Previously, starting an e-commerce business was a huge deal with so many technical details involved. Nowadays, with various ready-to-use e-commerce platforms, creating and marketing products has become much simpler.
Shopify is one such platform that has made a massive difference in the e-commerce sector. Many people with no technical knowledge have taken advantage of this platform to run their own e-commerce business with minimum investment. Before we jump on to how you can create your own Shopify store, let’s see what Shopify is and how it works.
What Is Shopify?
Shopify is basically an e-commerce platform for online stores and point-of-sale operations. This means that Shopify will give you space where you can create your e-store, add your products, sell it and run digital marketing campaigns for individual products. It is a cloud platform and, therefore, all the information you provide will be stored in a secure server and, therefore, you don’t have to worry about security or maintenance.
Shopify has grown a lot in the past few years with over 1 million merchants worldwide using this platform and its monthly recurring revenue increasing by folds every quarter.
Shopify doesn’t just give a platform where you can sell products. It offers a holistic service that includes inventory management, warehouse integration, shipping management, customer service management and many more. Therefore, with just a single platform, you can practically run your online business.
What Businesses Can You Run on Shopify?
Anyone can use Shopify to run any business. Even if you are starting in the e-commerce industry, you can still create a Shopify store and use it with complete ease in just a couple of days.
The best part about Shopify is that you can sell any type of products in here be it physical products or digital products. You can sell consultation services, writing services, therapy sessions, e-books, online courses and many more. You have to customize the Shopify store to make it clear about what you sell which is totally in your control.
Even among the physical products, there are several ways by which you can use Shopify.
- You can start a direct sale product business where you are the seller and you ship your products to the customers.
- You can create an e-commerce businesswhere you tie-up with multiple sellers whose products will be sold through your Shopify store. This is called a dropshipping business.
- You can sell second-hand products either shipped by you or by a seller.
Among the various businesses in Shopify, fashion and apparel industry seems to be the top industry that has maximum stores in Shopify followed by health and beauty, and furniture.
Among the top three fastest-growing industries in Shopify are pet products, music and adult products which show that the non-physical products are also making a huge presence.
How Much Does Opening a Shopify Store Costs?
Shopify has very affordable plans for businesses to start their stores online. Initially, if you want to try out their platform, you can use the free 14-day trial for which you don’t need to give any credit card details.
Once you are satisfied with what you see, you can upgrade to the paid plans. There are three main types of Shopify plans.
- Basic Shopify ($29/month)
This is the minimal Shopify program to run an e-commerce business. This plan is best for those who are single-handedly managing the e-commerce store and are just entering the world of online business. In this plan, you can create an e-commerce store and a blog, add an unlimited number of products to it, create sales channels, have options for discount codes and free SSL certificate.
The transaction fee for Basic Shopify is 2% which is higher than the other plans. You will be missing out the calculation of third-party shipping rates which is vital when you are dealing with many sellers.
- Shopify ($79/month)
This is a decent version of the Basic Shopify. It has all the features of Basic Shopify plus a few more features for the addition of gift cards and professional report generation. This report is useful to analyze how your e-commerce business performs and keep an eye on its progress and performance. The transaction fee is 1% for this plan.
- Advanced Shopify ($299/month)
Advanced Shopify plan is best for those who conduct large-scale online business where you have hundreds of sellers and numerous customers. Apart from all the features of the previous plans, you get access to the advanced report builder and the option for calculating the third-party shipping rates.
The best part of this plan is the least transaction fee which is just 0.5% of the amount you sell. It makes a huge difference for businesses who make thousands of dollars every single day. The 0.5% difference in transaction rate between the Shopify plan and the Advanced Shopify plan could save a lot of money in the long run.
Apart from these, Shopify has two more additional plans for businesses that have bandwidth lesser or greater than these three plans.
- Shopify Lite ($9/month)
If you want to run a small business integrated into your blog or website, you can use Shopify Lite. This plan allows you to sell on Facebook with a Buy Now button that takes them to the page on your website.
- Shopify Gold
Shopify Gold is for large-scale businesses and enterprises. You can sell your products worldwide and accept payments in multiple currencies and enjoy advanced customization capabilities. The price for Shopify Gold will be calculated based on request depending on the scale of your online business.
If you are starting with your online business, you can either go with Shopify Lite or Basic Shopify and then upgrade your account to the advanced versions as and when needed.
How Can You Setup a Store on Shopify?
Shopify is specially created for those with less technical knowledge to build and run an e-commerce store. So, it’s pretty simple to set up your account on Shopify and create a store.
To start with, you need to create an account on Shopify.
After that, you need to add the legal business name, the business address, the contact details and the payment information. These are the basic setups required for any online business. After providing the necessary information, you can go ahead and add the website domain and create a store by choosing a theme.
There are numerous official themes on Shopify from which you can choose the one that best fits with the products you want to sell. After selecting a theme, you can customize it with your business logo, business name, colour schemes and other page features. Once you have a store, it’s time to add product pages.
All you need to do is to add the product name, description, images, cost of the product along with the shipping rates and other additional details about the products. You can, in parallel, set up the collections which are nothing but defined groups with the same traits, like a collection of men’s pants, women’s tops, etc.
Once you have added all these details and the payment gateways, you can see a preview of the shop, test it a few times and make it live!
When you are creating a new Shopify account, you can use this official checklist from Shopify to help you out.
How Can You Grow Your Online Business on Shopify?
Shopify has a lot of features that help you with the other facets of running a business like sales and marketing.
- Blogs and SEO Tools – Shopify has options to create blogs and use SEO to optimize your product pages to rank better in search results.
- Marketing Campaigns – You can create digital marketing campaigns on search engines and social media right from the Shopify platform. You can see the performance of the campaign, make changes to optimize them and get the best out of every campaign.
- Marketing Automation – You can set up automatic emails to send to customers, set up automated sales lines, digital marketing automated funnels and assign tasks with the virtual assistant of Shopify, Kit.
- Dashboard Reports – Shopify and Advanced Shopify plans can generate reports of the business performance with various parameters and campaign comparisons to check what works and doesn’t works for your business.
Shopify has more such features that provide deep insights into the performance of your e-commerce business. You can take full advantage of Shopify down to its marketing and optimization tools to keep your business on the path of constant growth.
If you want some help in creating your first Shopify store or growing your e-commerce business, you can contact the digital marketing experts from YellowFin Digital. Our e-commerce specialists can help you with setting up a new Shopify store, make changes to it, provide consultation sessions on using the marketing tools of Shopify and conduct digital marketing campaigns on your behalf too. Have any other specific requirement in mind? Call us at 361-844-8550 now.
