While there are some enormous benefits to starting an ecommerce website, there may be even more benefits to doing it with the Shopify platform. In fact, many of the risks and the potential problems mentioned in this introduction that come with having your own e-store are minimized or eliminated thanks to the Shopify platform.
Whether or not you start an ecommerce business is up to you, but if you decide you are going to, you definitely need to do it using the Shopify platform. Here are just a few reasons.
- Your store design costs normally would be thousands of dollars, for
getting a website designer that not only has the skills to create a
great looking website, but also to program all of the ecommerce
functions you need including security. But with Shopify, there is no
huge investment of thousands of dollars. You just pay one of four tiers
of pricing and you get the perfect ecommerce website.
- You get the benefit of the entire Shopify team. You aren’t just
getting a website template with Shopify, you are getting a ready-made
store that has already had all of the bugs worked out and has been
re-designed and re-worked so that it functions perfectly and has just
about every feature that you could possibly want.
- The platform is so intuitive that you can start building your store
right after logging in. You might have to look at the help pages to use
some of the more advanced features but for adding products and
customizing design as well as other basics, you can start doing it right
away with almost no learning curve.
- You have some incredible security. By law, an ecommerce website has
to take certain steps to protect a customer’s financial information, but
you don’t just get sufficient security with Shopify, you get some of
the most highly rated security features of any ecommerce platform on the
market today. You don’t have to worry about programming security
protocols or making sure that your site is protected on all sides from
thieves who want your customer’s credit card numbers. Shopify does all
the work for you.
- Shopify is designed to help you reach your SEO potential. If you
were to pay a designer for a custom ecommerce site you would spend
thousands of dollars or perhaps even tens of thousands of dollars and
you wouldn’t get the features that you get with Shopify. One of those
features is their search engine optimization. With Shopify, your e-store
has the best chance possible to rank high in the search engines and
bring you lots of organic traffic.
- You get analytics that tell you exactly what is going on. With
Shopify, you can see exactly where your customers are coming from, what
keywords they are using to reach your site and where they go once they
get there, not to mention how long they stay. All of this information
has one primary purpose – to allow you to tweak your Shopify site and
your marketing and promotion efforts to get as many people coming to
your site as possible and then getting them to stay there once they
arrive. You still have to offer great products, but Shopify helps you
market your site much more effectively and gets customers to show up,
which is half the battle when it comes to ecommerce.
- Your site is already optimized for mobile and will continue to be
optimized in the future. With Shopify, you get a responsive website that
will work with any mobile device and as this quickly becomes the
primary way that people shop, your ecommerce website is only going to
get better, as the engineers behind the platform ensure that you always
keep up with the technology.
- You get hosting with your site. Shopify has an advantage that many
ecommerce platforms do not share – your site is hosted by them, and your
payment gateway and other shopping cart features are already taken care
of. Not only does this save you money since you don’t have to pay for
hosting, you also will always have enough bandwidth to support your
traffic and of course, you get security with the hosting that is
unrivaled.
- Shopify is extremely reliable. Shopify didn’t get to their spot as
the number one ecommerce platform by accident. They are so popular and
so widely used because of how reliable the platform is. When your store
begins to get more traffic, you will lose money for every second or
minute that your site id own. Using Shopify minimizes the chances of
this as much as possible.
- Shopify has numerous apps created for your use. The Shopify app
store has some talented designers creating programs that you can use to
make your ecommerce store even better. You can customize the appearance
of your site and do a great deal with Shopify but with the app store you
can create an unstoppable force in the world of ecommerce.
