What is Shopify and How Does it Work [Shopify Explained]

Are you interested in selling goods online? Are you writing the next great e-book? Or could your new hobby become your next big side hustle? If your answer is “yes” to any of these questions, then you’ve probably come across Shopify. But what is Shopify exactly? And- more importantly -, how does it work? Well, no need to fear, because we’ve put together the ultimate guide to this all-in-one e-commerce platform so YOU can take your business to the next level. What’s good, Mavericks? Welcome back, And if you are new to us, please make sure to subscribe to our channel AND click the bell right here (point over left shoulder). Nothing makes us happier than seeing our community of business-minded, tik-savvy viewers grow each week(nodding: yes, yes, yes). So today’s video starts off with the big question: What Is Shopify? Well, Shopify is a cloud-based software that’s packaged as a service shopping cart solution and allows businesses to set up an online store with little to no hassle. For starters, this e-commerce platform provides users with multiple pricing plans to choose from, making it a suitable option for businesses of all sizes. That means everyone, from startups to enterprise-sized businesses, can benefit from using Shopify’s easy-to-use features, AND there are also plenty of integrations to help grow your business, too. So how does Shopify work exactly. Acting as a cloud-based software, Shopify offers its users monthly subscriptions with access to an admin panel where you can enter your store info, add products and even process orders. The software is also extremely straightforward to use and only comes with a small learning curve for first timers. So don't worry--you can get your online store set up and running with just the click of a button. And for those who love having plenty of options to choose from, Shopify has a wide selection of free AND for-purchase design templates to make your store as stylish as you’d like, Varying from clean and modern to fun and vibrant. the platform’s templates can be tweaked to your liking by using any of Shopify’s editing tools now available at your disposal. This makes it easy to customize any theme to best fit your brand. If the creative freedom isn’t convincing enough, we should probably also mention how a subscription with Shopify includes secure, reliable web hosting for your website. So say goodbye to worrying about your site crashing during peak traffic hours or hackers hijacking your transactions. Shopify’s got you covered. Now that your account is made and your template looks great. the next question is: What can I sell on Shopify? Well, for starters, you can provide your customers with Handcrafted goods, Beauty supplies, Home goods, Outdoors gear, Clothing, Digital products, Online classes, Events, Gift Cards, eBooks And much more. But even with its great versatility, Shopify might still not be for everyone. Like with everything, it’s always important to weigh the Pros and Cons before making a decision. First off, The Pros: Easy To Use. - Low Startup Cost. - Beautiful Themes. - Good For Dropshipping. - Lots Of Support Options. The Cons: Limited Functionality. - Costly Add-Ons. - Transaction Fees - Strained Customer Support. If Shopify still sounds like a great option for your business, you’re probably now wondering How to use Shopify. Well, there are 7 basic ways for you to get the most out of your Shopify subscription, and we’ve broken them down for you right here. 1 - Starting with #1: Look into Shopify payments. If you choose to use Shopify’s in-house payment processor, Shopify Payments, you can actually have the transaction fees waived. Sounds great, but make sure you read through the Terms of Service before you count on enabling the feature. If you’re still interested in learning more about the pros & cons of Shopify Payments, I suggest you read our full artikle linked below, And if you need another payment processor, make sure to check out our website for more information. Next comes number 2 - Utilize Shopify themes & templates. Shopify is best known for its ease of use and modern web design, And at Merchant Maverick we are big fans of the drag-and-drop Section’s Editor. But let’s say you want even more control over your site’s design. Well, Shopify lets you change your template design by editing your site code as well. So for any coding wizards watching, feel free to make your Shopify site as personalized as you’d like. Number 3 - Become multikhannel with Shopify POS. When you sign up for Shopify’s eCommerce store, you’ll automatikally gain access to Shopify POS. Whether you have a brick-and-mortar or a pop-up shop, this software will make running your business easy with its in-house POS system. HOWEVER, if you are becoming a multikhannel merchant WHO SELLS IN-PERSON AS WELL AS ONLINE, Shopify is definitely a great option for you. If you’re interested in more specific information regarding credit card processing and how to use Shopify POS, we’ve written a full review available at the link below. And that now brings us to our 4th option: Try selling digital. Selling digital products allows you to benefit from all the perks of selling online, while eliminating one of its biggest downsides: shipping. By