In today's world, setting up an online store is way easier than before. Earlier in order to set up a store, a lot of factors had to be taken into account like :
These are just the three things I thought about right now. There are tonnes and tonnes of problems that come with setting up a brick-and-mortar store. Since I have no experience in that, I cannot talk about it obviously. Anyway, we are here to talk about online stores. With the introduction of the World Wide Web, setting up an online store has become quite easy. Easy might not be the right word, but comparatively it is much easier than before.
There are multiple ways to set up an online store with many services like WordPress, Woo Commerce and Big Commerce among others. However, in my personal experience and looking at the overall user response, it is safe to say that Shopify is the most preferred platform.
The Shopify platform offers a complete solution for setting up your online store. So if you are thinking about starting an online store I suggest you to try out Shopify. The beauty about Shopify is its very easy interface, and this is what sets it apart from other e-commerce website builders. Usually, you are supposed to take time to adapt to a new platform, but Shopify makes it very easy for customers with zero technical knowledge to set up their store. Store owners need not worry about anything but their business, everything else is handled by Shopify. Before writing about my experience with Shopify, let me just answer some of the frequently asked questions people have about Shopfiy
Yes, I believe Shopify is a great e-commerce platform. It enables you to focus on selling your inventory and takes the responsibility of doing all the other things! It offers a great platform for someone with little technical knowledge to build an online store! Shopify is certainly an amazing place to start your e-commerce business of any size and caters to a wide range of industries. Whether it is the best platform, you can figure it out yourself at the end of this article.
Yes Shopify is certainly up there with the best platforms. It offers a very easy to use website builder to its users. The process is straightforward and painless with the ready made store templates. It is a very user-friendly platform with a great support service
Well, this is a tricky question! The e-commerce platform will not have a large effect on whether your website will have more audience or not, however this is where Shopify excels! Shopify Apps plugs this gap brilliantly. They have apps for almost every purpose. You can use the Shopify apps to improve your marketing and SEO efforts drastically. I have used both Shopify and WooCommerce and I can certainly say that Shopify is the winner in between these two.
Let me just say, that Shopify is not at all expensive. It only looks expensive because they offer you a package deal. If you choose another provider, you will have to spend separately for each of the services Shopify offers. Having used both, I believe Shopify is actually decently priced. Might cost a bit more but that bit is completely justified! You can leave any other questions you have in the comments below and I will be more than happy to clear your doubts!
Shopify has made it incredibly easy for new users. They offer a 14-day free trial ( No Payment Information Required) for you to test the platform. Trust me, 14 days is enough time to get hooked. They know that and they are counting on that. Shopify makes it very easy to register!
With Shopify, you have two ways to accept payments. They are as follows :
Apart from this, Shopify has recently partnered with a payment processor which enables you to buy on Shopify with over 300 cryptocurrencies! Shopify Pricing :
In all the above monthly plans, you get unlimited hosting! That means even if your store goes viral, and gets 1,00,000 visitors in a day, Shopify can and will handle that. The only question is, do you have the inventory ready ?
You can create as many e-mail addresses as you want using your custom domain. For example, if your store is called uses the domain "dogstore.com" you can create unlimited number of e-mail accounts like "[email protected]", "[email protected]" among others. You can forward these e-mails to your favourite e-mail ID. This makes you look professional as well as saves you the hassle of checking multiple inboxes.
Shopify updates are automatic and be assured that you will receive the latest updates automatically and instantly as long as you are subscribed to Shopify.
This one is special, Content Delivery Networks enable your website to load quickly from anywhere in the world. No more worrying about someone accessing your website from Singapore while your servers are in the United States. A CDN is a large network of servers placed across the world so visitors can load your website quickly! We all know no one likes to visit, let alone buy, from a website which loads slowly!
This feature alone is worth paying the extra money for. An average of 69% users abandon their carts due to some or the other factors. Might be they lose their internet connection, may be they get distracted or maybe something else comes up. It is also important to know that most of cart abandonment comes from mobile phones. Suppose you receive a call in the middle of checking out, you sometimes tend to forget about the purchase especially if it is a long call. This functionality provided by Shopify is the reason so many people are migrating to Shopify. What Shopify does is, track the e-mail IDs of the users who have abandoned their shopping carts and remind them of it. This is not something new as you can make the use of Facebook Pixel or Google Analytics to track the same info and then setup remarketing advertisements. But, like you can see, this is a long process and costs more! Shopify has all these features in-built for you. Many times people complain about the higher price of Shopify but this feature alone nets you extra revenue over time, after which you will believe that you are paying peanuts in exchange of this service! Here are some facts about abandoned carts according to a survey by Moosend :
Out of all cart-retention intended emails that our users sent, a staggering 45% of them were opened, almost half of them, that is.
