If you’re investigating your options when it comes to ecom platforms and trying to figure out which would be the best fit for your business, you’ve definitely come across Shopify.
It’s the most popular solution available today with well over 2 million stores being run on it. But why use Shopify? What is it that makes it the default pick for most ecommerce businesses?
We thought it’d be interesting to put this question to a group of people that are extremely familiar with the inner workings of Shopify, and know exactly where its strengths lie. We got in touch with 20+ Shopify experts that use the platform every day and asked them each to provide one answer to the question of “Why use Shopify?”
We’ve compiled all of these reasons to use Shopify in this article to give you some insights into the benefits you can expect to take advantage of should you choose to use the Shopify platform for your store.
Why Choose Shopify? Here are the Biggest Reasons
Before we discuss the reasons to choose Shopify in more depth, we’re going to cut to the chase and show you the factors that have the greatest pull when it comes to people using the Shopify platform.
During our research in putting together this article, we asked 30 Shopify pros, each of whom have worked with the platform extensively, what they consider to be the 3 biggest benefits of using Shopify? The most commonly cited responses are shown in the chart below.
A lot of the most common responses to this poll really serve to highlight what pulls many businesses towards Shopify; it makes e-commerce accessible, in several different ways.
Firstly, you don’t need lots of technical knowledge. Sure, it helps, but it’s not necessary. Its user interface is easy to understand, even if this IS your first rodeo. It’s a hosted solution, which takes a lot of the technical setup + security considerations off your plate from the get-go, and the extensive app ecosystem allows you to add pretty much any functionality you might need to your store within a few clicks, often for very low cost and sometimes even for free.
And that leads us to one of the other major benefits that our expert panel highlighted. It’s very accessible in financial terms too. You can launch a new store for quite literally less than a new cell phone contract (Basic plan + free template), and unlike the cell phone, you’re not locked in. If it doesn’t work out or you want to jump ship, you can. They don’t feel the need to trap you, which I personally always find pretty reassuring.
Scalability was another popular response, with Shopify having the infrastructure in place that allows the platform to get you online when you’re still working out of your garage, and grow with you no matter what heights you reach. The experts also felt that the flexibility Shopify offers (you can build virtually anything you’re likely to want or need) and the outstanding customer support are other major reasons to choose Shopify for your store.
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Why Use Shopify? 26 Reasons to Choose the Platform
Shopify has become the first port of call for most businesses that sell products or services online. It’s incredibly popular. But why? Why use Shopify? Especially when there are dozens of other solutions out there.
That’s the question we set out to answer. We wanted to really get to the bottom of exactly why Shopify has become the “big dog” in the ecom space. Below you will find an overview of all of the Reasons to Use Shopify that we curated during our survey.
- Brilliant for Direct-to-Consumer Sales
- Built for Businesses of All Sizes: From Startup to Enterprise
- World-Class App Ecosystem
- It’s Risk-Free
- Amazing Partner Community
- POS System
- Streamlined Sales Process for Both Customer + Vendor
- Incredible 1st Party Solutions
- Internationalizing Your Brand is Very Easy with Shopify
- It’s the Best Multi-Channel Platform
- Perfectly Optimized for Mobile
- Its Script Editor for Creating Customisations (Shopify Plus)
- Very Easy and Flexible to Work With
- Headless Commerce capabilities
- Can Handle Lots of Traffic
- Great to Use from an SEO perspective
- Start at 2nd Base, Instead of from Scratch
- Theme Store Offers Well designed, High Quality, Scalable Themes
- Extensive Free App Library and One-Click Install Solutions
- Tag Functionality
- Lots of Payment Gateway Options
- Analytics are Detailed and Precise
- It’s Conversion Ready + Provides Superior Conversion Rates
- Shopify Reduces Abandoned Carts
- Integration with Amazon Marketplace
- Run Your Business Wherever You Are
Do you feel strongly about a benefit of the Shopify platform that is not on our list? We’d love to hear about it in the comments section of the article!
