What is Shopify and How to Start Your Shopify Store

Many entrepreneurs seeking to establish an online presence ask, "What is Shopify?" In essence, Shopify is an e-Commerce platform that empowers businesses of all sizes with various features and tools to create and manage their online stores. As a cloud-based platform, Shopify provides website design templates, payment processing, order and inventory management, marketing and SEO tools, and other essential functionalities to help businesses thrive online.

Whether you're a small-scale drop shipper or a rapidly expanding D2C enterprise, Shopify can meet your online store requirements with its various Shopify pricing plans and user-friendly interface. Indeed, Shopify's flexibility and scalability make it a popular choice for businesses seeking to establish or enhance their online presence.

Start trading with Shopify signing up for a 2-week trial period to test it. With just several clicks, you can create a Shopify store; the interface and menu are intuitive, and hundreds of shop templates are available. You can edit your admin page, add or delete products you sell, upload various photographs of your products, update prices whenever you need, and inventory the stock in real time.

The quantity and assortment of products you can sell through Shopify are unlimited. 

Managing your shop was never so easy, do it in the Shopify app for mobile or use your PC desktop to communicate with your team, receive order notifications, deal with refunds, track sales, and set up pricing.

With Shopify, you are not framed by only your webpage sales. Connect your sales to different social media resources and expand the chasing area of potential clients.

The Shopify interface is highly intuitive; you can have everything ready in minutes. Because the SaaS platform hosts all of its resources in the cloud, there is no need to charge additional costs for an external server.

One of the main advantages of using Shopify is its user-friendly interface, making it easy to create a professional-looking Shopify website without coding knowledge. Shopify also knows that mobile visits to online shops are currently the most popular and require mobile-responsive themes and platforms. Be sure your shop will look lovely on mobile phone screens and desktops.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is one of the most vital points to choosing Shopify, your store can look fascinating, but without clients, this loses sense. Shopify gives a colossal rank of marketing tools to attract customers. It includes discount codes, gift vouchers, and social media icons in all store themes. Shopify SEO features help to promote your shop in research results. You have access to analytics to examine where your clients come from so you can regulate your sales.

Being a leading e-Commerce platform, Shopify is in the scope of interest of many digital tools to connect. It integrates with many services such as email marketing tools, CRM, and other selling platforms such as Amazon or eBay. Best Shopify integration apps are among the most frequently used by Shopify store owners and managers. If you're interested in Shopify dropshipping, you can use Shopify's built-in integrations with dropshipping apps to help streamline your business processes.

In case you need to make a detailed analysis of your Shopify data or visualize it to get helpful insights for further successful business development, Power BI Connector for Shopify is here to serve you. Or perhaps you want to have interactive sales reports supported by detailed visuals in Tableau of your Shopify store database, then Tableau Connector will come in handy.

Two-factor authentication and fraud detection are extra compelling advantages of Shopify Security System to protect customers' data. Shopify monitors and identifies suspicious transactions, so you can always follow them. It means that the system demands a second factor to identify the customer, for example, the code sent via text or mail.

Shopify is the number one e-Commerce platform, where even the most potent modern brands, such as Tesla and Allbirds, benefit. Thus the question arises: How much does Shopify cost?

There are a lot of factors that impact the price of launching a Shopify store. Let’s check all possible Shopify Pricing Plans.

Two staff accounts, full access to the admin dashboard for managing products, orders, and customer information, and more competitive fee transactions are essential features that offer Shopify Basic Plan only for 29 dollars per month.

The Shopify Basic plan is suitable for those already running a business and wanting to improve sales online.

The Shopify plan is an excellent choice for growing companies that require effective report types for better business decisions.

The Shopify plan costs $79 per month. It is an upgrade from the Shopify Basic plan with advanced features like five inventory locations and five staff accounts, sophisticated reporting, and automatization of specific tasks such as stock orders when inventory is low or alarm notification for clients when wishlist items are back in stock and so on.

The Shopify Advanced plan costs $299 monthly, which is significantly more expensive than the Shopify plan. With the Shopify Advanced plan, up to 8 inventory locations and 15 staff accounts are possible, the reports are more advanced, and automatic taxes calculations are implemented.

Before choosing between the Shopify and the Shopify Advanced plans, you must calculate everything accurately.

How to start a Shopify store? Before you start building your Shopify store, ensure you have everything you need (for example, a logo, a firm business name, pics of your products, and so on). It speeds up the process and results in a more excellent online shop.
Follow the steps:

• Sign Up for Shopify

You can start with a 14-day trial period to decide which tariff is preferable.

• Add Pages to Your Site

The introductory pages to create are the About us page, FAQs page, Policy page, Contact page, and Blog page.

• Add Products to Your Shopify Store

After you've signed up for the Shopify free trial, users start selecting themes and experimenting with the design. However, you'd instead add your products first because your product selection will significantly impact the visual of your store. The best strategy is to build the shop around products.

• Choose a Theme and Customize Your Shopify Store

You can pick up one of the numerous themes for your shop and personalize it with the company logo, slogan, text, photographs, and overview videos.

• Customize Your Checkout Page

Yes, the checkout page is possible to customize, too. Use the same tools for this as you did for your store.

• Activate Your Payment Processor

Shopify works with over 100 payment gateways and also has its own named Shopify Payments, the application that will be the quickest payment processor to implement for most sellers. It is the only payment gateway without transaction fees.

Unfortunately, Shopify Payments is only available in a few countries, so if you live out of one, you'll have to use a third-party payment gateway.

• Setup Your Domain with Shopify

The name of your shop is significant, but if you can't come up with the perfect store name that is your shop's URL, you can skip this step and let Shopify generate a URL for you. And if you choose Shopify's URL generation for you, don't worry. You can change it later, but only once. Go to Settings -> Domains and press Customize.

• Connect Shopify Apps

There are more than 4 200 apps to integrate into Shopify with no code-skills requirements, which helps to improve your sales and customer experience.

• Launch Your Store

Now, you are ready to publish your store! Before launching, it is highly recommended to check if everything works as expected.

Shopify is indeed an all-in-one marketplace product that was created to assist business owners worldwide through the possibility to start selling when they want. With the Shopify platform, you can quickly create your online store and start selling immediately, benefiting from tariff plans, integrations, and security systems.

Ready to bet that considering the fundamental things of your online shop and what things are secondary before building your online shop takes longer than building up your online shop through Shopify. Create, improve, and sell with Shopify.