What is Shopify？Learn More Shopify

Summary

Shopify is a shopping cart system in SaaS field, which is suitable for cross-border e-commerce to establish independent stations. Users can use various themes, templates and apps online to establish their own online stores for a fee.

When choosing the shopping cart system to establish independent stations among cross-border e-commerces, many users are very upset, especially for those who have made platforms (such as Amazon, Wish, Aliexpress, etc.) before. If you just want to build a new independent station, Shopify is a very good choice, because it is the simplest and most efficient way to create an independent station.

Shopify’s History & Achievements

Shopify was founded in 2004. The system was originally developed to sell snowboards online. So it was born with a very pure e-commerce pedigree. By August 1, 2017, according to the official statistics, Shopify had 500000 businesses around the world, providing e-commerce services for 175 countries around the world. From 2012 to now, it has achieved a cumulative online transaction volume of $40 billion and maintained an average annual growth rate of 74%.

5 Advantages & 5 Disadvantages of Shopify

What are the disadvantages of such a good shopping cart system? The answer is yes. Everything is contradictory. If it has its advantages, of course, it will have its disadvantages. I have used three shopping cart systems, Magento, ZenCart and Shopify. I will use my experience to compare the three shopping cart programs:

Magento: disadvantages: it requires very professional programmers to build stations, upload products, set up stores, and also requires very high server configuration. The biggest problem I encountered was the slow speed of the website. It couldn’t be solved even with multiple cache plug-ins installed. It took five to seven seconds to open the page on average. That’s why I gave up the system.

ZenCart: its program update is slow, the function is insufficient, and it can’t keep up with the mobile era. Though it’s fast to open the website, the market share also shows that the system can not keep up with the times.

5 advantages of Shopify

Professional and exquisite Shopify template

Shopify officially provides more than 60 exquisite and professional templates, and all mobile terminals are adaptive, perfectly compatible with various mobile devices.

The exquisite and professional template theme provided by Shopify can make your independent station look more professional. Professional template, let your website get more trust so that visitors stay to browse more pages, get more visit time and more orders.

Shopify provides you with clothing, jewelry, furniture, art, and other themes. There are free and paid themes. The most expensive one is 180 yuan, which is a one-time payment for permanent use. It is worth mentioning that Shopify invites the most professional programmers to create themes for Shopify. These themes are officially reviewed by Shopify for quality, so they are perfectly compatible with Shopify. There is always a website suitable for you in so many themes.

Choose the right one for you:

In addition to the official templates, EASTDIGI also provides custom Shopify style.

Fully functional app Market

This is also the main reason why I like to use Shopify.

Before using Shopify, I used Magento to build the station. I remember once installing a daily deal plug-in (extensions). It took me two weeks to install and debug the plug-in, after the purchase of the plug-in, the download of the installation settings and to communicate with foreign technology. You only need 10 minutes to complete such a simple plug-in using Shopify.

Shopify’s app is similar to our mobile app. It’s like buying the latest iPhone 11, which only has the basic function of calling and texting. If you want to use your mobile phone to watch videos, play games,, you need to install Youku potato, King glory, and other apps. Similarly, after our Shopify is installed, only the basic shopping function is available. If you want to batch manage products, batch manage orders, advanced email marketing, and other functions, you need to install various apps.

This is actually one of Shopify’s biggest strengths. It not only allows you to set up an online store and process payments but also provides you with useful tools to help you succeed in other important aspects of your business. For example, Shopify can help you from these aspects: product release, product inventory management, email marketing, SNS marketing, remarketing, advanced analysis report, SEO, order management and so on. There are more than 1000 different apps in the Shopify app store for you to choose from. A large part of these apps can help you provide efficiency and automation. For instance, I like to use the secretary of domestic ERP shop to manage orders efficiently and quickly, and generate hundreds of e-mail Po numbers and quick print numbers with one click.

You can choose the applications you need. These applications can be perfectly integrated into Shopify, and they can be plug and play. After installation, simple settings can be used. General apps have detailed and simple tutorials to teach you how to set, which will save you a lot of time and work. Flexible payment methods: these apps basically have a trial period of 1-30 days. If you are not satisfied with the trial period, you will not be charged if you uninstall them during the trial period. Basically, the payment methods are based on your business scale, and you don’t want to use them in the future. If you don’t think they have any effect, you can just uninstall them with one click, and there will be no cost in the future.