using Shopify’s native digital product features, you can sell downloadable merchandise to customers anywhere. This includes marketing your MP3 files and distributing printables, videos or even ebooks to your clientele. Customers can instantly download YOUR digital products directly from your site, taking your business right into the modern age. Coming up next on our list is Number #5: Start A Blog. Maintaining a blog can work wonders for your online store. Not only do regular blog posts boost your SEO rankings, but they also help build your brand’s identity. Fortunately, Shopify is one of a handful of shopping carts that comes with its own built-in blog features. You can write, edit and publish blog posts right in your admin panel, allowing your customers to get to know YOU a little better. However, while Shopify’s blogging capabilities make it stand out amongst the rest, I should warn you that its features are pretty basic. Nevertheless, a few personal posts here, and there are better than none Following. this is number 6…. Tap Into Shopify Customer Service. Shopify is a leader in today’s e-Commerce industry when it comes to free tiknical support. This includes a handful of services like phone support, email support, live chat, written documentation, video tutorials, webinars and even a community forum for larger discussion. And last, by not least, rounding out our list is Number 7: Shopify’s MANY Add-Ons. Make sure you take advantage of them. While the e-commerce platform comes packed with a whopping 3,500 add-ons, and counting the 3 major ones that users are crazy about include ShippingEasy, Ordoro, a shipping solution, and ShipStation. Of course, there are countless ways to make the most of your Shopify experience, like Shopify Shipping or Integrations with Amazon & eBay, But if we didn’t quite cover all of your Shopify questions or concerns and you’d like to discover more, check out our full artikle currently posted on our website And, in case you want to experience all of these wonderful features yourself, you can sign up for the 14-day FREE TRIAL TODAY. Please be sure to leave us any questions or suggestions you may have right here in the comments section below, And, as always, your personal experience using the software is more valuable than any advice I can give. Thank you for watching and see you next week For other POS or eCommerce solutions. check out our playlists or visit.

Shopify vs Wix 2022 (Don't choose WRONG!)

so i've been using both shopify and wix to build multiple ecommerce stores over the past years. i've even created complete beginner tutorials on how to set up online stores using both shopify and wix. so in this video, i'm going to compare both of these e-commerce platforms side-by-side. this video is not sponsored by any of these platforms. i'm simply gonna give you my honest opinion based on my own experience and based on some further research that i've done for this specific video. so let's get started. [Music]. now i wanna make clear that i'm gonna compare shopify and wix as e-commerce platforms, so a place where you can build an online store and sell things. because this is already where we can spot a big difference between wix and shopify. both companies started out in 2006, but wix started out as a website builder, whereas shopify, from the beginning, focused on being an e-commerce platform. only in the recent years, wix started rolling out e-commerce features allowing us to sell products on a wix website. so, just based on that fact, it's clear that shopify has a lot more experience in the e-commerce space. however, that doesn't mean that we should immediately go and build our store on shopify. so let's go ahead and take a deeper look into both of these platforms, starting with plans and pricing. with shopify, you can choose between three different plans: basic, shopify and advanced. when you're starting out, the basic plan should be more than enough for you, so that would be 29 per month plus transaction fees for every sale that your store makes. you already get a lot with a basic plan, like being able to sell an unlimited amount of products, 24: 7 support and features like discount codes, abandoned card recovery, marketing automation and a lot more. the main difference between the basic plan and the other plans are the transaction fees. so if you go for one of the more expensive plans, you're gonna have lower transaction fees for every sale that your store makes. so when you reach a certain number of revenue per month, it certainly makes sense to upgrade to a higher plan to reduce those transaction fees. we will take a closer look into payment providers and transaction fees later in this video, because obviously this is a very important deciding factor. now let's look at the pricing of wix. on the pricing page, we first have to switch from regular website plans to business and e-commerce plans, because these are the ones we need to go for if you want to sell products on our website. here we also got three plans: business basic, business unlimited and business vip. and, by the way, these prices apply if you pay yearly. if you want to pay on a monthly basis, then these are the prices for the respective plans. with the basic plan, for 34 per month, you get everything you need for