What the Experts Said: Reasons to Use Shopify Explained
I’ve rambled on for long enough. I’m the messenger, nothing more, so I’m now going to leave it to the real experts to talk through the reasons why they think Shopify is a great e-commerce platform. And remember, these are folks that know it inside out and have set up all manner of businesses on Shopify.
A particular talking point caught your attention? Use the filters below to skip to it.
- All
- DTC Sales
- Scalability
- Script Editor
- App Ecosystem
- Risk-Free
- Partner Community
- POS System
- Sales Process
- 1st Party Solutions
- Internationalizing Brand
- Multi-Channel
- Mobile Optimized
- Easy to Use
- Headless Commerce
- Handles Lots of Traffic
- SEO Ready
- Start at 2nd Base
- High-Quality Themes
- Free App Library
- Tag Functionality
- Payment Options
- Shopify Analytics
- Conversion Ready
- Abandoned Carts
- Amazon Integration
- Location Independent
Built for Businesses of All Sizes: From Startup to Enterprise
– “Whether you are targeting your 1st sale or your 100,000th, Shopify was built with you in mind. If you have never built an ecommerce store before, Shopify has made it easy for anyone to get started. Making a store is COMPLICATED and Shopify has simply demystified it. Tackling shipping, taxes, credit card processing, inventory… it’s TOUGH.
Shopify has easy integration options to make sure your site doesn’t sit there incomplete. After you’ve finally gone live, the Shopify platform is built for your continued growth. Whether that’s through apps you want to connect, increasing your inventory management, reducing your costs with a different credit card processor, Shopify has made everything easy and upgradeable.”
It’s Risk-Free. For Real!
– “You don’t need to invest a huge amount of money to start to sell online. You can scale at your own pace, adding experts, apps or custom code along the way.
If it doesn’t work, which could happen since that’s also part of starting a business, you won’t have lost a fortune.
But when it works, you’ll get amazing ROI 😉
- Shopify constantly updates its platform.
- They also conduct fraud analysis on each order made through Shopify Payments.
- It never goes down because you have too many users on your website. (Ask any Dragon’s Dens participant. Shopify never fails their merchants)
- It’s simple and fast to use.
All this for 29 bucks.
As a developer, I could see Shopify as an enemy. But it’s not. It’s an ally. I can focus on helping business sell online instead of developing a store from scratch every time (as I would need to do with WordPress).
WordPress/Woocommerce’s time is up. Merchants want to try something by themselves and after that come to Shopify experts for advice about taking their Shopify store to the next level.
Shopify makes e-commerce simple for merchants. And that’s what they need in this uncertain time.”
It’s Conversion Ready + Provides Superior Conversion Rates
– “A beautiful online store is useless if it doesn’t convert visitors into paying customers. Shopify tackled this issue within its core. Every step of user experience from browsing through products to buying is optimized for conversion no matter whether you use free or paid themes, whether you use extra upsell apps or not.
Shopify offers built-in multichannel selling, ready-made abandoned cart recovery emails and upsell features in its original offering, which pushes clients to complete the purchase and buy more. And the best part, store owners don’t have to spend hours configuring those features or go through the guesswork. Everything is ready and pre-packaged.
If you want to take your conversion optimization game to the next level, Shopify offers a lot of upsell and cross-sell apps that really work. Something no other platform is offering.
Detailed (yet simple) conversion rate analytics allows you to make better decisions and adjust your product offers and user experience to boost sales.
From my experience, brands that moved from Woocommerce to Shopify generate on average 30% more sales!”
Great to Use from an SEO Perspective
– “Shopify is great in that it allows ecommerce businesses of all sizes to create beautiful and functional online stores, but that would be pointless if customers weren’t able to find them.
Many potential customers start their search for products they’re looking to buy in Google, and stores will only appear in the results if they work well from an SEO point of view. Shopify allows stores to be optimised for SEO to maximise the chance of appearing in front of their customers in the search results, which is absolutely essential.
While SEO is a long-term strategy, it’s important to get the basics right straight away. Shopify has been created with SEO in mind, so it allows merchants to optimise key areas like title tags, URLs, alt text and meta descriptions. There are also some automatic SEO features taken care of for merchants like automatically generated sitemaps and robots.txt files, and canonical tags added to pages to stop duplicate content issues.
