the admin panel, set up user accounts for your staff members. Assign permissions, restrict access, secure your internal processes by deciding who has access to what.

Ensure Secure Shopping

When you setup your shop on Shopify, you automatically get an SSL Certificate and PCI Level 1 Compliance.

Shopify provides a fully secure shopping cart for your ecommerce site, with the ability to accept payments through PayPal or credit and debit cards. Shopify provides integration with over a 100 payment gateways globally. So you have full flexibility in accepting payments.

Ecommerce Hosting

You get a secure PCI Compliant hosting for your shops. You can buy your domain name through Shopify or use an existing domain name. The backend functionalities of hosting and ecommerce are all taken care of by Shopify.

There are no hidden fees and you get unlimited bandwidth to handle any volume of traffic to your website. Shopify also provides an extensive Content Delivery Network or CDN, so wherever in the world your customers are located, your shop loads quickly and works smoothly.

Marketing and SEO

Your Shopify CMS has many SEO features. It lets you customize various elements like meta tags and H1 Tags. It also automatically generates XML files and sitemaps. Shopify has inbuilt analytical tools and also integrates with Google Analytics. You even get a $100 worth of Google AdWords credit if you set up an AdWords Account and use Shopify.

Shopify lets you set up email marketing easily by using the email list of customers who have subscribed to your newsletters. You can create and manage coupons with the Shopify Coupon Code Engine.

Mobile Commerce

Most customers love the convenience of shopping through their mobile devices. Shopify mobile commerce features ensure a responsive design for your ecommerce website. That is, your shop renders well even on the small screen of a mobile phone, with all the features of your online shop intact.

Extend Shopify Functionality – The App Store

Shopify provides all the features necessary for a full-fledged and secure ecommerce site. However you may need some special features and functionalities for your shop. The Shopify App store provides you a massive list of third party apps and plugins to extend Shopify’s functionality.

Shopify is the best ecommerce platform for beginners as well as for well-established retail businesses. It provides a fully integrated POS System for a retail store, so you get seamless integration across multiple sales channels too! This can come extremely handy when you’re setting up pop up stores at events to promote your products and your brand.