WE LOVE SHOPIFY. HERE’S WHY.

We recently had a client who approached us to build a massive new ecommerce business. It was a super exciting prospect until we found out they wanted it to be built on Wordpress using Woo Commerce. After much deliberation and many conversations, we decided not to accept the job. Why? Because it wasn’t going to be remotely fun. Lucrative, yes. Enjoyable? Not at all.

More than that, here at WWD we are constantly striving to give our clients as much autonomy and agency over their digital presence as possible. It’s vital, then, for us to use platforms that are safe, easy to update, and don’t require constant management from us or a third-party. Because that’s, frankly, bullshit.

There is no reason, in this day and age, that businesses need to be paying monthly management fees to web designers to make changes to their site or keep it from crashing. That’s just not something we need to worry about with any of the platforms we use.

So why do we love and recommend Shopify to the majority of our eCommerce clients?

Scalability

Every small business owner dream of one day growing their business into a successful and far-reaching enterprise. Shopify accommodates for this. Adjusting your shop to add new features, new products, or new pages is so simple, you’ll have all the more time to focus on expanding your business model and obtaining all your goals.

Hassle-Free

Many of Shopify’s features and tools are designed with making setting up an online store as easy and accessible as possible. They even created a solution for one of the more laborious and tedious tasks that come with being a business owner, taxes. Shopify has built in an automatic tax calculator into their platform to help you keep on top of your taxes and allow you more time to focus on your business and products.

Easy Product Management

Shopify’s wide selection of product management tools makes keeping on top of your stock very easy. The inventory management feature allows you to keep track of what you have in stock, orders, and product listings, meaning that it will automatically display items as sold out when you run out of stock. The ability to set up tons of product variations and prices according to these variations means that it has never been easier to keep on top of your inventory. Not to mention, these features make the user experience seamless and effortless, meaning that customers are even more likely to return to your store.

SEO Tools

If you’re going to go to the effort of setting up an online store, you need to be easy to find on search engines. Shopify’s SEO tools have been designed with functionality and results in mind. It’s Ecommerce-specific SEO features allow you to create SEO-friendly categories, insert Alt text images, and create URLs which best reflect your content or product.

So, there we have it. Ten reasons why Shopify is the best decision you can make as a business owner building an online store.

Apps and add-ons

Shopify’s app store has a lot of useful apps that can add to a great customer experience or make your life easy as a business owner. It covers areas such as marketing, sales and conversion, inventory management, customer support, finances, reporting etc.

Built in speed and security

Have you ever left a site because it took too long to load? Patience is a virtue customers don’t really care about. They want their products and they want them quick. For every second that your potential buyer has to wait for the payment process to complete, he is being tempted to leave your site and go to your competitor. Shopify handles speed and security with panache. They have global standards to meet and have huge investments in software and security engineering to build secure systems for your customers. Their sites are extremely fast, secure and integrate very well with payment providers without any delay in load times.

Customer Insights

Shopify offers users the chance to gain essential insights into their customer base and how to use this data to optimise their sales. One such feature which does this is ‘Facebook Pixels’, a piece of code that you can embody into your page which tracks visitors to your online store and what they get up to when they’re there. This kind of customer insight is fantastic for creating and executing successful marketing campaigns, as you can analyse your client base and customise your ads around your specific individuals. This kind of targeted marketing will optimise visitations to your site, maximise conversion rates, and ensure higher sales. You can even use this function to focus your ads on those who have abandoned items in their cart on your store, encouraging them to revisit your site and fulfil the sale. All you have to do is do open the Ads Manager on Shopify, go to Events Manager > Pixels, and select ‘Create a Pixel’. Easy, simple, and effective.

UX Design Features

Shopify’s easy to follow interface allows platform users to dabble in complex UX design processes without any hassle or complications. You can edit the coding of your page to insert headlines/tabs in your product description, change how the images are laid out, or annotate product pictures for a ‘quick view’ function. Whilst this seems a little bit scary at first, learning how to meddle with the coding of your online store really pays off. With a little bit of time and effort, you can enhance the usability of your online store and ensure that your customers’ experience on your site is an enjoyable one.

Here at WWD, we can handle every single element of your Shopify build - from design to launch. All you have to do, by the time we’ve finished, is press LAUNCH!