In the ever-expanding digital landscape, establishing a robust online presence is paramount for organizations of all sizes. Enter Shopify – an eCommerce platform that empowers entrepreneurs and established brands alike to effortlessly create, customize, and manage their online stores, offering a comprehensive suite of tools and features to transform your organizational goals into reality.
What is Shopify?
Shopify is a popular e-commerce platform that provides small businesses with a powerful and easy-to-use online store to sell their products or services, offering a modern online store with a user-friendly dashboard that helps businesses manage their store and sales performance. Shopify is a Canadian multinational based in Ottawa, Ontario, developing the proprietary Shopify platform, primarily aimed at providing organizations with a retail point-of-sale system and customer engagement tools.
As an all-in-one sales platform, Shopify gives businesses tools to sell online through social media sites, seller marketplaces, blogs, websites, email, text, and chat – and provides additional integration with in-person selling tools, such as point-of-sale (POS) systems for retail stores, pop-up shops, market sales, and subscription-based businesses.
Shopify self-reports to being used by over 2,000,000 businesses across 175 countries, and according to BuiltWith, powers over 4.2 million live websites or just under 4% of the top 10 thousand websites, as of April 2023.
Shopify’s popularity in the eCommerce industry
Shopify is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform with store subscription plans with fees that are tailored to meet the needs of organizations at any scale – though most commonly small to medium size enterprises – with its range of store subscription plans, including the Lite plan, which provides businesses with mobile POS sales and a Buy Button to sell products on an existing website or social media platform. Shopify’s other plans come with a suite of business management tools to handle product sourcing, sales, inventory tracking, payment processing, shipping, customer accounts, marketing, reporting, etc.
“With the increasing popularity of online shopping, having an eCommerce store is essential for businesses of all sizes.”
With the increasing popularity of online shopping, having an eCommerce store is essential for businesses of all sizes. Shopify has become a leading platform for e-commerce due to its simplicity, ease of use, and extensive customization options. To extend its functionality, various Shopify Apps available in the Shopify App Store, providing additional features to enhance their ecommerce and point-of-sale app capabilities. Shopify is an excellent option for both beginner and advanced businesses, including dropshippers, high-growth, and direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands.
A brief history of Shopify
Shopify was founded in 2006 by Tobias Lütke and Scott Lake after Lütke created his own eCommerce platform using Ruby on Rails. In August 2013, Shopify announced the launch of Shopify Payments partnership with Stripe to enable merchants to accept payments without requiring a third-party payment gateway. Shopify announced integration with Amazon in January 2017, which finally let merchants sell on Amazon from their Shopify stores.
Shopify’s technological developments in the 2020s include rebranding Shopify Pay to Shop Pay and Arrive to Shop, combining customer-facing features under a single brand. Shopify also made several acquisitions, including Primer, Dovetale, and Deliverr, and formed partnerships with Alipay, JD.com, Twitter, and PayPal to expand its offerings and services. In 2022, Shopify introduced Linkpop, a product to create a branded, social marketplace through which merchants can advertise and market their products via links to be added on social media channels.
How does Shopify work?
Shopify is a cloud-based, fully hosted ecommerce solution designed to help merchants sell their products both online and in person. The platform is built using the Ruby on Rails framework and uses MySQL as its database. Shopify utilizes sharding, which divides its infrastructure into small, independent groups called pods to help manage server upgrades and maintenance.
The platform is highly flexible, and its tools allow merchants to manage products, inventory, payments, and shipping across multiple channels, including web, mobile, in-person, brick-and-mortar locations, pop-up shops, social media, and online marketplaces.
Shopify’s themes and apps allow merchants to customize their online stores and integrate disparate systems to streamline their business. The platform’s layers and stack provide a robust set of business tools, including marketing, inventory, and data management.
Merchants using Shopify do not need to worry about hosting their website, as the platform is fully hosted, and it can be accessed from any internet-enabled device. This eliminates the need for merchants to worry about server upgrades and maintenance.
