Shopify is at the forefront of the new surge of Ecommerce stores popping up all over the internet. While there are a few other options in Woocommerce and Magento, Shopify has steadily been growing in customers since exploding onto the Ecommerce scene 7 years ago.
While most Ecommerce stores look like they haven't been updated in years (old Yahoo stores in particular) Shopify has made it their mission to offer premium templates and apps. These new templates look as though a professional design team did them. Shopify takes it a step further to offer free themes and apps to its customers, creating the possibility of making a million dollar store for only $29 a month.
The features
Shopify offers a ton of features for its basic $29 a month plan. One of the biggest things available to the shop owner is free themes and apps to kick start their business. An example of this would be the Stripe merchant feature automatically installed on all Shopify stores.
Many new online business owners do not know that you have to usually apply to be approved for a online merchant. This online merchant then takes a percentage of every credit / debit card sale your store makes.
Shopify has this feature already built into their stores, at competitive pricing. In addition to this, money gets processed from your Shopify store, to your bank account; in just 3 days now with the Stripe payment processor.
Website Design
One thing Shopify has really done to set its business apart from other Ecommerce stores, is the premium themes. These themes can be purchased for a onetime fee, and can be used on as many stores as you own.
What makes this option even better is that, even if you know nothing about optimizing a site or HTML coding, you can have someone work on the theme for a single store. Once the website looks exactly how you want it to look, you can export the entire theme via a .zip file.
This .zip file can now be imported into any other store you own on Shopify, so every tweak and adjustment made to your first site, can be seen immediately on your second site. Or your third site, or however many sites you own. So instead of paying a web developer to create 5 high, converting sites for you; you can just get it done for a single site and apply the changes all across the board!
The other thing that is important to remember is that you do not have to be a coding genius to make minor changes to your site. You can simply log into your Shopify admin dasher board and find many quick tweaks and fixes to the layout of your site.
The dasher board has multiple options from the color of your background, to the pictures loading in the slideshow, the list truly does go on for quite a while. This allows store owners who have never used a computer before, to be able to make very important changes to their website, without having to touch any HTML code.
What kind of stores can use Shopify?
To be honest, if you have a good or product to be sold, I am positive there is a Shopify solution for your business. I have seen many drop shipping stores be very successful on Shopify, and these stores do not even carry their own inventory. These stores simply act as the middle man when buying goods at wholesale prices.
A printing company could also succeed online, as you are now reaching not just customers near a storefront, but customers from all over the world. In fact, with the low shipping rates that a printing company can obtain, this business venture would be a great idea for those looking to minimize shipping costs and other expenses that heavier items usually have to deal with (ex. Freight LTL shipping,etc...)
There are even many store offering services online that use Shopify as their Ecommerce platform of choice. If you wanted to offer lawn and garden services to those families in your local area, setting up an online store would make things quick and easy.
Simply put together the different packages you are offering, and set a price point for each job. From there, add a calendar to the checkout page so that a date can be selected for when the service is requested. Lastly, use Shopify's free email response tool to instantly confirm the job selected, notifying the customer the payment was received, and that the date selected is a go.
All of this can be done in less than a day's work, and now anytime someone in your city is looking for a specific service online, your company will show up. Online Ecommerce stores are constantly extending the reach of our businesses, and Shopify has lead the way in this movement for quite some time now.
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