Why we love Shopify for eCommerce

Shopify has the 2nd largest market share

Shopify is a fully hosted eCommerce platform that is the fastest growing platform on the market.  It’s essentially turn-key and allows for the rapid and straight-forward selling solution. The trade off for convenience does come at the expense of control, but we’ve found it to be highly reliable and user friendly. 

1.  Getting started is painless and affordable.  You don’t have to worry about hosting, servers, back end maintenance and extensive development work.  This allows for the development work to focus on the design and user experience which mitigates development costs and timelines.
2. Beautiful and mobile responsive layouts abound.  You can choose a preset theme from the extensive marketplace and customize to your needs or build a fully custom solution.  Leveraging an existing theme makes launching an impressive eCommerce website a quick and enjoyable experience. The development environment allows you to tweak design or functionality and test before rolling these into production as well.
3. App and marketing integrations are plentiful.  The app marketplace is full of vetted apps that allow you to customize functionality to meet your needs.  Whether it be email marketing, image editing, SEO tools, store functionality, or design tools – the app marketplace likely has a prebuilt solution ready to solve your paint points.
4. Scalability and technical support is stellar.  Some of the largest vendors on the web are built on Shopify and it’s a solution ready to scale with your business.  In the instances where we’ve needed to reach out for technical support, they have been best in class and always available.
5. Built in payment processing and security.  You can bring your own merchant account or use Shopify payments.  You will pay a commission on sales to Shopify if you use your own payment gateway though, so if you’re doing significant volume it is a consideration.  Security with payment transactions is paramount for customer trust, using Shopify you already have PCI compliance and SSL security complete.
6. The interface is intuitive and easy to use.  Training staff to process orders, list products, and administer site updates is straightforward and tons of walkthroughs and reference material is available.  Outside of a major revamp or implementation most clients can be fully self sufficient without the need for a developer.
7. On page SEO is in place.  Shopify creates clean and search crawlable code.  It also allows for users to add custom meta descriptions, titles, and prevents duplicate content.  A lot of technical items are automatically completed such a sitemaps, schema, and canonical links. This allows you to focus on higher level concepts of SEO and start with a solid technical foundation.
8. Shopify API.  Looking to build custom functionality or integrate a third party service?  Using the Shopify API (and it’s extensive documentation) the options are limitless.  One of our favorites was implementing an inventory management system to live sync inventory between digital and retail properties.  The full scale of how customizable Shopify is really shines with their API.
9. Social media integration with Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest allows for shopping in app away from your website.  Allowing for an easy purchase experience improves conversions and provides a consistent in-app shopping experience. Using one product inventory you can sync it across all social channels and online marketplaces.

Extensive analytic reports are available.  Your dashboard will give insights and actionable intelligence into customers, traffic, and products.  These reports will allow you to make decisions based on hard data and achieve results.