Whether you are building your own eCommerce store or shopping for an all-in-one solution, getting all the pieces of an online store together can actually be a bit challenging. Luckily tools like Shopify are available to help you and your business. First, let's define Shopify and explain why it may be the best fit for you.

What is Shopify?

Shopify is an e-commerce platform that allows you to create, customize, and fully manage your business. Shopify gives you the tools to manage products, inventory, payments, and shipping for your business. You can use Shopify for multiple storefronts including online marketplaces, social media, and brick-and-mortar stores.

You can try Shopify out for free with their 14-day trial. After your trial has expired you can choose different monthly packages currently ranging from $29-$299 a month. The different packages offer different tiers of support, shipping options, payment options, and point of sale options. There's even a “Lite” option for only $9 a month and a Shopify plus version that serves enterprise and high volume merchants. Because Shopify is cloud-based and hosted it can be used in nearly every country without worrying about upgrading it or paying for any software.

Is Shopify a Good Idea?

Depending on your needs, Shopify can provide you with all the necessary tools to begin your online business. As mentioned before, starting your online store can be difficult and it’s tough to know what platform will work for you. Shopify offers all the features you could ask out of an e-commerce platform and can make overcoming that obstacle a breeze. Here are a few examples:

Marketing on Shopify

Before you can sell your products you have to let the world know what you’re offering! This is where Shopify’s marketing tools come into play. If you’re looking into creating marketing campaigns, incorporating an email newsletter, Facebook Ads, etc. Shopify allows you to easily create landing pages. If you’re SEO junkies like ourselves, you’ll enjoy the fact that Shopify allows you to create clean and crawl-able code. Shopify allows you to easily create custom title tags and meta descriptions for product and category pages.

Speed & Security

There are two things that most customers expect out of a quality online store: speed and security. Online customers have no time to waste and you don’t want your customers waiting for your site to load. This is precious time, and the longer they wait, the greater chance they visit a competitor of yours. It’s important to remember that Shopify is a global platform, and has a team of professionals that are experts in hosting. They know the best practices when it comes to compliance, caching, and other issues that may affect your online store. You can count on them to keep your store running quickly.

Shopify provides a full SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) on its platform, which is the standard security technology for establishing an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. With this in place, users can trust that their data, especially credit card information, will remain private and secure.

Customer Support

A bonus for Shopify is that they will never leave you in the dark while you manage your online store. Shopify provides great customer support in the form of chat support, FAQ’s boards, and phone support. There are many users on the platform and chances are they are many others asking the same questions as well as many others providing solutions. The web offers a well of knowledge and support for running your online store.

Oh, did we mention the wide range of themes?

Should I Buy a Shopify Theme?

Starting out you will do fine utilizing one of Shopify’s free themes, and customizing that theme to fit your needs. Shopify is very easy to customize, especially if you use their drag and drop layout tool. There are a lot of themes to choose from and plenty to fit the vibe you want to create with your online store.

What is so great about Shopify is that it also has the ability to wielded by a professional developer or web designer. This is generally where we would come in and customize your basic theme to create a really high-end website. By using our knowledge of HTML, CSS, and Liquid, Shopify’s templating language, we would be able to make detailed changes to your online store. We worked with Combat Waterfowl to design a custom Shopify website that would cater to their up and coming apparel brand.

Wrapping it Up

Ultimately Shopify is a powerful e-commerce tool that could be a great fit in helping you manage your multi-product e-commerce store. Shopify is safe, fast, and easy to customize to fit your mold. If you’re interested in starting up your online business contact Red Shark Digital today!

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