Is Shopify the best eCommerce platform for your business?
We think Shopify is the best ecommerce platform available today. It’s designed to make it easy for business owners to sell online, whether that’s via your own webstore, on third-party marketplaces, or via your social media channels.
From your customer’s perspective, your Shopify site will have an up-to-date look and feel that’s mobile optimised and easy to navigate. And the path to purchase is optimised for sales with easily customisable product pages and a simple checkout process.
Setup is straightforward. If you have all your ducks in a row, it’s entirely possible to have a fully functioning ecommerce store up and ready to take orders within just a few hours.
In our agency, we work exclusively with Shopify because we know that when we hand over a site to a client they’ll have a robust and secure platform that’s easy to navigate and can scale with them as their business grows.
No surprise then that Shopify is the most popular ecommerce platform out there. Right now there are over 1 million businesses running Shopify in 175 countries.
And being the fastest growing ecommerce platform, it’s where the majority of app developers choose to focus their energy. That means that when you need to extend the out of the box functionality you can pretty much guarantee that there’s a tried and tested solution already in the marketplace.
See our list of what we think are the best apps for Shopify.
With Shopify taking care of domains, hosting, all the back-end, and some of the front-end functionality, more time and resources can be put into growing your business.
Shopify Design Functionality
A Shopify site consists of the backend ecommerce functionality and the front end design. The design (your site’s look and feel) is controlled by the theme.
The first thing you need to do is choose a theme that more or less fits with your vision of how you want to express your brand. And once you have your theme installed, you can customise nearly every element using Shopify’s built in theme editor.
There are tons of themes to choose from, some of them are free, and some carry a price tag. A free theme is fine when you’re just getting started providing just enough customisation options without being overwhelming. Generally, a premium theme will provide more features and greater flexibility. Prices for a good pro theme range from around $180 to $350.
Shopify Online Store 2.0
Online Store 2.0 is an upgraded framework designed to make it easier to create unique shopping experiences. Previously, drag-and-drop content sections were only available for the homepage. Now every page on your site can benefit. There’s also built-in accessibility features and faster-loading pages.
If you want to make the most of Shopify’s Online Store 2.0 features, you’ll need to choose an OS 2.0 theme.
Shopify’s Theme Editor
The theme editor is a visual tool that lets you customise the content and appearance of your store, and preview changes to your theme in real time.
Theme functionality is divided into modular sections which you can use to build your pages. For example, on the homepage, you may want to have a full width banner at the top, complete with a headline and call to action. Following this you may want to display some featured products, a section about what makes your business special, a social media feed and underpin it with a newsletter signup form.
You can drag and drop the sections to change the order, and in the theme editor preview, you’ll be able to see exactly what will appear in the storefront when the theme is live.
Sales-Specific Features
Your main goal when you set up an ecommerce business is to make sales. When you break it down to the fundamentals, you have 4 levers to pull – Traffic, Average Order Value, Conversion Rate, and Lifetime Value. Shopify’s sales driving features are all geared towards pulling one of these levers. Indeed, Startups.co.uk ranks Shopify as the best for sales-specific features.
Read more about how to increase your ecommerce sales.
Multiple Payment Options
Accept credit and debit card payments with Shopify Payments
Expanding Internationally
Multi-Language Solutions
Weglot Translate, Langify
Shopify Reporting & Analytics
Shopify’s analytics and reports give you the means to review your store’s recent activity, get insight into your visitors, analyze your online store speed, and analyze your store’s transactions.