Shopify, the behemoth of the ecommerce world. Anyone who has any association with ecomm businesses or has spoken to anyone associated with the ecomm world has heard of Shopify – but exactly what is it and why is it a big deal?
As part of my ongoing education of new marketing technologies, I’ll be digging into platforms that I may not have experience in and sharing my notes and initial thoughts. These are by no means from an expert’s perspective (unless otherwise noted). This post will be about Shopify.
What is Shopify?
According to their website, Shopify is “one platform with all the ecommerce and point of sale features you need to start, run, and grow your business.”
According to Crunchbase, Shopify is “a cloud-based, multi-channel commerce platform designed for small and medium-sized businesses.”
According to their boilerplate, Shopify is “is the leading multi-channel commerce platform. Merchants use Shopify to design, set up, and manage their stores across multiple sales channels, including mobile, web, social media, marketplaces, brick-and-mortar locations, and pop-up shops.“
What this boils down to is that Shopify is an easy way for anyone who has stuff to sell to use their platform to create and manage a digital storefront. Shopify powers over 1 million businesses worldwide.
Who are the competitors?
Plenty. They include the big names such as BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Magento (Adobe); even site builders like Squarespace & Wix, and upstarts like Elliot.
So what makes Shopify stand out? Well it depends on what you’re looking for. If you’re an SMB business looking for an easy to use tool, Shopify lives up to that, but platforms like WooCommerce give you more flexibility in terms of customization. If you’re a larger business, you’ll have to look into Shopify Plus (enterprise level Shopify), but other platforms like BigCommerce offer a wide variety of features out of the box that make it very enticing.
Shopify Features
Shopify has a wide variety of features (you can find them all listed here), including:
- Easy to build storefront – themes, custom capabilities, a CRM, and hosting solutions
- Shopping cart features – credit card & payment gateways, shipping and tax management
- Store management – CRM, connections to fulfillment and drop ship services, and customer communications options
- Marketing & SEO – connect to social media, product reviews, offer discounts or gift cards
- Products – Manage and organize inventory,
- Web Hosting – Unlimited bandwidth and domain management
- Analytics – dashboards with (exportable) reporting and Google Analytics integration
As for ease of use and whether these features are best in class, I haven’t use the platform, so I’m not aware, but I plan to speak with friends who deal in ecomm to gain their insight – so stay tuned.
Why is Shopify a big deal?
It opens the doors for anyone to build a digital storefront. Ease of use, low(er) price point, and accessibility make it easy for anyone looking to build out their ecomm business.
Shopify fills the gap for SMBs to have power versus resorting to Amazon. While Amazon may be about 50% of e-commerce sales worldwide, that doesn’t mean that direct to consumer have no chance (some insights into D2C strategies). Some of the world’s largest businesses are running digital only businesses (while others say they won’t be successful without brick and mortar).
Resources
- What is Shopify on the Shopify Blog
- In-depth Shopify review – by Style Factory
- “How Amazon took 50% of the e-commerce market and what it means for the rest of us” TechCrunch, February 2019
- Shopify on G2
- Shopify on Crunchbase
- “Shopify, the e-commerce company that’s coming for Amazon” Vox, January 2020
Header Photo by freestocks on Unsplash