The way that Shopify stores are structured make them easy to crawl and be understood by search engines and there are many Shopify themes designed to be responsive, fast and mobile-friendly, which helps from an SEO point of view as well.
All of these factors add up to improve the SEO performance of the sites, and helps Shopify store owners gain more traction and visitors by appearing in front of more of their customers, more of the time.”
Can Handle Lots of Traffic
– “We migrated from Magento and we absolutely love Shopify Plus. The main benefit is that we no longer feel like our tech is built on a house of cards. After appearing on Shark Tank, we knew that being featured on a highly viewed television show would attract quite a bit of website traffic.
In the year leading up to the episode’s air date, we purchased thirty servers, simulated load tests, and invested over $500,000 to make sure the Magento site could handle the massive influx of traffic that would be coming our way. But when the episode aired, the site went down. In the world of eCommerce, uptime means everything! A lot of money was lost that day and that never would have happened if we would have been set up on Shopify to begin with.
It was complicated to migrate over from Magento, but once we were fully on the Shopify ecosystem we were able to do the same functionality in 1/4 of the time it took on Magento. Installing apps without a developer and test servers has been a dream come true.”
Incredible 1st Party Solutions
– “Shopify is always looking at its app ecosystem and the SaaS solutions offered to its users. When they find a powerful solution, they integrate it as a first-party feature. As customers looked for Remember Me payment solutions, Shopify released Shop Pay. This linked every other Shopify store customer to the same account that could be used across Shopify stores, even if you haven’t shopped with that specific brand before. A customer who just bought a pair of Chubbies Shorts, who then goes to All Birds to buy some shoes, will see they can easily pull up their previous payment method.
Shopify continues to look for opportunities to create first-party solutions for its platform based on trends and customer data. Just this past year, Shopify released their native solution for Buy Now Pay Later. Usually, a BNPL solution is a payment gateway that takes the user off-site and then processes their payment. With the release of their native BNPL solution, users never leave checkout.
Shopify continues to find solutions for the largest trends in ecommerce.”
Shopify Reduces Abandoned Carts
– “The COVID-19 pandemic forced consumers to spend more time shopping online than ever before, which consequently led to more abandoned carts than ever before. In fact, research published in March 2020 found that the average cart abandonment rate across industries was at a massive 88%. If your online shop were a brick and mortar store, this would be like watching nearly all of your customers fill up their carts before dropping them off at your register and leaving empty-handed. Pretty frustrating, right?
Although it can be disheartening to see so many almost-sales sitting in the backend of your website, Shopify’s abandoned cart tracking technology makes it so no potential conversion is a lost cause. If Shopify is able to connect an abandoned cart to an email in your subscriber database, it will send them a link to revisit the products or services they left behind the last time they were on your website. Sometimes a reminder is all your customers need to finish their purchase, and Shopify takes care of the nudging for you so you can focus on driving new customers into your sales funnel.”
Run Your Business Wherever You Are
– “Entrepreneurs usually multitask and like to remain in control of their businesses in order to run them effectively. Responding fast is essential for businesses to compete in fierce competition for customers. Shopify offers a variety of inherent Apps that make it possible.
On the go, Shopify can be used in several ways to run a business.
1. In Shopify, you can enable push notifications to receive an alert every time an order is placed with your store.
The Shopify app badge icon shows the number of open orders for one store only.
With an Android phone, you can still receive the push notifications with SMS, but the app badge icon is not available as yet.
With an Android phone, you can still receive the push notifications with SMS, but the app badge icon is not available as yet.
2. The Shopify Mobile App is the complete store on mobile. Store owners can manage their online stores with the Shopify Mobile App, which allows them to:
- Add and manage products and collections,
- Fulfill orders and create shipping labels,
- Create offline orders,
- Refund customers,
- Manage inventory levels,
- Communicate with customers,
- Compare and manage sales channels,
- Change settings,
- Manage staff,
- Share order information with your staff,
- Track revenue and other analytics throughout the day.
