If you are planning to sell online, Shopify is one of the first platforms worth looking at. It is hosted, it is well supported, and it takes care of the technical side of running a shop so you can get on with selling.
This post covers what Shopify actually gives you, the shape of what it costs, how a shop gets set up, and the sorts of business it suits less well.
Why businesses choose Shopify
Shopify is a hosted platform, which means your shop runs on Shopify’s servers rather than on hosting you rent and maintain yourself. That one fact removes a long list of jobs:
- Hosting, security patches and platform updates are handled for you.
- Card payments and PCI compliance are built in, so you are not assembling a payment setup from parts.
- The checkout is Shopify’s own, and it is one of the most heavily tested checkouts on the web.
- Shopify powers a very large number of shops worldwide, so there is no shortage of documentation, apps and developers who know it well.
For a one person business or a small team, that is the real appeal. You are renting a tested shop rather than building and looking after one.
What Shopify costs, in shape rather than figures
Shopify sells a handful of monthly plans. At the time of writing they run from Basic through Grow and Advanced, with Plus sitting above those for larger operations. Rather than quote prices that will be out of date before long, here is the shape of it:
- The monthly fee rises as you move up the tiers, and paying annually costs less per month than paying monthly.
- Card processing fees work the other way round: the rate you pay per transaction falls as the monthly fee rises.
- Using a payment provider other than Shopify Payments adds a further fee on each order, and that fee also shrinks on the higher plans.
- There is normally a short free trial and an introductory offer covering the first few months.
- Apps and premium themes are extra, and they add up. Budget for them.
The practical consequence is that the cheapest plan is rarely the cheapest option once you are doing real volume, because the transaction rate matters more than the subscription. Check the current figures on Shopify’s pricing page and work out your own total against the number of orders you expect. If you are weighing Shopify against other ways of building an ecommerce website, that total is the figure to compare, not the headline monthly price.
Setting up a shop
Getting a basic shop live is genuinely quick. The order of events is:
- Create an account at Shopify’s website and enter the basics about your business.
- Pick a theme. Shopify’s own themes are well built and will get you looking respectable without a designer.
- Add your products, either by hand or as a CSV import.
- Set up payments, shipping rates and tax, then place a test order to check the whole thing from basket to confirmation email.
- Connect your domain name, and choose a plan when the trial runs out.
That gets you a working shop. Making it look like your business rather than a stock theme, and making the product pages do the selling, is the part that takes real time. If you would rather hand that over, it is what our Shopify developers spend their days on.
Adding your products
Each product needs a name, a description, a price and at least one good photograph. Beyond that you can set variants such as size or colour, stock levels, weight for shipping, and the collections the product belongs to.
If you have more than a few dozen products, use the CSV import rather than typing them in. Export Shopify’s sample CSV first, fill it in with your own data, and import in small batches so that one formatting mistake does not create several hundred broken products at once.
One thing worth doing properly from the start: write your own product descriptions. Manufacturer copy appears on every other shop selling the same item, and it gives Google no reason to prefer your page over theirs.
What you get out of the box
- A range of themes, free and paid, that work on phones without extra effort.
- Card payments through Shopify Payments, plus wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, and alternatives like PayPal.
- Shipping rules: flat rate, free over a threshold, weight based, and live carrier rates.
- Discount codes, abandoned basket emails and gift cards.
- Sales and traffic reporting in the admin, with Google Analytics available if you want more detail.
- An app store covering reviews, subscriptions, accounting, email tools such as Mailchimp, and a great deal else.
The app store is both a strength and a trap. Every app you add is another monthly fee and another thing slowing your pages down, so install what you genuinely need and remove what you have stopped using.
Where Shopify is the wrong choice
An honest answer is more use to you here than a sales pitch. Shopify is not right for everyone:
- Content led sites. If the shop is a small part of a site that is mostly articles, guides or services, Shopify’s blogging and page building tools will frustrate you. WordPress with WooCommerce is usually the better fit.
- Unusual pricing or trade accounts. Customer specific price lists, quote based ordering and complicated B2B rules are all possible, but they tend to mean extra apps, a higher plan, or both.
- Deep customisation. Changing how Shopify fundamentally behaves means working inside its own templating language and accepting its limits. Some things you cannot alter at all, the checkout among them on the lower plans.
- Very few products and very tight margins. If you sell three items occasionally, a monthly subscription plus a share of every sale may not be worth paying.
- You are renting, not owning. Shopify can change its pricing, its rules or its features and you adapt around it. Some business owners mind that a great deal, and they are not wrong to.
If one of those describes your business, it is far cheaper to say so now than to find out after the build.
Promoting your shop once it is live
A new shop has no visitors, and Shopify will not bring you any. The things that reliably help are unglamorous:
- Write proper page titles and meta descriptions for your products and collections. Shopify lets you edit both.
- Publish something useful: buying guides, sizing help, care instructions, honest comparisons. Those are the pages that pick up search traffic and links.
- Set up the social accounts your customers actually use, and keep to one or two properly rather than five badly.
- Collect email addresses from day one. It is the only audience you own outright.
- Use paid advertising to test demand quickly, with a small budget and a clear idea of what a sale is worth to you.
- Look at your reports monthly rather than daily, and change one thing at a time so you can tell what actually worked.
FAQ
Do I need technical skills to run a Shopify shop?
No. The day to day work, adding products, editing prices, posting orders, happens in a straightforward admin area, and most owners pick it up in an afternoon. You only need a developer when you want something the theme editor cannot do, such as a custom layout, a bespoke feature, or moving an existing shop across without losing rankings.
Can I move my existing shop to Shopify?
Usually yes. Products, customers and order history can be brought across, and Shopify accepts CSV imports for catalogue data. The part that needs care is your web addresses: without redirects from the old URLs to the new ones, you will lose search rankings you have spent years building. Plan the redirects before launch, not after.
Will a Shopify shop rank in Google?
It can. Shopify gives you editable page titles, meta descriptions, clean web addresses and a blog, so the technical basics are covered. Rankings then come down to ordinary work: product descriptions worth reading, a sensible structure, fast pages, and other sites linking to you. The platform clears some obstacles, but it does not do the search work for you.
Is Shopify cheaper than a WordPress and WooCommerce shop?
It depends how you count. Shopify charges a monthly fee and takes a share of each sale, while a WordPress and WooCommerce shop has no platform fee but needs hosting, updates and someone to maintain it. Shopify is usually less work to look after. WooCommerce gives you more control and no cut of your takings.
Getting started
Shopify suits a lot of small shops very well, and a few of them badly. If you are not sure which group you are in, half an hour with someone who has built on both Shopify and WordPress will tell you more than another week of reading. We are based in Sale, South Manchester, and we will say plainly if Shopify is the wrong answer for what you sell. Get in touch and tell us what you have in mind.
