Table of contents

• Introduction
• What is Shopify?
• What to Consider in Making the Right Selection of an E-commerce Platform
• Key Reasons Why Shopify is One of the Best Platforms if You Want to Scale Your Business to Great Heights
• Bottom Line

Ensuring your e-commerce business stands out among the many existing competitors takes patience, grit, and tenacity to make it right. This is as opposed to what you have been told or know. Not only do you need painstaking research on what you want to sell, but you also need to choose an e-commerce platform to lead you through. There exist tens of thousands of e-commerce platforms online today. More than 100 platforms are trickling in each day. In the midst of all these, one crucial thing separates the winners from the losers—a good e-commerce platform. Choosing the correct platform for your e-commerce website is one of the first, and groundbreaking steps for any online business. Similarly, making the wrong decision at this stage, lead to complications and difficulties further down the road. It is, therefore, worthwhile taking time to conduct some explicit research before you make a decision.

In this article, we will analyze one of the biggest and fast-growing platforms out there—Shopify.

You have perhaps in one way or another heard of Shopify. This highly coveted brand has proven itself as the most convenient and cost-effective e-commerce platform. It is highly equipped to host everything from startups right through to enterprise businesses, including but not limited to BBC USA Shop, GYMShark, KKW Beauty, and Kylie Cosmetics.

So in brief, what makes Shopify unique? Its flexibility and reliability! It is these two outstanding qualities that allow Shopify to scale up easily, with contained costs compared to other e-commerce platforms.

In this article, we are going to provide a comprehensive understanding of Shopify and its features that you can use to build pivotal e-commerce websites. We will also highlight what to consider in the right choice of e-commerce plat for your online store, and explore 10 reasons why Shopify towers above most other existing e-commerce platforms. Keep reading to get detailed Shopify insights.

What is Shopify?

This is a cloud-based e-commerce platform that gives the details of how to start, run and grow an online store for any business. It has more than 100 million online stores today and it is used by various merchants in over  175 countries  around the globe. This popularity has stemmed from its ease of use, reliability, enhanced features, and other known mouth-watering benefits. This amazing platform offers everything of your interest in one platform. 

This one of its e-commerce platforms has surely revolutionized the e-commerce sphere and it is continuing to do so.  Need an expert to help you create a killer Shopify store which would stand out among its competitors? Connect with highly-qualified Webinopoly web designers. They have what it takes to take your e-commerce business a notch higher.

What to Consider in making the right selection of an E-commerce platform 

As I had said before, the selection of the right shopping cart software is one of the most crucial decisions you need to take. Your selected software should be for your specific business requirements, needs to be easy to use, should be well supported, secure, and offer high quality and high performance. It is also ideal to consider the potential future growth of your business and in essence, select the scalable software. Let’s take a look at some of the key features you should look for before deciding on the right type of software for your business:

1. Payment options:

It would be ideal to choose a platform with a payment option of your preference. The one which your users will feel comfortable using.

2. Customization 

Although most of the e-commerce solutions offer generic shopping cart features, which are efficient for the majority of product types, in case you need specific features then you will have to go for platforms with the ability to customize.

3.  Marketing tools and SEO support:

For your e-commerce to succeed wholly, you need online marketing. The platform of your choice should, therefore, be able to support various marketing aspects like customer segmentation, SEO, Targeted Promotions and Merchandising, Customer Attribute Management, Dynamic Rule-based, Product Relations, and Automated Email Marketing Reminders just to mention a few.

4. CMC and e-commerce

If you intend to build a content-based website together with an online store, you will have to have Computer-Mediated Communication as well as an e-commerce portal. This combination makes it possible for you to centralize your administrative areas where you can manage both the content and product inventory.

5.  Amount of product

In case you want to host millions of products via your website, you need to make a painstaking evaluation of the various platforms existing, especially being mindful of their scalability and performance points of view.

6. Ease of use

Put into consideration, the amount of time you would want everything done as far as the business transaction is concerned. In any case, if you lack enough skills, you will need to make sure that the platform you choose is straightforward to operate. It should make give you room to create a good-looking e-commerce site without taxing your patience.

7. Built-in Analytics

The only means to know how your site is performing and making positive progress is through the existence of built-in analytics. This makes it simpler for you to track the e-commerce metrics that are very crucial to your business.

8. Mobile-friendly

Those who are using smartphones to browse the internet, cover the vast majority. Your e-commerce site should therefore allow the shoppers to be able to easily browse your site and make purchases from their mobile devices.

9. Integrations and apps

A platform that allows integration, makes it possible for you to extend the functionality of your e-commerce platform and fill the existing gaps for the feature that your chosen might not have needed right out of the box. Additionally, you want to ensure that your e-commerce platform enjoys the comfort of working with tools you have already put to test such as email marketing, accounting, and even inventory management tools.