- And a lot more.
Adding shortcuts to Siri for sales, visitors and orders is another cool feature of the App Settings on mobile.
3. Shopify Mobile App also lets you access different store dashboards if you have multiple stores.
The app can be downloaded by logging into your Shopify account via a browser and downloading the application.”
Start at 2nd Base, Instead of from Scratch
– “The tough road of eCommerce is figuring stuff out, right? And any eCommerce team member’s time is best spent on growth, not keeping the ship afloat.
Shopify is an excellent starter kit and onboard ramp to multi-million dollar sales simply because the ecosystem is already built out. You don’t need to be the first one to do anything on Shopify.
The website themes and functionality are industry-leading so Shopify stores rarely have to worry about the basics: in design, marketing or tech.
There are thousands of third-party integrations available today and many are just plug-and-play, taking less than a business day to go-live.
And wow, the network effort. That’s what gets lost when we all go deep in the rabbit-hole of evaluating eCommerce tech and checking off the boxes.
Shopify has an enormous, engaged community of partners and active users which allows its active participants to learn faster.
With any burning question you have, there’s usually a dozen people who have worked through the same project before. Even the growth playbooks have been around for years – tried, tested and optimized.
With most business decisions on Shopify, you’re not flying alone. Shopify stores can have informed opinions and inputs to draw from which makes a world of difference since eCommerce success is always based on the ability to optimize ahead of the competition.
That’s why Shopify is such a popular shortcut for eCommerce businesses, like starting at second base, instead of doing it all from scratch.”
Perfectly Optimized for Mobile
– “With mobile shoppers continuously on the rise and with most stores having an unbalanced split of 70/30 Mobile to Desktop, it’s imperative that your shop is mobile optimised. Shopify was designed with mobile responsiveness in mind. It is nearly impossible to build a Shopify store that is not responsive on mobile.
If you don’t have a developer to help build your Shopify store, carefully selecting a theme file to work from will ensure that your site is responsive from the beginning, allowing you to launch easily without a hitch and worrying if your mobile customers will be able to make a purchase without issues. If a theme is not mobile responsive, Shopify will not approve it to be featured in the official Shopify theme store. This is why we recommend starting from an approved Shopify theme as a base template. Additionally, you can easily manage your entire Shopify store from their iOS or Android application.
If you do have the capacity to work with a Shopify Expert that specialises in UX design and development, they will know and understand the importance of enhancing your site to be designed and built mobile-first. There is a difference between a site that is responsive and one that has been designed with a mobile-first approach in mind. The issue with just relying on mobile responsiveness is that it’s not been fully designed for mobile; there are lots of variables that need to be taken into consideration when designing for mobile. The goal is to ensure it’s a lean design that offers a laser focussed user experience, and you can later enhance this further when you start to work into desktop. By working this way round you’re serving the majority of the customers who shop via their mobile device.
One of the first things to think about is content. Lots of text isn’t going to work with a mobile-first design. You need your call to actions clearly visible and to have short, snappy text that’s going to speak directly to the user and cover as much as possible without the need for scrolling.
Shopify gives you the option when designing and building sites to enhance your site for mobile. There are no limitations when it comes to what you can do with your design and development on the Shopify platform, so always remember – mobile first!”
POS System
– “Shopify’s Point of Sale (POS) System allows Shopify store owners to seamlessly move from online to in-person sales without having to worry about syncing inventories or even needing to scan bar codes. This feature is extremely valuable for users with retail or pop-up locations in addition to their online store presence.
The ability to merge both ecommerce and in-person sales with the POS system gives the store owner the ability to manage their inventory across sales channels while gathering customer data all in one place. The transaction fees are competitive at 2.7% for Basic plan users, 2.5% for Shopify plan users, and 2.4% for Advanced plan users.
There are several different hardware options available: the simple Tap & Chip card reader ($49 USD) allows a Shopify user to connect wirelessly via Bluetooth to a mobile device, making it a great option for sellers at places like pop-up markets or mobile boutiques. The Retail Stand ($149 USD) allows the user to use an iPad as their display to accept payments, while the Retail Kit ($229 USD) gives you both the Tap & Chip card reader as well as the Retail Stand. (iPad is not included in any of these).”
