Building your eCommerce store is every seller’s dream. You might be a successful retailer. Or the chances are that you might be selling online on social media or a marketplace. Even though these platforms give you great exposure, your online store helps you create a brand. Often on the Internet, you might have heard, but wondered, what is Shopify. Don’t worry; we’ll answer all your questions here. For the starters, Shopify is an online store builder.
The point is that you might be earning a good share of profits by selling on multiple platforms. But, the necessity of a store comes when you want yourself to stand apart. For example, let’s say that you’ve been selling handicraft products on Facebook for a long time. You’re earning good profits, and your business is going well.
A competitor of yours starts selling similar to yours in the same market. Chances are a lot of your customers who fall prey to this new seller’s marketing tactic and make purchases from their brand. As a result of which your business will have to suffer. In other words, you will lose sales and fail to create the impact of a brand over your customers.
Why Build an Online Store?
Now let’s come back to your question of what is Shopify.
Having your online store prevents you from any external malicious strategies. It gives you a brand you can boost. Moreover, it gives you complete autonomy to excel with your strategy and reach out to your customers. Shopify is one such platform that helps you build your eCommerce website and excel with online selling.
Shopify is an eCommerce platform that helps you to sell products not only online. The platform was created over ten years ago when the founder Tobi wanted to sell his products but was facing challenges due to lack of an eCommerce platform. He then came up with an incredible idea of creating an ecommerce platform. And that’s how the foundation of Shopify was built.
Now that you have a brief idea about what is Shopify, let’s move onto understanding the need for an eCommerce store.
Create a Brand
Having your store helps you create a brand in the market. It enables you to get started with selling. Moreover, it gives your customers something they can come back to again and again. This is especially helpful when a customer wants to repurchase something from your brand. The customer will find their order history and maybe even save their payment method on your store if they are a regular shopper.
24*7 Shopping Experience
Having your store gives you the edge to make money even while you’re asleep. This is not possible in the retail scenario. With an online store, your products are available 24* 7 for your customers. It gives them the flexibility to browse, wishlist, and shop anytime and anywhere. Moreover, a 24 * 7 shopping experience also ensures you are able to reach out to customers across the border. So, if you’re planning to expand your business, you can do so with a 24*7 shopping experience. Furthermore, knowing more about what is Shopify will help you establish your presence.
Broad Scope of Business
An eCommerce store broadens the scope of your business. It gives you the opportunity to stand out and reach out to even more market segments. Because you have a lot of clarity about your business, you plan to reach out to even more customers. For example, if customers have been eyeing your products from a particular geographical location, you can target them using your online store. Moreover, you can start selling hyper-locally or to foreign markets with a proper store in place.
Business Clarity
While you sell online as yourself the following questions-
- Do I really know my customers?
- Which geographical location do most of my customers shop from?
- What all products are the best selling?
- Which products will be in demand during a particular season?
- Which market segments can I target to expand my business?
- How can I outperform my customers?
- Where can I save my business costs?
- How can I engage the customers with my business?
- How can I market to new customers and increase my repurchase rate?
While selling offline or on a scattered platform will not give you the answers to these questions, a website can. A website can help you get business clarity and provide you a holistic view of your selling strategies. Based on these, you can sell to your customers better. Moreover, you can also understand your areas of improvement.
Furthermore, understanding what is Shopify and how it works will help you get started with a professional website. It will also provide an edge to your selling.
To further answer what is Shopify, let me go ahead help you with more details. Today, Shopify is the leading ecommerce platform that eCommerce sellers can leverage irrespective of their sizes. The eCommerce builder store provides sellers with three subscription plans.
You can start selling online on your store with these plans. Moreover, you can add functionalities as it grows.
There are mainly three different plans for all the users, which constitutes the following-
Shopify Plus
This plan is for the larger businesses or the ones who are planning to scale up their business. It offers a variety of features, like the capacity to handle higher-order with advanced reporting features.
Shopify Lite
This plan is much more affordable than Shopify, plus as it allows you to sell products on an existing website. Users can also use messenger chats and sell the products via both online and offline.
Shopify POS
It is an application that allows users to sell the products offline. Where users can sell products art of physical Store pop up shows or trade shows in person using the Shopify POS, the payments can be accepted via iPhone iPad for Android using the application.
What Can You Sell on Shopify?
The following are some different products and services you can sell on Shopify.
- Physical products are those that can be made by hand. Alternatively, they are something that can be manufactured and shipped to customers. These can include clothing, jewelry, accessories, travel products, bags and luggage, beauty products, kitchenware, etc.
