Why You Should Design Your Website With Shopify

Thinking about getting your products online but not sure what e-commerce platform to choose? You may want to check out Shopify. With its wide range of themes, app features, and 24/7 support, Shopify is a great option for creating a beautiful e-commerce web store.

A little about Shopify

Shopify is a popular option for businesses that wish to start an online shop. With this platform, you can set up your customised online store and manage it from anywhere.

This e-commerce provider also provides apps, themes, and tools that allow developers to customise websites in line with the needs of their clients’ business objectives. In addition to this, Shopify also has the option for e-commerce owners to sell their products and services through a variety of other channels too. These include Facebook, Amazon, Shopify POS, and Facebook Messenger.

Why Design with Shopify?

Wondering what’s the whole hype around Shopify? Honestly, you’ve got to experience it for yourself. But, I can highlight the many advantages the e-commerce hosting platform offers that make it a preferred solution for businesses looking to increase sales of their products.

Wide Variety of Design Themes

When it comes to webshops, the whole look and feel of the website has a direct effect on user experience. With Shopify, you can easily customise and make changes to the visual design of your e-commerce website.

How? By using the wide variety of themes available on the platform. The themes are sorted too – so, you can choose from grid-style layouts to beautiful image intensive designs or opt for minimalist styles. Your developer can also customise themes to make your website look more appealing, and thereby enrich the user experience.

Choice of Tools

Shopify also offers a good choice of tools that will help you make your e-commerce website even more interactive. Enhance your customers’ experience on your webshop by enabling features such as smart search, videos, and 360-degree product views to your website.

Website administrators can also take advantage of special tools such as blog import, subscription-manager, and data transfer to further simplify their tasks. In short, Shopify’s website design tools can help you manage your webshop whilst also improving your conversion rate.

Free and Paid Apps

Shopify’s app store is home to a number of free and paid apps that you can choose from. Developers can easily build and run their e-commerce stores with the help of the app store – no need for lengthy and complex coding anymore although HTML and CSS experience is a bonus. Plus, there are apps that cater for different functions too.

You can select apps to help simplify your everyday business requirements like inventory management, accounting and shipping. Or you may want an app for your marketing and sales needs, to help you drive traffic to your site, increase engagement, and boost conversions.

There are also reporting apps available for analysing customer behavior and your sales figures and even tracking the traffic sources to your webshop. There is no need to depend on third-party tools for your marketing and analytics requirements.

Optimised for Mobile

It’s the norm for all businesses to have a mobile presence these days and Shopify can help optimise your webshop for mobile devices, thereby boosting your mobile presence.

It’s extremely important that developers make use of mobile-friendly and mobile-responsive themes while optimising their clients’ websites for mobile users. Shopify can help developers with that. Plus, the e-commerce platform allows developers to use its built-in mobile-based shopping cart too.

The Mobile Shopify App serves as the ultimate solution for business owners like you to accept payments and fulfill orders. You can even directly manage your e-commerce shop through your iOS or Android device.

Payment Gateway Support

Did you know Shopify supports 70+ international payment gateways? This support is extremely useful as it allows you to choose a payment gateway of your choice. Shopify can then help integrate the same into your e-commerce application.

That said, you’ll have to pay transaction charges for each customer transaction if you’ve enabled a third-party payment gateway. If you want to skip this fee, you need to choose Shopify Payment as your payment gateway. However, do remember that this payment gateway is available only in select countries as of now.

100% Secure and Reliable

With Shopify, you’re opting for a 100% secure and reliable e-commerce website hosting solution. Customers, these days, want things like online purchases, done fast. Hence, it’s very important to have a website, especially an e-commerce site, which loads fast. Any website that takes more than three seconds to load is likely to be abandoned by customers. Also, customers sometimes stay away from webshops due to concerns around security and privacy.

Shopify not only offers you unlimited bandwidth, but it provides a holistic hosting solution for your e-commerce website. It provides a variety of features to improve the speed and loading time of your site. Plus, it also provides SSL options for 100% payment security and complete safety of your customers’ data.

Support 24/7

Website downtimes are an issue for online shops. It not only leads to revenue loss, but it also hurts your reputation and makes you lose customers too. When you’re starting out, you won’t have the budget to hire full-time technical manpower to handle such issues. That’s where Shopify can help with their dedicated round-the-clock support. Shopify’s support team is available via email, phone, or live chat.

Another big advantage that Shopify offers compared to its competitors is the 14-day free trial period. Once the trial period expires, you can choose one of Shopify’s paid membership plans – Basic Shopify, Shopify, or Advanced Shopify. These plans differ in terms of price and features offered. You can opt for a plan that provides the features that will help your e-commerce business establish itself in the market.

If you are looking for a Shopify web designer to build your new e-commerce website we can help!

For more information on our services, contact us here www.virtualeap.com/contact

Article by Danny Smith | Virtualeap

7 Tips for a Great Landing Page

by Danny | UX, Web Design

Your landing page is crucial to how your business is seen by your potential clients. A poorly designed landing page will instantly send visitors away but a well designed page will turn them into buyers. Take a look at the following tips in order to create a superb landing page.

Be direct

People need to see the offer or incentive as quickly as possible and so, that is one thing to consider when developing your landing page. When viewing a website, they do not want to read through lots of text and they will scan the screen to see if the information they want is present.

Therefore, make sure that you make it clear as to why they came to your site, show them what you are offering and how you can meet their needs.

Put text in a logical format, use clear headers and sub-headers and emphasise key points but remember to be brief.

Use different colours

Your landing page will need to have a call-to-action that really jumps out at your visitors. Therefore, it is important to make sure that forms are simple to complete. This is where contrasting colours make it easier to grab the attention of your visitors in order to guide them to where they want to go.

Get your logo out there

Your logo is your brand and that means it is your business. All landing pages should have a logo correctly placed that helps people understand that the landing page belongs to your business. This is very important for those visitors who come to your site from an external source. So, it is good practice to place it in the same location as the other pages on your site.

Don’t go crazy on the clutter

It can be exciting to think of your website with many different visuals playing a part on your landing pages but this is not really what you want. It is too easy to go over the top with too many images and doing so will turn people away.

Too much clutter can distract the reader from what your landing page is trying to achieve and of course too many images can cause the page to load slowly. Ideally the complete page should be viewable within 2 seconds or less. You want to create a simple pathway to conversion, so remember to keep things clear and concise.

Formatting is key

This is a simple practice that can make the world of difference to your landing pages. It is also easy to get right without having to put in a lot of effort. What you offer can be highlighted with a clear layout which will create an experience that enables the reader to easily complete the conversion process.

Use social media as proof

You may be wondering what this is all about but you need to add some form of credibility to your landing page. Case studies or testimonials will work brilliantly and using social networks such as Twitter and Facebook further enhance credibility.

If you embed tweets or posts from those people who have used your service or have said something good about an aspect of your business, then readers will believe that you are who you say you are. You may have an offer that has been taken up by a specific amount of people – if so, make it known just how many people have taken up your amazing offer!

Consistency is vital

It is well known that the layout of a page has a massive impact on conversion rates.

Therefore it is crucial to regularly test certain aspects of your page but remember not to make drastic changes. If your landing pages are consistent they will give your visitor that sense of familiarity each time they visit.

Oh and that submit button!

Time and time again I come across landing pages (and contact forms) that use the word “submit” as a call to action.

Words like this are known as high friction words and imply that your visitor has to perform a chore. Better examples would be “Get it Now” or “Get your FREE Quote” which actually describes what happens after your visitor has clicked your button.