Shopify has the advantages of being one of the most versatile, full-featured and constantly evolving ecommerce platforms today, but, like anything, it’s not necessarily the right system for every type of online store.
What Shopify is great for
Shopify, like any type of service, has its pros and cons — but thankfully the platform does work for a slew of businesses, business models and products.
- Shopify is great for stores that sell both physical and digital goods or services that require a minimal amount of configuration. The Shopify platform already has powerful built in variant support, including the ability to link product options, but it does max out at 100 variations per product. In short, if you sell products that come in, for example, a few colors or materials and sizes (or any other qualifier), Shopify can be a great way to go.
- Shopify is also great if you’re only selling a handful of products — or even just one. Using a theme with advanced Shopify homepage sections lets you sell products right from the homepage, making it easy to close sales.
- Stores with large inventories can take advantage of Shopify themes with features such as a multi-tag filtering and a flexible collections organization system to organize products. Many Shopify themes also offer the ability to create advanced megamenu navigation systems, which can be a must for stores selling a wide variety of products.
- Shopify’s built in tools can conform to a wide variety of business models and marketing approaches, allowing you to showcase sale prices or discounts on products, offer coupons to incentivize purchases or offer free shipping (or charge for shipping based on weight or other criteria). The platform also comes with great shipping, fulfillment, payment and inventory control systems, with numerous other add-on options available. Shopify also has intuitive shipping apps that help with complex shipping scenarios & ship with the top carriers across the globe.
Controlling the look and feel
Shopify is also ideal for store owners who have a good idea of what they want their store to look like but aren’t overly picky. There are hundreds of professional designed Shopify themes available for free or purchase, all of which offer store owners a great deal of customization over aspects such as colors, fonts, basic layout updates, navigation and more.
If reflecting your brand is important, but you don’t have the budget or time to hire a designer, Shopify themes come in a wide variety of flavors, so chances are you’ll find one that works for the look and feel you’re going for.
Leverage best practices
The Shopify platform is also a great choice for store owners looking to easily take advantage of proven ecommerce best practices. Premium Shopify themes are designed with conversion practices in mind and you’ll be getting access to proven designs without paying a custom price.
The advantages of using Shopify
Shopify also has a slew of advantages that make it an ideal choice for any business owner, whether a newbie or an experienced seller.
- Shopify is great for getting your business online quickly and easily. Shopify comes with all of the basic (and even many advanced) tools that most ecommerce businesses need to get started.
- Shopify can give your business the ability to not only sell online, but also in a physical store, popup store or at remote locations using a mobile device, so it can be a good choice for expanding an existing business into these channels or starting from scratch.
- Shopify also gives you the advantage of having access to a huge community of fellow merchants, experts and developers.
- The team at Shopify, as well as numerous independent developers and designers also publish a wide variety of great content, such as Out of the Sandbox's Shopify blog and Shopify's own blogs and resources, to help you not only use the Shopify ecosystem but also how to market, run and grow your business.
- The basic Shopify system is affordable for even new businesses, especially when compared to the cost of buying software, hosting and the other tools needed to sell online or via any other channel. Even more advanced add-ons are affordable enough fro most businesses.
- The Shopify platform is optimized for online selling, with baked in support and best practices for SEO, social media marketing, conversion tracking and secure, PCI compliant payment processing.
- Through third party add on apps, it’s possible to extend the functionality of Shopify or integrate directly with the services you need to run your business — whether it be email marketing, analytics or other tracking.
