You probably know that Shopify is one of the biggest eCommerce platforms; to be more specific, it is the second-biggest e-commerce platform with a 20% market share. Trusted by over 1,000,000 businesses worldwide, Shopify is top of mind when thinking about eCommerce platforms. 

Reasonably priced, with solid features and a 24/7 support center, Shopify became an excellent solution for everyone interested in selling online. It allows you to set up your store and sell whatever you want: physical products, digital products, services and consultations, memberships, ticketed experiences, classes and lessons, rentals. 

Key Shopify Features

Shopify provides a various set of tools to help you and other merchants to set up and run an eShop. Pricing plans are set on monthly billing, but for anyone running a successful shop, these should immediately become negligible costs. Depending on what pricing plan you choose, you can find everything you need to organize your products, sell your products online, advertise them, or to process payments. For this last part, we teamed up to offer you an easy to integrate Shopify Payment Plugin.  

To be more explicit about what Shopify has to offer, let's take a look at some of the essential features:

Storefront: 

• Free and paid themes: the  is full of templates ready to change the way your store looks

• Mobile optimization: it makes your shop look good on every phone or tablet

• Customization: allows you to edit themes in HTML & CSS, or even to work with an expert that builds your store from the ground up

• Complete blogging platform: a mean to provide relevant content to your customers

• Web hosting: permits the building of an eShop without the fuss over servers costs 

Shopping cart: 

• SSL certificate: guarantees security for all pages, content, customer, and transaction information

• It easily integrates with payment processing solutions, most importantly, it integrates flawlessly with Twispay

• Multiple languages: ensures that every customer understands the order and costs

• Flexible shipping costs: can be automatically calculated based on some criteria 

• Recovery of the abandoned checkouts: to remind your customers about their abandoned shopping carts

Store management:

• Friendly dashboard and mobile app: easy access to all your data and information about the eShop

• Product organization and an unrestricted number of products, both physical and digital

• Customer accounts (optional): could be handy for some business models (i.e subscription-based products & services) 

• Customer profiles and groups: it provides insights about customers and their habits

• Fulfillment solutions such as Amazon, Rakuten Super Logistics, and Shipwire that could handle warehousing, preparation, and shipping on your behalf

• Dropshipping integrations: you can get rid of inventory (but you can also get inventory management if you don't want to dropship) 

Marketing:

• SEO: helps potential customers find your shop using search engines

• Discounts, promotions and gift cards: to keep your customers engaged

• Social media integration and multichannel selling (Facebook, Amazon, eBay, etc.)

• Analytics: to have an eye on your store's growth

As you can see, from design to marketing, to security, Shopify provides a wide set of features that enables any merchant to run a successful online eShop. All in all, you can find more information and features here.

The Pros and Cons of Shopify

Before we wrap up, here are a few pros and cons to consider before deciding if Shopify is the platform for you: 

        Shopify Pros

• Easy to use even if you're technically illiterate

• Low monthly cost makes the setup affordable

• The variety of free themes  (paid themes are also available if you want more options)

• Dropshipping integrations make dropshipping more manageable

• Multiple support options that ensure technical support every hour of the day through phone, live chat, or email

• Selling on multiple channels such as Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, and eBay

• Intuitive management system/ dashboard

• It easily integrates with Twispay's nifty payment processing plugin ;)

         Shopify Cons

• Content format doesn't automatically update when you change themes

• Limited functionality (especially for bigger businesses) To meet specific business needs/ to make the shop work in a certain way you might need a handful of add-ons

• These add-ons are nice but also a little pricey

Wrap Up

Shopify is considered to be one of the most easy-to-use eCommerce platforms for both small and large businesses. It equips merchants with a full set of tools to build their eShop as wanted, but you should keep in mind that they're not all free. However, even if Shopify isn't the cheapest eСommerce platform, they are always fully transparent with their costs. 

We encourage you to take your time and research more platforms before committing to one. Take advantage of the free trials and test if it fits well with your needs and don't forget: we can help you with a seamless checkout integration.