There are certainly more than 5 reasons to choose Shopify for your next (first?) ecommerce platform, not least of which is because the company was founded by Canadians who love ecommerce and hockey. But there are recommended word count limits for blog posts so I polled the FastPivot team and identified 5 areas where Shopify absolutely shines.
Before we start, let’s talk themes for a second. At its most basic level, Shopify is theme-centric. If you’ve created a blog in the past couple of years, you’re probably familiar with the concept of themes. (Much of WordPress’s popularity can be attributed to them). Themes are essentially pre-built templates with a ton of options for customization through configuration. That’s where you start with Shopify.
Beautiful Design
Themes enable you to create a visually compelling Shopify store without breaking a sweat. With the variety of beautiful and responsive themes available in the Shopify store, it is easy to set up a great looking store out of the gate. Ben Rutledge, FastPivot’s lead designer, loves the way Shopify’s theme architecture makes it easy for professionals like him to customize themes a little or a lot, depending on the project. (He’s done both). According to Ben, “Shopify was built to support good design!”
Simplicity
Shopify simplifies much of what makes ecommerce scary for some and frustrating for many. Shopify has spent a lot of time making sure that their solution is easy to use on both sides. For the store owner, the Shopify dashboard is clean, simple and functional. It allows you to easily edit inventory, add pages and posts, change menus, or alter theme settings. Shopify store customers are greeted with user-centered shopping. Shopify’s handling of products, filters and collections makes store navigation simple for them. At the end of the shopping experience, the end of the buy path is a seamless cart and checkout experience.
Turnkey, Out-of-the-Box Deployment
An abundance of themes and inherent simplicity mean that you can start selling right out of the box. It’s a turnkey package so you have the basic ecommerce functionality you need to immediately launch a store. Although there is plenty you can do to improve and customize Shopify, it’s nice not having to if you don’t want to.
Point-of-Sale Integration
For online retailers with a brick-and-mortar location, Shopify provides a point-of-sale system that remains in sync with their online Shopify store. This is great news for the smaller online retailer that can’t afford a large full service solution costing tens of thousands of dollars. The difficulty of inventory management is alleviated. So if you’re selling merchandise online as well as in the high street (as they say in the UK), Shopify will eliminate some of your bigger headaches.
Cost
As an ecommerce retailer, you can spend money and you can save money. Shopify helps you in both areas. Themes and the integrated functionality of add-ons means your startup and operating costs can both remain quite low. With built-in features like abandoned cart recovery, the need for third-party applications is sharply reduced. Shopify is also a payment gateway, offering very competitive credit card rates. Both can help deliver more money to your bottom line. Overall, these cost savings are one of the most attractive reasons to take a very close look at Shopify.
Summary
We’ve really enjoyed watching this company be a change agent in the ecommerce platform industry. Picking just 5 reasons to choose Shopify highlights many of the reasons why the company’s popularity among online retailers has boomed in recent years. By making it easy to construct a beautiful looking store, they forced other ecommerce platforms to emphasize ease of use and utility. The flexibility also helps ecommerce agencies like FastPivot cost-effectively evolve themes into truly customized works of online retailing art.
If you have any questions about Shopify, please contact us. We can share with you the portfolio of Shopify-powered retailers we’ve worked with. And if you are interested in how to improve a Shopify store, download our eBook below.
