What is Shopify & How Does it Work?

Introduction

Shopify is a platform that offers a complete solution for the e-commerce industry. Technically speaking, Shopify is a software as a service SaaS sales platform. It offers subscription plans with starting fees of 29$ per month. The subscription plans support the online store with unique functions and tools that are helpful to scale their businesses. The experts and Shopify developers help merchants to design, manage and grow their websites. 

Shopify also offers a lite plan which starts at 9$ per month. The lite plan doesn’t support an online store but mobile POS sales also include a Buy button to sell your products on other websites, blogs, and emails. 

All plans support the business management tools. Some important management tools like product sourcing, order management, customer accounts, marketing, shipment and inventory tracking, etc. It let you scale your business with Shopify’s hundreds of rich apps. Learn more about Shopify below:

What does Shopify do?

Shopify works by organizing your product data, customer data, operations tasks, and admin tasks in one system to connect all of your sales channels to work seamlessly. Once these are organized systematically, it becomes easy for the store owner to track and manage all the activities that help in expanding the store. 

Here’s a step-by-step look at how Shopify works from initial set-up to managing sales.

Sign Up for Your Free Shopify 14-day Trial

You can test drive Shopify risk-free for 14 days. Shopify doesn’t even ask for your credit card information.

Connect Your Sales Channels

The account setup wizard connects your initial sales channels, which you can switch and extend at any time.

It let you connect your account to social media If you want to sell via your social media accounts.

Enter Your Product Data or Find Items to Sell

Start adding product images, prices, and descriptions for the products you have. Or you can source or tap into Shopify’s handshake wholesale network and dropship merchants to find products to sell. 

Set Up Your Payments

To start accepting payments, you can activate Shopify payments, you can connect your Shopify store to payment processors to start accepting payments right away. Shopify supports more than 100 external payment gateways. 

Set Up Shipping and Taxes

Set up your shipping methods and fees and your applicable sales tax information under the setting tab.

Now you’re all set to sell on various social media and marketplace channels, using the Buy Button tool and in-person with the POS card reader.

Set Up Your Shopify Online Store

The next step is to set up your Shopify online store if you want to sell through your own branded website. Shopify makes it easy with its various plugins and themes that are required to set up, up, and start adding content to your branded website. 

Process, Ship, and Track Orders

You can manage all the workflow with your Shopify dashboard. It is easy to set up efficient workflows for managing orders you ship yourself or dropship items, virtual services like e-books, podcasts, and music downloads via Shopify’s inbuilt tools.  

Once the setup and workflow are complete, now you can explore Shopify’s sales tools like email marketing, abandoned cart, remarketing, and blogging. 

What Is Shopify Plus?

Shopify Plus is an advanced version of Shopify. It is specially designed for large businesses. Shopify Plus is a powerful and flexible eCommerce platform on the market. It is suitable for brands and retailers who want turbo-charge expansion in their businesses. Businesses using Shopify plus can get into the market quicker, function well, and drive more traffic. 

Some features of Shopify Plus are:

• More customization and control.
• Greater automation power.
• Improved multichannel functions.
• Faster speeds.
• The ability to handle huge amounts of traffic and sales.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Shopify

Here are some advantages and disadvantages of Shopify which we will explain one by one.

Advantages Of Shopify

Shopify is an excellent platform to support e-commerce businesses and it is helping business entrepreneurs to build and run their online stores since 2006. It is a famous e-commerce platform worldwide with more than 500,000 merchants using it to run their stores. It’s no wonder why the platform has become a favorite of many online businesses.

It’s Easy to Get Started: Shopify is very easy to get started with. All you need to do is create an account, choose a theme, and add your products. Coding skills are not required to use this platform making it ideal for a person who is not technology-friendly.

You Have Access to a Wide Range of Features: Offers you rich features which let you easily add products, manage inventories, set up shipping, make discounts, etc. It has everything you that need to expand your store.

 It’s User-Friendly: Shopify is a user-friendly platform: The interface is easy to navigate, something that makes the platform extremely flexible. It has helped a large number of businesses to succeed in their goals making it a reliable platform.

 Security: Shopify is the most secure platform for your website.Shopify facilitates the security and compliance side of the business and also covers issues like hackers, compliance, and caching — which often comes up with hosting an online store. Shopify has a strong team of Cybersecurity experts to hack-proof their systems.

Disadvantages of Shopify

Here are some disadvantages of shopify:

Price: Shopify may be affordable if your business is small, it charges 29$ per month for basic website functions. With the growing business you need to pay more than 55$ per month to enjoy rich features which makes this platform costly.

Limited customization: Shopify offers number of powerful themes and it  is coded with its own language called liquid, so it when it comes to customize them the scope is limited. 

Migration difficulty: It is not easy to migrate Shopify to other platforms, it loses some of the stored information in the process of migration. The only option left to migrate your site is CVS export. This is a persisting issue with many eCommerce platforms including Shopify.

Very basic marketing tools: There is another big charge against Shopify that it offers very basic marketing tools. 

What can You Sell on Shopify?

You can sell pretty much everything on your Shopify website, like food products, fitness gears, digital products, etc. Apart from tangible products, you can offers services on your shopify website. Services like consultation, memberships, subscriptions, e-books, coaching. Shopify is a versatile platform so there isn’t any particular product we could name to sell on the shopify. 

But you have to follow the Shopify Acceptable Use Policy to use the platform to create your website. And this policy restricts eCommerce entrepreneurs from selling restricted items. Restricted items like weapons and their components, as well as products or services that encourage self-harm, such as drugs, are among these banned items.

How To Grow Your Shopify Store

The eCommerce space has been growing steadily, with the evolving technology. With Shopify being in the top 3 eCommerce platforms, opening up a store on the platform is relatively easy, but expanding it can be quite challenging.

However many online stores succeed from the same tactics and it usually comes down to who makes better strategies and executes them efficiently. 

 If you’re wondering how to face the throat-cut competition and beat them regularly, here are some easy tips to help you grow your Shopify store online:

• Keep Your SEO Updated
• Create Strong Brand Partnerships
• Re-engage Previous Customers
• Add Social Proof To Your Store
• Get Into Product Feeds
• Set Up A Referral Program
• Partner With Social Media Influencers
• Attract Affiliates And Sell On Other Platforms

Shopify is a robust platform to build an e-commerce website, learning some techniques you can successed in your business goals. The above tips will be helpful if you are planning to build your online store