The Canadian based Shopify is one of the leading ecommerce software services in the world. The company currently services more than 600,000 businesses with a gross that exceeds $55 billion.

Regarded by many as one of the easiest to use of all ecommerce providers, not to mention reasonable rates for merchants large and small — Shopify aims to produce a hassle free experience.

Why Shopify?

The goal of any great ecommerce software platform is to reduce the amount of time and energy you expend on transitioning into an online store. Running a business is complicated enough, so Shopify hopes to make everything painless from the creation of the website to managing inventory to processing orders to working with secure payments.

Merchants that use Shopify do not need any web design skills or hire an outside developer. Shopify offers over a hundred of professional, contemporary looking themes and templates. While the design is pre-designed, there is ample room to make the website as responsive and customizable as you prefer.

Shopify also offers affordable rates with a free, two week trial on its basic platform and rates from there that start at just $9 p/ month.

Website Builder

Shopify provides over 100 templates to select from. Most of them are moderately priced, and 24 themes are free of charge. They are a little more basic with less ability to customize yet ideal if you are an entrepreneur on a tight budget.

The ecommerce provider creates websites with mobile devices in mind, so the template will also translate into being accessible and looking great on a smartphone or tablet too. All the themes incorporate a pre-defined structure of an online store in order to provide all the working ingredients to make a sale. From there you can move around pieces to cater it to your own liking, but all the ingredients are there from the first moment.

Shopify also features in-house web hosting which will save you money. There is no need to invest in a third party web hosting which makes Shopify a great all-in-one deal. Furthermore, Shopify utilizes an optimized server structure in order to deliver top notch website performance. They are considered a cloud-hosted ecommerce platform.

While a lot of ecommerce software companies label themselves as “easy to use platforms” not all of them are accurate. Shopify, however, is one that deserves that title. From the creation and launch of your website, to day to day online management — Shopify is very easy to use. It is possible to launch a website in minutes and grow your online profile from there.

Management Tools

Shopify is extremely easy to use, especially for entrepreneurs that lack a ton of technological savvy. Among the management tool highlights:

• Inventory management provides quick, easy to read reports
• Accepts secure payments either through services like PayPal or credit card
• Organize inventory however you want, with multiple options
• Track orders and process them to your liking
• Select from a variety of shipping options and how to manage them
• Allow Shopify to automate tax rates or create tax overrides and exemptions
• Add customer accounts, monitor high buyers
• Track analytics both for website performance as well as customer preferences
• Improve marketing and SEO performance with resources
• Apps and built-in tools provide plenty of extra selling and management features

Features

Shopify features two plans: Shopify and Shopify Plus. The regular plan is built for start-ups, entrepreneurs or small to mid-sized businesses. Users may sign up for a free trial. Shopify Plus, meanwhile, is catered more to high selling merchants as well as large businesses and does not offer a free trial.

Along with a simple website builder and plenty of tools to handle everything from how your goods are organized and presented through your website, there is a number of built-in tools to help monitor everything from accepting payments, to calculating taxes and shipping costs, to monitor the actual shipping and dealing with customer communications.

The goal of every great online store should be to expand its demographic of potential buyers, and Shopify helps by providing an abundance of marketing solutions with apps that are also available from their App Store.

Customer Service

Shopify’s customer service is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Their customer service is available through phone, chat, email — along with a thriving online community that features a user forum.

The ecommerce software provider also offers an abundance of online resources including user guides, podcasts, encyclopedia and their “Shopify Academy”. If you have any doubts about transitioning to an online presence with your company, hopefully this will help ease your mind.

Pros

• Shopify is very easy to use with start-up themes and the ability to launch an online store in minutes. They provide plenty of tools and resources to improve your online presence over time.
• The performance of Shopify is outstanding. Because the ecommerce software provides its own web hosting, the speed and load times are great. Online merchants know how important speed and performance is to sales. Shopify delivers.
• Shopify is very secure whether it comes to accepting online payments or preventing hackers and other attacks from online predators.

Cons

• Though Shopify features reasonable monthly costs for its service, the additional transaction processing fees can add up. You need to be mindful of these charges when setting your prices.
• The basic management and maintenance of a website is easy, though if you are looking to really customize your online store you may need to hire someone with advanced coding as Shopify can get quite complicated.

Conclusion

Shopify is one of the most effective options available for ecommerce software if you prefer more of a hands off approach. Sure, you can invest in a quality web developer and/or team to keep your online presence thriving. However, if you don’t have the funds to make those kinds of investments, Shopify is a very good alternative.

It requires minimal experience with web design and management to get off the ground and handles most of the daily tasks so you can focus on what’s most important to you. They provide exceptional customer service that is available any time of the day or week, if you have any trouble operating this very easy to use platform.