If you’re considering launching an online store, you’ve likely heard of Shopify and are wondering, “What is Shopify?” You’re in the right place!
In short, Shopify is an eCommerce platform that allows you to build and run your online business effortlessly. It serves as a digital marketplace, offering an alternative to traditional brick-and-mortar stores. With Shopify, you can reach customers worldwide, expanding your customer base and increasing sales without the need for physical store locations.
The platform is packed with user-friendly features that make it easy to manage your online store, whether you have coding knowledge or not. From managing your product catalog to processing payments and handling inventory, Shopify simplifies the entire process.
In this article, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know about this innovative eCommerce platform, from its efficiency in managing online shopping to the biggest brands using Shopify to enhance their B2C (Business-to-Consumer) and B2B (Business-to-Business) operations.
Let’s dive in to discover what makes Shopify a go-to choice for online retail, from its secure payment gateways and seamless checkout process to its powerful analytics and inventory management tools.
Be sure to check out our other related posts, including a brilliant overview of WordPress and a unique look at what WooCommerce is all about. These posts offer great deals of educational value and insights you won’t want to miss!
What is Shopify?
Before we explore the biggest brands on Shopify, let’s take a look at what Shopify is, how it works, and its design and development process—essentially, everything you need to know from A to Z.
Shopify is an eCommerce platform that helps users build and manage online stores. It allows you to sell various products, including physical items, digital products, and services, all while offering a seamless shopping experience.
How does it work?
You can set up an online store by choosing a template, adding products, and integrating payment gateways. Shopify’s easy-to-use interface requires no coding skills, making it accessible for beginners.
Design and Development Process
Shopify provides sleek, minimalist designs that are mobile-friendly and customizable. You can modify themes to align with your brand, add product variations, and integrate a shopping cart and checkout system. The platform supports SEO optimization to ensure your products are discoverable by potential customers.
What can you do with Shopify?
You can sell a variety of products, from physical goods to digital products, subscriptions, and services. Shopify also supports dropshipping, so you can sell products without managing inventory.
What can you sell?
Shopify accommodates different product types, including digital downloads, physical products, services, and subscriptions. You can also offer product variations (like sizes and colors) and manage your product catalog effectively.
How do you make money?
Shopify offers various ways to make money, including direct sales, subscriptions, and dropshipping. It integrates popular payment gateways for smooth transactions and provides comprehensive sales reports to track your profits.
Key Features
- All-round customer support services
- Mobile-friendly and customizable designs
- Easy-to-use interface with no coding knowledge required
- Sell and dropship products
- Supports popular payment gateways
- Integration with top-tier, top-rated payment providers
- Premium themes and apps for added functionality
- SEO optimization for better search engine rankings
- Sales reports and customer accounts for better management
Shopify is trusted by some of the biggest brands on the web, making it a leading choice for online entrepreneurs who want a top-rated platform to manage their online store efficiently. Whether you’re a small business or a large enterprise, Shopify is designed to scale with your business needs.
What is Shopify Lite?
This comes in handy for those who have an already existing website and are planning to start selling products or services. Unlike Shopify, you can’t use it to build an online store but only for adding a buy button to a functioning website.
Be it WordPress, Tumblr, or another; you can turn it into a money-making machine with this buy button.
Its awesome features include:
- Create and send invoices to customers.
- Order and product management
- Customer profile and email cart
- Overview dashboard and finance report
Shopify lite allows you to start your dream business for just $9 Usd per month.
What is Shopify Plus?
If you’re a large e-commerce merchant with your brand doing over $59,999 in sales per month, getting a Shopify plus will be helpful.
It comes with tools that help maintain complex activities attached to business growth. Due to business growth, there will be an increase in customers, inventories, returns, and things to do every time. The tools can help you design and automate tasks relatively, and also trigger a response action after some criteria are met by customers. Shopify plus key features include:
- Multiple currencies, language, and payment payment
- Operate different storefronts from one account
- Easy to use interface without coding knowledge
- Serious traffic handling
What is Shopify POS?
Not only does it work for e-commerce but also local store retail services.
Shopify Pos works as a app to track client sales in the shop. It is a point of sale system that helps you track inventory and orders on various active sales channels such as online stores, social media platforms, retail locations, etc. Working well on smartphones and tablets, it’s an easy-to-use application that has two different plans (Pro and lite).
Its amazing features include:
- Multiple payment options
- Sales of digital and physical gift cards
- Custom discount and refund option for staff and customer
- Unlimited and complete multi-location inventory
How does Shopify work?
This works by using the SaaS model meaning software as a service.
Unlike the other website builders, where you have to worry about upgrading and maintaining the server monthly; Shopify outsmarts others by doing this because it is a cloud-based solution. With its professional tools, you can customize and own an e-commerce platform within 15 minutes. The payment setup method is stress-free as it does this to accept all forms of payment methods.
Also, its security system helps to keep payment and business data safe as it supports 3D secure checkouts.
What Can You Sell on Shopify?
Being an easy-to-use e-commerce platform for selling goods and services, you can sell any product and service as long as it’s in their circle of rules.
When deciding on what you can sell you give diligence in finding the scope for each product. You can do this by exploring seasonal trends using google trend, searching customers needs that sell , competitors and market size (demand and supply level), etc
Below are a few types of products that work well:
- Food products
- Household products
- Toys and games
- Classes and worksho
- Club membership
- Donations
- Ebook and audiobooks
- Art and craft
- Booking appointments for services like dentistry, hairdressing, etc
- Camera and product accessories
- Health and safety products
- Clothing and jewelry, etc
What Companies Use Shopify?
Shopify has grown to be the second-largest e-commerce platform housing more than 1 million stores for many industries.
Industries such as health, food products, automotive, sports, and clothing use this platform and have an expanding multi-channel presence.