The platform is designed to cater to independent developers, who can create themes, apps, and integrations to help merchants sell more effectively. Shopify also provides a range of resources to help developers build and market their apps.
Shopify’s architecture is designed to handle both online sales and retail sales, making it an excellent choice for merchants who have an online and offline presence. The platform’s inventory management tools allow merchants to track and manage their inventory across all channels.
Shopify’s technology stack
Backend
Shopify is built on a robust technology stack that ensures reliability, speed, and scalability. At the core of Shopify’s technology stack is Ruby on Rails, a powerful web application framework that enables the development of highly efficient and maintainable code. Shopify also uses MySQL, a popular open-source relational database management system.
Sharding
To ensure optimal performance and scalability, Shopify uses a technique called sharding. Sharding involves dividing a database into smaller, more manageable pieces called pods. Each pod contains a subset of the overall database, enabling Shopify to distribute the load across multiple servers and ensuring that no single server becomes a bottleneck.
Frontend
Shopify employs a powerful combination of React and Polaris for its frontend. React provides a robust foundation for building interactive and dynamic user interfaces to efficiently manage and update various components of its frontend. Polaris offers a collection of pre-built components and design guidelines to make development more consistent.
Shopify features:
Global reach made easy
Customer engagement & marketing tools
Shopify provides several marketing tools to help merchants build strong customer relationships and engage with their audience, including customer segmentation, email marketing, automation, messaging, etc., along with marketing insights and analytics.
Checkout and payment processing
Shopify provides a secure and reliable checkout process to help merchants manage customer orders & payments supporting various payment options. Shopify also has its own payment processing system called Shopify Payments.
Global markets
Shopify is a global platform that provides merchants with the ability to reach a broader audience with their products. With Shopify, merchants can sell their products online and reach customers from all around the world.
Shop app
Shopify’s Shop App provides a seamless shopping experience for customers on mobile devices. The app allows customers to shop across multiple Shopify stores, track their orders, and receive personalized recommendations.
“Shopify provides a dedicated support team that is available 24/7 to help merchants set up, design, and market their stores effectively.”
Shopify theme store and app store
Access to a vast selection of themes and apps enhance Shopify stores functionality and appearance. The Theme Store provides free and paid themes, while the Shopify App Store provides various apps that add functionality, such as payment providers.
Merchandising and visual displays
Shopify provides various tools for merchandising and visual displays, including product bundling, special offers, and brand recognition. With these features, merchants can showcase their products effectively and increase sales.
Inventory and selling strategies
Shopify provides various inventory and selling strategies, including unique pricing, promotions, pre-orders, try-before-you-buy, raffles, discount strategies, and Subscriptions Apps, letting merchants create customized experiences for their customers.
Dedicated support team
Shopify provides a dedicated support team that is available 24/7 to help merchants set up, design, and market their stores effectively. Additionally, Shopify provides various guides and articles that help merchants connect with customers and experts.
Why use Shopify?
Shopify’s integrated commerce platform, robust technical framework, and range of themes and apps make it an excellent choice for entrepreneurs, merchants, and developers looking to build and scale eCommerce businesses. With its emphasis on simplicity, accessibility, and creative expression, Shopify is a platform that enables businesses to create personalized and engaging experiences for their customers, leading to growth and scalability.
Shopify’s intuitive and user-friendly platform allows merchants to quickly and easily set up and manage their online stores, providing the building blocks and tools to enable creative expression and extensibility.
Shopify’s integrated commerce platform provides organizations with a broad range of commerce ecosystem integrations that enable merchants to seamlessly integrate with different channels, surfaces, and products – meaning businesses can expand their reach to new customers and markets, making growth and scalability more accessible than ever.
Through its robust technical framework, Shopify provides a powerful foundation for building online stores, with a large collection of themes and apps available to aid businesses in extending the functionality of their stores. Merchants can use these tools to create personalized and engaging experiences for their customers, enhancing the overall shopping experience.
