Selling items online used to be a very complex enterprise and still today, it is still not a trivial task. There are many factors to be considered and arranged before a user can place an online-order: the shopping cart, user account handling, calculating shipping costs, the checkout process, credit card payment gateways, secure certificates and so on.
For smaller vendors with a tight budget an almost impossible undertaking. Until recently that is. A few years ago several entrepreneurs recognized the market niche and started to code some hosted e-commerce solutions. And it seems that at this point, there are a couple of them that can be taken seriously.
Shopify features an easy-to-use navigation
A wide range of solutions
During my research I came across a couple of these services that looked promising: besides Shopify I also briefly looked at solutions called CoreCommerce, Big Commerce, Magento (not a hosted solution), Volusion or osCommerce. Each of these solutions has its strengths and weaknesses. CoreCommerce stood out as one of the only one being configurable in multiple languages, but only Shopify convinced me in terms of ease-of-use.
If you try to compare Shopify to other solutions, you might realize that it offers fewer features. But the features they offer are well-presented and easy-to-learn. Certainly not the best choice if you want to conquer the world, but as I mentioned in the intro, I was looking for a simple, low budget solution.
What's under the hood
The nice thing with Shopify is that in a day or two you have pretty much checked out all features. It offers pretty much everything you need to start a small store:
- Wide range of design templates
- Collections and tags to organize your products
- Basic features to showcase your products based on vendor, pricing or discounts
- Three ways to calculate shipping (price-based, weigt-based or in real-time with UPS and FedEx)
- Plenty of built-in payment gateways to accept credit cards
- Checkout available in many languages
- Simple interface to view your orders and customers
- Possibility to add a small blog and static pages
- Possibility to hook up your store to a professional fulfillment centre
The Strengths
One of the biggest strengths of Shopify is their ready-to-use design templates. They come in two categories: some are free, and for some you have to pay between $80 and $200. They have one thing in common: they simply look good!
If you know how to code, you can customize the templates with their proprietary programming language. Of course you also have full access to the style sheets and the image library to skin you store accordingly.
They also have an App store, where you can purchase plug-n-play functionalities. However, most of the Apps come with a recurring fee.
Last but not least I found the documentation of the application very well-done and comprehensive. This is, unfortunately, not a given these days.
With all that, if you know where you are going, you can have a professional looking online store in about two days.
Interface to add and edit products
The weaknesses
From my perspective, the rather limited amount of features is not a weakness. It makes things simple.
However, I would like to have an easy way to organize products into categories and sub-categories. This can be achieved currently, but it is a bit cumbersome. Un-shopify-like. The same can be said for static pages. Being used to a real CMS, this feels very basic.
Also, for a Canadian product out of Ottawa, someone would have expected the solution being multi-lingual. This can be achieved by setting up two or more stores, but again, it doesn't feel very intuitive and isn't the right answer to the issue.
Compared to similar solutions it is a bit pricy, in addition to the monthly fee there's the per transaction fee (between 0.5% and 2%) you will have to pay if you don't opt for the "premier" plan for $700/month.
Conclusion
Shopify is a really nice product. Not the cheapest, not the one with the most features, but it feels well-done and bug free. Certainly the best looking hosted e-commerce solution I came across. And as we all know: sex sells.
Further Reading
A very indepth e-commerce solutions review
Shopify Pricing