a basic online store. however, if you want your international customers to see prices in their local currency or if you want to sell subscription products, then you need to go at least for the business unlimited plan at 38 per month. now, looking at the wix and shopify plans side by side, we can see that the basic plan of shopify is actually a bit cheaper compared to wix's basic plan. if you pay monthly, then the higher tier plans of shopify are much more expensive compared to wix, at least when you first look at them, because one of the main differences here is that wix doesn't reduce their transaction fees for the higher tier plans. so even though you pay more in a monthly subscription fee for a higher tier shopify plan, the overall cost in a month can still be lower compared to wix, because for every sale that you make, you're gonna pay less in transaction fees. so in my opinion, the plans of shopify are a bit more attractive because with the basic plan, you pretty much get everything you need for your online store, and i also like the fact that you can reduce your transaction fees once you start making more money with your store by simply upgrading to a higher tier plan. shopify does have a 14 day free trial, so you can test out everything before choosing a pay plan. you're going to find a link to that trial down below in the video description. however, if you want to launch your store and make it available to visitors, you do need to be on a paid plan. wix doesn't have a limited free trial. you can basically just create a free wix account, take your time to build your store, but then, once you want to start selling, you also need to be on a paid plan. let's move on and compare the website themes of wix and shopify. both platforms have a lot of beautiful themes for all types of online stores. wix literally has hundreds of free online store themes that you can choose from, so the chances are very high that you're gonna find one that you really like that is already optimized for the kind of online store that you want to build. shopify, on the other hand, only has 9 free online store themes. so if you don't like any of these 9 themes for your store, you have the possibility to browse their premium theme library. however, those themes cost you around 300 as a one-time fee, so wix definitely gets a big point here for having a lot of free themes for online stores. however, one of the key differences between wix and shopify themes is that wix themes aren't always fully responsive, meaning that when you look at your website on a mobile device, it won't always be perfectly optimized, so you'll need to make sure to rearrange all the elements that are out of place for smaller screen sizes. wix does have the so called editor x that you can use to build fully responsive designs. however, that is more geared towards the advanced designer and agencies rather than the average user. shopify's themes, on the other hand, are fully responsive, meaning that you can just build everything on desktop view and it'll automatikally look good on mobile as well. now let's tok a bit more about design customization options for wix and shopify generally. you'll be more flexible using wix to design your online store. you can simply use drag and drop to add any element to your website and customize it as you like. this kind of drag and drop doesn't work on shopify. here, everything has its predefined position and you get some customization options on the side menu, so you definitely do get more flexibility when it comes to website design using wix. in terms of ease of use, i have to say that i find both platforms fairly easy to use for beginners. wix really tries to make it as simple as possible for absolute beginners to build a beautiful website. if you want to get your website up and running as quick as possible with minimum design work, you can use their adi website builder. here you can simply answer some questions, pick some favorite designs and then wix will automatikally design your online store based on your answers. shopify doesn't have something like that, but i still think it's fairly straightforward to build your first online store, especially if you use my shopify tutorial to guide you through step by step. in terms of managing everything else that comes with running an online store, like fulfilling orders, managing inventory handling, customer support or sending out marketing emails, i would say that both of them are equally easy to use. i personally like shopify a bit better in terms of user experience. i just feel like when i use shopify, i really notike that everything is specifically made for selling online and everything is optimized for that specific purpose, so there's no unnecessary features that distract you from what's actually important. however, i did read a lot of comments from similar videos like this one, and saw a lot of people saying that they found wigs a lot easier to use and a lot less complex. so probably the best way would be to sign up for both of these platforms and see for yourself which one comes easier to you. and, by the way, if you need some help in the beginning getting started with either shopify or wix, definitely make sure to watch my beginner tutorials here on youtube. they already helped out.