Key Reasons Why Shopify is the best e-commerce platform in case you want to scale your brand to great heights.

Quick and cost-effective to build

A highly modified and professional e-commerce store can be designed in a matter of weeks and at a moderate cost. This is one lovely thing about Shopify as compared to other e-commerce platforms. It leaves brand new shops with more budget to use in their marketing and growth.

Easy to use

It doesn’t require rocket Science to understand that Shopify is fitted with a user-friendly backend. This makes it the easiest platform to operate, meaning store owners can get to grips with their system in a matter of days and keep their store functioning with no interference. Other platforms such as Magneto or WordPress are too detailed and thus require a great deal of learning. Luckily, Shopify uses a more vivid approach, making it far easier to use and learn.

Existence of unlimited performance as well as rock-solid security

Courtesy of Shopify plans which are all fitted with unlimited bandwidth making it possible for your e-commerce to be hosted and run by Shopify servers, the stability and security of your site are optimized. You can, therefore, rest assured that you will be secured against two serious issues that are thorns in the flesh of other platforms.

Hacking: Shopify boasts of a full dedication to offering maximum protection against hacking.

Instability: you do not need to call for a backup as Shopify stores are extremely stable—site updates hardly cause an issue, in any case, there may exist.

Experienced Shopify experts as well as Shopify forum

      To ensure that your Shopify store keeps running smoothly without any inference, Shopify has deployed a vast number of experienced experts specializing in different areas of setting up, running, and maintaining Shopify stores. Additionally, there exists a lot of useful information available through your Shopify documentation as well as the Shopify forum. Our dedicated experts also offer significant alternatives at affordable prices.

Existence of powerful marketing and SEO

Being extremely mindful of their customer’s expectations, Shopify developers incorporated loads of features build-in. These include: think email notifications, automatic abandoned cart notifications, analytics, SEO tools, and many more. Shopify apps such as Klaviyo further Shopify tools and insights, and thus should be taken advantage of.

High-quality Customer Service

Customer satisfaction is one of the key components of ensuring customer retention. Customers feel satisfied when their needs are responded to promptly and accurately. Shopify has a credible customer support team. They are quick to respond and always willing to help. You can as well make use of  Shopify’s educational platform, where you are assured of finding the right tutorials touching on various topics such as how to use Shopify guides, marketing strategies, analytics as well as lots of other vital information to help you in expanding your business.

Multiple payment options as well as the use of various currencies 

Shopify store permits the use of a variety of payment options without the need of adding third-party programs to direct transactions into your bank. This all-in e-commerce platform is highly compatible with most of the popular payment options such as credit card debit cards, PayPal, Amazon Pay, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, and many more.

Better still, it also provides a native multi-currency system that allows your store to receive payments in almost any currency all over the world.

Availability of more than 4.5k Apps

To enhance the functionality and effective usability of your store, The Shopify App store offers thousands of various apps. These apps: Change your store’s appearance by adding advanced functionality and logic, allow you to integrate anything from your social media channels and reviews, and permits the use of size charts on the product pages and promotions.

Shopify platform makes scaling up easier 

If the foundational setup of the store is conducted properly, the scaling is significantly made easier. You will simply need to constantly update your store and implement improvements daily. You should therefore be set up by an expert.

Advantageously, the scaling-up usually leads up to a full rebrand and redesign, and at this stage, an immense impact will be knocking at your door in form of conversion rate. Besides, with Shopify, this process is doable safely offline. Because of this, your business will keep on operating normally throughout the entire duration of the development with no risk of or stress of platform migration.

• Existence of over 7.1k themes as well as 2.0 themes version rolling in

Shopify avails thousands of themes to themes to select from when you are building your Shopify furthermore, there exists a variety of designs and functionalities, with both free and paid options. You are therefore assured of getting the one that meets your unique needs.

Shopify launched 2.0 updates in June 2021. One outstanding change in the update launched was the addition of “section everywhere” to Shopify 2.0 themes This in layman’s terms is that you can build sections on every type of page, and not just on the homepage it was previously. With this latest addition, Shopify became as customizable as platforms such as WordPress.

Bottom line

From your analysis in this article, you have drawn your conclusion that we have unflinching love for Shopify. However, truth be told amazing features Shopify prides itself on, make it relevant to bother the newbies in e-commerce platforms and the veterans alike. It is also important to note that nothing is perfect and the right e-commerce platforms for you will definitely depend on factors unique to your business.

That being said, we will strongly recommend conducting explicit research to analyze various e-commerce platforms out there. You can then finally seek advice from an expert. Never forget that there are some deeply rooted secrets about the right e-commerce platform that only a highly experienced e-commerce agency can reveal.