You probably have heard about Shopify, but how many people use it for their eCommerce solutions? You know it’s massive, but how big? Here’s something that will get you drooling over Shopify.
Not long ago, everyone thought locking horns with eCommerce kings like Amazon was impossible.
Just when the online selling space was getting centralized with the bigs of Alibaba, Ebay, and Amazon— Shopify happened! Shopify eCommerce is a perfect example of decentralizing eCommerce platforms. It hands over the power to small and medium-scale businesses to own eCommerce stores and use their shopping cart solutions to sell.
Partly the reason why global eCommerce retail sales have touched 4.2 trillion dollars, and which is expected to hit a $6.5 trillion barrel by 2023.
Okay, e-retail sales in trillions of dollars, but how much is Shopify contributing?
There are over 1 million Shopify stores, second to WooCommerce, and greater than other eCommerce greats like BigCommerce. More than 500,000 Shopify stores are currently active!
With all the Shopify stores contributing hundreds of billion dollars in e-sales, the figure that crossed recently, the platform is attracting merchants in the global eCommerce scenery.
That said, you’d want to know how eCommerce Shopify has taken the market with thunder. In the given section, we will cover “A to Z’s” of one of the best eCommerce platforms! No, we don’t mean the Amazon logo! We’re talking about Shopify eCommerce. So, let’s quickly find out how it’s nailing the eCommerce space:
Shopify business model in a nutshell. How does it make money?
Model 1— Subscription Fee
Let’s say you have a product and you want to commercialize and make money out of it. How do you do it? Of course, the traditional way to go about it is through advertisement and retail sales.
But Shopify’s monthly subscription fee model lets you earn the bang of the buck by commercializing your products in the online sphere. In simpler terms, you pay a certain amount of fees, and Shopify lets you access its eCommerce services.
Breakdown of Subscription-Model
Fortunately, Shopify is not only for elite merchants. If you happen to have a small business or want to start a new store, this could be the place for you too! Here’s how eCommerce Shopify breaks down into different plans:
#1 Shopify Lite — $9 per month
Cheapest of all, Shopify Lite gives you the power to sell your products online. However, you need to be aware that it doesn’t offer a fully-functional standalone store feature in this segment. It facilitates:
- Online selling on your existing store
- Selling on Facebook
- Back-end system for selling products in the physical stores
- Email and chat functionality
#2 Basic Shopify — $29 per month
It is where Shopify starts nailing the market. A merchant can sell unlimited products with this plan. It’s not the complete eCommerce solution, but good enough to set up a new store and get you started. You’ll have:
- Fully-functional store
- Blogging functionality for inbound marketing
- A website that you can host with your domain name
- templates, support, abandoned cart saver functionality
- Email, chat, and phone support
- Fraud analysis tools
#3 Shopify — $79 per month
This is the plan that you need when your business is growing. When to opt? When you think your Shopify eCommerce needs a controlled-scaling. It is as good as the basic Shopify plan plus a few professional features to make calculated moves. You’ll get:
- Access to professional business reports
- 5 Staff members with access to the Shopify admin and Shopify POS
- Real-time carrier shipping
- Abandoned-cart recovery
- Report-targeting
#4 Advanced Shopify — $299 per month
Advanced Shopify is brilliant with grand-scaling. While other plans charge upto 2% transaction fees, it has the least transaction fees at 0.5%. The advanced program also lets you enjoy unlimited storage capabilities and scalable SaaS, depending on your business requirements. Here’s what you can expect to do:
- Unlimited posts, products, and videos
- Improve abandoned cart recovery
- Third-party calculated shipping rates
- More payment gateways
- Advanced report builder
#5 Shopify Plus — negotiable, but usually costs around $2000/month
You would want to have this Shopify plus plan when you’re an enterprise-level eCommerce merchant. Usually, Shopify is for SME businesses. But it also offers its one-stop-eCommerce-solutions to wholesalers, large ventures, and enterprising stores who want to hire technical staff like Shopify developers. Since the platform lets you customize the store the way you want, its prices vary. The plan comes with:
- Flexible SaaS platform
- 70+ payment gateways
- Unlimited bandwidth and storage
Model 2— Merchant Solution
You’ve your eCommerce store ready, but is it enough to get the numbers as you’ve expected? Are you replicating the efforts of your competitors?
