Shopify is the perfect platform to create and manage your online store. As it’s an all-inclusive software solution, it gives you the tools you need to set up a business and manage your back office to promote, sell and ship your products to customers.
Shopify has several different plans and many extra features and apps available. Shopify Basic has everything you need when starting an ecommerce store, whereas Shopify Plus is ideal for growing businesses.
The platform makes it simple for you to start your own online store, accept online and in-store payments, market your products via various channels, and manage everything from one place to your back office.
It also allows you to create an ecommerce store using the site’s hosting and payment platforms, leaving you free to concentrate on work.
Shopify takes all your business processes and puts them into a centralised command centre, your admin panel. As a Shopify merchant, you can use the platform to create your ecommerce website and sell on social media and other online marketplaces, all from one place.
You are able to keep a fully updated inventory of stock that can sync with all your online and offline sales, meaning you can easily manage all your sales and operations from one place. It even has features which can manage your shipping.
As Shopify is a fully hosted cloud-based platform, it takes care of things such as server upgrades, software updates and maintenance. You can access your online store from anywhere with an internet connection.
The daily running of any business can require the use of many different tools and systems to manage marketing, sales, payments, and so much more. However, Shopify merchants can forget time-consuming and complicated processes and manage everything from one back office.
Every Shopify plan has the same core features, covering every basic function you need to set up and run your ecommerce business. Here’s what you’ll get when you choose Shopify
A fully hosted online store
Shopify is a fully hosted store where you can upload and start selling your products. You’ll also be able to create landing pages and blog articles to keep your customers informed and updated. Hosting is with every Shopify plan. You won’t have to worry about keeping your store secure; this is taken care of.
The look and feel of your Shopify store can be customised with numerous templates and Shopify theme options available from the theme store.
Shopify point of sale (POS)
All Shopify merchants can access Shopify POS, their powerful point of sale app. This can be used to make sales in person, for example, if you have a brick-and-mortar store or attend events or markets.
This makes selling online and offline seamless and convenient, and removes the need to manually update stock inventories or input accounting information from multiple places. You only need hardware such as a card machine to accept the payment.
Easy payment processing
All merchants can use Shopify Payments or choose from over 100 payment gateways if they want to use a third-party payment processor. With any of the payment gateways, you can accept all major payment methods in over 100 currencies.
Shopify Checkout
Whether you make sales from your online store or use multichannel marketing such as social media shops, as a Shopify merchant, you will use Shopify Checkout, which gives you a fast, efficient and, most importantly, secure checkout process.
Shopify back-office tools
Shopify provides various back office tools that allow you to keep your ecommerce business running and make it super easy to manage everything from one centralised dashboard.
Shopify’s back-office tools include:
As well as streamlining all your business processes in one back office, Shopify offers merchants many advantages over other platforms, including these key benefits;
Shopify is easy to use
Shopify was designed to be the most user-friendly tool for setting up an online store.
Absolutely anyone can build an ecommerce website without needing any knowledge of coding or complicated integrations. Its drag-and-drop editor makes it simple to customise your store and upload your products.
Once you’re up and running, everything is taken care of in your admin panel, and it’s easy to see your sales, customers and other analytics.
Shopify stores are automatically fully mobile responsive. As this is likely where all your traffic will come from, it removes the worry and challenges of making your ecommerce site mobile-friendly.
Shopify is also mobile-friendly for merchants to use. Simply download the Shopify app on your device and manage your store from anywhere in the world.
Increasingly popular social commerce provides an excellent opportunity to make even more sales. Shopify allows users to sell directly on social media. You can easily integrate your social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok with your Shopify account.
Selling directly on these platforms means that social media users can discover your products via a social media channel and make a purchase without leaving the site they’re on. Everything still runs through your Shopify checkout.
Shopify stores come with built-in SEO features to help your business get discovered.
Shopify has many features to make it easy to optimise your content for SEO, including tools for your meta title tags and descriptions, URLs, products and webpages.
This automatically takes care of many time-consuming SEO tasks, such as adding canonical tags to pages. It will also autogenerate your website’s sitemap.xml and robots.txt files.
Final thoughts
A streamlined back office not only makes it easier to run an ecommerce business but also allows you to see exactly what is happening when it happens, all from the palm of your hand.
Shopify is the perfect platform for any ecommerce business, especially as you can add features and functionality to assist you as your business grows and changes.
At Quickfire, we love to see our customers’ businesses thrive, and Shopify, as we’ve seen, helps them achieve their goals seamlessly. Get in touch if you’d like more information on how Shopify could benefit your commerce business.
Need an answer to a problem? Take a look at our insights section to find advice, guidance and recommendations across a range of e-commerce topics – from conversion to retention and loyalty, from systems integration to remarketing.
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