The eCommerce Industry is witnessing a massive boom as more individuals are getting comfortable with online shopping. It has become necessary for retail businesses to sell their products in a digital space to increase their growth. Shopify helps companies to open online stores and sell products to a wider audience.
This article will provide a comprehensive understanding of Shopify and its features that help users while Selling on Shopify. The article will also mention a few tips that can help increase Sales on Shopify.
Table of Contents
Prerequisites
- Understanding of Content Management Systems.
Introduction to Shopify
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Shopify is a Canada-based Software as a Service providing company founded by Scott Lake, Daniel Weinand, and Tobias Lutke in 2004. It is currently the world’s most popular Content Management Service used by businesses to open online stores. Unlike other CMS platforms like Blogger and WordPress, Shopify is primarily used to create, host, and manage websites for companies operating in the eCommerce industry.
The platform offers multiple solutions and features to cater to all the needs of an eCommerce business, including Sales, Marketing, Customer Engagement, Customer Service, and many more. Shopify is a Multi-channel CMS platform mainly used by small and medium-sized companies to scale up their business by selling products in a digital environment. Customers of this subscription-based platform get access to thousands of customizable website templates to choose from, depending upon their business’ niche.
Shopify allows users to build, optimize and manage aesthetic-looking eCommerce websites that are compatible with smartphones. Selling on Shopify will enable businesses to expand their audience as Shopify provides support for advertisement and promotions over multiple social media platforms, including Facebook. This tremendously helps companies to amplify their Marketing and Sales efforts. Shopify also provides services to let users effectively manage their shipments and payments.
Since its launch, Shopify has meticulously worked towards providing the best features to its users. Over one million companies spread across more than 150 countries use Shopify as their Content Management System. Many industry-leading enterprises like Bajaao, Raymond, FitBit, Penguin Books, KKW Beauty, Hyatt Hotel Corp, RedBull, and John Jacob use Shopify to meet their eCommerce needs. To date, Shopify has raised total funding of $122 million over four funding rounds from investors like OMERS Ventures and Insight Partners. Shopify has successfully acquired twelve companies, including Oberlo, Handshake, and Boultmade, to enhance its CMS platform further.
3 Key Features of Shopify
Shopify being the world’s most popular CMS platform provides numerous features that make Selling on Shopify simpler for users. Below are a few notable Shopify features that help companies manage their operations.
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1) Shopify Inbox
Shopify Inbox is a solution developed to tackle the challenge of accessibility to resources for effective business operations. It is a handy smartphone application that helps users stay connected with their customers round the clock from any part of the world. Shopify Inbox lets users automate the process of sending customized messages to online store visitors in order to increase engagement and provide a better purchasing experience to customers.
Users can manage customer conversations across multiple platforms, including Facebook Messenger and SMS, using Shopify Inbox. The application is available for free download on Google Play Store and Apple App Store. The application will soon launch a feature to automatically classify conversations based on conversion possibilities to help users increase their productivity.
2) Shopify Analytics
Shopify Analytics helps users to analyze and understand the performance of their eCommerce stores. Shopify provides numerous tools that generate critical metrics like total sales, total customer visits, demography of visitors, and many others to help users better understand their business. Shopify displays impactful insights to enable users to make better-informed Sales, Marketing, and Customer Engagement decisions.
3) SEO Tools
It is imperative for companies to consider the effective utilization of Search Engine Optimization tools while Selling on Shopify. Better SEO will improve the ranking of websites on search engines that helps in increasing the online visibility of businesses and reach a wider audience. Shopify comes with multiple out-of-the-box SEO tools that enable businesses to achieve their goals.
Shopify also provides support for various third-party app integrations for effective website optimization. Smart SEO is one such application that offers features like automatic metadata input, multi-language support, providing Structured Data to multiple search engines, and many more. Accurately optimizing a website increases the possibility of boosting sales figures.
3 Ways of Selling on Shopify
Shopify is a robust platform that allows its customers to sell products via multiple channels. Below are a few ways companies can deliver their products by Selling on Shopify.
1) Online Store
Users can create stunning eCommerce websites and start Selling on Shopify. The websites built on Shopify are highly secure as Shopify provides 256-bits SSL Certification that ensures complete security of sensitive customer information like payment details, email address, phone number, address, and many more. The websites are also level-1 PCI compliant that minimizes the chances of a data breach. Users can build websites in Shopify without having prior knowledge of coding, as the platform comes with drag-and-drop functionality.
As the eCommerce stores are highly optimized, consumers get a very high loading speed and reliability that helps businesses improve their brand value and customer satisfaction. Effective Social Media Marketing on platforms like Facebook and Instagram helps companies reach out to a broader audience, increasing website traffic and Sales.