Shopify uses very concern as an opportunity and offers various merchant solutions to push you in the same ballpark as giants of the industry.
Frankly, the subscription fee is not even half the Shopify’s revenue. The platform’s merchant e-Commerce solutions are the real deal. The last reported quarter, 2020, Q2 saw merchant solutions revenue close to $520 million. It’s up by 148% year-over-year sales, which lastly showed the revenue of around $210 million.
Shopify offers additional services over the platform to cover merchant solutions. Its merchant solution rakes in a large sum of money through payment processing fees from Shopify payments.
Additionally, in-house Shopify Shipping facilities, transaction fees, Shopify Capital, Sales of point-of-sale (“POS”) hard, referral fees, etc. allow the eCommerce builder to have value for its money. Let’s have a look at these merchant solutions:
Merchant Solutions #1: Shopify Payments
Though you can have your favorite third-party payment gateway linked with the store, eCommerce Shopify gives you an option to power your payment channel with its powerful built-in payment system.
Usually, it deducts transaction fees for using external payment gateways such as Paypal, but the real bargain is with its Stripe collaboration. The eCommerce builder allows you to reap free services if you choose to transact with your customers using the Stripe gateway. Here’s the costing structure with Paypal:
- Shopify Basic transaction structure
Online transaction fee 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction.
In-person transaction fee 2.7% + 0 cents per transaction.
- Shopify plan transaction structure
Online transaction fee 2.6% + 30 cents per transaction.
In-person transaction fee 2.4% + 0 cents per transaction.
- Advanced Shopify transaction structure
Online transaction fee 2.4% + 30 cent per transaction.
In-person transaction fee 2.2% + 0 cent per transaction.
Merchant Solutions #2: Shopify Shipping
Logistics is the biggest challenge of any eCommerce store. If you have difficulty finding a satisfactory shipping partner, Shopify arranges shipping partners with its Shopify Shipping merchant solution.
You can pick from a variety of shipping partners and track customer orders within the Shopify platform. Additionally, the solution allows you to return shipping labels and print outbounds.
Merchant Solutions #3: Shopify Capitals
Shopify takes care of the budding entrepreneurs who want to start their eCommerce ventures but don’t have enough capital to make a start on. It funds to buy store resources and inventories with a simple, fast, and reliable Shopify capitals solution.
If you tie-up in secure financing with Shopify, the company will remit its loan by deducting from your daily store sales. As of now, the solution operates in the United States; however, Shopify plans to stretch its financing reach to the other parts of the world.
Merchant Solutions #4: Shopify Point of Sale
Shopify eCommerce also cares for the users who don’t have their online stores. It is why they say “not just eCommerce but commerce.” The retail POS feature adds versatility in business by unifying retail stores and online technology-stacks.
It comes in hardware forms, so the merchants get to sell in physical settings. The Shopify POS kit makes retail setting future-proof with hardware, including a cash drawer, iPad stand, card reader, and receipt printer. The set-up cost sits between $750 to $1000.
Technically, Shopify offers merchant solutions to retain the subscribers and let them enjoy a seamless eCommerce-solution experience.
Shopify’s open-ecosystem has made it big.
One of the key factors that make Shopify beat the giants like BigCommerce is its amazing community. The community is an open ecosystem full of app developers, digital and service partners, theme designers, affiliates, photographers, and graphic designers.
Multi-admin multiple stores— easing up handling multiple eCommerce stores.
Since Shopify got into the eCommerce space, it’s been claiming to ease up the merchant side’s eCommerce experience. Nothing more than a multi-admin multiple-stores app from Shopify stands true to its motto.
// Let’s say you manage three Shopify eCommerce stores for different types of products. Unfortunately, handling all the three stores through separate panels takes some serious mental-beating. It constantly keeps you busy, making you lose the pulse.
So, what do you do to shrug off the frustration? You sync off all the stores! How? Well, Shopify lets you sync all your stores with the help of its multi-admin multiple store app.
