Welcome to my first blog post ever! I feel like it's very fitting for my first post to be about Shopify since it's the very platform my website is hosted on! I've been using Shopify for almost a year now and I *think* I've gotten the hang of it. While I'm sure there are so many more things to learn about it, I wanted to share my top 3 favorite things about Shopify that I loved right off the bat.
- Powerful e-commerce tool
- Customization capabilities
- Page templates
1 | Powerful E-Commerce Tool
If you're looking to sell online, Shopify is the way to go. Yes, there are lot of other website hosting platforms to choose from (Squarespace, Wix, Showit, Webflow, etc) but Shopify takes the lead when it comes to building an e-commerce store. Everything is laid out for you, from customer details, website analytics, to business reports. I love that it provides in-depth buyer information so you know how many times they've ordered, if they subscribed to your email newsletter, and there's a dated timeline of when they placed the order and received confirmation/shipping/delivery notifications.
Product and inventory management is straightforward, yet robust and provides a lot of tools and organization features, such as creating collections. For example, when I release a new label design, it can belong in the collections "Labels" and "New Arrivals" and you can further categorize product by tags.
Their analytics gives you all the basic information you need to stay on top of your store and see what is and is not doing well. Shopify does give you the option to add Google Analytics to gain more in-depth information about your website, which is a huge plus. Reviewing your analytics report is a MUST so you can make data-driven strategic decisions to improve your business!
2 | Customization Capabilities
One of the best things about having your own website is that you can customize it to match your brand. Unlike a marketplace, you can add more than just your logo, like your brand color palette and font so that it better suits your brand on the entire site — even the checkout page!
You have complete control over how you organize and structure your site. You can also have additional pages and install apps to add depth to your site, such as a blog and featuring your Instagram feed. I do want to mention that depending on the theme you choose, your layouts may look a little different than someone else's site and you're limited to the settings your specific theme gives you. So although I have come across some situations where I wish I could tweak the theme (without coding), it hasn't interfered with me being able to create a great looking site.
3 | Templates
Adding on to their customization capabilities, I feel like this feature needs its own shoutout because it's probably my FAVORITE thing about Shopify: creating templates for pages.
If you have a variety of items that have different product information or the add to cart process varies from each other, this is a neat feature to utilize because you can create a template for groups of items that have the same product listing characteristics.
You get exactly what you need from your customers and if you need to update any information, you can edit the template and it'll apply to all products using that template, rather than editing each individual listing.
Here's an example on my site. This feature in particular was great for me because the add to cart process for packaging labels is different than vinyl stickers in my shop.
Packaging label page is on the left, vinyl sticker page is on the right.
For vinyl stickers, customers can purchase a quantity as little as 1, so I left the default quantity -/+ button. But for packaging labels, I sell them in packs starting at 25 so the customer can select a pack size from the dropdown menu. You'll notice that the default quantity -/+ button is not even there and I LOVE that I can remove it! On a marketplace like Etsy, there's no way to remove that so it shows both on my page (see image below).
My rectangle packaging labels all have the product info: 2.25" x1.25", design is printed in black, etc. So I added those details into the TEMPLATE and not to each individual listing. This saves me SO MUCH time because I only need to input this information once so now whenever I add a new listing, I just apply the template and all that information is there. You can also create templates for other pages of your website too, such as your blog and collections!
And that conclude my top 3 favorite things about Shopify! I hope this post was helpful. There’s definitely a lot more about Shopify that you can delve into but if you’re looking for a powerful e-commerce website to launch your small business, this is it! If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below or reach out to me on Instagram @contradesignco! 🙂