Shopify Review – Best E-Commerce Solution Or… Headache? See Here

E-commerce is growing. At a staggering rate.

With solution such as drop shiping completely revolutionizing how we sell, merchants need a good platform to open their online stores.

However, for most people, though they might have in-depth knowledge of their products, not many have enough experience in programming, coding or web development.

In such a scenario, you have some options that make it (a bit) easy for you. Right from “plugins” like Woocommerce to custom shopping cart solutions like Magento or Open Cart.

Still, they can get quite complicated, needing a developer in your team.

However, if you truly wish something that needs ZERO technical knowledge,  nothing comes close to the simplicity, ease, and affordability of Shopify.

Let’s quickly review Shopify’s service in this blog post today.

WHAT IS SHOPIFY.COM?

Shopify is a highly effective eCommerce website builder. It provides a platform for merchants to design, develop, market and sell various types of goods and products to consumers all around the world.

Shopify offers complete website building templates with 100’s of templates that are pre-made for you to use them as they are.

To use Shopify, merchants have to sign up to their website (which is a very simple process).

Also, Shopify offers various deals, such as a 14-day free trial for new users that helps the merchants to understand if it is right for them and their business.

Plus, you can also customize the templates offered on their platform with images, videos, logos, text etc. to complement your brand and product’s image.

All you need to do is… choose a theme! That’s it!

And with that, your business has been set-up! You can sell your products right away with the platform’s built-in shopping carts.

After this trial phase, the merchants can access their Shopify stores at a starting price of $29 per month.

Here’s the detailed pricing plan…

Shopify’s monthly plans

Shopify has several great features that make it a preferred platform for the merchants to create their online store.

SHOPIFY PROS AND BENEFITS

• ​Shopify is a platform that integrates over 70 payment gateways with check-outs in over 50 languages, which makes it easy for merchants to sell their products to the customers anywhere around the world.
• It has an app store that offers several applications that enable the merchants to add more functions to their shop by automating a lot of business tasks such as customer service, inventory management and bookkeeping.
• ​It includes free, built-in mobile e-commerce shopping cart features that enable the prospective customers to browse and purchase from the store directly through their mobile phones.
• The monthly plan offered by Shopify includes Shopify hosting the online shop for the merchant (no more hunting for a good web host!), and gives the merchant an unlimited amount of bandwidth. That means Shopify charges no extra money up to the fixed number of visitors on your plan. With this, you don’t need to pay more than your requirement.
• Finally, they back up your data automatically every day and ensure that it’s safe and secure. This is a big headache for most merchants when hosting their own websites, so this one’s a big deal.

​Some of the ​extra benefits that Shopify offers are:

• ​Fully hosted plans with unlimited bandwidth, storage, and products.
• ​It offers easy-to-use Shopify stripe payments for processing the various transactions involved.
• ​It offers a lot of eCommerce features, including discount codes.

​Shopify also offers various tools to the merchants that help them in various functions such as:

• ​Insert images and other descriptions and details of the product.
• ​Organize the products into various categories for the customer’s ease of access.
• ​Track customer and order details.
• ​Set up customer accounts.
• ​Create discount codes.
• ​Manage the inventory.
• ​Sort the customers by categories such as money spent, locations, etc.

Along with these benefits and tools, yet another another amazing thing they do is, they educate you on all things e-commerce.

 They call it the free business lessons!

But like any other online platform, Shopify also has a few cons linked to it. You must know them before choosing the platform for your e-commerce store.

SHOPIFY CONS (FEW, BUT YOU MUST KNOW ABOUT THEM)

• ​Shopify charges a transaction fee for every sale if you use any other platform than the Shopify Payment. However, this is a very small amount that goes into covering the technology that is used to power the sales.
• ​The monthly costs go up if you integrate multiple apps. Although Shopify offers a huge number of apps to extend the functionality of your online shop, many of these apps are not offered for free, which would naturally lead to increasing your monthly cost.
• IF you want to customize any of the given themes, you must know ‘LIQUID’, Shopify’s custom coding language. Although not much of a problem, since 9 out of 10 Shopify users select it because they don’t want to do this!

All in all, what started as a venue to sell snowboarding goods, Shopify has come a long way.

It is now one of the most popular e-commerce web-builders in the market and hence, is a perfect destination for you if you’re looking for a simple e-commerce solution.

And don’t forget, you also get the flexibility to grow your business with complete pricing transparency, on-boarding help, and awesome support with them.

Start your Shopify trial today by clicking on the button below.