The convenience of online shopping is irresistible, but picking a platform to build your online business can be a daunting task.
Building your eCommerce store is more than just building a homepage and a few product pages. You’ll need a fair stack of technology features to save you a lot of time and effort.
There are numerous eCommerce platforms that allow you to build an online store with ease but Shopify is the most preferred of them all.
Shopify does the best job of building an online store where your customer can do shopping with utmost convenience and satisfaction.
Shopify is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms that was launched in 2006. So, far it has powered over 1 million businesses in more than 175 countries.
That’s quite impressive, right?
Its easy-to-use tools allow you to start, run, and grow your online business with full independence. In simpler words, it’s a one-stop-shop for eCommerce enthusiasts.
Some of you might be at the beginning of the learning curve of eCommerce platforms and might be wondering how Shopify can help you establish your business.
The right eCommerce platform will provide you with versatile options and features. Here are some reasons why Shopify is still the leading E-Commerce platform.
Thousands of Themes and Templates
Who would complain about a visually appealing online store?
Shopify offers thousands of ready-to-use themes and templates that will create the first impression that you want your users to have.
From clothing and electronics to games and food, Shopify has managed to cover a wide range of industries to categorize its themes. You can also develop a Shopify theme with the help of a theme kit.
Shopify also enables you to filter themes for your store based on different styles, prices, and functionality.
Easy To Use
For someone who doesn’t have a technical background, Shopify is the go-to eCommerce platform. With Shopify, you won’t have to start from scratch.
We can’t stress enough about how easy it is to manage your store with a simple-looking dashboard.
Even if you’re on vacation, you don’t need to worry about the management of your store as you can easily handle it with your smartphone. Shopify’s app on the smartphone gives you all the access to orders, customers, and other important settings.
Multi-payment Gateway
You don’t want your customer to abandon the cart just because they can’t find their favorite payment method option in your store.
The good news is that Shopify offers hundreds of payment gateway integration options. PayPal, Amazon Pay, and debit/credit cards are some of the popular payment methods offered by Shopify.
Not to forget, Shopify has its own payment method as well.
Multi-channel Selling
Promoting an eCommerce store is not easy! There is a need to not only find out new ways to market your product but also to sell them. Shopify makes this task easier for you.
Shopify provides you a platform to sell everywhere you want. You can seamlessly integrate your online store to sell on huge marketplaces like Amazon and eBay.
No one can deny the power of social media to catch the attention of your target customers and generate consistent sales. Shopify helps you to tap into some of the most popular social media platforms in the best way possible. Just keep yourself updated with the latest trends in eCommerce marketing and use your innovation to implement those trends and ideas with your Shopify store.
Marketing Tools
There are over 20 million eCommerce stores on the internet. To keep your store one step ahead of your competitors, you need to implement out-of-the-box promotional techniques. From creating a promo code for your store to attract your audience, to running giveaways, the opportunities are endless.
While you might’ve to spend some money on the marketing tools to support your promotional activities, Shopify has in-built marketing tools that are free of cost. These marketing tools will allow you to follow SEO best practices or your sites such as adding meta description, page titles, keywords, and unique URL. Shopify also supports different app integrations such as abandoned cart apps helping you retain maximum customers.
You can also integrate your social media accounts such as Facebook and Instagram to create more brand awareness for your store on social media.
Easy App Integrations
Shopify is an app-rich platform which makes it one of the leading choices for eCommerce business doers. Its environment allows you to integrate all the apps that will act as a solution to your eCommerce problems.
For example, it supports various dropshipping and inventory management software to sell your business on different platforms.
You can also integrate other apps such as customer service apps, SEO apps, and management apps. If you’re wondering who offers more app integrations, Shopify or Wix, the answer is Shopify. The platform offers far more flexible third-party app integrations that can give your business a boost.
Customer Support
Even if you’re a beginner and want to rely on technical help from time to time, Shopify’s extremely reliable customer support will be there to support you.
Its customer support team is available 24/7. All you’ve to do is raise a question and its support team will be there to guide you through email, phone, and even live chat.
Speed
One of the most crucial factors behind the success of a website is its Speed. No potential customer wants to wait for your website to load. It’s extremely important that you speed up your eCommerce website before you make it live.
This is the case for online shopping stores as well. Shopify provides you with all the essentials to increase the speed of your website for better conversions. It also comes with a built-in speed calculator.
14-Day Free Trial
If you’re not sure about the working of Shopify, it allows you to take a 14-day free trial. This trial will help you to familiarize yourself with all the features available on the platform.
To start with the free trial pack, you just have to fill in some personal details and answer questions about your business.
Although the free trial pack will allow you to add products, customize themes, and various other settings, it won’t allow you to go live. After the trial pack is over, you’ll need to choose a package according to your budget.
Unlimited Products
One of the best features of Shopify is that you can sell an unlimited number of products.
Shopify puts no restriction on the number of products you put for sale. Whether it is 200 or 1000 products, it won’t stop you from adding products to your online store.
Easy Scalability
Unlike web hosting, it is challenging to transfer eCommerce platforms for store owners. While planning your online store, you need to look at the scalability options as your business will grow.
With Shopify, you just have to transfer your low-cost plan into a high-cost plan as you grow. If your online store and staff grow, you can opt for the Shopify Pro plan that allows you to add 15 staff accounts and 8 locations.
Isn’t that great?
Analytics Reporting
At the end of the day, you need to summarize your actions and improve the things where you had gone wrong.
Shopify was solely developed as an eCommerce platform, a feature not so common in the Shopify alternatives available in the market. This is the reason it has managed to provide its users all the tools to track their business.
Shopify allows you to take advantage of its built-in analytics features, along with an easy Google Analytics integration. These analytics will help you to monitor your target customers, orders, and even stock level.
You can also have access to various reports such as financial and customer acquisition by subscribing to its higher level plans.
Pricing
If you want to run your store with a low budget, we’ll advise you to opt for Shopify due to its low costing plans. The Basic Shopify Plan starts at $29/month and does a good job of providing all the necessary features.
Multi-currency Support
Shopify not only supports multiple languages to help you sell all around the world but also provides multi-currency support.
This way, you can give your customers an option to buy the products in whatever currency they prefer.
Conclusion
These 14 most advanced qualities make Shopify the leading eCommerce platform on the internet. Although Shopify is an ideal choice to start an online store, we’ll recommend you to research other eCommerce platforms as well. But we are pretty sure you will bounce back to Shopify!
Shopify has always been the first choice for beginners and start-ups. That doesn’t take away anything from its capability to host huge stores.
Try out Shopify and comment about your experience!
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