2) Shopify POS
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Shopify Point Of Sale (POS) is a feature that allows companies to sell their products offline through pop-up stores. Companies can build their own physical stores and sell their products in the real world without worrying about maintaining separate business records for online and offline purchases. Shopify POS allows users to accept hassle-free payments from customers using card readers. The transactions are directly linked with the company’s Shopify inventory, making data management an easy task.
The Shopify POS smartphone application is compatible with Apple devices (iPhone & iPad) and allows users to customize orders, view customer purchase history, and add discount offers. Shopify offers this product in two options, namely, Shopify POS Lite and Shopify POS Pro. The latter comes with better analytics tools and omnichannel selling features. Shopify POS can also be used to create Marketing Campaigns for walk-in customers.
3) Shopify Dropshipping
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Dropshipping is a retail business model that allows companies to tie up with wholesalers and sell third-party products on their websites. This unique model eliminates the need for eCommerce businesses to maintain operational warehouses as the entire storing and shipment process is outsourced to third-party wholesalers. Dropshipping makes selling easier for small businesses as they can sell a wide variety of products from their eCommerce websites. Companies forward order details like product name, delivery address, and other information to wholesalers, who then pack and deliver desired products to customers.
Shopify offers many applications that are available on the Shopify app market to enable users dropship products. Some notable dropshipping applications available for Shopify include Oberlo, D-Sers AliExpress Dropshipping, Printful, AutoDS, Syncee, Trends, and CJDropshipping.
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Advantages of Selling on Shopify
Selling on Shopify gives companies various advantages over others, some of which are mentioned below.
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1) Customer Support
Shopify provides a 24/7 customer support service that can be used to resolve any business-related issues. Shopify customers get access to many FAQ sections and community forums to resolve any query regarding running their eCommerce store on their own.
2) Easy to Use
Shopify comes with a clean and user-friendly interface that lets users understand the platform’s functionalities in a short time. As Shopify comes with many drag-and-drop features, it becomes easier for users to set up and start Selling on Shopify. Shopify displays all the necessary Analytics Data on a unified dashboard to let users understand the performance of their websites.
3) Improved Customer Experience
Shopify offers over 100 ready-to-use templates that users can customize according to their requirements. Users get to personalize Call-to-Action (CTA) buttons to provide a better overall buying experience to their customers. Customization options lead to improved brand value that results in increased customer satisfaction.
4) Mobile Friendly
Most eCommerce customers prefer to use smartphones to shop products online. Shopify gives users a massive benefit as websites built on this platform are optimized for mobile phones. Customers can seamlessly order their desired products by visiting online stores from their smartphones at ease.
4 Best Practices for Selling on Shopify
Leveraging the aforementioned features, users can amplify their Sales on Shopify. Below are a few tips to aid companies in Selling on Shopify.
1) Abandoned Cart Reminders
Customers tend to add products to their carts and then forget about them. Users must effectively use Shopify’s Abandoned Cart Reminder feature to send customized emails and messages to remind them of the items they have added. This helps companies to increase sales figures considerably. The process gets much smoother as it gets automated when users subscribe to Shopify Advanced.
2) Utilization of Reviews
Customers have an affinity for choosing products with higher and better reviews. Businesses must display product reviews to help customers make quicker and firmer purchasing decisions.
3) Utilization of Social Media Channels
Companies need to advertise their products across various social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and many others to increase their website traffic. With tap-to-action features like a swipe up and checkout button, launching Social Media Advertising Campaigns has become easy. Effective utilization of multi-channel advertisement plays a vital role while operating an eCommerce business.
4) Adding Live Chat Option
According to research, over 60% of customers tend to visit websites that provide live chat options. This feature helps to resolve product-related issues in an instant that results in faster purchases. As customers need not send emails to get their questions answered, live chat also helps to improve customer experience, and selling on Shopify is made easy.
Conclusion
Shopify is a powerful platform that caters to every need of retailers to sell products online and offline. Despite the fact that there are numerous all-in-one eCommerce software solutions available, Shopify remains at the top of its game. Selling on Shopify allows companies to expand into a larger market, resulting in increased Sales and Growth. The tips mentioned above will further help users better understand their audience and grow rapidly.
It is quite easy to sell on Shopify. However, tracking, integrating and analyzing customer information, particularly when your customer base is huge, becomes a difficult chore. This is where Hevo saves your efforts and simplifies the process.
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Share your experience of Selling on Shopify in the comments section below.
Dipayan has worked with several B2B SaaS companies to break down the complexities of data integration and analysis through insightful content tailored for technical and business audience.