Online support for you 24 hours a day, 365 days a year

You can contact them at any time by phone (rarely used in China, after all, it’s expensive to call abroad), online chat or email (our favorite way of communication in China). For example, if you have problems setting up collections or binding domain names, you can click online chat and Shopify’s official technical support will help you solve the problem in time. At present, the official does not support Chinese communication. Please use English.

Provides you with stable and secure servers

Speed: It’s one of the factors behind the success of running an online store. The CWCS study found that 57% of customers leave the site if the page takes longer than three seconds to load.

If you have your own Shopify website, you can test the speed of your website. Not only do you need to test the homepage, but sometimes the speed of the product page is more important.

• Shopify adopts SSL security protocol in the whole station to ensure the security of data transmission (Any package can have this function free of charge, without additional payment).
• Shopify payment security has passed the certification of PCI DSS, which can better protect the data security of transaction credit cardholders.
• Shopify also perfectly integrates PayPal payment. Not all sites can access PayPal payment. PayPal also has certain requirements for the security of independent stations.

Shopify compatible multi-channel sales

As long as your Shopify store is established and the product is uploaded, you can start your sales on these platforms with the corresponding apps (no additional app is needed for some channels) and the collection method, instead of repeatedly uploading the product to these platforms. This function is very powerful. For example, the “Facebook global store” in the market costs tens of thousands of yuan to open a store. If you use Shopify, you can directly open the Facebook sales channel in the background. In this way, the so-called “Facebook global store” will be achieved, completely free of charge.

• Currently, Shopify is compatible with the following sales platforms:Social platforms: Facebook, Pinterest, Facebook messenger
• Professional sales platform: Amazon, wish, eBay (coming online soon)
• Other platforms: BuzzFeed, KIK, Houzz, etc

5 disadvantages of Shopify

Shopify compatible multi-channel sales

The transaction cost of Shopify: I think this transaction fee is the most fatal disadvantage of Shopify. In addition to the monthly package fee, Shopify will charge us 0.5% – 2% of the transaction fee. Unless you use Shopify payments as your collection method, in this case, all your transaction fees will be exempted. However, it is difficult for us to adopt a Shopify payment in China. To open Shopify payment, you need to verify the U.S. ID card and the U.S. bank account corresponding to the ID card. So at present, we can’t open Shopify payment temporarily, which means that in addition to the basic monthly fee, if there is a transaction, you need to pay Shopify an additional 0.5% – 2% of the transaction fee.

App fees of Shopify

Though Shopify offers you more than 1400 apps to extend the capabilities of your online store, many of them are not free and charge you monthly. Obviously this could keep your costs going up. For example, to integrate cross-sell and social login into the Shopify store, you need to add 9.9 + 1.49 = 11.39usd every month.

Some of the apps will make your work easier and get higher efficiency; Some of the apps will make your website more professional. You can get more sales, get more traffic, get more email subscriptions. The app is perfectly integrated with Shopify. You don’t need to worry about the bug at all, just contact the developers directly, and their reply efficiency is also very high. So you can focus on other important aspects of the business. If you are still worried about app costs, remember that the app is completely optional.

Few professional development programmers

At present, it is difficult to find a very professional liquid programmer in China. The course of this program is basically in English. Liquid language is relatively small, unlike PHP, there are many experts in China, and there are many mature Chinese courses like this. EASTDIGI can modify the website, or develop specific functions.

Shopify’s backup transfer

I haven’t thought of migrating Shopify yet, but that doesn’t mean I will always use Shopify in the future. What if there is a better shopping cart program? If you really want to migrate the website, the only way you can do now is to export the products in CSV format, and then open a Shopify to import the products again. But for blog content, contact us, return and exchange policies and other pages, these pages are hard to recover. I haven’t come up with a better way yet.

The wholesale function is basically not involved

Now I do small B2B wholesale, so I will use Shopify to do this kind of small B2B, but it does not have this wholesale function. For example, I want to set the price step by step, Shopify needs to use the app.

Conclusion

To sum up: do you think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages? There is no doubt that I personally think the above-mentioned shortcomings are not really unacceptable, and they will only affect a small number of users. Before I met Shopify, I never thought it would be so simple to launch an online store. This is good news for most small and medium-sized cross-border e-commerce practitioners who don’t understand the code and want to try it out with an independent station. They can use Shopify to build a professional e-commerce website for only 29 dollars a month. Try it now. It’s free for 14 days. There’s no need to bind credit card.