More:Google Ads Tutorial For Beginners 2021 - Create Your First Ad Step By Step

I Tried Shopify Dropshipping With NO MONEY For 1 Week

so in this video, i'm gonna start a brand new shopify drop shipping business and attempt to take it from zero dollars to over one thousand dollars in just one week. and i'm not going to be using any money for this challenge, and i know a lot of people think you can't start a drop shipping business without any money, but we're gonna prove them wrong in this video and i'll be starting the drop shipping business completely from scratch and walk you through the entire step-by-step process, and at the end of the video, i'll show you exactly how much money the business makes. honestly, i'm hoping it's gonna make over a thousand dollars, but we're just gonna have to wait and see. so i have a lot of stuff that i have to get done today, and the very first thing i want to do is just find a good product to sell, and then after that, i'm just going to find a good supplier. then i'm just going to create my online store with shopify and then after that, i'm going to start creating advertisements, and for this challenge, i'm basically going to be using pinterest, instagram and tiktok and just basically post viral videos on there for free. and yes, this method does work well, since i do use it on my current drop shipping businesses that make over six figures. okay. so the first thing i want to start by doing is trying to find a good product to sell and, honestly, as long as i can create viral videos with the product and it has high demand, it's something i can work with. and, honestly, i find about 99 of my viral products on tiktok, so i'm going to kind of show you my strategy and how you can do this yourself. so kind of what i do on tik tok is just search up tiktok made me buy it- then i'll just click on that little hamburger icon in the top right corner, then i'll just change the date posted to this month and now it's going to show you a bunch of relevant winning products that are selling right now. and some other hashtags you can do this with is amazon fines, drop shippers exposed and tiktok viral products. but anyways, i'm going to take the next 20 minutes to try to find some good products to sell and once i do find something, i'll come back and update you okay. so, honestly, i found a ton of really good products, but there is one that stood out to me the most, which is the cordless hair curler. and for anyone who doesn't know? the cordless hair curler is really convenient for females, since you can kind of touch up your hair anywhere you go, and there's so many stores on tiktok selling this product, so if they're doing well, i'm sure i can also do the same. all right. so the next thing i want to do is find a supplier that i can get the product from, and so for this video, i think i'm going to use spocket. so i found the cordless hair curler on spock it for 28 dollars and 30 cents, which is really good, and the shipping times are only seven to 14 business days, which is also ideal, and i think i'm gonna sell the product on my store for 59.99. now i've actually seen a lot of stores sign this product for over a hundred dollars, but because i do want to sell a lot of product in a short period of time and i don't want it to be too expensive, i think 59.99 is a good number to stik with, and if my customers do see that other stores are selling it for over a hundred dollars and i'm only selling it for a fraction of that cost, i'm sure they'd rather buy it from my store. now i do want to add one other product to my store, and i'm thinking just to make it an upsell. so, anyways, i found this heat protectant spray and i think it goes really well with the cordless hair curler, and i'm thinking to sell it on my store for 19.99, and it's only going to cost me eight dollars and 27 cents, which is pretty good, and if you do need a supplier for your drop shipping store, i'll leave a link for spock it in the description of this video. but, anyways, now i got the product, which i'm happy about, and so the next step now is to actually start building my shopify store, and i do want my store to look like an actual brand, and so it is going to take me a little bit of time to build it. so, anyways, i'm going to start working on the store right now and then i'll update you tomorrow once i'm done. all right, so it's the second day now and i finally finished the store and i made it look very simple and clean, and i'm going to show you the page that the customers get redirected to. so, anyways, i have different color options here, and i also did add a sales timer to create sense of urgency. i also included a ton of high quality photos, which is really important, and i also added this to build more trust with the customers. and if you scroll down here, you can see i put what's included in the package, then i tok about the benefits of buying the cordless hair curler, then i added some frequently asked questions and then i also do have a 30 day money back guarantee. a lot of customers won't buy your product if you don't have this, so make sure you do. and if you scroll down here, you can see that i did include how the cordless hair curler works, so this just makes it look really easy and straightforward. and all the way at the bottom of the page i did include some customer reviews. now, i obviously did import these reviews to my store, but usually i do have real customer reviews. but that's pretty much it for the store and i think it looks pretty good. but anyways, now that i'm done with my store, the next important thing i have to do is add a shopify app called after sell to my store, and the reason i'm going to use after sell is because it can increase my revenue anywhere from 10 to 15, which is exactly what i want. and afterstok is for post purchase upsells, and if you don't know what that is. it's basically when you offer a customer a product to purchase after they've already purchased something from your store. for example, after someone purchases the cordless hair curler from my store, i can then offer them another product to purchase. so in my case, i could upsell the heat protectant spray, since it works well with the cordless hair curler. and post purchase upsells work so well because if a customer just purchased something from your store, they're more likely to purchase another item, since you already built that initial trust, and you can even give them a really good discount on the upsell offer, which will then make them want to buy it even more. now, one thing you never want to do with upsells is actually offer them to the customer before they've made a purchase. this will just end up confusing them and they might not end up buying the product at all. but the good thing about after sell is that the upsell offer only comes after a customer makes a purchase, which is exactly what we want. but anyways, i'm actually going to create an upsell offer using after sale for my store right now and kind of walk you through the process step by step. okay, so the very first thing you want to do is go to the shopify app store and just search for after cell and it should come up. so it's going to look like this: after sell, post purchase, upsell. so let's add the app. okay, so once you're in after sale, the first thing you want to do is click here on enable settings. then it's going to bring you to the shopify page. so just make sure you click on after cell, then just click on save. okay, back here, let's just refresh the page. okay, now the first thing we want to do is actually just set up our first funnel. click here on create and i'm just going to name this funnel: heat protectant. so here i want to click show this funnel to all customers. since i only do have one upsell product. okay, now i'm going to choose the upsell product and basically what i'm going to be upselling is this heat protectant spray. now, the cool thing here is, if the customer actually does end up purchasing this product, you can offer them another upsell, and if they decline this product, then you can offer them a downsell. now, since i don't have any other products, i'm just going to keep it like this, but you can add products in here. now. next thing i want to do is click here on edi.

