If you’re looking to sell products or services via your website, check out Shopify. 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 tools elevate it above a packed playfield to join Wix Stores as a co-Editors’ Choice pick for e-commerce services.
Shopping Cart Packages
Shopify offers three standard packages, starting with the $29-per-month Basic plan, that lets you sell products on existing websites, social media, or a hosted Shopify site. This plan includes unlimited products, storage, and monthly data transfers, plus 24/7 support, a website and blog, an SSL certificate, and two staff accounts. Shopify collects zero transaction fees if you use Shopify Payments, which is a nice touch. The $79-per-month Shopify plan includes everything in the Basic plan, as well as five staff accounts, reporting, international pricing, and abandoned cart recovery. The Advanced Shopify plan starts at $299 per month and includes 15 staff accounts, an advanced report builder, and automatic shipping rate calculation.
There are two additional plans that the company does its best to hide. Shopify Lite is a $9-per-month plan that includes the ability to sell items in-person or add a buy button to an existing website. Then there’s Shopify Plus for enterprise-level customers; it’s a custom-built service featuring custom-built prices.
Not all shopping cart services charge transaction fees; 3dCart and PinnacleCart are two examples. Keep in mind that whichever merchant account and payment gateway you wind up using with those services will charge you transaction fees. The benefit of using Shopify is that it handles all of that for you, freeing you up from dealing with merchant accounts and their additional bills.
Shopify has a 14-day trial, which gives you the opportunity to set up a store and test transactions before committing to the software. Shopify accepts all major credit cards. If you decide you don’t like Shopify and you don’t choose a pricing plan during your free trial, then your account will be frozen and you won’t be charged for anything when your trial expires.
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 dashboard is where you do all of the work, and it’s easy to use. You can view information about existing orders, product inventory, and customers. We found it 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 store 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 can make your monthly bill skyrocket.
On the Add a Product page, we entered the product’s name, a description, product images, pricing information, and the associated SKU and bar code. 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. Shopify automatically assigns prices and unique SKU codes for each variation. At the page’s bottom, Shopify displayed how the product page would look in search engine results; this helped us focus on search engine optimization (SEO). If all this sounds overwhelming, then you may prefer BigCommerce, an e-commerce platform that breaks the product page into different tabs.
Shopify offers free, attractive, and modern-looking themes in 11 different categories, including Home, Clothing, Food, Accessories, Art, Electronics, and Books. These are clean, good-looking store themes that’ll stand up to what’s available from Wix Stores and other competing services. Once we were happy with a theme, we clicked Publish to apply it to our account. We were satisfied with the free themes, the Shopify Theme Store offers more sophisticated options (it contains more than 100 free and premium templates). You can customize a theme with the integrated, drag-and-drop editor, and tweak the HTML/CSS through a built-in text editor.
An online store isn’t just inventory pages and order forms; you also want your shoppers to find the information they need. Shopify lets you create a blog to engage with customers, as well as static pages, such as About Us and FAQ. It also let us add our Google Analytics codes 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). Shopify doesn’t offer a built-in email marketing tool, which is a huge omission. However, it offers a feature called Kit, a virtual marketing assistant that helps you do things, such as create Facebook or Instagram Ads, and send templatized emails (think “Thank You” auto-responders).
We had the choice of using an existing domain or registering a domain through Shopify and letting the company act as my domain registrar. Prices begin at $11 per year for uncommon domains (like .online), $14-20 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 Experience and Payments
The easiest shopping cart software is worthless if customers can’t find products and pay for them. Fortunately, Shopify offers a simple, seamless user experience for both sellers and customers.
By default, Shopify uses its own payment gateway, Shopify Payments, as well as PayPal Express Checkout. If those aren’t your cup of tea, however, Shopify integrates with 70 other payment gateways. For this review, we set up PayPal. PayPal charges its own credit card transaction fees, but if you use Shopify Payments, Shopify waives the transaction fees. 3dCart and BigCommerce don’t charge transaction fees, so they’re good alternatives if you don’t want to deal with Shopify Payments.
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 you’re ready. Shopify offers a helpful page explaining the difference between automatic and manual payment capture.
As we mentioned earlier, Shopify lets you use the same platform for online and physical store sales. There’s also the option to put a Buy button on another website, which may be useful if you don’t want to use Shopify’s website-builder tool.
Excellent Customer Service
Shopify offers 24/7 phone and chat-based support when sending an email just isn’t enough. There is also an active discussion forum. Customers based in North America, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore 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.
Great Shopping Right Out of the Box
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 spend a lot of time learning the software. Shopify makes it easy to get off the ground using basic features, expand your store’s capabilities at a later date, and integrate numerous payment platforms. As a result, Shopify is our co-Editors’ Choice for shopping cart tools (along with the equally excellent Wix Stores), due to its flexibility and easy-to-navigate dashboard.
For more on e-commerce, check out Building an E-Commerce Website: 8 Technical Aspects You Need to Know and How to Secure Your E-Commerce Website.
