SHOPIFY MARKETING AND PROMOTION
What is Shopify?
Shopify is an ecommerce platform that you can use to build your store both online and offline. Bloggers use WordPress. Store owners use Shopify. It allows you to sell both online with your own website and/or in person with Shopify POS. This ecommerce website builder has features for everyone from beginners to ecommerce website
What Does Shopify Do?
Shopify provides you with the foundation to run an ecommerce business. As you venture into the online selling space, you’re expected to open a storefront, showcase products, engage with customers, accept payments, and more. Shopify offers all the tools you need to manage each of those activities. Think of Shopify’s platform as a facilitator working to ease the process of selling products over the web.
What Can You Sell on Shopify
On Shopify, there are always new trending products that you can sell on the platform. You can sell anything — from fashion to beauty to home and garden. Here are a few popular products you can consider selling:
- Clothing
- Jewelry
- Home accessories
- Travel products
- Baby or maternity products
- Bags and luggage
- Fitness accessories
- Beauty products
- Kitchenware
- Pet products
- Automotive accessories
- And much more!
BENEFITS OF SHOPIFY
1: Easy set-up & use
Shopify offers a super easy and quick launch for an online store. There is no need for a server or any technical skills to develop your store. The software and the hosting are offered within the platform itself.
2: Security and reliability & use
Another important feature that can listed among the benefits of Shopify, is the security and reliability that it offers.
Online retailers are always face to face with sensitive customer information. Security is a must for businesses that deal with personal and payment information of their customers. SSL certification could be enabled for your store to encrypt all the data. Shopify takes care of PCI, too.
In addition to those, your online business must be always online answering to the shopping needs of your customers. Shopify is taking care of any maintainance work and any updates so that your visitors can constantly be able to shop from your store at any time. And of course, Shopify makes sure that your pages load quickly.
3: Mobile friendliness & use
Every single day, the number of mobile shoppers rises rapidly. Mobile responsiveness is very crucial for the success of the online stores. Knowing this, Shopify developed its interface with mobile responsiveness to make sure your store looks great on all the devices. As a result, your customers will be able to shop conveniently from wherever they are.
4: Recovery of your abandoned carts & use
Two of your three customers leave your online store without buying the products they have added to their baskets. Knowing this, Shopify developed abandoned cart recovery system, which automatically emails these customers and reminds them to complete their purchases. This is a great way to increase your online revenues.
5: Shopify customer service
Shopify is great at customer support. Their experts are available 24/7 via telephone, email or live chat and they are ready to answer your every need to keep your store running every single minute. This means that your business is never on its own.
Additionally, there are many community forums, useful documents in the Shopify Help Centre and a wide range of Shopify University guides.
6: Shopify Store Apps use
It is quite easy to integrate a Shopify website with apps. Its app store has thousands of applications. We can easily say that there is an application for everything that users would like to do. Users can add some extra features to answer any need of their shoppers and enhance the value of their stores.
7: Blogging
Blogging is very important in increasing the traffic to your store. Shopify comes with a built-in blog. This allows you to create a related content to ensure that your site gets a high ranking.
What Are The Benefits of Shopify Payments?
As a result of a great partnership with Stripe, which is a payment service provider for eCommerce businesses, Shopify has created its own credit card processor; The Shopify Payments.
Now, Shopify Payments is one of the many payment processor options that Shopify users can select to safely receive the payments from their users. And this is for sure one of the advantages of Shopify.
After the sign up, Shopify users do not need to install any other payment processor or collaborate with an external company. Shopify Payments is integrated in the platform. All the things that users have to do is just to select Shopify Payments — which is in the admin panel — and add the information that is asked. These are the banking details, the Employer Identification Number, the average price and the average shipping time. After these steps, all the transactions that come to the store will be easily managed from the Shopify dashboard.
We can say that Shopify decided to cut the middleman, and relax its users, which is one of the greatest benefits of Shopify Payments
We found this feature advantageous, as users will not need to log into another platform to follow up their funds and it removes extra transaction fees.
