Shopify
Hassle free Commerce Platform for Retailers

On browsing Corrine Anestopoulos’s fashion website, BIKO, one will be amazed at the plethora of designs and interactive elements the website has to offer. The site showcases Corrine’s vintage inspiration to create hand-crafted, versatile pieces with metals, charms, and natural stones. Her designs featuring sleek mixed metals, hand-cast pendants, and natural stones added with attractive colors have found a place in many hearts around the world. But as good things take time, designing the website and housing all the products needed a fair bit of creativity and market intelligence.

It was 2004 when Corrine decided to jump into the online market and approached Shopify for the same. Since then, her website has served as the perfect intermediate to showcase her designing skills. She extols, “Shopify has helped me grow my business amazingly. It’s been a pleasure because everything has been easier than I ever imagined. When I received my first online order, I was stoked! It was amazing.” This is just one of the successful endeavors of Shopify; till date, the firm has assisted over 600,000 businesses in approximately 175 countries and is trusted by established brands such as Red Bull, Nestle, GE, Kylie Cosmetics, and many more.

With the Shopify platform, the firm assists merchants to set up and manage operations across multiple sales channels including web, mobile, social media, marketplaces, brick-and-mortar locations, and pop-up shops. This platform enables merchants to select from over 100 professional store themes that aptly match their business requirements.

Merchants can further customize the colors, designs, imagery, and fonts without being adept designers. All the Shopify themes are mobile-friendly which assures that end-customers get unparalleled experience while logging into a website. Merchants further get a powerful back office and a single pane of glass view to oversee all the operations. To ensure that a merchant never misses a sale or any of its customers, Shopify’s inventory is synced across all sales channels every time.

The Shopify platform also renders a gamut of other services that assist merchants in supplementing their business. Firstly, merchants get a comprehensive dashboard for understanding the sales and orders which allows them to tailor their products according to the needs of the end-customers. Secondly, the platform is built-in with SEO best practices like customizable H1 title and meta tags, along with automated marketing and free educational material which aids merchants to gain a competitive edge in the market. Shopify also offers over 2300 apps such as MailChimp, Xero Accounting, and Kit which merchants can leverage to promote their products through drop shipping or social media portals. As the Shopify platform is built on Ruby on Rails, it enables merchants to make rapid improvements in their websites. Furthermore, the firm assists merchants to manage a business from the palm of their hand with a mobile application. With the Shopify app, merchants can manage orders, products, staff, and customers from any geographic location. The app assists merchants to add new products in a seamless manner as they just have to upload the product photos, details in terms of description and pricing, and subsequently add it to a collection.

The app enables merchants to oversee sales and orders in real time. For shipping, Shopify automates the entire delivery process by connecting merchants with the best shipping carriers in a given area. The end-customers can also leverage the app to check the specification of a certain product.

A Distinct Checkout Counter

Apart from the aforementioned offerings, the firm also provides a robust payment gateway called the Shopify POS system that ensures seamless payment during selling or buying of a product. The offering is georedundant, and it enables merchants to accept payments in-store or from remote locations. Buyers can use multiple payment methods such as cash and card along with leveraging other custom methods such as checks, IOUs, or gold coins. On the other hand, merchants can process refunds but instead of repaying the paid amount to the customer they can issue store credit. Shopify POS also enables merchants to sell gift cards which a buyer can redeem during his/ her future visits.
Over the years, Shopify has continually thrived under the leadership of Tobias Lütke, Founder and CEO of the firm. Recently, the firm became the first e-commerce platform provider to offer Google Pay to its merchants that enables millions of shoppers to have an accelerated checkout. The firm has also added a ‘Shopping on Instagram’ feature in its offerings that allows businesses to advertise and sell merchandizes by simply tagging them on Instagram posts. Currently, this feature is available for merchants in eight countries including UK, Australia, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Brazil.