12 Mar Ecommerce with Shopify
Shopify is a Canadian online selling platform that enable people to sell at a very low cost. It charges as low as $29 per month and a merchant can promote, sell and ship products using the online store. Most people use it because it is very affordable, and you can have your online business running in less than a week. Shopify is loved by merchants because it is very easy to use, the website was designed for the illiterate and all operations like adding products, processing orders and advertising are made easy. Shopify works well for dropshippers who have no store for the products they sell. Shopify also comes with 24-hour support from the technical team through live chats, emails and phone calls.
Challenges
However, shopify has got a very restricted functionality and most times merchants must purchase add-ons in order to operate the online store according to their requirements. The software lacks a lot of features and this forces merchants to incur more cost for instance the cost of adding just 3 add-ons can double the monthly payment. Shopify has not been able to maintain its customer support as a lot of merchants and their customers use shopify and they fail to respond to all of them. The client load is expanding, and the support fails to keep up. Transaction fees for shopify are higher than other selling platforms, the fee has raised from 0.5% to 2.0% varying according to the merchant’s pricing plan. Shopify is also not user friendly in terms of product search and filtering. There are limitations when searching for a product and the customer is not able to filter the option for example if a customer searches for ‘skirt’ a list of options will come up, but the customer will not be able to narrow the search to ‘white skirt’.
Evolution
Shopify has now advanced into a system called Shopify POS which links the online and physical retail. The system welcomes any kind of payment – credit/debit cards, Apple pay and even gift cards. Small retailers who have one inventory location are the ones who have advantaged to this system. Stores with more than one inventory location can not use it since the system carters to only one stock location. However, this system is a beginning of shopify’s journey into the retail world and there is no doubt that in due time it will start serving multi-inventory retailers.