More:How to Run Facebook Ads for Local Businesses: Driving Foot Traffic

Top 10 Shopify Apps You SHOULD BE Using In 2022 (E-commerce Tips)

hey, everyone davey here, welcome to our first video of 2022. today we're going to go through my 10 favorite shopify apps. shopify makes it so easy to install apps. it's one of its super powers. apps can increase conversion rate, increase average order value and make you a ton more money. apps need to come with the warnings, though. if you use the wrong apps, it can slow your website down and leave a ton of money off the table. for those that have been following along in our lemon scrub series, you know that we've got our website all set up. now it's time to install apps. if you haven't been following on, that's okay. i'm just going to use the lemon scrub as an example in this video. none of these apps have paid me for this video. there are a couple of affiliate links down below, but i'm going to give you lots of alternatives and outline the pricing so you can make the best choice for your business. let's get into it. the first app that we're going to cover today is perfect if your product is low average order value, so basically under 70 or so. with products like that, shipping costs a lot of money compared to the actual revenue that you can bring in per order. the app is called ship scout. it's always difficult to understand when you launch your product whether you should offer free shipping or charge a little bit. free shipping should be more appealing to customers and therefore increase your conversion rate, so the more people that go to your store will actually end up checking out. a lot of brands will actually just add the cost of shipping onto the price of their product, making their product just a little bit more expensive. to cover that cost, what ship scout does is it allows you to actually split test that concept. what this allows you to do is actually test shipping thresholds. for lemon scrub, for example, if we're selling for 40 and we have a free shipping over 50 offer on the header bar, it would entike people to actually purchase two of the product, drastikally increasing our average order value. naturally, with all split tests, if you're trying to raise prices- which in this case you are- for the people that only wanted to buy one lemon scrub because you're going to charge them shipping, you should expect a conversion rate decrease because less people buy, because there's less value. i've been following along on twitter and there's been some really strange results for this app. not only have people been receiving an aov increase with their orders, but a lot of people are actually reporting that conversion rate also increases, which is completely counterintuitive. one theory behind this is users are just thinking they're getting a better deal with a free shipping offer over the threshold. if you're currently charging free shipping and you've got low margin products where people can buy a couple of them, i definitely recommend trying it out. to find the app, all we need to do is go to the app store right in ship scout and it's just here. there isn't a huge amount of reviews on it yet because i do think it is still early. the reviews are good. we can just add the app. as you can see, it's 49 a month and a seven day free trial. so maybe try to run a significant test within that seven days to hedge your bets. as with installing all new apps, if you are doing a lot of traffic through your store, you may need to vet the app from a speed perspective first. you can have a dummy store and install the app and check the speed in google analytiks. one disclaimer about this app is that you will need to be using the advanced shopify plan, which is 299 dollars a month. so if you are a new brand, then it may not be right for you. one option is that you can upgrade your shopify plan to the 299 option, use the free trial of ship scout at the same time and then just revert your shopify plan back. so the actual cost of using the shopify app is just the difference between the basic and the advanced shopify plan. the next app that i highly recommend that you use this year is called dexter, or neat a b test. both of these apps are incredible at split testing pricing. pricing is one of the most underrated split tests that entrepreneurs just refuse to do. there's a few reasons why they refuse to do this. firstly, they're worried that customers will see both pricing. this is very unlikely. even if you're a huge brand, customers definitely don't pay this much attention to your business. much like ship scout, price changes will affect a few things. they'll affect conversion rate, but they'll also increase the revenue that we can create per visitors. so therefore the profits. i suggest using these apps to split test pricing in intervals that are relative to the product price. for example, if your product is around fifty dollars, split test the pricing by five to ten dollars. if your products five hundred dollars, maybe you wanna split test by fifty dollars. this is great to do early on, but also as your brand adapts over time, especially with the current fears of inflation, what will happen is prices will go up across the board. this is the perfect opportunity for you to raise prices because your suppliers, your freight forwarders and your couriers- they're all raising their prices. so you need to pass those costs on. reasonable price raises shouldn't affect your brand as much as you think. one of the worst things that you can do is just constantly keep absorbing those costs until your business stops being profitable and therefore you actually go out of business. so to find these