Another significant advantage of using Shopify is its simplicity and accessibility. The platform is designed to be easy to use, with an intuitive interface that makes it simple to navigate and manage online stores. This accessibility means that merchants can focus on growing their businesses without worrying about technical complexities – which particularly important for small to medium sized organizations.
Advantages of Shopify: Why it’s a popular choice for eCommerce businesses
Shopify offers comprehensive tools for building and managing an e-commerce store. Its user-friendly admin panel, robust features, customizable themes and design elements, reliable hosting, subscription plans, robust app store, and low barrier to entry make it an excellent choice for organizations of all sizes.
User-friendly admin and comprehensive reports
Shopify’s admin panel is user-friendly and easy to navigate, making it an excellent platform for beginners, offering comprehensive reports into the performance of your online store.
Robust features for online store management
Shopify offers a wide range of features that help you manage your online store effectively. You can create product pages, manage orders, and view a real-time overview of your store’s performance.
Customizable themes and design elements
Shopify has range of free themes that you can use to design your online store, customize branding, font, color scheme, and photos to match your business’s unique style and branding choices.
Cloud-based platform with reliable hosting
Shopify is a cloud-based platform, which means you don’t need to worry about server or hosting maintenance. The platform offers reliable hosting, and downtime is rare, even during high-traffic periods.
Subscription plans for eCommerce stores of all sizes
Shopify offers various pricing plans that cater to eCommerce stores of all sizes. With plans ranging from Shopify Starter to the Shopify Plus , you can easily find the plan that suits your business needs and budget.
Robust app store with tools for marketing & store management
Shopify has a robust app store with a host of tools and apps to enhance a store’s marketing and management capabilities, including countdown timers, image background removers, and more.
Shopify use cases and what it can do
Online and offline commerce
Businesses can create online storefronts with custom and personalized shopping experiences with Shopify, with storefronts that can integrate with the company’s website, social channels, and other sales channels. Businesses can sell their products through various marketplaces and the Shopify Shop App platform.
Audience growth and promotion
Shopify provides a range of tools to help businesses grow their audience and promote their products. Social media integration allows businesses to reach a broader audience through various social channels, while the sales channels feature enables selling products on marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay.
Centralized data & staff management
Shopify offers a centralized platform for managing all aspects of the business, including inventory tracking, staff management, and sales analytics. The platform provides real-time data on sales, inventory, and customer behavior, enabling businesses to make data-driven and evidence-based decisions.
Creator tools & business building
Shopify provides a range of creator tools and business-building features, such as content production and store data analytics. These tools allow businesses to create and publish high-quality media, including images, videos, and blog posts, to engage with their audience and build their brand.
Shopify for business growth
Shopify provides organizations with a comprehensive platform to manage and grow their businesses and enhance their eCommerce efforts with a powerful set of features and tools, such as streamlined business management, fulfillment and shipping, optimized supply chain and backend management, payment options, mobile app, automation, and marketing and conversion optimization. With Shopify, organizations can focus on what they do best – growing their businesses – while leaving the technical details to the platform.
Central admin for streamlined business management
Shopify’s Central Admin dashboard is a powerful tool for managing your business. From a single location, you can monitor your business metrics, track your inventory, manage your shipping and fulfillment, and much more. This centralized approach allows you to stay on top of your business operations, giving you the time and resources to focus on growing your business.
Fulfillment and shipping made easy
Shopify offers a range of powerful tools to help you manage your fulfillment and shipping processes. With the Shopify Fulfillment Network, you can outsource your fulfillment to a network of trusted 3rd-party logistics providers (3PLs), so you can focus on other aspects of your business. The Shipping Partner Platform connects you with shipping providers, giving you access to competitive rates and streamlined shipping processes.
