Shopify should be on your radar if you want to sell products or services via your website. The popular e-commerce platform is one of the best options for processing digital and physical sales online. Featuring useful integrations, numerous free and premium themes, and an intuitive interface, Shopify's excellent toolset elevates it above a packed playfield to join Wix Stores as an Editors' Choice winner for e-commerce services.
Plans and Pricing
Shopify offers three standard packages: Basic, Shopify, and Advanced Shopify. Basic ($29 per month) lets you sell products on social media or a website (either hosted on Shopify or another platform). This plan includes a website, blog, SSL certificate, and unlimited product listings, storage, and monthly data transfers. The Shopify plan ($79 per month) includes everything in the Basic plan, plus five staff accounts, reporting, international pricing, and abandoned cart recovery. Advanced Shopify ($299 per month) has 15 staff accounts, an advanced report builder, and automatic shipping rate calculation. Shopify accepts all major credit cards.
Alternatively, Shopify offers several plans for niche-use cases. Shopify Starter ($5 per month) lets you exclusively sell products through social media apps. The Retail plan ($89 per month) focuses on selling items in person. Enterprise users can opt for the Plus plan ($2,300 per month) or the Enterprise Commerce tier, which has custom pricing. These tiers introduce wholesale and B2B options.
Shopify has transaction fees that get cheaper in the more expensive tiers. Online card rates start at 2.9% plus 30 cents in the Basic tier, while the Advanced tier lowers that to 2.5% plus 30 cents. These are standard rates for the category. Rates are even lower for in-person and third-party payments. Shopify has a three-day trial that lets you set up a store and test transactions before committing to the software.
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Building a Shopify Store
Shopify makes it easy to get a store up and running. After we created an account with an email address and password, Shopify figured out our tax rate and currency based on our physical address. The service also used our store's name to create a customized URL. This way, you can kick the store's tires even if you haven't registered a domain name.
The intuitive dashboard lets you view information about existing orders, product inventory, and customers. It's easy to add third-party e-commerce apps, including ones for recurring billing and loyalty programs, to enhance our store's capabilities. In addition, the theme store offers attractive, easily editable templates. The app marketplace is extensive, with plug-ins for external sales channels on social media, accounting tools, help desk tools, and even access to other sellers. Be aware that adding these features will make your monthly bill skyrocket.
We entered a product's name, description, images, pricing information, and associated SKU and bar code on the Add a Product page. In addition, we set up Shopify to track inventory and save the total shipping weight information. This page is where you can specify variations, such as size, material, style, or color. In testing, Shopify automatically assigned prices and unique SKU codes for each variation. At the bottom of the page, Shopify displayed how the product page would look in search engine results; this helped us focus on search engine optimization (SEO).
Shopify offers more than 200 free and premium themes in several categories, including Accessories, Art, Books, Clothing, Electronics, and Food. These clean, good-looking store themes rival those available from Wix Stores and other competing services. Once we were happy with a theme, we clicked Publish to apply it to our account. Customizing a theme using the drag-and-drop editor and tweaking the HTML/CSS through a text editor is simple. Unlike Wix Stores, Shopify lets you easily switch themes.
An online store isn't just inventory pages and order forms; you also want your shoppers to find the information they need via a blog or an About page. The service let us add Google Analytics code to pages for web metrics. You can capture customer data via user accounts (users can also access these to see their order status or enroll in a loyalty program). An email marketing tool is available for creating strategic customer campaigns.
We had the choice of using an existing domain or registering a domain through Shopify and letting the company act as our domain registrar. Prices begin at $11 per year for uncommon domains (like .online), $14 to 20 per year for standard domains (like .net and .info), and then they balloon much higher for custom domains. Shopify provides thorough instructions for configuring your domain's DNS records to point to Shopify's servers.
Customer Payment Options
The easiest shopping cart software is worthless if customers can't find and pay for products. Shopify offers a simple, seamless user experience for both sellers and customers.
By default, Shopify uses its own payment gateway, Shopify Payments, and PayPal Express Checkout. However, if those aren't your cup of tea, Shopify integrates with 70 other payment gateways. Shopify also supports payment systems based on cryptocurrencies and other alternative currencies, such as BitPay, Coinbase, Dwolla, and GoCoin, as well as checks, money orders, and bank deposits. If you're uncomfortable with Shopify automatically charging customer credit cards—or you want to wait until everything has been shipped before charging the card—then you can set up the store to just authorize payments and manually charge the card when ready. Shopify offers a helpful page explaining the difference between automatic and manual payment capture.
Shopify lets you use the same platform for online and physical store sales. You can also put a Buy button on another website, which may be useful if you don't want to use Shopify's tool.
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Customer Service
Shopify offers 24/7 phone and chat-based support when emailing isn't enough. There is also an active discussion forum. Customers in Australia, New Zealand, North America, Singapore, and the UK have a designated regional phone number. We found it easy to get someone in chat even at 1 a.m., and the phone support representative delivered helpful answers about the different options available in each package.
Verdict: It's Simple to Sell With Shopify
Simplicity is critical when setting up an online store. Your customers don't want to jump through hoops to make payments, and you don't want to spend too much time learning the software. Shopify makes it easy to build a store, expand its capabilities at a later date, and integrate numerous payment platforms, earning it our Editors' Choice award. If anything, its array of options might be too overwhelming for newcomers. Casual users should consider using Wix, our other Editors' Choice winner, and opting for the Wix Stores add-on.
Juan Martinez and Mike Williams contributed to this review.
Shopify is a top-tier e-commerce platform that has many useful tools for selling physical or digital goods in person or online.
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