This way, you can manage multiple stores from a single interface. The feature also syncs all the collections and products from all the stores. Further, it allows inventory sharing and order-fulfilling across the multiple-stores. Should you need a customized multi-admin panel, ‘Multify’ lets custom integration.
Abandoned shopping cart recovery— the best of Shopify’s genius
Do you know almost 70% of the customers don’t finish the purchase? It means that seven visitors out of 10 abandon your store. Think of this: converting 50% of these visitors could truly help you accomplish your eCommerce goal. But how to convince the gones? More importantly, how to have the details of these users?
Shopify has a strong solution to recover these users. Its abandoned cart recovery app prevents and recovers the gone. By integrating the app with your store, you can access the list of recent deserters, and improvise marketing campaigns with beautiful and personalized emails, Facebook Messenger reminders, and pop-ups.
Send clear retaining signals to your visitors: ‘let bygones be bygones’ and try converting them with reminders and pop-ups. Shopify also gets you across useful customer insight. You can use segmented data to personalize your targeting campaigns.
Dropshipping—no more hassling around the complex inventory
Managing inventories and shipping orders are the biggest nightmares for any eCommerce merchant. Not willing to own up the massive responsibility? Don’t feel comfortable with these aspects yet want to have a Shopify store?
Shopify dropshipping solution ensures that you’ve no upfront inventory costs, packaging headaches, and shipping logistics. Here’s how you run your store without a warehouse with Shopify’s dropshipping:
- Your customer reaches your Shopify eCommerce space and orders a product.
- Your store forwards the indent to your partnered-wholesale business, apparently also your dropshipping supplier.
- Your drop shipping partner prepares and packs the order.
- The dropshipper ships the order directly to your customer.
With a hassle-free dropshipping solution, you can play around various products in your store regardless of whether the previous goods are sold. Shopify eCommerce also notifies your customers about order transit. So, if you’re looking to jumpstart an eCommerce business— Shopify dropshipping is the meal of the deal.
Order fulfillment— setting up a sustainable business for a marathon
Let’s be honest to ourselves; we all want early ROIs, as owning the store without profits sounds like feeding an elephant. So we market our stores aggressively, expecting to have a surplus as early as we can. As sales grow, the challenges in eCommerce grow, especially in order fulfillment.
It’s one of the loose-ends that dissolve many eCommerce in the sales squirt. Ask yourself, what would you do if your sales grew overnight? How would you fulfill all the orders in time? Shopify lets you answer these questions with automated order fulfillment solutions.
Order fulfillment is a chain that begins with orders from the customers and ends with having your customer’s items delivered. The feature lets you fulfill the order automatically, and it’s marked when paid. Remember that eCommerce stores bring the best results when you know you’re up for a marathon and not a small sprint. The functionality of Shopify makes a sustainable environment around your business.
Quick loading website— the beginning of a robust shopper’s experience
If your website loses speed by 4 seconds, we repeat, merely 4 seconds, you’ll lose sales by 25%. Currently, the average eCommerce page load time is 8.56, which is more than the average attention span of a user on a website, which is 8 seconds. Let alone the product targeting, an eCommerce that loads before the visitors bounce off the website is an achievement in itself.
Worse luck, the eCommerce page load time drops more as the internet gets a tad slower with its overuse in the COVID-19 pandemic. But Shopify SEO management tools help you optimize the store and improve the web performance for imprinting a powerful first impression. Shopify experts promote smooth animations, font swapping, and request to minimize third-party impact to have stores running at a desirable speed.
Customer experience— the shopping-experience beyond expectations
Shopify is brilliant for eCommerce merchants. Agreed! What about the customers? Most eCommerce builders either trade-off customer-experience for easy development solutions or offer complex development solutions for wonderful customer-experience.
But it balances Shopify developer and Shopify customer experience evenly. The platform has over 5000 tools that include the best Shopify apps for managing the web store, customizing the customer-experience, & personalization of the website and campaigns.
The store uniquely lets you blend the best web designs with new app functionalities to have a beautiful journey throughout the buyer’s cycle. It certainly pushes the buyers through the sales channel much faster.
Brand appeal— striking the right emotional chords with Shopify.
There’s a saying: ‘customers can switch brands if you motive them enough.’ But how do you make them switch to your store? ‘Brand appeal!’ Branding is not just about making a logo and designing a website but interacting with your customers when they truly have a hard time shopping for their favorite numbers.