Out of the opened emails, 21% of them received click-throughs.
Half of the recipients who engaged with the content of the email completed their purchase. After reading this, you are free to decide by yourself if Shopify is worth it !
Your store is useless if people are never going to know about your store. No matter what you are selling, no matter how much discount you offer, if users are never going to find out about it, then it is as good as useless! Shopify does a great job in offering you all the basic SEO tools you require to make your store noticed. They do a very good job in providing all the basic functionalities. You have many more options in the app store to further increase your marketing game but for starters, Shopify provides some great features.
I have previously used WordPress with WooCommerce for setting up a store because I did not understand why Shopify cost so much more! It is a hassle managing everything from SEO, Google Schema, Remarketing Campaigns, E-mail campaigns etc etc. You have to do everything completely on your own (of course with the help of plugins). If you want to do it the hard way by pinching pennies then it is up to you. After working on a Shopify store with a friend of mine, I realized how easy it is to develop. All the things I had to do manually for WooCommerce were already integrated into this platform. It saves you a lot of work and you can focus on selling. Earlier my friend had to take help from a SEO consultant as well as a paid marketing advisor who would help him set up all his marketing activities. So if you come to think about it, he was spending way more! Even if you are finding it hard to set up your online store on Shopify, you can hire a developer for a one-time fee to set up your store. This still costs less than paying all the other expenses that you incur with setting up a self-hosted shop! I only have experience with WooCommerce and Shopify so I cannot speak for other online store builders. But there is only one clear winner in that comparison. Oh, and also Shopify offers you a 14-day free trial so you don't have to worry about wasting any money!
If you are looking for an all-in-one platform to sell a decent number of products, Shopify is the right choice for you. If you do not have many products or only have a few digital products to sell, then you can start with something like WooCommerce or BigCommerce. Check out Shopify's Plans over here and choose the best one! If you have any comments, questions or reviews you want to share, please comment below! Start your FREE Shopify Trial now! I will be adding to this post as I learn more new things about this platform because I am sure I have left out some things or haven't explored the platform completely yet. Also, there is another article you must read about how to start a profitable dropshipping business with Shopify!
These are just the three things I thought about right now. There are tonnes and tonnes of problems that come with setting up a brick-and-mortar store. Since I have no experience in that, I cannot talk about it obviously. Anyway, we are here to talk about online stores. With the introduction of the World Wide Web, setting up an online store has become quite easy. Easy might not be the right word, but comparatively it is much easier than before.
There are multiple ways to set up an online store with many services like WordPress, Woo Commerce and Big Commerce among others. However, in my personal experience and looking at the overall user response, it is safe to say that Shopify is the most preferred platform.
Yes, I believe Shopify is a great e-commerce platform. It enables you to focus on selling your inventory and takes the responsibility of doing all the other things! It offers a great platform for someone with little technical knowledge to build an online store! Shopify is certainly an amazing place to start your e-commerce business of any size and caters to a wide range of industries. Whether it is the best platform, you can figure it out yourself at the end of this article.
Yes Shopify is certainly up there with the best platforms. It offers a very easy to use website builder to its users. The process is straightforward and painless with the ready made store templates. It is a very user-friendly platform with a great support service
Well, this is a tricky question! The e-commerce platform will not have a large effect on whether your website will have more audience or not, however this is where Shopify excels! Shopify Apps plugs this gap brilliantly. They have apps for almost every purpose. You can use the Shopify apps to improve your marketing and SEO efforts drastically. I have used both Shopify and WooCommerce and I can certainly say that Shopify is the winner in between these two.
Let me just say, that Shopify is not at all expensive. It only looks expensive because they offer you a package deal. If you choose another provider, you will have to spend separately for each of the services Shopify offers. Having used both, I believe Shopify is actually decently priced. Might cost a bit more but that bit is completely justified! You can leave any other questions you have in the comments below and I will be more than happy to clear your doubts!
