What is Shopify?
As per Shopify, it is the best E-commerce platform to sell Online on Facebook/Instagram, or in-person. Shopify offers a vast amount of customisations to its customers where-in they can create professional websites without writing a single line of code.
Shopify allows people to create websites that can sell, help them create an online presence, and do a lot more by offering an array of services that allows shop owners to completely focus on their brand while Shopify takes care of the rest – Domain, Hosting, Analytics, Order Management, Plug and play plugins, and a lot more.
As per latest stats, Shopify powers more than 800,000 stores.
How does it help in selling online?
With the internet as an enabler, many small businesses are actively tapping into the opportunities presented online. Social media helps multiple small businesses engage with their customers without a website, but what about the people who want a website?
Shopify realized this opportunity of a plethora of sellers who wish to sell their products online but lack the technical expertise and capital to custom build their website, and that’s when they created a platform that allowed business owners to build websites that enable online shopping with a few clicks.
Shopify allows people to sell online by making it very easy for business owners to do the following tasks with ease –
- Deploying a functional website without going through the process of purchasing a domain, hosting, etc – One can deploy Shopify websites in a few clicks
- Shopify offers a host of beautiful themes that can be installed with a click to create appealing websites that delight users. This feature of making the task of creating beautiful stores with ease is something that makes the entire process of web development so much easier for the people.
- Uploading products, and their details such as description, headings, titles, images, etc visually without the hassle of doing it over the backend
- Ease of using plugins that enable you to add any extended functionality that your business needs. Example – There are external plugins that allow you to add tracking scripts like Facebook Pixel, Google Analytics trackers, etc with ease.
- Tracking orders, generating automated emails for communication, and a ton of other features to enable ease in managing orders, and business operations gives Shopify an edge over the competition.
There are tons of other advantages of using Shopify, but these are some advantages that make Shopify the top choice for so many individuals, and businesses. With over 800,000, and growing the number of people who run their stores to generate a cumulative of billions of dollars in revenue indicates how strong is the offering of Shopify.
What is the cost of building a shopify website?
Annie is a home-baker, and now wants to build a website for her bakery to reach out to a wider audience, and allow her customers to place their orders in advance. How should Annie go about making her website?
Should she hire a team of Shopify developers to build the website? She could do this, but this process is expensive, and time consuming. Annie might not be able to facilitate the project from the idea to the execution stage, since her expertise is at baking, and not product management.
There are millions of small, and medium sized businesses just like Annie who feel the need to build a website, but often lack the required expertise, or resources to build one for themselves, and that’s when Shopify comes into the picture.
Shopify is a one stop platform that allows businesses to set up websites with 0 knowledge in coding, or business operations seamlessly.
What is Shopify?
It is the world’s 3rd largest e-commerce platform, and powers more than 800,000 websites, and attributes to 10% of the Global web-traffic, and is a popular choice for businesses for their websites.
As per a report by Sumo, we can see the growth trajectory of Shopify, and it’s popularity amongst merchants. The following graph is an indication of how well Shopify caught up with the merchants, and businesses.
Information source – Sumo.com
Why is Shopify so popular? What are the pros of using Shopify? h2
- No coding knowledge required unless you’re looking to modify the code of existing themes to achieve desired functionalities
- There are many themes one can use to build their website as per their design, and brand requirements
- Unlimited products can be listed with text, and rich media files – Image, video, etc
- 1000s of widgets, and plugins to meet any desired requirement such as Invoicing solutions, analytics, up-sell features, etc
- A huge community of Freelance Developers who can help set up fully-functional Shopify stores in days
Alternatives of Shopify
With the ever increasing number of businesses willing to go online, there are many companies who are looking to cater to this demand, and there are quite a few companies that are good, and allows their users to build beautiful websites without having to take the pain to code, or hire developers or having to wait for months to get bring their projects to live.
There are some alternatives of Shopify which are WooCommerce, SquareSpace, Wix, Webflow, etc, but one should note that the decision to use any of these platforms is to understand the business requirements first, and then see which of the platforms may suit the best.
Editor’s Note on Shopify
Founded in 2006, Shopify is also a public company listed under the name “Shopify Inc”, and the company has shown tremendous growth in acquiring merchants, and helping them grow their business multi-folds.
Shopify is a very reliable platform that gives business owners the super-power to deploy websites at super fast speeds. We recommend Shopify as a platform, since it’s robust, and caters to the needs of almost every kind of small and medium businesses.
Some very famous brands that are said to have used Shopify at some point in their lives are –
- Tesla – The electric car maker run by the legendary Elon Musk once ran on Shopify
- Budweiser – World famous Beer brand
- Hasbro – The World famous toy-retailer
- Penguin Books – If you’re a reader, Penguin is a known name to you
- Heinz – Ketchup brand
- And many many more.
Conclusion
Shopify is the best thing that ever happened to the internet businesses, as it allowed them to reduce their costs of development substantially, and helped them bring their ideas to the world.
800,000 businesses are already using Shopify. What are you waiting for? Looking for an expert Shopify developer?
