The Power Of Shopify For E-Commerce

E-Commerce can simply be defined as the purchase and sale of goods using the internet, which involves the exchange of data and money in order for these transactions to be completed. E-Commerce does not only refer to the sale of physical products, but also includes digital products and services.

Since the internet has come to dominate almost all aspects of our daily lives, including business, it is no surprise that e-commerce has undergone exponential growth over the past two decades. Here are some numbers to demonstrate this…

According to BigCommerce (https://www.bigcommerce.co.uk/articles/ecommerce/), sales in online stores are expected to reach 22% of global retail sales by 2023, compared to 14.1% in 2019.

It’s clear that e-commerce is the future of business. So, if you’re looking to get into the e-commerce game, what’s the best platform to get started on? Well, we’re here to provide you with a solution - Shopify.

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What is Shopify?

Shopify is the quickest growing, most scalable and most feature-packed e-commerce platform out there. Here at Step Labs, it has enabled us to develop a number of world-class sites for our clients, which have projected them onto further success and skyrocketed their revenue. Shopify is perfect for those with small businesses, but it also powers huge brands like Huel and GymShark.

Over a million online stores in 175 countries have been built on Shopify, and for good reason. It is a full-service e-commerce platform that is completely cloud based and hosted. This you won’t have any problems upgrading or maintaining software and servers - access your online store from anywhere with a WiFi connection, whether that be your office, your bed, or the beach!

Shopify lets you manage products, payment, inventory and shipping all in one place. It lets you build a beautiful website to advertise your products or services, but also makes it super simple to manage the operation of your business.

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What’s the cost?

Shopify offers a number of different pricing plans to accommodate for businesses of all sizes. These are:

• Shopify Lite - $9 per month.
• Shopify Basic - $29 per month.
• Standard Shopify - $79 per month.
• Shopify Advanced - $299 per month.
• Shopify Plus - custom pricing for enterprise level businesses.

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Features

So, what are the features that make Shopify so great?

• Physical and Digital: Shopify allows you to sell an unlimited amount of either physical or digital products online. These physcial products could be handcrafted goods, clothing, home utensils, or cosmetics. Some digital products that can be provided are online classes, events, gift cards or e-books. Selling digital products in particular gives you all the benefits of e-commerce without the obstacle of shipping, which can often cause problems.
• Shopify Admin: Shopify’s back end is pretty easy to get to grips with. It’s dashboard gives you access to comprehensive sales reports, and it enables you to manage products, orders and customers without messing around with the code. The CMS lets you easily edit images, text and sections of your website when required, preventing you from having to hire developers to make minor adjustments.
• Marketing and SEO: Every online business needs a great marketing and SEO strategy. Luckily, Shopify allows you to build an SEO optimised website that loads fast and includes a blog feature. It also offers advanced SEO functionality allowing you to update meta tags, titles and alt tags, and automatically generals a sitemap that you can submit to Google to ensure it can index every page of your e-commerce store.
• App Store: Shopify’s app store gives you access to over 2,500 apps, all with features designed to streamline the sale of your products or services online. These can assist you with subscription payments, upselling, customer service, inventory management and more. The app store is constantly being updated, meaning that every day Shopify becomes more and more powerful, giving users more and more options and flexibility.
• Plug-ins: Choosing the right plug-ins for your Shopify store can really accelerate your sales, by improving your User Experience or making your products simply irresistible. While adding too many can slow your site and affect SEO, the value that the vast array of plug-ins can offer, if used right, is significant. Some of the most popular ones are Nudgify, Yandex and Easy Ship.
• POS: Shopify offers a feature called Point Of Sale. This enables companies to sell products in the real world. For example, they can open a physical pop up store and sell products offline and accept payments using a card reader. These payments are directly linked to the company’s Shopify inventory, which also maintains a record of every transaction. POS provides a dashboard to manage sales records, and it can also be used to plan and set up personalised marketing campaigns for in-store customers.
• Support: Shopify offers a huge amount of free technical support, whether that’s by phone, email, live chat, written documentation, video tutorials, webinars or the community forum.
• Flexibility: Shopify lets you build a website using free or paid themes, but you can build a completely custom theme. This is one our specialities. At Step Labs, we create themes with custom features and functionality to give our client’s brands a unique visual identity that clearly communicates their originality and the value they offer. With Shopify, the possibilities are endless.
• Multi-Channel Selling: Shopify allows you to sell your products in multiple places at once whilst still maintaining admin in one place. It enables you to easily sell on Facebook, eBay, Amazon, Instagram and even through a blog with it's powerful mutli-channel integrations. This is important for expanding reach, increasing audience sizes and maximising sales.

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Conclusion

Shopify’s domination of the market share speaks for itself. It is used by a massive range of businesses, from super small to super large. It is affordable, easy to use, and has a huge number of great features that make it the best platform in the game. Shopify has helped us build beautiful and highly successful websites, and that’s why we would recommend it to anyone.

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We are Step Labs - a Webflow & Shopify web design & development agency! If you would like to build a beautiful and high-performing website, contact us at victor@steplabs.xyz.

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Written By: Matthew @ Step Labs