Digital Content Manager Shopify is a beginner-friendly eCommerce platform that lets you sell different kinds of products and services. For a decade and till now, it has been standing tall among other eCommerce platforms due to its reliability, performance, and flexibility.
So interested to know more about Shopify?
In this article, we will see an in-depth Shopify review along with its features, pricing, pros, and cons based on my hands-on experience. With this, you can decide whether Shopify shall be a good eCommerce platform of your choice.
Ready to dive in?
Let’s explore.
What is Shopify?
Shopify is a cloud-based eCommerce platform that offers all resources to build and launch an online store. It has good scalability potential as it can be used by almost all businesses ranging from small-sized to large scale.
You can set up your Shopify store without diving deep into handling technical requirements. The onboarding process is smooth and even if you are new to the platform, you won’t get that surreal feeling as every element is easily customizable.
The best part of using Shopify is that it offers colossal integrations with third-party apps via its app store. You can browse apps in various categories and install them in your store within a couple of clicks.
With that being said, next, we shall see the different kinds of products that you can readily sell on Shopify.
What products can you sell on Shopify?
The following are the different kinds of products and services that you can sell using Shopify:
- Physical products
- Services (appointments)
- Memberships
- Digital Products
- Classes, lessons, and workshops.
- Event tickets
- Digital gift cards
- Rentals
Literally, Shopify offers unbounded capabilities to exhibit your potential. All you have to do is to sign up on the platform, start uploading products, set up payments, and then you can start your online selling.
Shopify Review: Features
In this section, we shall take a look at different sets of features offered by Shopify:
- Ease of use
- Product Management
- Marketing
- Payment Methods
- Customer support
1. Ease of use
As discussed earlier, the greatest advantage of Shopify lies in its user-friendliness. When you create an account and log in, you can see its dashboard along with a list of options for getting started.
Directly from its dashboard, you can quickly start customizing your theme. Fortunately, Shopify offers lots of beautiful free and paid themes in various niches that suit your purpose.
All the Shopify themes are SEO-friendly, customizable, and have lots of eCommerce-focused features to uplift your business potential.
Talking about the Shopify store editor, it is easy-to-use as you have to input the needed elements in your online store.
You can upload images, logos, modify the text, add newsletter blocks, and much more to create an impressive storefront. Even the advanced users can use custom CSS functionalities to upgrade their Shopify store with their needed features which enhance customer experience.
So ultimately Shopify’s ease of use is one of the ultimate endeavors for the platform’s high competitiveness.
2. Product Management
Adding products is a crucial factor as it determines the success of your online business.
Shopify lets you get rid of the cumbersome process as you can smoothly upload via its product editor. It allows you to craft product title, write unique product descriptions, set variants, track inventory, apply shipping charges, and much more.
In addition to this, you can improve your product’s visibility by optimizing its meta description and URL handle. This is a great comfort as you can do this directly in the product editor.
To further extend its potential, Shopify helps in updating your variant quantity with just a few clicks, set up inventory tracking, and also adjusting the inventory counts.
3. Marketing
Shopify offers a reasonable set of marketing tools to let you constantly engage with your customers.
The different marketing tools offered by Shopify are:
- Shopify Email: With Shopify email marketing, you can proactively communicate with your customers regarding important offers, sales, updates, announcements, etc.
- Abandoned Cart Recovery: Bring back your lost customers by sending them reminder emails that contain a direct link to the cart to complete the purchase.
- Facebook and Snapchat Advertising: Shopify allows you to advertise on both social platforms which increases followers base and engagement levels.
- Discounts: Create discount codes manually or apply automatic discounts at the customer’s checkout.
As these are the ‘must-have’ features for an online store, you can readily utilize these powerful marketing tactics to convert new visitors into potential customers of your brand.
4. Payments
When it comes to payments you can either use Shopify payments or accept transactions via a third-party provider. If you are using a third-party payment provider you will be charged transaction fees. Note that the transaction fees are not applicable to Shopify payments, manual payments, and POS orders.
Apart from Shopify payments, you can allow customers to pay online without using PayPal, Amazon Pay, and Apple Pay.
An added advantage is that if you use Shopify Payments, you can enable Shop Pay to save customers’ information which lets them proceed to the checkout at a faster rate.
Shopify extends its payment potential to cryptocurrencies too. If you wish to accept cryptocurrencies as a mode of payment, you can integrate Coinbase Commerce, BitPay, GoCoin, and CoinPayments.net to accept bitcoins, ethereum, litecoin, etc.
5. Customer Support
Shopify offers excellent customer support via its community forum, help center, and contact support.
When you log in using your Shopify account for accessing support, you can specify your issue and Shopify displays a set of related articles.
If you are still not convinced with those articles, then you can scroll down on the same page and click the ‘Get Support’ option. By clicking that option you can communicate with the Shopify team via chat, email and quickly resolve your issues.
How much does Shopify cost?
Shopify offers a 14-day free trial and comes with four major pricing plans:
- Lite Plan – $9/month.
- Basic Shopify Plan – $29/month
- Shopify Plan– $79/month
- Advanced Shopify Plan – $299/month
- Shopify Plus Plan – $2,000/month
Shopify lite is exclusively designed for merchants who are looking to sell via POS or embed a buy button on their website.
By paying $9/month, you get access to its dashboard, reports, issue gift cards, in-store inventory, custom discounts, customer profiles, product&order management, etc.
On Basic Shopify, Shopify, and Advanced Shopify plans you’ll almost get access to all of the features.
It includes selling unlimited products, 24×7 support, sales channels, inventory locations, free SSL certificates, abandoned cart recovery, gift cards, etc.
The only thing is that reports can be accessed only from the Shopify plan and displaying calculated shipping rates at checkout is available only on the Advanced Shopify plan.
Finally, Shopify plus is for enterprise businesses and so its features are huge. You can unlock 18% higher conversion with Shop pay, built-in AR/video/3D media on product pages, localized shipping experiences, customizable checkout, and 99.9% uptime.
Note: Transaction fees are also included in the following plans.
- Basic Shopify – 2.0% transaction fees
- Shopify – 1.0% transaction fees
- Advanced Shopify – 0.5% transaction fees.
So be wise in choosing the best pricing plan that suits your business requirements and start selling.
Shopify Review: Pros and Cons
Pros –
- Easy to set up and customize.
- Sell in multiple channels.
- Excellent customer support.
- Fully hosted platform so you need not worry about server maintenance.
- Offers gorgeous free and paid themes to get started.
Cons –
- Incurs transaction fees.
- Reporting is available on higher pricing plans.
- Some content management features can be made available.
- The blogging module in Shopify could be slightly improved.
Is Shopify the right eCommerce platform for your business?
From this comprehensive review, you might have understood the potential of Shopify. It is packed with all the features that make your eCommerce business scale to a greater potential.
So if you are looking for an eCommerce platform that easily handles all your requirements, then Shopify shall be worth considering. It also offers a 14-day free trial so you can sign up, work, and understand how the platform is flexible to all your requirements.
Recommended Reading – How to sell NFT on Shopify?