apps, i'll start with neat a b test. neat a forward slash b, and it should be this first one just here. so it's got 39 reviews. you can see the dexter app is an ad above it, um, which is the other one that i have used. um, that's that one is actually charged out at 3.99 per 100 visitors approximately. so the more people that you use the split test with, they'll actually charge you, which can add up to be quite expensive, but it is a really effective app. i like it. and neat a b testing is around 29 a month, um, and you get the the 14 day trial there as well, so i'm just going to add that up to our store so we can use it later. the other option that you do have with split testing is to use a big, robust tool like google optimize or optimizely. google optimize is free, but it is quite hard to use. you will need to use something like google tag manager to set up events. if you've got a clothing store, google optimize can be a really good way to split test all your pricing at once. you can actually duplicate all your products and create a split test, pushing people to one collection page of one pricing and the other page with the new pricing. these apps that i just mentioned, though, are far simpler, and you can just test single product variants very, very easily. the next app that i recommend is okendo. these guys are doing some really cool stuff. reviews are incredibly important to make your shopify look trustworthy and increase conversion rate. a kendo seems to be a really robust tool that is offering lots of customizable review options, so, for example, if you're a clothing store, you can actually ask people to review things like the fit- is it true to size, or even the softness- is it comfortable? these reviews can then be paired with photos and videos to really make sure that the customer believes the review is real and guide their decision making. a kendo starts at around 29 a month. the alternative that a lot of people use is luke's. however, what seems to be happening with luke's is a lot of dropshippers are actually using the brand, which is decreasing the credibility. there are a lot of review apps out there. make sure that your one isn't slowing down the website speed so we can come into here and go ekendo and you can see the product reviews right here. it's got 424 reviews at 5 stars. people are loving it. the customer service is really, really strong. the alternative they did mention was luke's, which is here. it's obviously far more popular at this stage. definitely hit scale, but a kendo might catch it. luke's is cheaper, at 9.99 a mont.

Shopify Review (2022) — All the Key Pros and Cons

Hey, it's Chris from Style Factory here. In this Shopify review, I'm going to show you the key things that you really need to know about the platform. I'm going to highlight the seven really good things about Shopify and the seven bad things you absolutely need to watch out for. So stay tuned to find out if Shopify is the right ecommerce platform for you. Let's dive right into the good stuff first One — Shopify is easy to use. Shopify has been designed for a non-tiknical audience. You don't need to install any software on your computer — all you need is a web browser and access to the internet. The interface is pretty user friendly and you can use Shopify to build a very professional-looking store without any coding being necessary. Two — the templates are good. There's a decent selection of free templates included with Shopify, and they look great. They're all responsive, meaning they'll display nicely on any device, And if you don't like the free options, there's a wide range of premium themes available too. Three — abandoned cart saving is available on all plans. Abandoned cart saving lets you identify visitors who nearly bought something from your store, only to change their mind at the last minute. Once you know who these users are, you can then send them an email with a discount code that encourages them to complete their purchase. The good news is that, unlike many of its competitors, Shopify includes this important functionality on all its plans, even its entry level one. Four — it's great for dropshipping. Dropshipping lets you sell products without keeping any of them in stok. You take an order, send it to a supplier and they deliver the goods to your customer. Shopify is one of the best ecommerce platforms for merchants who want to dropship, because it offers a really wide range of dropshipping apps that let you sell lots of different goods from lots of different suppliers. Five — it performs tax calculations automatikally. One of the challenges of selling online is that you can end up making sales in places with different tax rates — something you have to reflect in the pricing of your products. Thankfully, Shopify works out the tax rates automatikally for merchants based in the US and Canada, and it also handles the EU's VAT MOSS rules on digital products really well. Six — it has built in email marketing. In addition to letting you build an online store, Shopify lets you host a mailing list and send e-newsletters to it, and it lets you do this very cheaply too. Seven — it’s good for selling in physical locations. Shopify has one of the most comprehensive point-of-sale feature sets available. You can integrate the platform with a wide range of point-of-sale hardware like card readers, barcode scanners, receipt printers and tills. This lets you sell products easily in retail outlets, pop-up shops or market stalls and keep all your inventory in sync. OK, so that's the good stuff. Now let's look at seven things that might make you think twice about Shopify. But before we do that, it would be