Shopify Review 2021

What is Shopify? 

Shopify is a commerce platform that allows you to set up an online store and sell your goods or services. You can sell online or with Shopify's POS you can make sales in person.

Their Headquarter is located in Ottawa, Canada. Shopify is use by over one million businesses spanning 175 countries. This includes big names like Allbirds, Gymshark, PepsiCo and Staples.  

With so many different options for building a website for ecommerce it becomes a case of analyses paralyses. For that reason this Shopify review will only focus on a few key points. Key points like....

• Pricing
• Easy of use
• Quality
• Flexibility       

Shopify's Pricing Plans

Shopify has three plans they offer. Basic Shopify, Shopify and Advanced Shopify. Each plan is catered to a stage of growth in your business. With basic Shopify being the starting line and Advance Shopify for when your business is in full sprint.   

Basic Shopify plan 

Starting out with a 14 day free trial is a good way to test Shopify out. If you decide to stick with them and choose the basic plan it's only going to cost you $29 a month, which is less than some gym memberships.

Extra Cost

Some other cost to consider are purchasing a domain name, third-party payment fees (Shopify calls them rates), online credit card rates and in-person credit card rates. In the Basic plan these rates are

• 2% for third-party payment
• 2.7% In-person credit card rate
• 2.9%+ $.30 online credit card rate 

Discounts 

One unexpected advantage to signing up to Shopify is that it gets you discounts on shipping. For the basic plan the discount goes up to 64% with company's such as DHL Express, UPS, or USPS. This is a great advantage because shipping cost can really cut into your profits. 

Shopify plan

As your business is growing and building momentum you'll need to advance to this next level. The Shopify plan will cost you $79 a month but it comes with some significant advantages. Increased shipping discounts and lowering of credit card payment rates are some of the Advantages.

Extra cost

Just like the basic plan you're going to have more cost added to the $79 a month. 

• 1% for third-party payment
• 2.5% In-person credit card rate
• 2.6%+$.30 online credit card rate

Discounts 

Again you'll get a shipping discounts with some major shipping companies. The discount goes up to 72% for the Shopify plan. That is a 8% increase in discounts which doesn't seem like much but as your sales increase this will save you a lot of money in the long run.   

Advanced Shopify

This is the plan you want to achieve because its means your business plan is working and you're ready to scale!! This plan is significantly more costly than the two others. The increase volume of sales you should have at this point makes the discounts in shipping and lowered payment rates well worth it. The cost for the Advanced plan is $299 a month.

Extra cost

The advanced plan have the lowest rate for credit card payments and third-party payments.

• .5% for third-party payment
• 2.4% In-person credit card rate
• 2.4%+$.30 online credit card rate

Discounts 

Though the Advance plan is more costly the shipping discounts make up for it. You can easily save more than $299 on shipping if your volume of orders is high enough. The shipping discount is up to 74%. 

Easy of Use

From my experience It's true that you can setup a store in 30mins with Shopify. That is they really streamline things with the use of themes. You can go with the free ones or you can pay for some and edit them to your liking. You don't need to code and the whole experience is like setting up a profile page on Facebook, only more detailed. You're still going to need some knowledge of websites but there is so many YouTube tutorials that can help you it wont hinder you too much.

If I where to compare easy of use between WordPress and Shopify I would say Shopify is easier.   

Shopify's Quality

One major factor in a business's success is its reliability. So if your an online business and your website is constantly down you're in big trouble. When addressing the quality of what Shopify brings to the table its reliability is very important. 

Reliability 

As a platform Shopify claims to have maintained a 99.99% uptime for the last 90 days. Uptime is how they measure the reliability of their services such as online storefronts, checkout, Shopify POS, Shop Pay, Shopify Payments, and Shopify itself. This seems to be a padded number because  they do not include the following to calculate their uptime.

• Outages of third-party services
• Errors resulting from theme customization
• Errors resulting from public or private apps
• Planned downtime or maintenance
• Major or natural events outside of Shopify's control

Conversion Rate

We all want our storefronts to look good but if they are not converting visits to sales then what is the point. The average conversion rate for ecommerce store in the US is 2.63% but the average Shopify user gets 1.4% conversion rate for desktop and .9% for mobile. (Check out a great way to increase your sales with Email Marketing) 

I don't think this is because Shopify websites don't work but because of the easy of use and reasonable price you get new business that are not skilled at online sales as they should be. As stated earlier big names like PepsiCo and Staples use Shopify which shows that if done correctly a Shopify store will convert with the best of them.

Checkout my demo store  made with Shopify.

Flexibility

The sky is the limit when it comes to what you can sell with Shopify.  Here is a list of ideas of what you can do with Shopify.

• Physical products: Anything you can touch from watches to coffee beans to car parts.  
• Digital products: eBooks,  audio downloads, e-courses
• Services and consultations: Cleaning, website design, writing services  
• Memberships: subscription boxes, gym memberships or member-only access to your content
• Classes and lessons: Customers can purchase, rent, and book lessons 
• Rentals: tools, rent dresses or props, 

Summary 

When its all said and done Shopify is a very solid company that solves many pain points for customers. They're good and reasonably priced and flexible which is why I give them a 9/10. For someone just starting out to a more experienced business person Shopify has plenty to offer from discounts to scalability.

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