It’s time to admit it. The internet has won, and if anyone wants to be a player in any form of business, then they need to take their business online. Whether it is considering having a site that is simply content-based to promote information about your business, or a full-fledged eCommerce site to sell your products directly to your extensive consumer base, you need to get that domain name and build that site. This can be scary for a lot of people because they think they need to be master programmers, and IT tech wizards, who can hack the planet to be able to get their shop up and running. Those days, thankfully, are gone. You need minimal IT knowledge to set up.
All you need to set up a Shopify Account is a website name, credit card, and email address. That’s really it. You might hear scary words such as DNS settings or domain name transfers, but most domain hosting sites have made it so easy to connect your sites with your Shopify account, that in these cases all you need to do is log in to both your Shopify account and tour domain host and click connect.
Yes, it can really be that simple and easy. You may have to wait for up to 24 hours as the magic happens in the backend, but eventually, yourwebsitename.com will show up on your Shopify account.
Shopify provides most eCommerce features out of the box. It helps you set up your products, upload images, utilize easy to change design templates, all without ever having to type a line of code. It has a click and drag mentality called WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get), where all the code is done on the backend as you design. You can set up payments through Shopify payments that accept all major credit cards, and connect other local payment platforms as well as platforms such as PayPal.
It really simplifies the entire process of getting your products properly set up and ready to be purchased. Additional categories such as sales, tax handling and shipping connects are all done with easy to use plugins… if you are considering creating your own products, a venture capital firm such as My Product Today can expertly work to take your idea and make it a reality.
Shopify natively connects with Facebook and Instagram. What that means is that with some clicks of the button, authorizations and logging in, you will be able to connect your social media pages to your Shopify website. Based on the template design selected, you can even have those social media sites as icons on your web page. This is a great way to engage your active online community and thus redirect them to your Shopify powered website to purchase your products.
Shopify also comes with features that showcase user visitor metrics, such as how many visitors you have per day, whether they are coming from either your social media sites, or other outlets, and the visitor to buyer ratio. It easily optimizes the content on the page to initiate your SEO (search engine optimization ) strategy, until you get more comfortable with third party marketing tools. There are also numerous built-in tutorials to connect to third party marketing channels such as Google AdWords or specialized SEO tools to help bring in traffic to your site.
The biggest selling point of Shopify to consumers is that it has some very advanced plugins to utilize. These can come free or for a small fee, and what they can do is supercharge your store. In most cases, you simply need to install the plugin and it is ready to work, with some minor non-technical set-up. These plugins can help convert your site to a wholesale business, connect to third-party marketing tools, and even connect to distribution companies that sell wholesale straight from the factory and to help enable a no – inventory dropshipping strategy. They can even help with administration situations such as connecting to your invoicing or tax software for easy communication and annual filings.
Since you won’t need to take those online courses for programming websites, or need to hire an in-house web designer, you can really save a lot of initial investment into your business. Shopify comes in three different pricing models, that really are built to scale as your business scales, and usually offers two weeks as a trial to see all the functionality that it can offer. The pricing after that is again, designed based on your volume of sales.
Those plugins mentioned earlier, the good news is most of them come free or with free testing periods. The even better news is that even those that cost money are always at fair pricing that is priced similar or slightly higher than your monthly Netflix subscription. Keep in mind to only use plugins as needed, and to always check what you’re paying, because they can easily add up to one or several hundred dollars a month if you get too plugin friendly.
Either way – if you’re looking to get online, and online fast, look no further than utilizing Shopify to convert your commerce business into eCommerce.
