SHOPIFY: General Overview

Shopify is one of the most robust and the best known e-commerce platforms today. It’s a complete tool that allows you to build a working e-commerce store, even if you don’t have any coding skills or website building experience. More than 500,000 stores are being hosted over Shopify and that remained successful in generating $46 billion in sales. Here are some of the most notable clients of Shopify:

• Gymshark Store
• Kylie cosmetics
• Holland Cooper
• Leesa

Shopify: What is it?

Shopify was founded in 2004. It is headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario and founded by Tobias Lütke, Daniel Weinand, and Scott Lake. The company reported that it had more than 1,000,000 businesses in approximately 175 countries using its platform as of June 2019, with total gross merchandise volume exceeding $41.1 billion. It offers numerous features which help you build and manage your online store. From inventory management to SEO effectiveness and support for different payment gateways, this makes you stand out amongst your e-commerce competitors.

It is a 'software as a service' (Saas) tool. This means that there is an ongoing cost of using them. You will have to pay a monthly or annual fee for access to the software.

There are 5 of the pricing plans that Shopify provides:

• Basic Shopify: $29 per month – cheapest option available for starting a small business. 
• Shopify: $79 per month – standard pricing plan.
• Advanced Shopify: $299 per month – to further expand big businesses
• Shopify Plus: $2000 per month. Shopify Plus is an enterprise-level ecommerce plan and offers custom prices. 
• Shopify Lite: Begins with $9 per month. This plan connects your store with Facebook and sells your products there.

SEO TIPS FOR SHOPIFY

If you have already built your Shopify e-commerce website, then let's dive into some Shopify SEO tips that can help you optimize your store. They will bring better results and will improve your rank and your traffic.

• Register your Shopify store with Google and Bing 
• Ensure faster loading speed of your Shopify store 
• Use headings properly
• Identify your Keywords
• Engaging meta descriptions
• Mobile friendly

Shopify Pros

Beautiful Themes: With a number of professionally designed responsive themes (both free and paid) in its Theme Store, it lets you customize your website across a range of industries including clothing, jewelry, art, etc. 

Highly Flexible Platform: Shopify provides you a range of resources for inventory management, customer support, marketing, delivery, reporting, social media and much more after you create your online store. As a highly versatile platform, you can choose these instruments according to your needs and let you automate your e-commerce business.

Tremendous Speed and Security: To run your online store smoothly, Shopify ensures that it runs at a quick pace and has a high level of security, as payment normally requires credit card processing.

24/7 Customer Support: Shopify offers you comprehensive customer service via email, live chat online and mobile. It has a huge FAQ database to help you in troubleshooting the technology. Its team will provide you with quick and helpful support any time you need it.

Shopify Cons

Less Customizability: Shopify is built with its own language called Liquid which they use to create the themes. Though you can use other programming languages while coding, it has certain limitations. Shopify only lets you change some aspects of its features and is not as flexible as self-hosted sites that would allow you to change almost everything.

Pricing: Like several other online and self-hosting e-commerce sites Shopify isn't free. On the other hand, you have pretty good options for building e-commerce stores like Magento, Zen Cart, WooCommerce, etc. The cheapest plan is $29 and can go up to $299. Other expenses include transaction fees associated with selling online as well as subscription fees to use the apps you need.

Conclusion

Shopify has now become immensely popular in the e-commerce industry. You can easily set up an account with Shopify, upload your products and can begin selling right away.