Shopify is Easy and Flexible to Work With
– “Having worked in ecommerce for eight years, I’ve tried quite a few of the ecommerce CRM platforms. Six years ago I decided to only work with Shopify. Why? It’s just so damned easy, flexible and effective for the end-user.
Six years ago, admittedly, Shopify was pretty basic, but nonetheless powerful, and simple to use. It was sometimes difficult to persuade my clients to move to Shopify because of its simplicity; they felt that it wasn’t a serious product. As Shopify has invested in its platform and grown exponentially as a business, it is now taken seriously as a powerful ecommerce tool by businesses of all sizes.
And it is the flexibility, combined with power and intuitive ecommerce flows, that helps vendors of any size to use Shopify. Solopreneurs and side hustlers can set up a basic ecommerce store with little knowledge and no experience in coding, at a low monthly cost. Larger businesses can invest in the Shopify platform safe in the knowledge that the platform is flexible for growth and is straightforward for their staff to use.
What Makes Shopify Easy to Use?
- Set up the basics of a site in minutes
- Easy to add and edit sections to build your brand story content
- Easy to create a basic, yet effective, branded site
- Intuitive ecommerce features
- Easy to set up shipping
- Simple, effective checkout
- Secure servers and payments
- Deep app ecosystem
- Basic SEO built-in
- Amazing step by step help documentation
- Quick and knowledgeable support
- Simple to understand analytics
- Built-in Marketing channels
- Easy to set up and sell on social media.
Branded Site Content
Not having to spend time, energy and money on building and developing a site means those resources can be directed to what really helps sell your product or service, and that is beautiful and engaging branded site content with a solid brand strategy and ecommerce flow.
I advise investing in a premium theme such as one made by Archetype, which have useful and powerful features to help you sell, and make designing your own site even easier. Saying that, I have built many successful ecommerce experiences using the simple sections on the basic Debut theme with no customization, and this is due to the client investing in authentic branded site content. One such store is now on Shopify Plus and still on the same Debut theme I set up several years ago!
Summary
At the end of the day, Shopify is a fantastically powerful and easy to use tool, but it is how you use the tool that matters. Before you start a store, invest in your brand strategy, brand design and think about the ecommerce flow.
Your theme is your palette, try to use the sections available to build your site with the branded content you have developed. Any other necessary functionality can be added using the excellent apps in the App Store.”
Analytics are Detailed and Precise
– “TCM is a tech-first e-commerce aggregator that relies heavily on big data, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technology for e-commerce store optimization and growth.
Shopify analytics are a huge advantage for us because the analytics provided through the platform are so detailed and precise. We can take advantage of the analytics in a variety of ways that benefit each store, as well as our company as a whole.
- Shopify analytics, reports and 3rd-party apps bring together the entire view of the store metrics in one place, from logistics to customer journey and the conversions funnel. These numbers are crucial to achieving our monthly and annual goals for individual e-commerce stores. This data helps us to make intelligent decisions.
- Since TCM is an e-commerce aggregator that manages many stores on the Shopify platform, we benefit from the Shopify API as an enabler for gathering all the metrics from all the stores into our business intelligence (BI) tools. It accelerates the way we control and grow our business.”
Integration with Amazon Marketplace
– “One valuable reason brands, especially new small businesses, should use Shopify is their ability to integrate with Amazon. This integration provides an opportunity to connect with millions of potential customers instantly, who are searching within the Amazon marketplace for products. Shopify provides a feature that allows companies to create Amazon listings, link already existing Amazon listings, as well as syncing inventory and fulfilling orders.
This is great for small businesses that don’t have a huge marketing budget and want to focus on growing sales quickly, and are not so concerned about building a brand (initially). Our clients have experienced as much as 20% to 30% increase in their sales when harnessing the native integration that Shopify offers with Amazon.”