Optimized supply chain and backend management
Shopify provides robust supply chain and backend management tools to help you streamline your operations. From managing inventory to tracking sales and financial data, Shopify’s backend tools allow you to keep your business running smoothly. With access to banking, balance, and capital features, Shopify also offers options for funding and managing money.
“Shopify offers a range of payment options to help you capture more sales and improve your customer checkout experience.”
Shop Pay and installments for easy payment options
Shopify offers a range of payment options to help you capture more sales and improve your customer checkout experience. Shop Pay is a secure and convenient payment option that saves customers time by securely storing their payment and shipping information. Installments is another payment option for customers to split purchases into four interest-free payments, making larger purchases more accessible and affordable.
Automation for streamlined business processes
Shopify offers a range of automation features to help you streamline your business processes. With Flow, you can automate repetitive tasks, such as sending order confirmation emails or updating inventory levels. This helps you save time and resources, allowing you to focus on growing your business.
Marketing and conversion optimization
Shopify offers a range of powerful marketing and conversion optimization tools to help you drive more sales. From email marketing to abandoned cart recovery, Shopify provides you with the tools you need to reach your target audience and convert them into paying customers. With advanced analytics and reporting, you can also track your performance and optimize your marketing efforts over time.
Understanding Shopify’s product layers
At its core, Shopify offers a robust and reliable e-commerce platform that includes all the essential tools and features needed to create an online store. This core product includes templates, tools for managing products and orders, payment processing, SEO, and marketing tools. However, Shopify’s product layers go beyond the core product, providing additional products and services that can help businesses grow and scale.
Core product
This includes essential tools for creating an online store, such as templates, tools for managing products and orders, payment processing, SEO, and marketing tools.
Third-party apps
A vast array of apps, plugins, and tools developed by third-party developers help businesses add new functionalities and features to their online stores.
Professional services
Shopify Experts provide businesses with a range of professional services, such as design, development, marketing, and SEO – to optimize and grow their online stores.
Additional products
Shopify offers products such as Shopify Payments for access to a secure payment processing system, and Shopify Capital, for businesses seeking funding.
Upgrades and custom solutions
Shopify’s product layers offer access to custom solutions such as code customization and custom integrations, by 3rd-party developers or Shopify Experts.
App marketplace
In addition to third-party apps, Shopify also offers its own marketplace of apps and tools, designed to integrate seamlessly with Shopify’s core product.
Shopify features: Global reach made easy
Checkout and payment processing
Shopify provides a secure and reliable checkout process to help merchants manage customer orders & payments supporting various payment options. Shopify also has its own payment processing system called Shopify Payments.
Global markets
Shopify is a global platform that provides merchants with the ability to reach a broader audience with their products. With Shopify, merchants can sell their products online and reach customers from all around the world.
Customer engagement & marketing tools
Shopify provides several marketing tools to help merchants build strong customer relationships and engage with their audience, including customer segmentation, email marketing, automation, messaging, etc., along with marketing insights and analytics.
Shop App
Shopify’s Shop App provides a seamless shopping experience for customers on mobile devices. The app allows customers to shop across multiple Shopify stores, track their orders, and receive personalized recommendations.
Inventory and selling strategies
Shopify provides various inventory and selling strategies, including unique pricing, promotions, pre-orders, try-before-you-buy, raffles, discount strategies, and Subscriptions Apps, letting merchants create customized experiences for their customers.
Merchandising and visual displays
Shopify provides various tools for merchandising and visual displays, including product bundling, special offers, and brand recognition. With these features, merchants can showcase their products effectively and increase sales.
Shopify theme store and app store
Access to a vast selection of themes and apps enhance Shopify stores functionality and appearance. The Theme Store provides free and paid themes, while the Shopify App Store provides various apps that add functionality, such as payment providers.
Dedicated support team
Shopify provides a dedicated support team that is available 24/7 to help merchants set up, design, and market their stores effectively. Additionally, Shopify provides various guides and articles that help merchants connect with customers and experts.
