10 Reasons to choose Shopify

As a ‘hosted’ platform, the Shopify way is streamlined and simple. It is possible to DIY your online store with little to no real tech skills required. Shopify handles much of the technical stuff for you, including hosting, security updates and a suite of epic ecomm features that are included with your store, ‘out of the box’.

Shopify hosting is secure, robust and fast, and that means that when you start to see growth, your Shopify store can handle the traffic spikes. Plus, you’ll get all new features and platform updates automatically so you can focus on selling, and let the tech take care of itself.

Tech headaches are minimal with Shopify because the platform has always been all about making high performing ecommerce accessible to all businesses, from startups to big business. You can set up shop without the hassles of servers and coding.

The interface and user (that’s you!) experience of the Shopify admin and Content Management System (CMS) is as user-friendly and intuitive as your favourite social media apps. Plus, Shopify hosts heaps of helpful information, and there are online communities to give you help and feedback 24/7. They’re all lovely, friendly and helpful too.

Shopify does user experience for business owners very well indeed and that means an easy-to-use back-end with an intuitive dashboard of performance metrics presenting all the information merchants need to manage their online store, and track performance. Your team will have access to detailed sales reports and key metrics. Management of customers, orders, products and collections is simple and all code-free.

Plus, the Shopify CMS is high powered and gives a full range of content control to the team running your brand - They can easily change images, sections and text on the website which reduces the need to get development support, and gives merchants complete control over the content that needs changing most often. That’s smart, and really the way it should always be.

In ecommerce, where there are credit cards, transactions and money involved, security is crucial. While other, open source platforms can be security nightmares, Shopify's got your back with best-in-class security. PCI compliance on credit card transactions is all part of the service, and your SSL certificates are included in your platform subscription, and updated automatically.

Shopify hosts literally millions of online stores around the world, and they can’t do that successfully without making sure that each site is secure so that customers are safe and confident in their online buying, and business owners like you have total peace of mind.

It has become the standard for 80% + of online shopping to be done via a mobile phone. For many brands, that figure is even higher. That means the most important version of your online store is the one that works on mobile phones. Shopify is, and has always been, mobile-first, with content across all current themes set up to scale responsively, to suit the screen size and format that the customer is using.

Shopify themes are mobile-responsive, and include a free built-in mobile commerce shopping cart, to make sure your store looks good, and the shopping experience remains simple and intuitive on mobile devices.

Shopify stores are based on ‘themes’ that establish a set structure to the way content will be presented to your customers. Shopify offers extensive opportunity to ‘customise’ site design, structure and individual sections, via the theme ‘customiser’ and every theme can be transformed to your unique brand and personality when your assets are applied to the theme.

You can choose from free and paid themes, developed by Shopify and external theme developers, to find the one with the structure and features that works best for your business. And with the right Shopify partner agency, the theme base code can be customised to create any visual or feature requirement that you can dream up. Flexible? Check. Beautiful? Check. Bespoke? Check.

Do you own an iPhone? If you do, you’ll be familiar with the Apple App Store, right? Great. Well, the Shopify ecosystem works in much the same way. When you open your Shopify account, you open up to all of the ‘native’ Shopify features that are included in the platform, just like your iPhone comes with certain features ready to go when you turn the phone on for the first time. Like Apple, Shopify also has an app store of carefully curated and maintained apps that deliver all sorts of additional features.

App-based features can include Cross Sell and Up Sell, Discounts, Subscription Sales, Shipping Management, Email Automations, Reviews, Loyalty Programs and much, much more. Some apps are free, and some involve fees. We advise that ecommers choose apps based on the benefits they can deliver your business. Apps that will help you drive revenue growth, or achieve process efficiencies are always worth the investment.  

Site design and functionality is important, but don’t forget about your site visitors. No ecommerce brand can succeed without humans hitting the store to browse, investigate and buy. For SEO and organic search performance, Shopify offers a swag of robust SEO features to help your site perform in search and climb those rankings.

Plus, Shopify has formal agreements with Meta and Google (including YouTube) to help merchants connect and share the products from their Shopify store directly into the digital and social channels where customers spend so much time. That is powerful. Plus, Shopify’s own metrics work nicely in tandem with GA4 to give you advanced analytics to understand your customers better and how they engage and convert with your online store. And then there are an array of extra marketing tools in the app store to help you implement the marketing and retention strategies that drive sales and revenue growth.

Shopify is an ecommerce platform that was launched in 2004, and has been evolving and improving ever since. That’s some serious ecommerce R&D history this platform has to work with. So when Shopify says "Shopify has the world's best-converting checkout," we can believe them. The Shopify Checkout is highly evolved and high performing, and to prove it, they partnered with a ‘Big Three’ global management consulting company, gave them access to Shopify’s own data, and asked them to study the checkouts of the major ecomm platforms. After months of independent study, it was found that Shopify's overall conversion rate outpaces the competition by up to 36% and by an average of 15%.

Plus, the research showed the power of Shop Pay, Shopify’s accelerated checkout. This can lift conversion by as much as 50% compared to guest checkout, out performing other accelerated checkouts by at least 10%. So, you can rest easy with Shopify, knowing that your store is backed by the Checkout that out-converts the others. That’s the most solid foundation there is upon which to build your online business.

One channel for selling your awesome products to the world might not be enough. The good people at Shopify know this, and the platform has been developed to allow you to sell your products in multiple places at once. What we’re talking about here is those other ‘marketplaces’ like Facebook, eBay, Amazon and Instagram.

The beauty of the Shopify approach to omni-channel selling is the simplicity of managing those channels. With Shopify, your business will maintain all inventory, products, orders and customer management in one place - The Shopify admin dashboard or course! The opportunity to open up other channels via which you can reach more customers and convert more sales is an awesome benefit and a great way to finish up our 10 reasons for choosing Shopify.

There you have it - 10 rock-solid reasons to get Shopify on your shopping list of potential ecommerce platforms for your business.

Our experience working with founders, business owners, retailers, ecommerce managers, marketing managers and product managers to understand the options and make the right choices for their brands, goes right back to 2010.

Ecommerce business people choose us for advice and guidance, to make the switch to Shopify, redesign existing Shopify stores, and improve store performance across Engagement, Conversion and Retention.