Based on market value and capitalization, here are influential companies that use Shopify to grow their brand:
- Kkw beauty : Was founded in 2017 and owned by Forbes billionaire Kim Kardashian, a company known for its cosmetic beauty products. It is now one of the most successful stores on Shopify. It makes annual sales that sell products within minutes with a market value of $1 billion.
- Red Bull GmbH : This company is one of those using Shopify. It accounts for a 43% share in the market of energy drinks making it the largest. Alongside its drink market, it also owns various sports events and partnered with Verod Capital firm in funding clothing manufacturers. Red bull has a market value of $12 billion.
- Shop BBC : This company allows you to take a peek at some of the famous movies and give more than 300 stories or news a day. Besides that, BBC has a shop online using Shopify to sell many products such as toys and games, accessories, books, jewelry, accessories, and Celtic collection.
- Holland cooper : Established in 2008 by Creative Director Jade Holland Cooper, it offers tweed clothing for country ladies.This company runs more than enough market chains that market exclusive clothing, shoe products, bags, and dog accessories. using this e-commerce platform, they have grown ro have a market value of $1 billion.
- Good American : A fashion brand built by Emma Grede and Khloé Kardashian in 2016. This fashion brand offers trend-driven denim designs, clothing, and accessories for ladies.Through its eCommerce site, it sold about $1 million on its first day of launching a campaign and has been increasing in size with a market value of $2.7billion.
- Lazy Oaf : Lazy Loaf was founded by Gemma Shiel from a North London Garage in 2001. They use online shops to sell products such as lifestyle and homewares, clothing, shoes, and accessories. First started as a retail stall in Spitalfields Market, later opened online awareness with Shopify, and now has a net worth of £952,025.00.
- Kylie Cosmetics : Kylie cosmetic is one of the biggest companies that use Shopify. The company was founded in California in the year 2015 by Kylie Jenner. This brand sells beauty products such as eyeshadow palettes, highlighters, concealers, accessories, blushes, etc. Also, Coty Inc. owns a $600 million stake in Kylie Cosmetics which accounts for up to 51%. with the sales online its market value has risen to $1.2billion.
- Kraft Heinz : Kraft Heinz is also one of the biggest companies using Shopify in reaching out to customers. They moved online using Shopify plus when they wanted a way to get their food products to people during the pandemic.This amazing site increased its sales in 2020 and market value to about $49.7billion.
- Nescafe :Nescafe is a coffee brand founded by Nestle, it has over 5000 products. This comes in various flavors, with over 5000 retail stores in the world. This brand is one of the biggest companies in Shopify. This brand has grown to have a value of $314.9billion.
- Tesla :This company is one of the growing manufacturers in the world using Shopify stores. Owned by Elon Musk and having its headquarter in California, it designs and markets electric and automobile vehicles. Tesla’s online shop sells car chargers, clothes, vehicles, and accessories. Being a king in automobiles, it has grown to have a market value of $644 billion.
- MVMT : MVMT is one of the companies using Shopify to boost its online sales. Started in 2013 by Jake and Kramer while still a student.The market premium products such as watches, eyeglasses, men’s leather products, and jewelry to change the way people think about fashion.Well not up to five years, they did hit over $90m in total revenue and sold more than 1.5 million watches and other accessories in over 150 countries.
- Fashion Nova : One of the famous brands in America, a fashion retail company. Founded in 2006, CEO Richard Saghian owns and operates it. They deliver the season’s most wanted design to various companies. using the Shopify app, they went online in 2013 and 2020 made a net sale of $615.9million.
- Rebecca Minkoff : Rebecca Minkoff is a fashion brand, founded in New York City by Rebecca Minkoff and Uri Minkoff in 2005. It has retail stores distributed in over 850 shops globally. This brand is one of those companies using Shopify to market their designed products such as bags, shoes, clothing, and accessories globally.
- The:5th :In 2014, this brand was established by Alex McBride. The founder focuses on releasing new designs of watches exclusively on the 5th of every month. Their designs are strictly Paris, New York, Melbourne, Bilbao, London, Geneva, and Swiss-made.This brand is known globally because it uses the e-commerce platform in reaching out and satisfying customers.
How to Grow Your Shopify Store?
After deciding on what product to sell and opening a store, you must have been asking how to grow it to outsmart competitors. Here are a few ways to get your store at the forefront:
- Drive traffic: look for ways to make people always visit your store. How can you do this? Very simple! make sure your blog post contents are SEO optimized for it to rank high on google and yahoo pages.
- Convert traffic to customers: This is about turning your page visitors into potential clients that will buy and still come back for more. To achieve this, make your site friendly, engaging, and convenient for them along their journey on a visit.
- Add Shopify payments: we all know that online transaction fees can be a pain in the neck. When you add Shopify payment and pay for a base Shopify subscription, the transaction fee will be less or out of the way which will keep your clients happy.
- Invest in paid ads: Popular business owners invest in paid ads to increase awareness and google confirmed that 64.6% clicks on them when looking for what to buy.
You can do this as well to build your brand.
- Market your brand: there are various means to market your brand. With the increase in social media users, you can get to their forefront by marketing on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and even with email marketing the oldest functioning method.
here we include a few popular stores worldwide, check here for more examples.
Make your product stand out
Shopify is one of the best eCommerce platforms, offering powerful tools to effortlessly customize your online store and keep clients coming back for more of your products.
It’s designed to boost business awareness and drive profit, helping you unlock success in the competitive world of online retail.
Now that you know everything about Shopify, it’s time to take the next step. Use this top-tier platform to create awareness and make your product stand out in the digital marketplace.
While Shopify comes with a price, the newest features and secure setup will unlock exponential growth for your business, making the investment well worth it.