World-Class App Ecosystem
– “One of the biggest benefits of Shopify is its app store. From email marketing and reviews to shipping and inventory management, merchants have unlimited access to the broadest range of third-party technology providers at their fingertips. And because each app integrates seamlessly with Shopify, merchants can focus on growing their business from every angle without worrying about downtime.
Also, Shopify’s ecosystem continues to attract the very best talent to create new and valuable technology integrations. This commitment to innovation ensures businesses on Shopify always remain one step ahead of the curve.”
Streamlined Sales Process for Both Customer + Vendor
– “When it comes to selling tangible products, Shopify is definitely what I recommend to my clients. The platform is built for it and provides a very streamlined process for sales from receiving an order confirmation to printing shipping labels and tracking inventory for each item.
There are a variety of carrier options to choose from for shipping so you can set the prices, process(and profit margins) as works best for your business. Then you can easily tick off when it’s been shipped and the customer gets an email notification. Everything is so smooth for the buyer from clicking “add to cart” through checkout and then for you as the shop owner from receiving the order to dropping off packages. Win-win on both ends.”
Theme Store Offers Well designed, High Quality, Scalable Themes
– “If you are looking for a way to launch your online store without knowing how to code, then the Shopify theme store is for you. The Shopify theme store offers a large variety of modern templates that are incredibly easy to customize to fit the needs of your store. Not to mention, they are a cost-effective way to get your store up and running without hiring a developer for far more money.
A Shopify theme is what determines the look, feel, and functionality of your store. Let’s face it, how your Shopify store looks directly affects your credibility. The way customers perceive you in the first few seconds can make or break a sale. Professional looking Shopify themes are proven to keep your visitors intrigued and can give you a competitive advantage over your competition. They have many different styles and layout options to design and structure your home page, category pages, product pages, and all other pages of your site.
In order for a theme to make it into the official Shopify theme store, each theme goes through a rigorous list of tests and requirements for usability, SEO, site speed, Ecommerce best practices, cross-browser compatibility, responsiveness, code compliancy, unique layouts, attention to detail, functionality, etc… Shopify’s own in-house theme team reviews every line of code created for themes offered in the official store. Only themes in the official Shopify theme store have undergone this extensive quality review. So you know you’re getting a quality concrete foundation for your store with a theme from the official Shopify theme store.
There are free themes and premium themes in the theme store. Although in my experience, you get what you pay for. Think of your theme as an investment. The free themes are good, but not great. They offer the bare minimum features to get your store up and running (side note: free themes are preferred as a base for developers to create a fully custom store design, because there’s not much excessive JS or HTML to get in the way of creative coding). Any theme between $100-$170 are mid-level and have more customizable sections and features than the free ones. The $180 themes are the highest quality and have the most customizable/rearrangeable sections, best developer support, constant bug fixes/updates that are free to you, and all the bells and whistles. They are definitely worth the higher price point and in most cases, never need any code manipulations to meet your store’s needs. Some of my favorite go-to $180 themes are Impulse, Prestige, Motion, and Empire.
Check out the industry survey we did on the best Shopify themes
Shopify also saves the users time and frustration of finding a theme by integrating a theme filtering system into their theme store. Users can easily filter their theme choices to find the theme that supports the size of their product catalog, desired features or functionality, marketing tactics, and by industry. Finding the correct theme that is suitable for your store is important because it helps you to manage and display your content and products properly to your buyers.”
Extensive Payment Gateway Options
– “Shopify offers a vast amount of payment providers that you can connect to your store in order to receive payments from clients all over the world. Depending on where your business is located you are presented with different payment gateway options: PayPal, Stripe, Shopify payments, 2checkout etc. If the most popular choices (like Stripe & PayPal) aren’t available in your country, Shopify allows you to choose from other options.
Connecting a payment gateway is relatively easy and straightforward. Shopify is also the only e-commerce platform (as far as we know) that has it’s own payment gateway – Shopify payments. Depending on your business needs you can connect one or even several gateways. For instance, you can accept credit card payments through Stripe but also integrate PayPal, which allows customers to pay using their PayPal accounts. This gives customers flexibility and choice, which in return increases conversion rates.”
