Shopify Might Be Right for Your Small Business Store
In the last decade and a half a lot of things have changed in terms of online-commerce. In the year 2000 having a custom e-commerce store could cost a small fortune. Places like Yahoo Stores and Ebay helped to get people online for cheap and put the pressure on companies to truly create solutions for small businesses that wanted to be online but didn’t have a large corporation’s budget.
With Shopify a company can get started online with little to no upfront costs. This isn’t your run-of-the-mill online store builder, or typical online hosted e-commerce platform. The real beauty of Shopify is the massive amount of features packaged into the system. Want to accept credit cards but you don’t have a merchant account? No problem, they have you covered. Want to integrate locally with your database of products and orders, no problem! Want to have a designer customize all aspects of your Shopify store? NO PROBLEM!
FULL FEATURE LIST – CLICK HERE
Why should I consider a remotely hosted e-commerce platform?
This really comes down to your needs. For some of us, we don’t have huge e-commerce portals with 3 million products. The typical small business is selling less than 1000 products and their e-commerce needs very easily fit into the features of Shopify.
Even better you can get a big bang for your buck. Rather than spending $15,000 on a custom solution that will cost you money to maintain this solution. For some of our customers a custom solution is absolutely the right solution, but for others with limited budget and small feature set, it starts to make more sense to go with a solution like Shopify.
Shopify Ecommerce Feature List
…and we’re always adding new ones.
Design
- A professional-looking ecommerce site up and running in minutes
- Standards-compliant, fully customizable templates provided free to use with your account
- Complete control over your website’s HTML and CSS
- Flexible layout of dynamic content via the Liquid templating language
- Media assets linked to individual products or your shop as a whole
- A network of fellow Shopify designers eager to discuss new tips and strategies on our forums
CMS Product management
- Easy to add, list, edit, and organize products using our streamlined CMS interface
- Inventory tracking for whichever products you want
- Drag-and-drop ordering of product images
- Multiple variants for each product allow options with unique inventory tracking, prices, weights
- Keyword tags to aid in searching and browsing within your ecommerce shop
- Don’t want to do shipping? Let someone else do it for you through one of our supported fulfillment services such as Fulfillment by Amazon.
Orders
- New order notifications via email, RSS, and on your mobile phone with SMS messaging
- Email customers from within Shopify
- Track payment and shipping status on orders with detailed reports
- Customizable views of your orders filtered by their current status
- Orders can be exported in CSV format to use in your spreadsheets
- Realtime notifications for orders using WebHooks
- Order cancellation with automated chargeback option
CMS Admin Interface
- Uncluttered interface letting you manage your ecommerce shop without getting in your way
- Streamlined dashboard showing you vital shop information each time you log in
- Interactive real-time statistics panel
- Inventory warnings placed in the sidebar to let you know when products are out of stock
- Blogs, pages, and site navigation all managed through intuitive administration screens
- A full featured Asset system which lets you use and re-use your stock photography, logos or product pdf’s wherever you need them.
Ecommerce Marketing
- Shopify’s CMS was designed by SEO experts so your store will rank in Google, Yahoo and Bing
- One click submission to Google Product Search comparison shopping search engine
- Ability to create coupon codes for percentage or fixed amount off, free shipping, etc.
- XML Sitemap automatically generated for search engine indexing
- Enter comparison prices to indicate sales or to set you apart from the competition
- Shopify’s blog and “Guru” coaches help with tips and tricks to get more sales
Under the Hood
- Certified Level 1PCI compliant to ensure the security of your customer data
- Built on a foundation of open source technology that is constantly being tuned and improved
- Developed with the powerfully agile and expressive Ruby on Rails web framework
- Hosted on our secure and expertly maintained Debian Linux servers, guarded by ultra secure OpenBSD firewalls
- Backed by the reliability and speed of MySQL databases
- Operating from a World class data center
- Compatible with many direct payment processors
Great site and offers! Good information for businesses.