Why Shopify is the Best E-Commerce Platform?
Did you know that the first ever online sale happened on August 11th, 1994, where a guy sold a CD of a band “Sting” through his website Netmarket? Fast forward to present and we don’t even have to go out to buy groceries. That’s how far we’ve come.
Without further adieu, let’s get started.
What is an E-Commerce Platform?
Basically, the platforms that allow us to build our own online store, where we can sell our goods and services to potentially everyone in the world, are e-commerce platforms. And thanks to dropshipping, nobody has to have inventory either.
You can simply find the right supplier, post their product on your own online store, and boom! All you ever needed to make money was your laptop. It’s no surprise everyone’s after building their own online stores. The current pricing models for $29, $79, and $299 for their Basic Shopify, Shopify, and Advanced Shopify plans, respectively.
It is estimated that there are about 12 million — 24 million eCommerce websites across the world. However, it’s shocking that less than 1M of these sites sell more than $1,000/year, so there’s a vast room for growth.
What’s special about an e-commerce platform is not having to hire a developer to write a code. You may have to hire a Developer but the store can be set up really quickly. Initially, you can even learn to set it up yourself since it’s about dragging and dropping different modules.
There are 4 types of e-commerce sales:-
- B2B (Business-to-Business) — Where one business sells to another. Eg. Unity Technologies, Hubspot, Salesforce, etc.
- B2C (Business-to-Consumer) — Where the business sells to a consumer, which is most of them. Eg. Amazon, eBay, Nike, etc.
- C2C (Consumer-to-Consumer) — Where consumers sell their old products to other consumers. Eg. Craigslist, Etsy, eBay, etc.
- C2B (Consumer-to-Business) — Where Consumers sell their services to businesses or large organizations. Eg. photographer, musicians, etc.
Introduction to Shopify
It was the year 2006 when 25-year old Tobias Lütke wanted to sell snowboards online but figured that it would be a challenge to sell them without having an easy-to-use e-commerce platform and that’s how Shopify came into being.
No matter if you’re selling physical products, digital products, services and consultations, memberships, or even tickets, you should definitely look to Shopify as a platform to set up your online store with.
What Sets Shopify Apart?
Since it isn’t 2006, there are multiple e-commerce platforms like Magento, BigCommerce, WooCommerce and several others to choose from. But if we were to focus on one platform that’s not only easy to use, but has excellent designing capabilities, an amazing support team that’s available 24-hours, and tons of features that could actually make it the best ecommerce platform.
Here are a few features that make Shopify so great:-
User Friendly
Shopify is structured in such a manner that it’s really easy for you to understand what goes where. The drag-drop modules of Shopify make it convenient for designing and arranging various elements conveniently.
Again, you may choose to hire a Shopify developer whenever complications arise, otherwise you can gradually arrange the significant elements on your own.
Flexibility of Templates
Right off the bat, the templates you get from Shopify have a high scope of modification. You’ll get more than 70 themes to choose from, and have complete access to the HTML and CSS of your website.
You can even publish and categorize articles, create lookbooks, encourage discussion, and moderate comments on your Shopify blog.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
What good is an online store when people search for a product you have but you don’t pop up in the top search results? Spend as much as you may on PPC and Social Media Advertising but do focus on improving your organic to your target audience.
Shopify’s on-page optimization is super easy and since their backend is highly intuitive, it’s easy to implement. If you were to choose a lightweight template, your page will load faster and hence, rank higher.
Product Customizability
In order for Shopify to be declared as the best ecommerce platform, it has to be able to compete with the best ecommerce business. We all know Amazon, a company that expanded from an online bookstore to now being a leader in e-commerce.
What you probably didn’t know was that your Shopify website has the capacity to have all the product features that the Amazon website has.
From product presentation (zooming ability, add pictures and videos), cart function, customer ratings to defining several variants like size, color and material based on which it produces all the combinations of products, Shopify can do it all.
Checkout, Payment & Shipping
A great e-commerce platform is one that offers as many offers to its customers as possible. When it comes to checking out and making payments, Shopify offers compatibility with all the popular payment options like Credit card (including Stripe and Authorize.net), PayPal, BitPay for Bitcoins, and manual payment options as well.
It allows sale of digital goods, dropshipping, and SSL encryption. It even allows consumers to buy products without creating an account.
Excellent Inventory Management
Back in the day, it was a full-time job to manage inventories, now it’s all automated. Thanks to Shopify that tracks all items you have in stock. There’s a POS system to manage both online and offline inventory, thereby avoiding spoilage, dead stock and save storage costs as well.
Some of these features are FIFO (First In First Out), LIFO (Last In First Out), Contingency Planning, Regular Auditing, etc.
Things to Keep In Mind Before Going for Shopify
Before you go ahead and get yourself a Shopify subscription, you should read the following things about Shopify because it’s only fair to know the entirety of facts:-
You Need a 3rd Party App for Adding Multiple Currencies
If you’re ready to sell your products all over the world, then you should know that there isn’t any in-built support for multiple currencies. However, you can integrate 3rd party apps to achieve this.
Transaction Fees
Using any external payment method results in a transaction fee. However, if you’re using Shopify Payments, you won’t be charged any such transaction fee, not even for manual payment methods like cash on delivery, bank transfer, or test orders.
Regular Blogging Complexity
Even though Shopify comes with an in-built blog for products, it’s important to know that for non-ecommerce purposes, you might want to change the way it looks, which involves a few complexities. You might want to hire a Shopify Developer in that case.
Not a Multi-Language Store By Default
By default, Shopify only supports English language. However, there are 3rd party Apps that can help you translate the page into your preferred language.
URL Structure
We talked about how amazing Shopify is from an SEO perspective. There’s just a little caveat — All the regular pages have a URL structure that isn’t ideal for SEO since Shopify uses subdirectories like /pages/ or /blog/news/.
Bonus Takeaway
I’ve told you all the benefits and caveats of Shopify, and I still believe it’s the best ecommerce platform. Here’s why — Shopify has plans for all kinds of users. Apart from their 3 popular plans (Basic Shopify, Shopify, and Advanced Shopify plans), there are 2 plans you might not know about:-
Shopify Lite
Shopify Lite starts at just $9 and is for people who don’t want to set up a website. They can just go and start advertising on facebook, where the users won’t even have to open a new window app, thereby allowing them in-app purchases.
Shopify Plus
This platform is for large e-commerce merchants and is packed with even more features than the Advanced Shopify Plan. Shopify Plus costs either $2,000 per month, or 0.25% of sales volume per month, whichever is greater.
