If you are planning to launch a full-fledged eCommerce website with added functionalities and custom features, Shopify is what you must turn to. The ease, flexibility, and variety of options that it offers in managing inventory and selling products are simply unmatched by any other eCommerce platform. This is one of the fastest-growing eCommerce platforms and is widely popular because of the range of themes, plugins, and APIs it offers merchants to outpace competitors. This post evaluates Shopify’s worthiness as a next-gen eCommerce development platform with some top reasons to build an online store with it.
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Table of Contents What Makes Shopify Distinct? Shopify Plans Shopify Eminent Benefits
Shopify’s Captivating Features Trademark Advantages of Shopify
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What Makes Shopify Distinct?
The ease of setting up a store with Shopify and the number of features it offers merchants to customize their stores make Shopify distinct from other eCommerce development platforms. Currently, there are over 5.6 million online stores powered by Shopify (May 2022). Besides this, order management, customer tracking, report & analytics, and seamless payment integration are some of the most rejoiced aspects of Shopify merchants.
You can also easily manage your Shopify store and modify its visual appeal without meddling with the codes. This is what makes it an extremely popular platform across 175 countries. The Shopify community is regularly engaged in equipping the platform with the latest tools so that merchants do not struggle to perform any task regarding updating, managing, and customizing their online store.
Shopify Plans
Shopify has a plan for online stores of all sizes, offering tools, features, and support accordingly. Here are the five most widely used plans:
· Starter: starting at $5 per month
· Basic: $29 per month if billed monthly and $14.44 when billed annually
· Shopify: $79 per month if billed monthly and $39.44 when billed annually
· Advanced: $299 per month if billed monthly and $147.74 when billed annually
· Shopify Plus: This plan will cost you around $2000 per month. However, the prices are negotiable.
Beginners can easily start with the basic plan. Further, large and complex online stores can choose to go ahead with Shopify Plus, which offers seamless integration and customization options for merchants.
Shopify Eminent Benefits
Let’s glance at some unique and much-admired benefits that Shopify offers worldwide merchants to run their online stores with added convenience and flexibility successfully.
· Up-to-the-mark Security
Shopify is compliant with PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security & Standards) and uses SSL encryption to secure data transmission between servers. This makes Shopify development utterly secure as you can safely integrate multiple gateways for your store without worrying about its security. In addition, Shopify offers a wide range of security features for merchants, like two-factor authentication and fraud detection. It detects all possible suspicious activities and warns you to review them manually. It offers an extra protection layer against any unauthorized access or data breaches.
· Following Trends with Added Customizations
Customization has become an indispensable part of running an online store successfully. Shopify lets you manage and customize products based on buyers’ interests or views. You can add unlimited product options at your store, modify your theme and content, add text fields and checkboxes to your product pages, and much more.
· Fast Loading Speed
The current fast-paced generation is extremely concerned about their time, especially when they are online. Shopify uses the latest CDN powered by Cloudflare and offers a swift loading speed by utilizing caching at its best.
· Scalability for Emerging Functional Scope
Every merchant aims to target maximum users, elevate the profit, and globalize its brand. Shopify knows this very well and thus offers high-level scalability to let online retailers grow and scale up their products and server space accordingly. Its impeccable POS accepts payments and keeps track of sales. The higher the volume of transactions, the more flexible Shopify’s POS gets to facilitate uninterrupted transactions.
Shopify’s Captivating Features
Shopify offers a range of default features that make it exceptionally distinct from its close competitors. Here are some amazing features that add to its eCommerce prowess that you can implement without any extra plugins or apps:
· Calculation and collection of sales tax
· Shipment tracking, calculation, and label printing
· Posting engaging blogs & creating product information
· Local delivery & pick up options
· Accepting payments from multiple gateways including credit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Facebook Pay
· Automate order notifications and tracking updates
· Web hosting with CDN and SSL certificate included
· Seamless integrations to sell your products to third-party platforms
· Create advanced product variations
Trademark Advantages of Shopify
Besides the default features, Shopify has some exhilarating features and traits that make it a distinct eCommerce development platform.
· Enticing Themes
Shopify allows merchants to choose the best theme for their store from over 1600 lucrative themes. This eliminates the need for web designers to create a template from scratch; they can directly work on customizing these themes per their unique store requirements. These themes allow you to offer customized products and content and easily add, remove, or modify page layouts. You will find free and paid themes on Shopify to choose the right one as per your product catalog and one that truly reflects your brand’s image. All the themes on Shopify are designed considering the mobile audience; hence, you need not worry about performance and speed. The free trial will give you good insights into its usability and feasibility.
· Shopify Analytics
Customization is the key to surviving in the highly competitive eCommerce landscape. The more analytics you can leverage for your Shopify store, the better customization you can offer your customers. Shopify offers critical insights into your store’s performance through live view, reports, analytics, behavior, finance, industry, marketing order, profit, retail sales, product analysis, and many more. All this information adds to your store management abilities as you can easily identify your customers’ purchasing patterns and optimize products, deals, and discounts. You also get various financial reports to manage and allocate the budget depending on the peak times.
· Abandoned Cart Reminders
Cart abandonment can lead to heavy losses, but Shopify lets you eliminate this possibility by offering regular abandoned cart checkout emails. This will help you to identify customers with products in their carts and send reminder emails to finish their purchases. This will reduce the cart abandonment rate and help merchants boost sales.
· Shopify Wishlist
Let users add items to their bookmarks and start directly from where they left off when they return to your store. Users often spend more on such a purchase, and this has a positive impact on your sales.
· Intuitive SEO Tools
Following standard SEO practices have become mandatory for online stores to survive the competition. Shopify offers various apps and plugins to get desired results from your SEO practices. Smart SEO is such an app that offers automated metadata input along with multi-language support. There are several apps like this that you can leverage to enhance your store’s ranking and attract maximum visitors to your store.
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