Shopify? What is that many newbies to the ecommerce world ask me. The answer… the best thing since sliced bread! Well more accurately the easiest to use, easiest to setup, and easiest to manage ecommerce platform for their small business!
With such a bold statement, let me back it up with a few facts (learned by myself, and any of my ecommerce customers).
- Out of the box in 10 minutes or less! – Shopify can be used, with no real configuration, nothing fancy, to host your online store in 10 minutes or less. Don’t believe me, ask and I will prove it to you. Now sure, it might not be exactly what you want, look the way you want, but your products, ordering, pages, contact forms, etc can be put in, and ordered from anyone in 10 minutes or less.
- HUGE gallery of themes, and a great price! – The Shopify Theme Gallery hosts a wide varity of styles, colors, and general functionality that will suffice for almost every business model that I have come across. Most will take a little help to understand, some training on how to manage your navigation etc, but trust me start with a standard theme.
- Easy to get exactly what you want – Shopify has from what I have seen the technical backend to support almost anything you can think of. With a good plan, a clear requirement, and a great developer you can do a wide variety of things pretty quickly (our average turn around for a development request is about 1 day)
- Enabled! Want a mobile version of your store, it’s there… a Facebook tab to sell products, it’s there… Shipping integration to USPS, UPS, FedEX, it’s there… Shopify was very smart from a business perspective by opening up information about their API early. This has allowed a host of other companies to build wonderful apps that can be installed in minutes to meet almost any need you may have.
- Supports SEO! The general layout of Shopify makes the first steps of SEO automatic. It names pages the way you write (not in crazy numbers and things like other ecommerce vendors). It automatically creates well formatted and appropriate URLs, Canonical Id’s are built in, OpenGraph is supported easily, and most other platforms can’t say that. Recently they added native 301 redirect support… who does that!!!
So to sum it up… would I use it… OF COURSE (if I actually sold products). But I will tell you that I haven’t had a customer that I got using Shopify (like www.killerduckdecals.com), or one that I helped with their store (like www.nestbedding.com, https://www.madeindetroit.com, or even https://www.bobinette.com) ever left!
So here is a shout out Shopify! Stay calm, and Shopify on!