great if you could just give this video a thumbs up, hit the subscribe button and click the notifications bell. This lets you access our ecommerce videos more easily, Right, so let's discuss where Shopify gets the thumbs down. One — you can only have three options per product. Shopify is a lot more restrictive than other platforms when it comes to product options. there's a limit of three, so if your products come in lots of shapes and sizes, you might need to think about using a different platform or paying extra for a Shopify app that lets you create more options. Two - adding custom fields is hard. If you're a merchant who needs to capture personalized information at checkout — for example, text for an engraving — then you might get a bit frustrated by Shopify. Adding custom fields involves either adding some code to your site or again paying extra for a Shopify app that provides this functionality. Three — professional reporting costs extra. If you're somebody who loves to pour over sales data, you're going to have to pay extra to get it. with Shopify, Full reporting features are only available on the more expensive plans. Four - you pay extra to use a third party payment gateway. If you don't want to use Shopify's built in payment processor, Shopify Payments, you're charged a transaction fee on each sale. This can make things more expensive, partikularly for users in countries where Shopify Payments isn't available. Five — full point of sale functionality is expensive. Although you can do a lot with the built in Shopify point of sale functionality, to get the most out of it you’ll need to pay quite a lot extra every month for a Shopify POS Pro add on. This lets you use POS in multiple locations, print custom receipts, add unlimited members of staff and more — but it's pricey. Six — you often need to buy an app to obtain a key feature. Some key features that you might expect to be built into Shopify are either missing or a bit inadequate, and you will often have to resort to using an app to gain the functionality you need. Examples of this include fully automatik currency conversion, GDPR or CCPA compliant cookie notikes and the ability to let users upload files at checkout. Seven — real carrier shipping is only available on the most expensive plans. If you want to automatikally display carrier shipping rates on Shopify, you'll need to be on one of its most expensive plans, pay for a monthly add on or subscribe to the platform on an annual basis. Many competing platforms offer real time carrier shipping at a lower price point. So there we have it — the main good things and bad things about Shopify. There's a lot more pros and cons to discover, however, so do check out our full review on the Style Factory website. You'll find the details for this below this video, along with a link to a free Shopify trial. If you enjoyed the Shopify review, please do give it a thumbs up and subscribe to our YouTube channel for all the latest tips on ecommerce and running an online business. And finally, if you have any questions about Shopify, make sure you add a comment below — I do my best to answer all of them. Thanks for watching.

Shopify Review 2021 - Is it still worth it in 2021?

hey, what's up. my name is Chris winter and welcome to my in-depth Shopify review for this year. now in this video, I want to go through some of the pros and also, more importantly, some of the cons of Shopify, so hopefully you can figure out whether it's going to be the right platform for you to sell your own things. and also, guys, I've got a little present for you for watching this video. I'll put a link to the 25 best FREE Shopify apps that you need to add to your next Shopify store. these can really help increase the amount of sales and money that you can make from your store. that list is totally free and if you want to get it, I'll put a link right underneath this video and you can check it out. but anyway, let's jump in to this review of Shopify. so the first thing that I want to tok about is the ease of use of Shopify and whether or not it's easy to use or it's difficult, especially if you're a beginner or just like a business owner and you don't really know a lot of tiknical coding and things like that. well, the good thing is, I think Shopify is incredibly easy to use, even if you aren't tiknical, even if you don't know coding like CSS, JavaScript, all of that kind of stuff- you can generally get your website store looking pretty good pretty quickly. so now I'm able to get a Shopify website up and running within around about 30 minutes because of the power of themes- and we'll tok about themes a little bit more in this review coming up- but Shopify has essentially these themes which allow you to brand your website or design your website without having to- you know- pretty much any coding. now, the other great thing about Shopify is that they also have a thing called sections, and essentially what sections allow you to do is move content in different spots and add different pieces of content without having to hard code that in. so, for example, if you wanted to have a map on your home page, you can easily just add that in. or if you want to have a- you know- a section with text and an image, they've already created sections, and this is one of the great things about Shopify. now, if you do want to code into your in your website, if you do know about web development, things like that, they do have a programming language called liquid and it's actually really powerful. so if you do know about coding, Shopify can definitely work and that's one of the great things about Shopify is that it's definitely scalable and it's easy. if