Shopify offers an elegant solution for those looking to set up their first online shop or for those looking to grow their existing ecommerce offering
With over 1,00,000 shop owners using Shopify – it is a tried and tested system.
Shopify is the perfect home for your brand and allows you to create a beautiful online shop with a secure checkout which re-assures your customers.
In this article, we review some of the great features of Shopify and also highlight some great tips and ideas from their blog and our experience.
Customise your shop
With Shopify, you will have complete control over the look and feel of your website, from choosing your domain name to your websites’ layout, colours, features and content.
No design skills are required for Shopify
Yes it’s true – no coding skills required!
Choose from over 100 hundred professional store templates, or Scoosh can build one for you.
You can get your Shopify store up and running very quickly without having coding knowledge.
This is one of the main reasons that Shopify has grown so fast.
Showcase your Products
Your products are displayed in an online catalogue, that can be organised by category making it easy for your customers to browse and shop.
Sell one product or thousands!
Shopify fits your business plans whether you are part-time business working from home, a weekend business or a large brand name.
There are no limits to the number of products you can sell – you can start with one!
Easily manage your orders with Shopify
Accept orders in seconds and get notified by email or mobile when a new sale comes in. Fulfill one or multiple orders with just one click, making your order management a breeze.
Shopify makes delivery easy
Easily integrate delivery with every major carrier and provide your customers with tracking info for their orders.
Access everything from your mobile phone
Your business doesn’t stop when you’re away.
Instantly access your store analytics, update your store, fulfill orders, or contact a customer all from your mobile phone.
The Shopify shopping system?
Secure Shopping Basket
All Credit Cards and transactional information is protected by the same level of security use by major banks: a 256-bit SSL certificate.
Accept all major credit and debit cards
With Shopify you can accept Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express the minute you launch your shop. You’ll get a low credit card rate and no hidden fees.
Offer Free Delivery
Free Delivery
Post Office studies have shown that one of the most common reasons that people ‘abandon their shopping baskets’ on websites is that they are hit with hidden charges upon checking out – especially delivery charges.
With Shopify you can offer free delivery or choose a price point where delivery is free (e.g. Orders above £50.00 are free).
By making this clear to potential customers it has been shown that this increases your sales online.
Multiple languages
If you are looking to export (and with the internet anything is possible!) Shopify can be setup for over 50 languages.
Managing and Fulfilling orders
Customer Profiles
Find your customer’s contact information and order history ‘at a glance’.
Learn more about your customer’s shopping habits and provide deals and offers to encourage them to spend more.
Customer Accounts
Repeat shopping is a great way to grow sales.
Encourage this by allowing customers to create an account when they checkout.
Many customers – usually ones in a hurry or with a one-off purchase – prefer to checkout as a guest without having to take time to create an account.
Shopify caters to both.
Order Fulfillment
Many online stores do not actually hold stock.
Instead, their orders are fulfilled by ‘fulfillment centres’ e.g. Fulfillment by Amazon
Shopify can connect to these systems to allow you to be more efficient in order fulfillment.
Manage on the go with the Shopify Mobile
Shopify Mobile allows you to manage orders, update your shop. manage stock, fulfill orders and contact customers.
All from your mobile phone.
Shopify is search engine optimised
Potential customers will search for shops, products and services in Google and other search engines.
Shopify supports best practice for SEO and allows you to customise Header tags, titles and meta tags.
Find out more about Search Engine Optimisation here.
Sitemap is generated automatically
It is important that a regularly updated sitemap is created and submitted to Google and other search engines. Shopify will generate a sitemap.xml file and automatically update it when you change your products, web pages and blog posts.
A sitemap is a file that lists all the web pages that make up your web site.
Search engine web crawlers read this file and use it to intelligently crawl your website and index your pages (or not) it in their search engine.
Shopify automatically generates a sitemap for you and updates whenever you add, edit or delete a product in your shop.
Offer discount codes, coupons and gift cards
Run sales and promotional discounts on your website by offering coupon codes.
You can for example set up choose ‘x £ off’, or a ‘% off’ or ‘Free Delivery’.
Mailing out offers and sharing on your social media platforms is a great way to generate additional sales.
Allow customers to purchase gift cards for someone from your shop.
Gift cards can also be used as store credit.
Social Media Integration
Social Media offers tremendous potential to build a customer base.
Shopify websites include options to integrate Social Media on all your (and your customers) favourite platforms including Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.
Email Marketing and Shopify
Shopify integrates with many email marketing platforms (e.g. MailChimp)
When your customers checkout on your website they can be given the option to sign up an so doing, you can build up your email list.
Selling on Facebook
With over a billion users Facebook offers huge potential to reach existing and new customers.
Customers can browse the products that you add to your Shopify store and make purchases without leaving Facebook.
Manage your products
Stock Management
Manage your entire stock with Shopify.
Track your stock counts and automatically stop selling a product when stock runs out.
Offer product variations
Offer different variations of the products that you sell.
For example small, medium large, or variety of colours.
The possibilities are endless.
Each product can have its own price Stock Keeping Unit (SKU), weight, dimensions and stock.
Organise your products
Products can be organised by category, type, season, sale and more.
Products can also be sorted based on price, supplier and stock level.
Add multiple images to products to show off your products and encourage buyers.
Shop products and SEO
Product pages can be difficult to rank well in SEO terms.
One reason for this is that some products are so similar to others that Google may treat this as duplicate content and not rank all your product pages.
Also a lot of product pages don’t have much content on them.
Shopify optimises your product pages by allowing you to add product specific meta tags titles and url handles, which are the basics of good SEO.
Digital Products
What is a digital product?
A digital product is one that you don’t deliver through the post but can be downloaded digitally.
This could be a song (mp3 file) a pdf book or any file that you are selling.
Digital products can easily be added to your online shop.
Import and Export Products
If you have a spreadsheet of products that you would like to add to your new or existing Shopify website, you can import a CSV file.
This can save time when you are setting up your shop or mass editing
Unlimited Products
There is no limit to the number of products that you can add to your online shop.
Analytics
When you login to the administration area of your Shopify website your dashboard has a complete overview of how your shop is doing.
Understanding your orders and your web traffic will help you make the right choices to grow your online business.
Product Reports
Analyse and gain insight into your shop’s growth. See which products are selling — and which ones aren’t – and make change
Contact us if you have any questions about Shopify as a platform for your e-commerce website.