Shopify eCommerce lets you connect with your customers in real-time and reports professional data to manage your brand image. The online chat facilities, phone, and email support also send a neat message that you’re with your customers through thick and thin.
With Shopify’s feedback features, you can dive into the important insights and traces left by your customers and paint your brand in the color they want the most. Having attractive themes and simulating functionalities, you can appeal to your customers at each point of the sales journey and measure your performance through key metrics.
No hidden cost— what you see is what you get.
As mentioned, eCommerce is sometimes like nursing an elephant— hard to manage, stressful to arrange security walls, and annoying to process supply-chains. But one thing that deters many eCommerce merchants is the hidden cost, especially when branded eCommerce-builders furnish unwanted bills.
Fortunately, Shopify stands for ‘wysiwyg— what you see is what you get.’ You select a plan, and you’re billed exactly for the program you opted for. Before buying any plan, make sure that you go through its commercial tables carefully. Shopify has a series of deliverables with specific plans, and you’ll receive bills concerning it.
Social proof— a powerful psychological eCommerce driver
Social proofs have existed for close to a century. To make it simple for you, it’s the testimonials of your products and services. And most people trust other people’s words more than yours— no matter how much branding efforts you put. If you’re not using these proofs, you’re not only missing a boat but a titanic— once the largest ship.
But Shopify’s social proof apps lets you convert your existing traffic by showcasing reviews, testimonials, recent viewers, reviews, and customer purchases. Since you’d want to put the positive reviews on your store, a strong email copy “we want to make you famous” to your customers shall do the trick.
Having these testimonials and honest opinions, pasted, will enhance your store’s credibility and boost your sales. Shopify’s apps will automatically make customers feel great about your store based on other buyers’ actions.
Product descriptions and specifications— the texts and visuals that sell
Having compelling texts and visuals on the product pages is an uphill struggle, especially when you have a long list of items to display. Plus, you also want to be easing up your customer’s journey! So how do you manage texts and visuals that simulate your visitors and help them buy the most relevant products?
Shopify store has apps that take your product description and specifications to the next level. Usually, they need to be inviting actions from the customers. But working around so many products across multiple stores can be tiring and time-taking.
The app allows easier to notice and readable product info and description. As visuals have a better impact than texts, the Shopify in-store apps also place visuals and content in a way that can’t go without noticing. Another main objective of a good product page is to leave a good memory in your visitors’ minds. Arranging texts and visuals in an appealing-hierarchy will make your page memorable.
Reliable customer service— a strong Shopify backup
You don’t enter into a battle without any support. Shopify eCommerce ensures that you never do it, not carried away with your craziest adrenaline rush! Instead, reliable customer support is Shopify’s strong suit— the 24/7 assistance that keeps your eCommerce engine up and running.
Think of this way: you care for your customers. Don’t you? So, you set a customer-service desk that helps your visitors have a seamless shopping experience. Similarly, you’re a Shopify customer. As much you care for your customers is Shopify care for you. You have means of entry to their technical desk using phones, chats, or emails. Not just this— you also have access to Shopify help center, Shopify Experts, Discussion Forums, and Shopify Compass to have your business running.
Key Takeaways— Shopify Nailing The Ecommerce Space
- You think of commercializing your product? Shopify eCommerce lets third-parties merchants like you monetize through the product.
- The company relies on two business models: Subscription-fee model and merchant solutions.
- You can have your eCommerce store ready in less than 50$. It was a distant dream a few years ago.
- For extensive enterprising ventures, get yourself the best Shopify plan.
- eCommerce Shopify is simple to workaround, thereby making it into the top choice of the non-developers.
- The open-ecosystem of Shopify is way too dynamic and allows non-tech merchants to have their stores customized.
- Free customer-support makes Shopify fulfill its motto of developing a hassle-free platform for the experts and non-experts alike.
Though you should try your hands on Shopify web development, make sure you’ve supportive hands of the experts in the industry. In case you need your cash registers ringing, our team at HuptechWeb, who happens to be a seasoned Shopify campaigner can help you accomplish your eCommerce goals!
