Shopify Inc. is a Canadian multinational e-commerce company headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario. It is also the name of its proprietary e-commerce platform for online stores and retail point-of-sale systems. Shopify offers online retailers a variety of services including payments, marketing, shipping and customer engagement tools.
Dropshipping
Dropshipping is a Shopify feature that lets you sell products by using a supplier that holds the inventory and ships the product for you. You pay the wholesale price to the supplier, while controlling the price that your customers see in your Shopify store.
When a customer places an order in your store, you purchase the products from the supplier and select how to ship the product directly to your customer. You don’t need to hold any inventory or ship items yourself.
Products are the most important part of your dropshipping business, the products that you choose to sell will shape how you run your online store, how you market your store, and who you market it to.
Preparing for a dropshipping business
Dropshipping suits nearly any size of business. You can use dropshipping to help your daughter sell her band’s merchandise or use it to run a multi-million-dollar enterprise. Although the method for running the business is the same, the amount of preparation for each differs greatly.
Your final goal for a dropshipping business determines how much setup you need to do. If your business goal is to explore entrepreneurship and financial success is a secondary goal, then there are fewer steps to start your business. However, if your goal is to have a business that eventually becomes your full-time job, then you want to make sure you’re setting up the business for long-term success.
Products
Your products are the goods, digital downloads, services, and gift cards that you sell. You add a product in Shopify by entering product details and uploading product images. If your product has options, like size or color, then you can add a variant for each combination of options.
When you are adding or updating a product, you can make the product available to one or more of your sales channels.
You view, add, update, and organize all of your products and variants from the Products page in the Shopify admin.
Online Store
The Online Store sales channel is an online home for your business. Your store needs to be on the Basic Shopify plan or higher for you to sell with an online store. If you’re new to Shopify, then learn how to get started.
You can use your Shopify online store to create webpages, publish a blog, and sell your products. You need to be on the Basic Shopify plan or higher to sell with an online store.
Your online store is flexible, so you can build your business with the following customizations:
- build custom menus to help customers navigate your products and content
- add a custom domain
- set up dynamic checkout buttons for your product pages
- design your online store using responsive themes
5 reasons why you should use Shopify for your retail business
When it comes to building websites for your business with so many options to choose from, sometimes it’s so overwhelming that you are tempted to just purchase from the first website you go to.
You should buy your website from Shopify as this is the easiest, cheapest and most convenient way for a business to set up a store and start selling their products and services online straight away.
Here are five reasons on why you should opt for Shopify websites/Stores:
1: Big brands are using Shopify
If it’s good enough for well-known brands, then it’s definitely good enough for your e-commerce website. Names such as Lollapalooza, third eye blind, and American Blues musician Jimmie Vaughan also sells his merchandise on his Shopify website. SMS Audio, Bohemian Guitars and Leather Head sports also use Spotify making this is a good reason in itself to buy Shopify sites to help boost your e-commerce traffic.
2: You don’t have to worry about server costs
Many businesses are put off by server prices, so luckily Shopify’s server is maintained by them, and it comes with a number of plans and a monthly subscription, so you choose the plan which fits your requirements. Shopify is free for 14 days, so you can set up your online store and choose a plan later. Prices range from $29 to $299 a month.
3: Discounts are offered on annual plans
Not everyone is a fan of monthly payment plans, which is why Shopify also provides discounts on annual plans and biennial plans. If you prefer annual payments, you will receive a 10% discount, and if you prefer biennial plans, your company will receive a 20% discount.
4: Shopify has great app integrations with SaaS services
Shopify is popular with SaaS service companies because their customers are familiar with monthly plans.
That’s why you’ll most probably always find whatever innovative new service you need on Shopify first before anywhere else, and some of them offer excellent free plans. Conversely, SaaS companies also aren’t keen on e-commerce competitor platforms like woo commerce or open cart because the people who use them don’t pay monthly subscription fees. So a lot of really convenient services are not integrated on these platforms.
5: Security & Reliability
Shopify is a global hosted service, meaning they have people monitoring their network 24/7 for any attacks and they can help you deal with any problems that arise. Also, their add-ons have a certain standard and will not pose the risk of giving you Trojans or viruses. You can also opt for SSL or even PCI compliance to accept credit cards and store sensitive information without having to know the technical details of how it works. Other sources do offer this as well. However, they can’t offer you this level of security and reliability for the same price. Other companies will charge you more.
What’s new at Shopify?
With the Amazon sales channel, you can sell on the world’s largest online marketplace simply and conveniently through Shopify. Since the channel’s launch, U.S. Shopify store owners have made millions in sales and fulfilled tens of thousands of Amazon orders with Shopify, making it one of the fastest growing sales channels.
