It's very hard to make a business out of being an influencer, or even internet famous! If you don't have a product or service to sell, then you're either not got a business or married to someone with very deep pockets. One of the best ways to earn money online is to have a product or a service and then sell that product or service. It seems very simplistic, doesn’t it? Well, it is.
Once you have the items you wish to sell, you'll need to have a simple way to keep track of inventory, deliver the goods to your customer and market it to your ideal audience. In other words, the shop is just the start of your online retailing business.
One way to do this online is with a shopping cart. There are numerous shopping carts available to you online but one of the best, which has many of the features you need to become a success online all in one fabulous package, is Shopify.com.
Shopify has all of the features that you’ll need to make your online shop profitable.
Shopify Feature Overview
Shopify has all the features you need to get started with a store and start profiting quickly. Depending on the type of product you choose to market and sell, this platform offers everything you need to run a profitable online business.
With Shopify POS you can take payments at trade shows, offline as well as online and even have a pop-up shop.
The Shopify POS aspect enables you to issue gift cards and store credits as well as custom payment types. That's right, if you want to take payments in gold bars, you can. I'm seriously tempted to have that as a payment offering :).
There's also Shopify & Facebook where you can set up your store and integrate it with Facebook to sell your products to your audience there – bringing a whole new dimension to social selling!
Whatever your online selling needs, Shopify has an option that you'll love.
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Your Storefront
You can choose to have an online store front, point of sale or both. It’s up to you. When you choose an online store front you can create your website, with a blog, quickly and easily using free and premium templates. What’s more, your store is automatically mobile responsive, and yes, it includes a full-featured blogging platform.
You have full control over the HTML / CSS of your store, so you can customise the website completely if you know how to do that or have a web designer. Your store will be branded as your own store and is easy to set up using the templates that are offered. Of course, you can have your own domain name when you set up your store and upgrade to a paid account. If you don’t have a domain name yet, you can buy one through Shopify.
Everything is web-based or “cloud-based” so you will be able to build your store and manage your store through the online interface that Shopify offers. It has a full website builder, not just a store. It’s everything you need in one stop. Plus, it can integrate into your already existing website if you’re using it as a shopping cart for your offline store, too. The possibilities are endless.
Shopping Cart
Let’s talk about the awesome shopping cart. It’s amazing, secure, and offers over 70 payment gateways. You can set it up to automatically offer free shipping or other types of shipping charges. You can even set up recurring payments and charge the right taxes when needed.
It includes so many features that you won’t be missing anything that you need. Plus, even though it’s feature rich, it’s not difficult to set up. A great feature that will help tremendously with marketing is the abandoned cart feature. If customers leave the cart, it can send registered customers a notice telling them about their abandoned cart, giving them a chance to buy so you don’t miss out on more sales.
Online Store Management
You can manage your store from one dashboard. You can view the profiles of your customers, plus their accounts, and even customise them by group. This can help with all kinds of marketing functions. The ability to connect with fulfillment centers like Fulfillment by Amazon, drop shippers and inventory management like Ordoro is also a wonderful ability that can help automate a lot of the management process.
What’s even better is you can manage your store on the go with mobile devices like your smartphone or tablet. You can even give your customer a refund while you’re on vacation if you need to without any worries. With numerous email templates that will help you get everything set up quickly, your store will be super-professional and can grow as big as you need to grow.
And finally, there's the accounting aspect of your business. Shopify integrates with Xero, Quickbooks and other accounting applications (some at additional cost). This means a lot of your accounting headaches are dealt with.
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Shopify Marketing & SEO
Outside of choosing the right products or services for your audience, the next most important aspect of your business is marketing it. Shopify helps you with every aspect of this by helping you create the best SEO descriptions of your products, allowing for customisation your headers, titles, and tags.
Even a sitemap is generated automatically every time you update your website. Sitemaps help search engines like Google index your website and your products. You also get some credits for Google AdWords which will help with marketing your shop in its early days. Plus, you can even set up an affiliate program, which allows others to promote your products and earn a commission.
You can also allow product reviews, which also helps with SEO a lot by allowing users to leave their thoughts about the different products you offer. The ability to engage with email marketing by integrating with MailChimp and the ability to use gift cards too, make selling even easier. Plus, you can even sell right on Facebook and the share buttons for Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr all make social media marketing even easier.
Products
One of the best ways to sell your products is through multiple images and a really good organisation. The Shopify software allows you to include unlimited product variations, many images, and much, much more. You can have unlimited products as well as product types including physical, digital and services.
Shopify & Web Hosting
If your store doesn’t work well, and load fast, you’ll have a lot of problems with keeping customers happy. But with a Shopify store you’ll have unlimited bandwidth, daily backups, SSL certificate, email forwarding, PCI compliance and everything you could want including 99.99% uptime.
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Analytics For Your Shopify Store
In order to be sure that your descriptions, SEO, marketing and product choices are working you need to be able to see the numbers. You can see everything you need to know via your dashboard. Sales, orders and traffic information all help you make smart decisions and choices for your business.
You can even export reports so that you can send them to your CPA or business advisor to help you make even better decisions. You can also integrate Google Analytics with your online store to help you track sales, visits and referrals even more easily.
Shopify Mobile
One of the most exciting features of Shopify is the fact that it’s mobile responsive. Your sites will look great on mobile, but what’s more is you can, with the right app, manage your store completely with just your Smartphone. Given that more and more people have a mobile device and access the internet using a mobile device means you'll not lose sales as your site can be used by mobile users. This means you can fulfill orders, capture payments, see everything on your dashboard so you can manage inventory, email or call customers etc, no matter where you are in the world. Your data will be synced automatically and you’ll be fully informed and up to date at all times.
24/7 Support
When using such important software for your business, it helps to know that smart people have your back. The support with Shopify is above and beyond with several ways to get support. You can search the knowledge base, call them, email them and chat with them online all 7 days a week 24 hours a day.
Two exciting features to note are the discussion forums and the Ecommerce University. The forum has users and experts alike with whom you can discuss marketing, accounting and more. In the University there are eBooks, videos, webinars and more all included. In other words, your online learning and development encouraged, after all, your success is their success 🙂
Is Shopify right for you and your business?
Only you can decide if Shopify will work for you and your business. For you to discover if it's right for you there's a 14-day free trial where you can go and press all of the buttons and see if the functionality is what you're looking for. The best way to know if Shopify is the solution for your online business is to simply try it out.
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Sarah
PS if you're really interested in Shopify but don't wish to push the button on your free 14-day trial, then share this post from the box below and grab your Shopify Profits guide.
[wpsharely] How to Get Started and Profit with Shopify Right click and then “save as” to your desktop. The open up your Shopify Profits guide, read, implement and enjoy! [/wpsharely]
Hi Sarah,
What a timely post! I had a Client of mine ask me about opening a Shopify store and didn’t really know anything about it. I’m happily passing this along because I know may will benefit from it!
Brenda
Good Shopify breakdown Sarah. We need some shopping platform to handle the dirty work of selling online. Some pitched me to set up a cart thru my blog; nightmare city. No thanks, with the security and encryption headaches. I’d go with the full service deal here, and Shopify seems to be just that. Using Selz for my blogging course but always open to new options.
Ryan