By Published On: December 31st, 20156.3 min read

Shopify is one of the most popular DIY online store / ecommerce website builder available today. It is a powerful and impressive shopping cart software that will help you built your custom ecommerce store, manage your inventory, sell your products and increase your revenue.

Shopify offers state of art tools and simplicity of creating and designing a professional ecommerce website. Shopify-store comes with the top-notch security, administration tools and marketing tools to help bring traffic to your site.

Shopify is easy to understand and use ecommerce website builder which powers more than 150,000+ online stores. You don’t need any technical knowledge to set up your online business. Even beginners do not have to worry about getting lost in the process of setting up their online store. The seven step-by-step guide from beginning to end helps to lead new merchants to set up their online store quickly and with ease.

Why Shopify ecommerce website builder?

Plug and Play: Convert CapEx to OpEx

Shopify is a hosted plug and play ecommerce website builder. There is no software installation required either on your desktop or server hence saving money for you which would have been required if you had to maintain your servers or IT infrastructure. It takes care of all aspects of running an ecommerce website, such as hosting, marketing, logistics management, inventory, payment gateway, and the like.

You pay only for apps you use and a monthly fee as per your selected plan. This way you can convert your capital expenditure (CapEx) into operational expenditure (OpEx) and have more liquidity to focus on other important business processes. All of Shopify’s plans come with unlimited bandwidth. The number of SKU’s and storage depends on the plan of your choice.

While Shopify’s prices are quite reasonable, the company does charge a percentage of transaction fees for merchants who sign up for their Basic, Business & Professional Plans. Only the Unlimited Plan ($179/month) is exempt from any transaction fee charges. Choose your plan wisely. Check latest prices and offer here.

Custom Design and Professional E-commerce Store

Shopify ecommerce website builder offers you a wide range of pre-designed customizable “themes”. It also allows you to choose different themes for your main site and your mobile site. You can create your own themes too using HTML, CSS and Liquid language or get in touch with WeCT for your custom Shopify theme. Your web store looks they way you want.

Total Control: Full-featured E-commerce platform

Shopify does set limits on the number of products you can add to your inventory depending on your plan; however, you can add unlimited categories as per your requirement. It lets you add a variety details including pictures to each item in your inventory. You can add product description and images easily and quickly.

Keep a close eye on your inventory with the help of products menu. You can create new product profiles, import and export long lists of products and keep track of stock. The navigation menu will put you in the driver’s seat and enable you to choose how your site is displayed.

Now you can sell in store and on the go with Shopify POS. 

You can sell both physical and downloadable goods, such as applications, eBooks, music, software etc. with Shopify. You can create a variety of reports to analyze sales, traffic and inventory with the powerful reporting capabilities it offers.

Shopify offers numerous payment options with over 70 payment gateways. Your customers can pay using credit cards, eChecks, PayPal and more from around the world. Automatic tax and shipping calculators make the checkout process much simple and smoother.

However, it does not offer in-house credit card processing, which means you have to look elsewhere for a merchant account to accept credit card payments online.

Shopify ecommerce website builder is quick and easy to use for setting up your store to maintaining your warehouse. Even someone who has never used ecommerce software would be able to have a professional design online store up and running the same day.

Higher Customer Reach

Shopify comes with an excellent tool for marketing campaigns. The customer menu helps you organize information about your clients. This ecommerce website builder is equipped with the tools that can filter a list of your biggest clients (the ones who buys more stuff on your website) so that you can send specific email marketing their way.

You can even filter customers by location. Even more you can import or export a large database of customers for easy management. You can also know about customers who have not been back to your online store in a long time and you can send special email communication to them.

All Shopify themes include social network integration, letting your customers to spread the world and share the great products they find on your online store.

eCommerce Website Builder – Shopify

Built-in coupon engine can be used to create sales, discount codes and coupons to help promote your products. Tight integration with MailChimp allows Shopify to give you numerous email-marketing options.

Shopify offers easy access to Google Analytics which comes fully integrated with this e-commerce software to help you get even more information about your online store. You can find out which keywords and campaigns are garnering the most business. It also helps you measure how well your site does compared to others in your industry.

Shopify automatically generates sitemaps.xml files so new products and site changes show up on search engines quickly. This helps you increase traffic to your site and generate higher revenue. You can add daily deals to entice customers, product comparisons or create a loyalty program, available through app store.

Peace of Mind

Your customers need to feel comfortable and secure while shopping online. The Shopify checkout process is simple and secure. Your customers can place their orders quickly and with confidence. Shopify does an outstanding job of putting customers at ease.

Your online store will look professional and will be Level 1 PCI DSS compliant. Shopify also provides 128-bit Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encrypted checkout to protect personal data. Furthermore, Shopify has a team of fraud-protection specialists who work hard 24×7 to make sure that you and your customers have a positive experience.

Shopify’s help and support is unparalleled and best in the industry. All kind of help and support is available to you whenever you need it, ensuring your site’s success. Above all you can reach support by phone or email any time. Support community, FAQs, forums and a wiki page are also available for your help.

Summary

  • Easy to use / manage ecommerce website builder
  • Robust shopping cart platform
  • Search engine and social media friendly
  • Complete control over content and products management
  • Supports both offline and online store
  • Reasonably priced

Shopify does cost more than shopping carts like CoreCommerce or BigCommerce but it is worth every single cent. It is easy to use, and one of the best platforms to get ecommerce business up and running immediately. Also, it has a straightforward user experience and is designed with simplicity in mind.

This ecommerce website builder guides the user in a step-by-step manner in helping them to set up their online store. Certainly it is an excellent tool to start an online store since it has the ability to scale with you as your store grows. But if you are a high volume seller who has access to technology talent, and budget is not a constraint then you could consider licensed shopping carts.

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About the Author: Bhasker Thapan
Bhasker leads WeCT, engaging clients in all industries, from pure R&D to full scale transformations. He help teams to apply human-centered web designs, analytics, automation and artificial intelligence technologies to solve pressing client problems.​

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