When you decide to grow your business online, the path often starts with determining the right eCommerce solutions. Shopify online store is one of the options to help your brand go, scale, and grow.
What Is Shopify?
Shopify is a modern business-focused eCommerce solution. It is a cloud-based eCommerce platform for everyone who wants to start, grow, and scale their eCommerce business. With Shopify online store, you will enjoy benefits such as various marketing tools, payment gateways, effective product and store management, and analytics.Unlike other platforms that require hosting or website knowledge before use, Shopify offers tools and resources to sell online successfully for both beginners and experts.
Shopify features include:
- an admin panel to manage the website;
- a website builder helps you create an online store;
- a Shopify cloud hosting;
- a mobile-friendly look to provide a great digital experience;
- domain registration to create a catchy domain name for your brand;
- a shopping cart optimized to sell;
- advanced inventory and product management to keep full control over the products;
- the marketing features such as SEO, gift cards, free shipping, discounts to grow customer loyalty and brand awareness;
- advanced store management to connect various services, manage on the go, and discover more useful information about your customers;
- multiple languages support to communicate with a broad audience;
- a POS solution to sell in person;
- a complete blogging platform to create connections with your target audience;
- a handy dropshipping solution helpful in starting businesses or experience dropshippers;
- and more great solutions to help your brand grow!
Why Shopify Online Store Will Help Your Brand Grow
Shopify is an excellent choice for those who want to give an online business a try and see how it will work. You can launch your store quickly and sell right from the start. It requires fewer investments into web development and less time into education than more complicated and advanced platforms. It’s a great solution for beginners and experts. This is why:
Easy-to-Manage
Shopify platform is created with users in mind, focusing on the user and the business. It doesn’t require deep technical knowledge of web development, system administration, etc. All you need is to create your account, build your website with a handy block editor, choose the design, and add the content. It is all easy to do with an admin panel. It gives you building blocks for your eCommerce store, all necessary tools, and practical guides to create your eCommerce experience. If you need any help, you can always turn to the Shopify expert to get assistance right from your admin account.
You’ll save costs on website support and team education.
Fast-to-Start
Shopify allows launching an eCommerce website within a few weeks. We recommend you create a plan, evaluate your budget, decide what capabilities your store needs, prepare your content, and then start growing online.
After you choose your domain name, you can create a Shopify account in a trial version. During 14 days, you can see how it goes. So, you are free to look around till you come up with the decision whether you like this platform or not.
You’ll then be able to buy the subscription to one of Shopify plans, find and connect needed features, and select one of the beautiful themes in the Shopify Theme Store. If you add your authentic content, your online store will look different from the others, even with the ready Shopify theme. It will be a great start, especially if you are on a tight budget! If you want a unique look for your online store, professional designers and theme developers from all over the world are at your service.
You save time for project development and start to earn faster.
Business-Focused
Shopify is not just a platform. It is a whole ecosystem that unites entrepreneurs and experts: brand owners, Shopify experts, and digital specialists. You can always connect with professional people ready to help your business grow. This platform focuses on your business and provides you with all the necessary tools to grow successfully, save you time and money, and grow your business income.
It doesn’t matter whether your first try or you already run a successful business using another platform. Shopify allows you to launch quickly and on a budget or migrate without too many efforts. Shopify is not an open-source platform. There is no way to modify its backend, but you can add all the required features with particular apps. In most cases, you’ll need help with creating the custom theme – if you want a unique design or if you’d like to delegate some tasks.
Various reporting tools allow you to analyze business results, create marketing campaigns, and see all about your store management.
The platform focuses on optimizing your business results.
Mobile-Ready
Shopify provides fully mobile-optimized commerce. Mobile eCommerce sales account about 50% of total eCommerce sales. Our customers want to shop right on the go. It is now essential to make sure that the brand website mobile-optimized as mobile traffic has increased significantly. Fortunately, the themes on Shopify are optimized for mobile devices and provide a responsive mobile experience.
You reach a large audience of mobile users and grow conversion.
Growth-Oriented
The in-built SEO functionality of Shopify will help your brand rank well in Google search results and bring more traffic.
Shopify app store offers various marketing tools, from integrating your store with social networks and advertising tools, such as Facebook, Google shopping, Google ads, Instagram, to an email newsletter and customer reviews.
Moreover, if you don’t have the time for digital marketing or find it time-consuming, Shopify provides an in-built kit to help you. It works as a virtual assistant, performing marketing activities based on your sales, helping you grow and track progress.
You have all the tools you need to grow your brand right from the start.
How Does Shopify Work?
Merchants have the following options: they can create or buy an online store. Charging begins after a trial expires.
Shopify uses a monthly subscription model, offering to choose among three plans. They will cost you $29, $79, or $299 per month. They differ in their feature list and purposes.
Shopify, Shopify Basic will be enough in most cases, especially for those who are just beginning their online business growth. These plans have some differences in the reporting system, the number of team members’ accounts, and some additional features.
Advanced Shopify provides additional features for scaling business, such as different locations, advanced reporting, custom-calculated shipping rates, international domains, and exchange rates management. It’s suitable for experienced companies that want to scale.