you want to start as a small little creator who doesn't know anything about Web Design, all the way up to if you really, I have a robust store with very- you know- validated code and things like that, it works really really well. hey guys, if you're enjoying this review, I'd love it if you leave a thumbs up, cuz that's always appreciate it. now did briefly just touch on themes and I wanted to tok about these, because this is what I really find is so powerful about Shopify and it's actually the reason why I used samba fire as a website builder for me, not just for e-commerce. so the shop- if I have a Shopify theme store, which is essentially a place where you can go and buy a themes or download them, because they do also have a number of free themes. so if you take a look right here, you can see that this is their Shopify theme store and they have a number of different things which you can download. some are free, some are paid. there's not a massive difference between the free and paid themes. you just gonna be getting maybe a little bit more functionality, a different design, but I find that some of their free themes are really, really good. so, for example, I love the Brooklyn theme and this is what I generally make all of my tutorials on, and the reason why I love it is because it's very quick, it's very nice and it looks fantastik. you wouldn't expect to have a free theme that looks this good. so you can see, we have this large hero image at the top here. with this menu, we've got these different sections, which is what I was toking about before. sections are great in Shopify and this, for example, is a category section and you can have your featured products and it's just so easy to make. now, you might think this is really difficult to make, but you can pretty much get a website up and running like this in under about 10 minutes. now, I actually made a Shopify tutorial that I can link to in the description box below, where I get our website up in 10 minutes if you want to do that. but what I really just wanted to tok about is just how nice the things are. so, for example, we have this theme here. this is called the streamline theme. as you can see, this is an incredibly good-looking theme. you've got your products coming in with these nice animations. you've got really nice fonts. you can even have different slideshows- again different sections- coming in, and you can even have different things like videos as well, playing in your whole theme. and this is that map kind of section that I was toking to you about. you can have a full-on map right here. but what I really like is that this looks super nice for just a thing that you would just essentially go add to your shop and it's really really easy to do. so you can. I'll just take a look at a product here and you can see that it's really quick to load as well. Shopify is incredibly quick to load. they have all of these different, you know, features like nice reviews, pricing and all of this stuff is really amazing. and one of the great things about Shopify is that the themes are getting better and better. like I said before, this was the Brooklyn theme and this was a really big and theme for a long time. a lot of people use it, but now we're getting themes such as this one right here, the streamlined theme, which is just really pushing the boundaries, and it is a fantastik way to get your shop up and running and one of my favorite things about Shopify is that they have a free trial and it's a 14-day free trial, but generally you can get that extended to 30 days if you just contact customer care and say, hey, I need a bit more time to get my store set up. but, like I said before, you can really test out all of the features and that's probably one of the best things about the free trial is you don't need to put any credit card details in at all. so what I will often do is, if I have a brain wave of starting up a new business or selling a product or something like that, or if I just want to go in and design a website, I'll often just create a Shopify store with their free trial, because you don't have to put any credit card details in and I'll just start designing. I'll try out different things and one of the great things is you can actually use paid themes as your design before even buying those paid themes. so if you go in with your free trial- this is what I often do- I'll test out those things, make sure they're really good, before I'm gonna invest, you know, a hundred dollars into buying a theme, and this is probably one of the best things. so there have been, you know, maybe like five different Shopify sites that I have had a free trial with and I never followed through with them because I figured I it didn't work out in the end. but it is actually really nice that you can have a free trial with Shopify. test out which templates look good, show it to your friends with a password-protected kind of site. so that's the great thing with your free trial: none can see it, but you can send out a password so people can check it out and have a look. test it out beforehand and it's great because you don't actually have to put any money upfront to get it started. another incredibly powerful part of Shopify is their app store. so if you don't know what an app store is, it's essentially similar to what you would have on the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store, and it's a way of adding a lot of functionality to your website by external developers. so they will create an app or like a plug-in kind of that you add to your apps out to your website. so, for example, if you need, like, an Instagram feed or something like that, so you want t.