Shopify

Why Shopify: 5 reasons why Shopify is a good idea by Linda Bleijenberg

You probably ended up on this blog because you are curious if Shopify is the best e-commerce platform for your online store. If you make the decision to choose Shopify, you want to make sure the outcome is worth it, right? Not only should there be some solid return on investment, but maybe a part of you also wants to make up for time wasted because of your old, underperforming platform. In short: your e-commerce platform better be good. So what advantages does Shopify bring to the table? In this blog, we’ll highlight 5 reasons why Shopify is a good idea.

1. Shopify is SaaS

What is SaaS? The concept of Software as a Service has become pretty established over the past few years, so you might not need any further explanation. Just in case, allow us to summarise it here:

SaaS is about eliminating all the hassle from IT. It centres on the cloud: instead of companies buying and owning licensed software suites or, alternatively, installing and maintaining open source software on their own servers, they can now lease their software for as long as they need it and access it online, from anywhere.

The software or platform is owned by the company developing and maintaining it. That company - let’s call them Shopify, but Google, Apple, Adobe and a host of other companies work the same way - is responsible for keeping the platform in the air, making it secure, and adapting it to developments in tech and users’ changing needs and expectations. The company employs an army of specialists to do just that. If they don’t, users will simply leave them by terminating their subscription, and move on to a more promising competitor.

With Shopify, you are always using the latest version of the platform and you will never face the end of life of the version you’re using. With Shopify, you don’t have to run security updates. Ever.

With Shopify, hosting and bandwidth is off your list of things to worry about. And Shopify never crashes: it has a 99.98% uptime. With its infinite scalability, Shopify Plus allows you to process more than 10.000 transactions per minute.

To make this possible, Shopify will not allow you to tinker with their platform too much. They reserve the right to make the final decisions as to what features the platform needs, what functionality is native and what will be provided in the form of third party apps and integrations, and in general what an excellent, future-proof e-commerce platform looks and feels like. You have to remember, though, that Shopify is very much in your corner. They essentially have the same goal as you: making your online business successful.

2. Shopify has the same goal as you: making you money

The Shopify fee is built up according to a 'revenue sharing' model (USD $2000 a month or 0,25% of your online revenue, whichever is greater). By asking you to share revenue instead of charging a fixed sum, Shopify allows for your sales figures to fluctuate throughout the year.

Even with revenue sharing, Shopify is pretty much always cheaper than most platforms — open source or not. In this blog, we explain how this works by means of the concept of Total Cost of Ownership.

Finally, there is another argument in favour of this pricing strategy that we didn’t mention yet. Because of revenue sharing, Shopify’s business goals line up very nicely with those of a merchant. Both have a vested interest in making the merchant as much revenue as possible. If Shopify succeeds in making its users money, it will share in their profits through revenue sharing. Hence, Shopify has a very clear incentive to make its platform as effective as possible.

3. Shopify simplifies tech

How does Shopify make its platform effective and profitable? First of all, by relieving merchants of any worry about the technology behind their online store. This alone frees up plenty of time for online entrepreneurs to focus on revenue-making activities like sales and marketing. With the tech reliably taken care of, merchants can look ahead and start making plans for the future.

When those plans involve anything tech-related, Shopify has already cleared the path. Shopify Plus helps you automate any recurring, manual tasks that slow you down, by handing you Shopify Flow and Launchpad. Thanks to its fast API, Shopify Plus allows for unlimited integration with other IT platforms. The Shopify App Store provides an entire ecosystem of functionality that is fully compatible and easily added to any store. Shopify cultivates good relations with a number of high-performing partner agencies like Code. What is more, since Shopify is such a big player, many third parties have developed their own integrations with Shopify.

4. Shopify simplifies and optimises Sales and Marketing

Shopify offers a range of options to take your sales and marketing up a notch. With Shopify Plus you can manage sales channels such as Marketplaces, WhatsApp and social media channels like TikTok and Instagram, all from a single dashboard. You also have the option to customise your checkout, by adding upsell and cross-sell possibilities or by setting ‘smart rules’ with Shopify Scripts. This lets you apply customer-specific discounts, shipping options and payment methods - all serving to generate more sales.

Interested in exploring new markets and expanding internationally? Shopify Plus offers you nine extra storefronts without additional cost (and more for a small fee), to serve other regions or launch a B2B webshop. You can manage these stores from a single dashboard, without having to login again. Want to test out new audiences and regions before deciding which ones to focus on? Shopify Markets is just what you need.

5. Shopify gets you traffic and conversion

Shopify is always working on features that will improve the platform in any way - especially where it concerns conversion rates. Hence, Shopify is fully responsive. Hence, Shopify hands you a lot of reporting tools and data analytics which you can use to boost your store’s conversion and customer retention.

And let’s not forget SEO. At Shopify there are a lot of very capable developers working around the clock to make incremental improvements to Shopify’s SEO performance, because it pays off big time. And not just for the merchant. With 2 million live online stores sharing revenue with Shopify, even the smallest of improvements will make Shopify a lot of money. Just saying...

Are you considering Shopify?

You’re always welcome to have a sparring session about your replatforming plans. Tell us what you have in mind, what your business is like, and what platform pains you currently have, and we’re happy to let you see what we can do.

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Written by

Linda Bleijenberg

Code easily writes 100 lines of code every day, but a blog is a different story! So we leave that to Linda Bleijenberg, our copywriter. She lives around the corner in Delft and wants to be an IT wizard when she grows up. Until then, she interviews our experts and shares our most interesting insights about Shopify and E-Commerce on our blog.

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