Shopify is an eCommerce software platform that gives small to mid-sized businesses the advanced ability and place to easily sell their products online, regardless of location. Its features are catered for easy payment solutions, Shopify POS integrations and efficient monitoring across all factors. This includes product tracking, performance analytics and store management.
Shopify Features
The following features are found in Shopify’s system:
Storefront
Setting up the storefront to your business is made easy with Shopify’s 70 plus professional themes and web-based website builder. If you need help in setting up your store from the ground up, you can contact an expert to assist you in customization. The storefront also lets you publish and categorize articles, create brochures with all the products and their corresponding prices and encourage discussion through the comment section.
Shopping cart
Shopping has never been made easier with Shopify’s free SSL certificate, 100 payment gateways and automatic carrier shipping rates. Depending on your pricing plan, shipping discounts can be used as well. It has other features such as automatic taxes, multiple language options and abandoned checkout recovery.
Store management
This feature lets you manage several customer-related categories. This lets you experience an organized interface complete with customer profiles, customer accounts, customer groups and more. Inventory is also automatically updated, making customer refunds easier to process.
Marketing and SEO
Letting you do on-page SEO practices such as customizing meta tags, you can expect an increase in your ranking when customers use search engines. Marketing features and tools found under this feature include social media integration, letting consumers leave product reviews and letting sellers offer discounts and gift cards.
Inventory and product management
Keeping track of your products can be difficult without the right system in place. However, with Shopify, you don’t have to worry about not being on top of things. You can find helpful tools to assist you in managing your inventory, offering different variations of products, organizing your items based on categories and importing and exporting them using CSV files.
Analytics
Knowing how your business is doing lets you change techniques or boost marketing strategies related to a popular product. With this feature, you can enjoy a variety of tools and features such as a dashboard, product reports, the ability to export reports and Google Analytics integration.
Mobile application
Even without a desktop or a laptop, keep updated with your business through Shopify’s mobile application. Business owners can now capture payments and fulfill orders straight from their phone. The application also has a mobile dashboard that allows you to manage inventory, contact customers and keep data in sync.
Shopify Benefits
Omni-channel setup
One of the top reasons why people are using Shopify in the first place is because it lets you have a virtual store online. The stress of setting up virtual stores is considerably lesser than physical ones. You don’t have to worry about opening at a fixed time and taking inventory manually at the end of each day.
With Shopify, you can sell everywhere—Facebook, Amazon, Pinterest and even the applications that you’ve developed on your own. This drastically increases your sales revenue as people can easily find you online and buy their products that catch their attention. It also helps that Shopify has more than 100 payment processors worldwide.
Digital and physical products
Shopify lets you sell both digital and physical products. Just specify them according to their type. The digital products can be handled through email or downloaded via online storage. This type of feature can’t be done through physical stores, which means you’ll get to sell more products online.
Boosted sales
The third benefit ties well with the previous reasons. Since you have an omnichannel setup with both digital and physical products for sale, it’s expected that your business will experience a boost in sales. However, Shopify’s features also ensure no unnecessary loss from your visitors and customers.
This is observed in Shopify’s abandoned cart recovery tool. People abandoning their carts online is a common occurrence in online shopping, especially when shipping fees are added. However, Shopify has the solution to address this problem. You can now follow up on customers who didn’t complete their shopping process by sending an email.
Shopify Pricing
If you want to test out Shopify’s previously mentioned features and benefits, the best way to do so is to try its 14-day free trial version. You can start your freemium version at any time as it does not require you to input important credit card information.
When it comes to pricing plans, Shopify offers three of them. They are separated according to their monthly price, available features and even shipping discounts, namely Basic Shopify, Shopify and Advanced Shopify. All the plans have Shopify POS app, hardware peripheral support and third-party POS applications. In this part of this review, the tools, payments and point of sale integrations will be discussed accordingly. This is to give you a better understanding of which plan is most suitable for your business.
The first plan, called Basic Shopify, is catered for people who are just starting out on their new business. It’s priced at $29 per month. The shipping discount can reach up to 64%, complete with print shipping labels. Additionally, Basic Shopify’s most notable features include the following:
- Online store
- Unlimited products
- Two staff accounts
- 24/7 support
- Sales channels
- Manual order creation
- Discount codes
- Free SSL certificates
- Abandoned cart recovery
Shopify, whose price starts at $79 per month, is the second pricing plan. It has everything you need for a growing business. Most of the features found in Basic Shopify have further been advanced in this plan. Expect an increase in staff accounts and additional tools such as gift cards and professional reports. An increase in shipping discount is also noted—this time reaching up to 72%. You can also have register shifts and unlimited Shopify POS staff PINs.
The last pricing plan is Advanced Shopify, priced at $299 per month. It has all the features found in the previous versions with additional tools like advanced report builder and third-party calculated shipping rates. Shipping discount now reaches up to 74%.
If you feel like the prices are not in line with your budget, there’s also a fourth plan—Shopify Lite. It’s priced at $9 per month but works primarily for Facebook and Messenger chats. You can add products to any website or blogs. You can pay for Shopify Lite through credit cards.
However, some people out there have high volume merchants and large businesses. If this is the case for you, then you can consider Shopify Plus. Just contact Shopify’s contact support and request a quotation.
Conclusion
The best way to improve your business is by capitalizing on what everybody else is using. Through the Web, companies and organizations alike are using top-tier software solutions to reach across the globe and widen their audience. Therefore, you’ll see an increase in online stores and shops all from different social media platforms. You have eBay, Craigslist and even Instagram plugins.
Shopify can be the difference between a sinking business and a profitable one. Selling in a remote location just won’t cut it, especially if you want to thrive on increased sales revenue. The best course of action to take is to sell online.
If you’re looking for one of the top software solutions to help you in reaching your goal, then consider Shopify. It’s widely regarded as one of the best online store builders. With more than 100 payment processors worldwide and free professional design store templates, it’s no wonder multiple businesses and companies are using it.