Shopify’s Tag Functionality
– “Shopify offers a “tag” function that no other “out of the box” shopping cart platform provides. Tags provide you with a great deal of flexibility and functionality.
You can create filters with tags that allow customers to drill down on the exact product they are looking for. For example, if your website sells televisions, customers can use checkboxes to narrow the selection by size, brand, smart/non-smart, price, etc. giving them the ability to end up with only a few products that meet their needs exactly. This is normally something that can only be done with high-priced add-ons or custom programming with other shopping carts, if it is possible at all!
Tags also allow you to easily assign products to one or more collection (category) without having to manually add them. Just create a new collection and tell Shopify to add any products that contain a certain tag. Putting multiple tags on a product allows it to show up in multiple places.
There are even more ways you can use tags … you can add tags to products so that they show up when customers search using specific words. You can add tags to your customer’s detail page and then use those tags to filter customers – very handy for bulk emails and upsells (e.g. all customers in the MidWest or all customers who used financing to purchase products – they usually have “money left to spend”). You can even place tags on orders and filter orders by those tags (e.g. tag all orders for a certain type of product so that you can quickly see all of the customers that bought that type of product – again, very handy for email blasts and upsells).”
Amazing Partner Community
– “Shopify is a brilliant platform. But it is not all things to all people – perhaps intentionally so. While it grows at a thoughtful and careful pace, it also systematically cultivates partner relationships on several tiers.
On the agency tier, Shopify knows its partners well. Referrals aren’t a perk of being in the Shopify club. Rather, Shopify has an intimate knowledge of which agency specializes in specific areas, and refers incoming merchants to the best fit. This intentional system allows agencies to flourish while simultaneously ensuring merchants launch with their specific needs addressed by the best in the industry.
On the technological tier, Shopify has made its APIs open and widely available for any use a developer can imagine. This means platform extension where shortcomings might previously have been perceived. Metafields are a great example – only accessible via an API, the average user won’t ever touch metafields. However open APIs, plus app developers, equals a range of solutions that allow merchants to extend and enrich their data models in ways that are not considered “out of the box,” via metafields. The win-win is that developers can market their talent for real payoff while merchants receive plug-and-play solutions to some of the most challenging and frequent issues a retailer can face.
Finally, on a general community tier, Shopify has struck a unique balance where knowledge-sharing is built into the nature of its ecosystem. From their Partner Slack channel to developer and merchant forums, it’s apparent that partners aren’t information hoarders. Shopify has been able to manage and grow its community connections to build trust between partners – even those who are direct competitors – to genuinely care for the merchant and their success. Ask any question you can fathom and there are likely dozens of people, from various echelons of the Shopify environment, who will swoop in to aid you and ensure your success.”
It’s the Best Multi-Channel Platform
– “In the past few years, Shopify has shown itself to be the best O2O platform – or in other words, the best platform to connect offline to online. However, developing hardware and its own integrations between the offline experience (POS) and the online store is only one step they’ve taken to become a multi-channel monster. Shopify has integrated more and more social media channels so you can list products from Shopify to their catalogs and it was the first platform to enable product tags on TikTok.
In addition to POS + social media channels, Shopify has integrated and developed more and more marketplaces. It was the first and only platform to integrate Walmart and develop its own marketplace to sell B2B called Handshake. And this is just a small taste of the integrations Shopify has developed to become the best multichannel platform to sell everywhere through one place.”
Brilliant for Direct-to-Consumer Sales
– “If your business is selling a product online direct-to-consumer, Shopify is the best option. It’s the only platform built from the ground up to sell products, and it does it very well. It can also scale all the way up to enterprise-grade performance with Shopify Plus.
The ‘limitations’ that people seem to complain about aren’t ever an actual issue. The lift to migrate from another platform to Shopify down the line sometimes is a complex process, so just save yourself the headache, and pick right the first time.
If you’re selling B2B or high-ticket items, Shopify is probably not the best item. It’s very much specifically well suited for consumer goods.”
