Why would you pick Shopify to grow your ecommerce business?

With a whole host of ecommerce platforms to choose from the most popular is Shopify. It is one of the most scalable, feature-rich and fastest growing ecommerce platforms that exists. Over 2.1 million active ecommerce stores in 175 countries of all shapes and sizes trust the Shopify platform. From young new start ups all the way to enterprise brands such as Gym Shark, Deliveroo, Huel & Red Bull online stores are all powered by the platform.

If you are experiencing non-stop issues, difficulties, spiralling costs and nothing but problems with your current e-commerce platform that effects your customer base and revenues then this post may be the example you need to migrate to Shopify.

Anywhere you wish to grow your store, a Shopify trial is a great pay to see if what others are talking about as you’ll soon find plenty of benefits. Here’s a few of the top features and qualities of Shopify that will likely help yours and other industries business needs.

What is Shopify?

Shopify is a complete ecommerce platform that allows businesses to sell online with outstanding order / customer management and features that keep your customers coming back.

If you choose Shopify you’ll be in great company with leading brands such as Gymshark, Heinz & Kylie Cosmetics all trusting the platform.

What Does Shopify Cost?

Shopify is not free like some of it’s competitors, however, we recommend delving into what is included before you consider other platforms. Shopify provides merchants with a reliable, secure and scalable platform that actively improves sales and performance online. Reporting, analytics and automation is second to none with the platform – things you didn’t realise you needed until you don’t have them!

Shopify’s prices start from $29 per month for the ‘Basic Shopify’ plan, or tiered up to the highest plan at $299 per month for ‘Advanced Shopify’. Shopify accounts are incredibly flexible – you can upgrade, downgrade or cancel your Shopify plan at anytime, providing you a pay per month and not on an annual basis. Shopify does charge a small transaction fee when using their payment gateway – between 2.6% and 2.4% + 30 cents. If you choose to use a third party payment gateway you will be charged between 0.5% and 2.0% depending on your plan.

If your brand exceeds the demands of a small to medium business then Shopify Plus, the enterprise business platform – built for fast growing high turnover brands, may be the answer to delivering a reliable, secure and superior ecommerce experience to your customers.

What is the difference is between Basic Shopify, Shopify, and Advanced Shopify.

Basic Shopify Plan
At $29 per month, the basic Shopify plan allows you sell an unlimited number of products and is the lowest cost solution if you have a large range of products. However, more advanced features like reports or abandoned cart recovery emails and third party shipping calculations aren’t included – Shopify still include telephone support should you need it.

The Shopify Plan
Although a higher price at $79, The ‘Shopify’ plan does include a range of additional features. The rate charged for credit card payments on this plan is lower, you will get access to professional reports to allow you to delve deep into the insight of your online store, making analysis and business planning easier.

Advanced Shopify
This is the most expensive plan of the three at $299 however does of course come with it’s benefits, including the lowest credit card payment rate, plus the ability for shipping to be handled by a third party. In addition, it also features an advanced report builder which allows you to customize your own professional reports. You can even have up to 15 staff acounts – the highest amount out of the three.

Shopify Plus
Shopify Plus is a solution for companies with a need for an ecommerce platform that supports high performance. It’s pricing starts at $2000 per month which is obviously a big step up from the three plans discussed above. But what do you get for your extra money? You’ll be able to enjoy dedicated, priority 24 hour support to help with your store – as opposed to just standard live chat, email & phone support. Your developers will have increased access to the Shopify system for customisation, plus you have the option of additional clone storefronts to deliver unique stores based on location. Shopify Plus offer cutting-edge technology with the most powerful of features.

Features of Shopify

Shopify is equipped with all the features you’ll need to nurture your business from a start-up all the way to a global brand and we, as an expert ecommerce digital agency, we are here to support you every step of the way with designing, building and optimising your Shopify or Shopify Plus ecommerce store.

Always In Control With Shopify Admin

Shopify is hugely favoured for it’s easy-to-use back-end with a dashboard that allows merchants to have all the information they need instantly. From detailed sales reports, easily manage customers, orders and products without typing a line of code – Shopify, in our opinion, is made so anybody can use it. Shopify includes an incredibly powerful content management system (CMS), this allows merchants to easily change images, sections and text on their website so you don’t have to rely on your development team to make simple content changes.

Large App Store With Endless Features

Not disimilar to Apple & Android, Shopify offer an app store with over 8,000 apps from trusted technology partners all with features designed to improve the experience of your store. Some tools included on the app store include subscription payments, upselling, customer service, inventory management and more. Every day more and more apps are being released so you really can stay on top of the latest trends. The flexibility of the app store means Shopify continually becomes more and more powerful with the world’s best developers delivering the very best apps for you to use.

Marketing & Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

A strong marketing & SEO strategy is vital to attract news customers to your website. SEO is effected by both the way the website is built (by Shopify) and also the marketing & SEO skill of the person working on the site. Shopify’s system is built with SEO in mind so you can rest assure the code won’t let you down. However, Shopify offers advanced SEO functionality giving you the ability to update meta tags, titles and alt tags. In addition to this, Shopify automatically generals a sitemap that you can submit to google to ensure it can index every page of your ecommerce store.

Multi-Channel Selling

Shopify is built with you business in mind and allows you to sell your products in multiple places at once whilst still maintaining all inventory, order and customer management in one place – the Shopify admin dashboard. The ecommerce platform allows you to easily sell on Facebook, eBay, Amazon, Instagram and even through a blog with it’s powerful mutli-channel integrations. We believe it’s one the most vital features for an ecommerce platform as it allows you to expand your reach, increase audience sizes and maximise sales.

Flexible & Built To Scale

Whatever stage of your business, Shopify is an incredibly flexible platform meaning it will meet needs of a business that is just starting out all the way up to a global brand fulfilling thousands of orders an hour. Shopify offers over 60 free and paid pre-built website themes that you can install with the click a button, you can add products and content with quickly and easily. For larger brands, Shopify allows experts teams, like us, to design and build themes with custom functions, features and user journeys. The possibilities of Shopify is truly endless meaning your ecommerce store will never hold you back.

Secure & Reliable

Shopify hosts all merchant’s stores on it’s own incredibly powerful servers, you never have to worry about your store crashing with a surge of customers again. With 99.999% average uptime, Shopify has handled over 10,000 transactions per minute at a peak. Shopify can handle 1 million page views per minute & unlimited bandwidth too. In the modern age of cyber-crime we live in, security has to be at the top of any ecommerce merchants priorities. Shopify has trusted security covered with PCI-DSS Level 1 compliance.

Take the big step and speak with The Food First Digital Agency and take the first step to ecommerce success.