With so many options available for creating your online store, catering to different sized businesses, it can be a daunting decision to pick the one that is best for your own individual needs. Get it wrong and you face the prospect of needing to transfer each of your products across to a new platform, costing time, money and in a worst-case scenario, customers. But get it right, and your site can grow alongside your business, scaling as you gain customers and sales. And that's where we come in.
Over the years, we have tried and tested most of the ecommerce platforms out there, and truthfully we would now only recommend one for our clients looking to start or grow their online business: Shopify. Unless you have an unlimited budget for a completely custom end-to-end shopping experience, and to be completely honest we would say even that isn't necessarily worth it, Shopify is gradually destroying the competition in terms of its functionality, flexibility and scalability. Since the update to Shopify 2.0, the platform is more versatile than ever before, and what was once a slightly clunky system that didn't allow for much customisation has evolved into a platform that is dominating the industry.
It's easy to use
Perhaps the most fundamental benefit of using Shopify is it's ease of use. Whether you are a store owner or a customer, Shopify's clean UI and backend management system makes building your store and managing your products and orders a breeze, while the checkout flow is intuitive and seamless. We have on occasion seen fellow designers and agencies complain about the apparent 'complexities' of building a store with Shopify, and what bugs us the most is that these complaints seem to forget that we, the designer, are neither the end user nor the customer. What matters is building on a platform that the person who will be using it, namely the business owner, finds straightforward, so that they can focus on selling their products and growing their business.
It's secure and reliable
While we use Wordpress for information-based websites, it is not a hands-off platform and requires constant updates and monitoring to ensure that all the third-party-plugins are up-to-date. When your customer's personal data is at stake, it is essential that your site is working perfectly all the time, both for security and conversion. Shopify by comparison is a largely hands-off platform, where you pay a monthly subscription fee and can be safe in the knowledge that behind the scenes their team is ensuring your store is delivered securely and reliably, and is constantly monitoring to make sure that your customers receive the seamless and trouble-free experience they're expecting. It's one less worry for business owners to have to think about and allows you to focus on the day to day running of your business.
Marketing Channels
As any store owner will tell you, having a physical or online store is only half the battle. The other half is marketing and actually getting your products in front of your ideal audience. Shopify links to all the marketing channels that you know and love, including Facebook shopping, Instagram shopping, Google shopping and Pinterest shopping. (Having had the biggest headache trying to set up Facebook shopping via Facebook itself, take it from us that it's also FAR EASIER to link it up correctly via Shopify than it is the other way around).
It has every app you can imagine
Need a quick and easy way to add a returns portal to your store? There's an app for that. Or perhaps you want to include carbon offsetting with each purchase? There's an app for that too. (And while we're on the subject we wrote a very handy article about our top picks for the apps every store must have right here). Our point is, whatever additional functionality you could ever dream of wanting to add to your store, Shopify has an app for it, and they're all found in a handy and easy to navigate app store that store owners can browse to their hearts content. This makes Shopify as a platform vastly more flexible than all of its competitors, and with each apps setup handled either within Shopify itself or a direct connection through to its own site, its a seamless process to give your store all the bells and whistles you can imagine.
Multiple markets
Honestly we could probably write a separate article dedicated purely to Shopify Markets (and in all likelihood we will - stay tuned) but to condense our fan-girling into a paragraph, let us just say this: Whether you are looking to sell purely within your home country, or expand into a global enterprise, Shopify Markets has you covered. If you want to sell different products in different countries, totally possible. If you want to use geolocation so that customers are automatically directed to the store most applicable to them, easy peasy. You can set specific currencies and languages to show in certain countries' stores, such as French and English in a Canadian store or Spanish and English in a US Store, all with a few clicks. Every aspect of a market is adjustable to be relevant to that particular country or set of countries, from shipping to sales tax to product assortment, which begs the question: how big do you want to grow?
It can handle your US sales tax
Despite the US sales tax situation being about as complicated as trying to find your way through a maze while blindfolded, i.e damn near impossible, Shopify presents you with their saviour: Shopify Tax. While this is a paid add-on to the primary website plans, it is WORTH. ITS. WEIGHT. IN. GOLD if you sell within the US or plan to in the future. Shopify tracks the constant minutia of changes that occur weekly within the world of US sales tax legislation, and make relevant suggestions to you depending on your sales activity to US states and territories. Started marketing in California and suddenly had a flurry of sales? Fear not, Shopify Tax plots your sales against the sales tax thresholds for California and alerts you when you're getting close. Similarly for other states with different requirements and thresholds, Shopify tracks all of that for you, so you can rest easy knowing whether or not you have to pay tax in a particular state or not, and what you need to think about.
It's scalable
As your business grows, you need to feel confident that your store can scale with you. While the standard Shopify website plans are more than capable of handling your growth, what happens if you get HUGE and suddenly need additional features and functionality, like advanced development, fully customised checkout processes and complex market adjustment. Enter Shopify Plus, the next step up for enterprise-level ecommerce businesses starting at $2000 / month. With hands-on support to tackle your specific needs, Shopify Plus is the white glove treatment you never knew you needed, ensuring that your business is in safe hands no matter how big it gets.
It integrates with your fulfillment
Designing your products and building a beautiful store that customers love are of course essential, but ensuring that their purchases make it to their doors seamlessly is also a critical part of the process. It is also a big factor in whether customers will buy from you again and whether they'll rave about you to friends and family. Luckily Shopify can integrate with your fulfillment company to make the delivery and order tracking as painless as possible, so you can focus on the product development while watching the orders roll in with your feet up and a glass of wine. Working hard or hardly working? We're not judging!