Headless Commerce capabilities
– “A key advantage of the Shopify platform is their Headless Commerce capabilities.
Headless Commerce separates your storefront that customers interact with from your back-end systems such as order fulfillment and inventory management, giving you more creative and functional control. With Headless Commerce, you can take your branding and checkout anywhere you like, whether that be on the web, mobile app store, gaming, or any other platform.
Shopify is one of the best options for Headless Commerce because their Storefront API and SDKs enable you to quickly get to market with all your ecommerce needs on whatever customer-facing experience you create. The documentation and community also makes it easier for developers to create their first Headless Commerce experience.
Shopify Plus takes this a step further again with faster API call rates and exclusive APIs, helping large and quickly growing ecommerce brands scale.
If you need to integrate a number of critical business systems with a high level of control over how your website looks and works, all tied together in a highly performant storefront, Headless Commerce with Shopify is your best pick.”
Internationalizing Your Brand is Very Easy with Shopify
– “The first option is to add further subdomains to your existing account (free of charge) and edit the payment and language settings accordingly.
This option is relatively easy to set up and a good option if you want to test the waters in a new country. Also, it’s the best option if you want to deliver almost identical content to the audience you want to target with the new subdomain.
The second option, which we opted for, is creating a new Shopify account and tailoring the content to its full extend for the new ccTLD (top level domain). This is the more systematic yet more expensive and time-consuming option.
Nonetheless, the second option really helped us gain way more traction internationally, and, due to Shopify’s user-friendly backend, we can switch between the country-specific websites effortlessly. Furthermore, it’s very easy to assign access and create teams to country-specific Shopify accounts with this option which helps to maintain accountability.
Lastly, it`s very easy to export and import all products from one store to another. Even code customizations can be copy-pasted into the new store – if required. All in all, it’s easy to duplicate the existing store and make the required changes on the new, country-specific, Shopify account.”
Script Editor to Create Customisations
– “Shopify has some very cool features and useful tools when merchants make the upgrade to Shopify Plus. Shopify Plus is a plan option available to merchants operating on a more enterprise level where sales, orders and daily visitors are significantly higher.
One such feature is access to its Script Editor to create customisations typically done with third-party apps. You can write your own scripts to enhance the checkout and shopping experience.
Such examples are:
Percentage-based discounts (i.e Buy one get one free)
Product bundles and product combination offers
Dynamic pricing for volume-based price breaks (great for wholesale).There are many more examples but it’s a very powerful feature for merchants who want to extend the capability of Shopify to tailor their business’ needs further.”
Extensive Free App Library and One-Click Install Solutions
– “One of the most compelling reasons to choose Shopify over its competitors is its extensive free app library with one-click install solutions. You have a wide range of alternatives not just for adding functionality to your online ecommerce store but also for connecting it with other tools. You pay for the Shopify plan, but in return, you can get tons of great apps that are free and available only on Shopify.
Not only you can select an app from 8 main categories, but there are also 43 subcategories – from store design improvements, marketing tools to customer service and sales. A constantly growing developer market provides better tools every day, and seamless integrations mean that you can install those apps with a single click.
From the user experience perspective, it means that you no longer need a developer to help you out installing those widgets. Remember when you needed to install a sales tool and it required javascript to be added somewhere in the code? The Shopify App Store makes it easy for you and saves you from these headaches.”
While the high street is fast becoming a ghost town, ecommerce is booming. More people are buying online than ever before. It’s also never been easier to start selling online. Whereas the #1 question for small businesses used to be “how the hell can I afford to get into ecommerce?” now it’s “which ecom platform would work best for me?” You just need to choose one and away you go, sometimes in as little as a few hours. But how do you decide which one to choose? Which platform can help you take your business to the next level?
“Shopify can carry you through your business journey for years. Ideally you grow too fast and you scale up to Shopify Plus. With prices starting at $2000 a month vs the $29-$299 a month on regular Shopify, Shopify Plus is everything you need to run an Enterprise level store. Recently we helped an 8 figure seller migrate from Netsuite to Shopify Plus and they saved over $630,000 & increased conversions by 25%. 
