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