For now, it is not available for every country, making it one of the disadvantages of Shopify.
1. Quick & easy to set up & use
Shopify offers an easy way to quickly launch an online store without the fuss over servers and development costs that can be incurred with self-hosted platforms such s Magento. The admin interface is clean and user-friendly and pretty intuitive because all the features are logically structured. You can also find extensive documentation and video guides on the Shopify site. All you really need is a product to sell.
2. No tech worries
Good news! You don’t need any technical expertise to launch a basic Shopify store; all software and hosting is provided by Shopify. Not only does this make it easier to get up and running, but it’s likely that Shopify’s hosting will be faster and more secure than you could achieve alone, plus it will easily accommodate any spikes in traffic you might receive. Shopify also take care of all software updates. So you can focus all your efforts on selling and not worry about technical issues, hooray.
3. Secure & reliable
If you have an eCommerce store, you will be dealing with sensitive customer information including credit card details, plus impatient customers. This means your site needs to be fast, secure and always online. One of the big advantages of a hosted solution is the reliability it provides. Shopify will take care of all server maintenance and upgrades to keep your store and shopping cart available at all times, and ensure that pages load quickly.
SSL certificates can be enabled for your store to encrypt all data and pass it through a secure connection, plus Shopify takes care of PCI compliance for you (required when you deal with credit cards).
4. 4/7 customer support
Shopify are big on customer support. They are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and the response time is fairly instant, meaning your business is never on its own. You can get in touch via phone, email or web chat. In addition there are a number of community forums, extensive documentation in the Shopify Help Centre plus a range of advanced Shopify University guides.
5. Mobile ready
With mobile visits to websites now higher than desktop, it’s essential, not optional, to have a mobile optimised site. Luckily Shopify know this. All of Shopify’s themes are mobile responsive and the platform includes a free built-in mobile commerce shopping cart, meaning your store looks great on all devices and your customers can shop freely wherever they are.
In addition, there are free iPhone and Android apps that let you manage your store on the go should you wish to.
6. Customisable
There are 160 themes to choose from (free and paid) in the Shopify Theme Store, all of which are mobile responsive, plus hundreds available on sites such as ThemeForest. Each theme is also fully customisable by editing the code. So creating a beautiful and unique online shop that fits with your brand identity is simple
7. There’s an app for that
Shopify’s app store is a treasure trove of functionality that you can add to your shop. You can add reviews, loyalty programmes, customer wishlists, get in-depth analytics, print labels and packing slips, integrate with accounting software, shipping programs and social media sites, not to mention all the marketing apps available. With over 1,500 to choose from, whatever you want to do it’s likely there’ll be an app for it. Note that whilst many are free, over half are charged for.
8. SEO & Marketing tools
It’s all well and good having a beautiful online shop but if no-one visits you’ll be pulling down the virtual shutters in no time. Another of Shopify’s big selling points is its powerful Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) features that will help your website rank higher in search results so customers can find you. You also have access to advanced analytics to tell you where your customers are coming from so you can tailor your marketing accordingly. You may wish to recruit the help of an SEO company to help you.
The app store gives you access to a huge range of marketing tools including social media integration, product reviews and email marketing. As standard, Shopify allows you to create discount codes. Gift vouchers are available at the next level up. Social media icons are included in all themes. And if you’re a bit overwhelmed by digital marketing and the time it could take, Shopify Kit has been designed to help. It acts like a virtual employee, recommending and executing marketing tasks based on your products, audience and store performance.
9. Abandoned cart recovery
What happens if a visitor to your store places a product in their shopping basket but leaves without buying it? According to statistics, over two thirds of potential customers will do this. Shopify offers an abandoned checkout cart recovery service which automatically tracks and emails these potential customers to remind them to complete their purchase; an easy way to potentially generate more revenue.
10. Own payment gateway
Shopify has integrated with dozens of payment gateways, but also offers its own which is powered by Stripe. If you choose to use this you will not incur any transaction fees plus you will benefit from lower credit card fees. It also doesn’t require a merchant account to use.