Shopify has made it incredibly easy for new users. They offer a 14-day free trial ( No Payment Information Required) for you to test the platform. Trust me, 14 days is enough time to get hooked. They know that and they are counting on that. Shopify makes it very easy to register!
With Shopify, you have two ways to accept payments. They are as follows :
Apart from this, Shopify has recently partnered with a payment processor which enables you to buy on Shopify with over 300 cryptocurrencies! Shopify Pricing :
In all the above monthly plans, you get unlimited hosting! That means even if your store goes viral, and gets 1,00,000 visitors in a day, Shopify can and will handle that. The only question is, do you have the inventory ready ?
You can create as many e-mail addresses as you want using your custom domain. For example, if your store is called uses the domain "dogstore.com" you can create unlimited number of e-mail accounts like "[email protected]", "[email protected]" among others. You can forward these e-mails to your favourite e-mail ID. This makes you look professional as well as saves you the hassle of checking multiple inboxes.
Shopify updates are automatic and be assured that you will receive the latest updates automatically and instantly as long as you are subscribed to Shopify.
This one is special, Content Delivery Networks enable your website to load quickly from anywhere in the world. No more worrying about someone accessing your website from Singapore while your servers are in the United States. A CDN is a large network of servers placed across the world so visitors can load your website quickly! We all know no one likes to visit, let alone buy, from a website which loads slowly!
This feature alone is worth paying the extra money for. An average of 69% users abandon their carts due to some or the other factors. Might be they lose their internet connection, may be they get distracted or maybe something else comes up. It is also important to know that most of cart abandonment comes from mobile phones. Suppose you receive a call in the middle of checking out, you sometimes tend to forget about the purchase especially if it is a long call. This functionality provided by Shopify is the reason so many people are migrating to Shopify. What Shopify does is, track the e-mail IDs of the users who have abandoned their shopping carts and remind them of it. This is not something new as you can make the use of Facebook Pixel or Google Analytics to track the same info and then setup remarketing advertisements. But, like you can see, this is a long process and costs more! Shopify has all these features in-built for you. Many times people complain about the higher price of Shopify but this feature alone nets you extra revenue over time, after which you will believe that you are paying peanuts in exchange of this service! Here are some facts about abandoned carts according to a survey by Moosend :
Out of all cart-retention intended emails that our users sent, a staggering 45% of them were opened, almost half of them, that is.
Out of the opened emails, 21% of them received click-throughs.
Half of the recipients who engaged with the content of the email completed their purchase. After reading this, you are free to decide by yourself if Shopify is worth it !
Your store is useless if people are never going to know about your store. No matter what you are selling, no matter how much discount you offer, if users are never going to find out about it, then it is as good as useless! Shopify does a great job in offering you all the basic SEO tools you require to make your store noticed. They do a very good job in providing all the basic functionalities. You have many more options in the app store to further increase your marketing game but for starters, Shopify provides some great features.
I have previously used WordPress with WooCommerce for setting up a store because I did not understand why Shopify cost so much more! It is a hassle managing everything from SEO, Google Schema, Remarketing Campaigns, E-mail campaigns etc etc. You have to do everything completely on your own (of course with the help of plugins). If you want to do it the hard way by pinching pennies then it is up to you. After working on a Shopify store with a friend of mine, I realized how easy it is to develop. All the things I had to do manually for WooCommerce were already integrated into this platform. It saves you a lot of work and you can focus on selling. Earlier my friend had to take help from a SEO consultant as well as a paid marketing advisor who would help him set up all his marketing activities. So if you come to think about it, he was spending way more! Even if you are finding it hard to set up your online store on Shopify, you can hire a developer for a one-time fee to set up your store. This still costs less than paying all the other expenses that you incur with setting up a self-hosted shop! I only have experience with WooCommerce and Shopify so I cannot speak for other online store builders. But there is only one clear winner in that comparison. Oh, and also Shopify offers you a 14-day free trial so you don't have to worry about wasting any money!
If you are looking for an all-in-one platform to sell a decent number of products, Shopify is the right choice for you. If you do not have many products or only have a few digital products to sell, then you can start with something like WooCommerce or BigCommerce. Check out Shopify's Plans over here and choose the best one! If you have any comments, questions or reviews you want to share, please comment below! Start your FREE Shopify Trial now! I will be adding to this post as I learn more new things about this platform because I am sure I have left out some things or haven't explored the platform completely yet. Also, there is another article you must read about how to start a profitable dropshipping business with Shopify!
