As soon as you sign up, you'll get access to the full toolset required to build and then manage an eCommerce website. Shopify lets you customize your design, create a product catalog, set prices, payment methods, and taxes, and then even add extra features via installable extensions.
With Shopify, you can sell pretty much anything you wish – physical products / shippable goods, digital products, and services, and you can also establish a dropshipping operation.
Shopify's most popular payment plan is $29 / month, and there's a 14-day free trial available.
What are the Pros of Shopify?
- Shopify is very easy to use and doesn't require any technical skills from the user.
- Shopify is ready for anything you might throw at it. You can sell shippable goods, digital products, services, anything.
- Shopify gives you a great selection of store designs. They all look modern, and beautiful, and are optimized to maximize sales.
- If all you want to do is sell products on social media, like Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest, then you can do that with the cheap Shopify Lite plan at $9 / month.
- You can sell your products via multiple channels, not just through the online store. Shopify even lets you integrate their system into your existing brick-and-mortar storefront.
- Shopify is fully hosted. You don't need to worry about any server-related issues or any maintenance at all.
- There's 24/7 customer support.
- Shopify gives you mobile apps for iOS and Android – so you can manage your store on the go.
- No transaction fees if you use Shopify Payments – Shopify's own payment processing module.
- There are more than 2000 apps and plugins available in the Shopify App Store. This means that you'll be able to integrate your Shopify store with countless third-party services and also add new functionality at the click of a button.
- Shopify scales very well, which means that no matter the size of your store, Shopify will be able to handle it.
- Great inventory keeping module if you happen to be selling shippable goods.
- Great if you want to do dropshipping.
- There's a 14-day free trial.
What are the Cons of Shopify?
- If you want your customers to be able to leave reviews and ratings of your products, those features are extra paid via extensions.
- You're not exactly in full control of your store. Your store is hosted on servers that are owned by Shopify. This means that if at any point in time, they decide to take your store down, they can. Likely not going to happen if you don't break any of the license agreements.
- Professional reporting is only available on higher-tier Shopify plans.
- There are additional payment processing fees above the standard credit card processing rates if you're not using Shopify's own payments module.
- The blogging module, even though it is there, doesn't have the most friendly user interface, and you might find it challenging to create good-looking blog content on a regular basis.
