Are you planning to start your online store?

Or you have a physical store and want to showcase your branding online.

Or you are going good with your physical store and now considering to make it available for the people around the globe.

If your answer to any of the above question is Yes, then you have come to the right place. I am happy to help you with your baby steps.

The first confusion everyone came across while planning to start a website is its hosting solution.  Let me introduce you to this term first. Web hosting is a space where our site will be stored and maintained. It makes your site available on internet. Your choice of shopping software can vary with the kind of hosting you want for your site. You can choose to buy a hosting and manually configure your site. Magento is the most famous self hosted e-commerce platform. There are many others like prestashop, opencart, woocommerce.

Then comes a fully hosted option i.e. you don’t need to worry about the space, hardware, infrastructure where your site will be stored and maintained. The softwares used are thoroughly tested. You don’t need to go through the process of maintaining or upgrading your software’s especially when upgradation involves long site-downs. Shopping softwares which comes with fully hosted solution are Shopify, Bigcommerce , Seoshop and many more. If we compare fully hosted solutions Shopify stands out in many terms.  We will discuss them here one by one.

Shopify was basically designed for ecommerce in 2004 by a Canadian company. It has become every merchant’s first choice when it comes to choosing between hosted shopping cart softwares available. You can set up your basic store with shopify easily and within minutes. It comes up with all the preconfigured things which are required for online selling. You just need to enter your details, catalog setup and you are ready to go. Shopfiy keeps on constantly upgrading their softwares that also silently in background. Additionally, there are no bandwidth issues with Shopify as all its plan includes unlimited bandwidth. So here we save lot of time on keeping our site secure and up-to-date.

Shopify comes up with variety of plans to choose from. If you are a beginner and first want try the things out you should go for shopify’s starter plan. Then there are basic, professional and unlimited plan. The choice of the plan can depends upon the catalog structure.Professional and storage plan differs in terms of storage. And above all if you are looking for an enterprise solution then you can go for Shopify plus which is custom plan with whopping price of $1000. For more details, see shopify’s pricing section here.

Other important things which comes to mind when planning to sell online is payment gateways to be used, shipping price and taxes setup. Payment gateway is a service which allows you to accept payments online. Shopify supports many local and international payments thus you can choose the best available option according to your sales. View the payment gatway details here.  Above all these options, in 2013 Shopify announced its own payment gateway named Shopify Payments. You can choose this if you don’t want to go through the process of setting up merchant accounts with third party payment gateways and long verification procedures. Shopify payment methods works on 0% transaction fees charged to the merchant when selling online. You can also setup shipping rates and taxes, countries as well regions wise. For shipping you can also go for live rates using services like USPS, FedEx and many more. If you are selling on amazon as well then you can opt for amazon fulfillment services as well.

After the basic store setup and integrating all the payment options, next thing to be considered is the look and feel of the storefront. UI part of the store plays an important role in sales. Shopify’s beautiful theme store comes with many free and premium readymade themes. You don’t need to do much if your needs are simple and above all, you can modify every HTML and CSS part of your store. Plus Shopify’s powerful live theme preview feature lets you customize the look and feel of your store before publishing live and without affecting the already published theme. Above the basic setup and beautiful storefront, Shopify has powerful app store which can extends your store’s functionality with many kinds of free as well as premium apps.

Best part of shopify is it’s powerful, easy to use admin panel and they are constantly adding more to its never ending charm. As soon as you login to store’s admin panel the powerful dashboard gives you the details of your recent orders, visitors, referrals and much more. Shopify mobile lets you manage your store on the go easily. At the end, Shopify has much more to offer in its plate for all types of merchants whether they are at the starter’s level or a full packed enterprise.

If you are planning to start your online store Shopify is must to consider. Start your free trial here. We have served all types of Shopify merchants and helped them to grow with Shopify with their custom needs. Do send us your Queries for your Shopify store, we can dig into Shopify at its deepest to fulfill your needs.