If you are searching how to set up an e-commerce store for a minute, you might encounter Shopify at the top of search results. Shopify is a powerful and fully-hosted e-commerce platform that can entirely support merchants of any scale to start an online store. Hosting millions of stores in 175 countries and annually facilitating around $1 billion in transactions, Shopify deserves its high marks as the top-recommended shopping cart.
Shopify Themes
Shopify offers nine official free themes: Boundless, Brooklyn, Debut, Minimal, Narrative, Express, Simple, Supply and Venture, which are all fresh, well-designed and compatible to all niches. About 70 official paid themes are provided on Shopify whereas more than 1,200 unofficial Shopify themes and templates are offered on Theme Forest and 1,160 are available on Template Monster.
Elegant and modern Shopify themes
All of the themes allow merchants to showcase large and high-quality photos of the products and whitespace, in particular, some of them feature video, product navigation and wide layouts, etc. In case you are wondering which is the best free theme to launch an eCommerce business, Simple and Brooklyn would be the top choices.
Shopify Apps
Shopify apps for your online store
Shopify apps assure that your store can fully and effectively function as an online business should. You can find support from apps for store design, orders and shipping, inventory management, customer support, report and many more to facilitate the performance of your campaign and sales revenue. Some argue that if they need plenty of advanced features, they might spend a considerably high amount to buy the apps or add-ons, however they would be worthy since the developing stores need advanced functionalities.
Compared to their rivals, Shopify has a vast array of apps to upgrade your store’s features, in detail, there are 3,200 Shopify apps available in Shopify App Store, which is around five times higher than the second-biggest competitor – BigCommerce.
Shopify Price
Price of three popular Shopify Plans
There are three popular Shopify Plans: Basic Shopify, Shopify and Advanced Shopify. 14 days of trial with no credit card needed and automatic cancellation of the created account at the end of day 14. If you are satisfied and want to activate, you can pick a plan to purchase, otherwise, just leave it.
- Basic Shopify is an affordable plan which costs you $29. This plan allows you to use the most fundamental functions of an online store such as unlimited products, blog posts, sales channels or 2-staff accounts. This plan is the number one choice for small businesses or those trying to establish a new store.
- Shopify: This is a standard Shopify option that includes everything like Basic Shopify and additionally gift cards, reports and 5 staff accounts. If your business is growing quickly or the revenue reaches $5000, you can consider standard Shopify.
- Advanced Shopify: Delight option for large-scale business. Offering all features of the standard version and upgraded with some effective functions, Advance Shopify is definitely designed for the larger brands that their revenue exceeds $10,000.
The dashboard of Shopify Plus
There is a more affordable option – Shopify Lite for $9. This plan simply allows you to sell items on Facebook and shows a buy button to embed offerings into another website. Though this cannot create a real website, you can chat with your customers, make an invoice and accept payment by credit cards. While Shopify Plus is mostly used by enterprise businesses that sell over a million dollars a year. The price of Shopify Plus is customized, if you are considering using Shopify Plus, the advice is that you should contact Shopify for a special price.
Customer service and technical support
Shopify Customer service
The reviews from the customers come both progressive and negative. Some rave about Shopify’s experts for intuitive and friendly support while others opine that the Shopify representatives just speak out loud the script. It might depend on each case and the way to locate information, however before evaluating their qualification, let’s see what Shopify offers to help their customers:
- Phone: different phone numbers for different geography, ranging from the UK, Ireland, North America to Hong Kong, Singapore and others.
- Live chat: effective but requires your patience.
- Email: email support is available all the time, day and night to all users.
- Help center: find documentation when waiting for live chat, phone or email.
- Forums: some community forums might be of help; it is up to your issues.
- Social Media: Shopify’s Twitter might sound great for advice.
- YouTube: numerous tutorials videos are posted on Shopify Help Center channel.
- Changelog, Free Tools, Experts, Podcast, Webinars or Developer Docs: there remain many ways to assist merchants during peak time.
Independent, elegant and easy-to-use, these words are totally used to assess Shopify. Although you might be overwhelmed by the countless customer support options or disrupted by the additional cost, their plus points still outweigh. We are proud and confident to recommend the practical and helpful Shopify to all merchants with a shoestring budget.