View the complete feature list on the Shopify website.
You can add useful features with Shopify apps and create an attractive design for your website by applying one of the Shopify themes or creating the custom one.
Shopify Apps
The Shopify App Store is a place where you’ll find various apps for everything, whether you’d like to include customer reviews, offer your products on social media, manage inventory and shipping, analyze results, or boost marketing effects, and more.
Many of them are free. You can add the desired feature by installing the app on your website.
Shopify Themes
The Theme Store has an extensive selection of themes and templates, among which you can choose the desired web design. There are various styles and layouts, offering each user a unique experience for a particular business niche. You can modify the theme with the theme editor in your admin panel.
How Much Does Shopify Cost?
The total budget that you need to launch your Shopify online store depends on your particular brand needs and basic costs:
Hosting: Shopify offers cloud hosting and no set-up costs for all plans.
Subscription: Shopify provides three basic payment options for businesses: $29, $79, $299.
Domain: You’ll need to buy an eCommerce domain that will cost you about $11 per year.
Apps: Apps differ in their cost. Of course, you can find helpful free apps. Most of the paid apps cost $20-$29. Others cost about $67 , a one-time payment.
Theme: Prices for Shopify themes vary from free to $180 one-time.
Setup: Most advanced eCommerce platforms require knowledge in website engineering and coding expertise to get started. Shopify offers a choice: you can launch and set up your website by yourself using their helpful guides or request the Shopify expert for help. This work cost also differs and will depend on the agency’s or developers’ hourly rate and hourly project estimation. Rates vary from $30 to 150 per hour.
So, lets’ calculate:
Minimally, the Shopify store launch will cost you about $500 if you buy about ten apps, a basic plan, a $180 theme, and set up your store by yourself.
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How Can You Grow Your Brand with Shopify?
Shopify is a business-focused solution that can help you solve various business tasks:
Sell Online Everywhere
Shopify offers the opportunity to start selling quickly and set up an online store within several days. With its help, you can sell on the website and social media. It allows you to transact in person with the Shopify Point of Sale (POS). You can manage all these from a user-friendly interface.
Get Paid Instantly
With Shopify payments, you can keep track of all your transactions and orders from anywhere. This feature is preinstalled with your account and will start working the moment you activate it. You will start accepting payment instantly while skipping third-party activations.
With an active Shopify account, Shopify payments will show you a complete overview of your entire finances and the needed things to prepare your documents.
Start with Dropshipping on Shopify
Jumpstart your business by dropshipping on Shopify. It works straightforward and conveniently. You’ll not pay for additional shipping logistics, and Shopify dropshipping will ensure that your customers receive their products unscathed. Your dropshipping supplier will automatically receive your orders, prepare them and finally ship the orders to your customers.
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Unify Your Sales with Shopify POS
Shopify POS allows you to handle your entire inventory management from the Shopify cloud. It will help you save time and make smarter decisions with a comprehensive and detailed report. Besides, it will also save you the hassle of third-party restrictions and accept payments.
Drive Marketing & SEO for Shopify
SEO can get your brand to the top of the pages of search engine results, and as a result, bring significant and relevant traffic. Utilizing SEO for Shopify is an organic way of growing your company’s exposure, which would then play a huge part in how shoppers can easily find your store. Shopify offers various SEO-friendly features, and the higher your ranking, the more traffic your online store will get.
Enhance Shopify Shipping
A fulfillment service is a network of third parties that prepares your orders for you and ships them. If you don’t want to have to deal with delivery or have evolved beyond your current warehousing capabilities to a point where manually moving goods is impossible, opting for fulfillment Shopify is a fantastic choice.
You can take control of your Shopify Shipping from your location to any part of the globe without an extra fee.
Create a Blog for Your Brand
Content marketing and a blog will help your brand highlight your goods and services, educate your customers and create a connection with them. Consistent blogging will show your customers that you have invested in your brand and are eager to help your customers make the right decisions. It is a powerful tool to connect new and loyal customers who want to discover what your brand offers. The default blog on Shopify is free, easy to use, and covers the blogging basics. Another option is you can link your blog from an external platform from within your Shopify online store.
Work on Customer Loyalty with Gift Cards
To attract new customers and retain old ones, you can employ a loyalty program. This method resonates well with shoppers, and you can easily use gift cards to conduct social media contests and giveaways.
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Motivate return visits by adding Shopify gift cards into your loyalty program, either as discounts, birthday rewards, or in your brand awareness campaign.
Grow Trust with Customer Reviews
You can automate your review collection for service and product reviews, add a TrustBox widget, and collect reviews from your previous customers via Shopify’s incorporation with Trustpilot. Trustpilot helps you automatically collect your customers’ reviews. Your customers can share their experience with the world and your sales can be greatly influenced by their reviews because buyers will definitely look for feedback before making any purchase. This way you build trust with your customers and grow your brand equity.
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To sum all this up, get inspired by Shopify store examples where you’ll see the great stores created for different product categories and niche markets. Use Shopify sitemap to learn all you need to know about this solution and see how you can grow your business by industry.