- Digital products are those categories of products that include electronic books, email templates, clothing patterns, audio downloads, etc.
- Services and consultations are needed by one person or the other. You can also sell these on Shopify. Examples of this include interior designer, dentist life, coach, and it can be sold online and offline.
- Memberships are also something that can be sold on your Shopify website.
- Rental businesses are technically service-based businesses. Even though they involve the physical product, the sellable quantity is services. For example, if your customer wants to rent a dress, props, etc. you can advertise these on your Shopify store.
Why Use Shopify?
The following are some advantages and disadvantages of using Shopify-
Lots of Freebies
Shopify comes with free features like the free theme, which is just perfect for all the beginners. You also have the freedom to customize the website according to your branding style. Moreover, you can also choose free fonts, auto change the colors, and their photos and do a lot more things. You can simply head to the Shopify store and leverage its freebies.
Seamless Integration with WordPress
One of the best qualities of Shopify is that it seamlessly integrates with WordPress. While we all know that WordPress is an excellent content management system, Shopify integration takes it to the next level. It integrates with your existing WordPress account within minutes via a plugin. And then there’s no going back to unstructured selling.
Something for Everyone
Shopify has a plan for everyone, according to the size of the business and their need.
It’s an application that includes everything on the same platform. Moreover, it removes the need for tons of other paid apps.
Free Resources
Shopify is always ready to help its users as they want them to succeed on their platform. They also have a blog where the e-Commerce experts share some best tactics. To help sellers understand online selling even better, they have created a Shopify academy with free eCommerce courses.
Free App Store
Apart from all the freebies that Shopify offers to help you succeed, it also gives you a free app store. It is just like any other store and enables you to get started with the frills and fancies of selling. For example, if you want to run ads on your Shopify store, you can download the Shopify app store’s right plugin. Similarly, you might want to offer discount coupons to your customers. For this, you can search for a relevant app and get your work done in minutes.
Shopify alone won’t guarantee your success as you need to have the right mindset and the marketing techniques to promote the business and survive the competition.
Moreover, Shopify is a learning curve, and to get hands-on, one needs months of experimentation and some practice. Now that you know the A to Z of what is Shopify let’s find out how it works.
How Does Shopify Work?
While the answer to what is Shopify is clear, undertaking the nuances includes several steps. Essentially Shopify is a subscription service that helps you create a website. Using their shopping cart solution, you can sell, ship, and manage your products.
Enter the Required Details
First of all, one would need to sign up to the Shopify and enter the required details and click on the start free trial button.
Enter Your Unique Store Name
After entering all the details, enter a unique store name. Spend time thinking about the right store name as it will be your brand. Make sure it is something catchy and resonates with the spirit of your business.
Choose a Design and Theme
Now the user would need to choose a design for the store, which includes theme font colors logos, etc.
Customize Your Store
Once you have signed up, you will become the admin of your store. Now head to the Admin Panel to start customizing your store by uploading the products, and setting up the payments and shipping.
Add a Payment Gateway
Once your products are uploaded, add a payment gateway to your Store, This will help your customers make transactions smoothly. Make sure you only add a reliable portal to ensure the safety of the transactions. Often, fraudulent activities occur via the gateway, and customer’s card details are stolen. Make sure you do not end up choosing an unreliable payment gateway where such malicious activities take place.
Create a Test Order and Start Selling
Now that everything is done to create a test order to check if everything is going fine in your store. Get, Set, Start Selling!
How to Grow Your Online Store on Shopify?
Understanding what is Shopify can help you establish your presence in eCommerce. But, with time, you will also have to think of ways to grow your business.
Leverage the following strategies to grow your online business on Shopify-
- Create ads and run them on various platforms, such as Facebook, Google, or any other social network.
- Create an impression with your content. You can try to write blogs related to your niche and use search engine optimization to drive your website’s traffic. However, new store owners usually neglect the content marketing strategy as they focus just on the ads. On the other hand, with content marketing, you can drive blog traffic, which will lower the ad costs and increase conversion rates.
- Before making your store public, build an audience with the help of social media. For example, before launching your store, start an Instagram account, and start promoting products there.
Now that you know the A to Z of what is Shopify and the way it works, you can start selling to your audience. Just download the Shopify plugin and reach out to your audience at a domestic and international level. In case you’re worried about shipping, try Dash101’s low-cost shipping services and take your business to new heights. The key to excel is taking the first step and building your eCommerce store.
