Shopify is the definitive market leader among all-in-one, hosted e-commerce platforms, commanding roughly 28% of the US e-commerce platform market and up to 46% of the hosted store sector globally.
And there is reason Shopify are the market leader in online e-commerce for small independent business with over 7 million live stores globally.
I haven’t tried to build a site in Woo Commerce or Big Commerce but I have built a site using Squarespace. I remember getting so far and then when I tried to add user sign up subscriptions to build my list with a simple email confirmation, the integration was mail chimp I think I couldn’t get it to work and ended up giving up.
The monthly fee for Squarespace is cheaper than Shopify at £12.00 per month.
If you are a budding online shop owner I would recommend Shopify. When I was first thinking about building my own store I asked a few people for help and everyone told me, go through the pain barrier. Your site will be so much better if you build it yourself and although the site construction is quite tricky to master and I spent a lot of time in the beginning repeating the same steps from the help files you really do learn as you go and in the most part because there are so many Shopify partners and experts online looking for clients and wanting to engage you as a potential customer, there’s loads of free help out there to take advantage of.
The other great thing is even if your site isn’t perfect, you can make it look pretty professional, I was surprised how good mine looked even with only a few products up there to begin with.
I pay about £20 per month for my site and a commission to Shopify of 3% on everything I sell which some people find is a lot, I actually think it’s fair enough. That’s their business model and there’s been millions invested in the Shopify tool to make it what it is today.
There are ways to get this fee down by using Shopify’s internal payment processor and also upgrading your monthly plan, something I will probably do when the sales increase and the balance tips.
What makes a good Shopify site?
The better your images are the better your site will look. Fact.
When you create your collections, the buckets you assign your products to sort them and the building blocks of your Shopify site, make sure you give each collection the best image you’ve got. These collection images feature heavily throughout your site and great images sell your site.
I didn’t look at trying a load of different themes, I picked one and ran with it, I liked DAWN. It was simple and clean.
To be honest, experimenting was scary in the beginning, you change something, ruin what you’ve done and can’t get back to what you liked so I stuck with basic fonts and colours. I am sure I may get into fine tuning down the road but in the beginning I just wanted to get selling.
The most labour intensive part of building your site is all the product images and actually adding all your products. It takes a while for sure. Apparently there are AI tools available to help and you’ll get a million emails from Shopify partners saying they can help you sell for a price. I looked into Sanomads which look incredible but with fees to utilise their services estimated at between £5K and £20K I am going it alone for now.
I am not going to tell you Shopify is a piece of cake to master, it’s not. One problem that took me ages to figure out was creating a collection/all collection to override the default “all products” shopify have built in that you actually cannot edit and for me every where I saw it of course it presented the worst least desirable products in my catalogue first.
I won’t explain all the steps here as you can easily find the work around online, which I have done and works fine on my website. I haven’t quite figured out yet how to make the override work in the Shop App but that’s the Shopify journey. One day you’ll have a problem you have no idea how to resolve, and the next you’ll have a eureka moment “ah that’s how that works”
My one piece of advice, keep going, it gets easier. And when you get your first sale, mine was in New York and then California, and then Ontario Canada the sense of accomplishment followed. When the sales start to come it is worth all the brain freeze. You just have to remember when you plant a tree you have to nurture it to watch it grow and it doesn’t bear fruit until the end.
The downsides, Shopify is a bit buggy, especially when it comes to saving product. And the auto meta tags a great tool but will they save when selected NO. I remember using the logo building tool for a few hours, figured it out, created a great logo but the whole thing crashed out at the end, saying I couldn’t download the finished result and when I tried to reboot and start again, it told me I’d used up all my edits. I ended up creating my own logo using a photo I’d taken and slapping on some text in Pic Collage. It wasn’t perfect but hey.
That said all in all Shopify is pretty neat, like a very complex 10,000 piece massive jigsaw, you find the edges and then piece by piece you start to fill in the blanks. Then one day 6-12 months later that’s how long it took me to really feel like I had a site and a business that was doing something, you see the big picture emerge.
Shopify do offer a 3 day free trial. You won’t get anywhere in three days unless you’ve built a lot of websites before. I’d say don’t let the trial time put you off. It’s overwhelming at first. Sign up for the three months at a buck a month and get stuck in. In three months you’ll have a site. You probably won’t have any customers, getting the traffic is of course the hardest part of any web ecommerce business.
The shopify marketing promotes no design skills needed and trusted by millions of businesses. Would I recommend Shopify? YES. Can anyone do it? If you like a challenge and have a problem solving type of brain, like you’ll keep reading, watching You Tube and repeating the same steps over and over until you get it right, then absolutely.
It’s not easy but then what is easy that’s really rewarding and worthwhile.
Shopify is incredible but YOU have to do the work.