Shopify is an ecommerce software behemoth currently valued at over $44 billion (SHOP).
Canada-based Shopify is so successful because they created the easiest, most accessible platform for building and launching an ecommerce store.
Shopify tapped into a huge pain point: ecommerce entrepreneurs want to sell their product on their own website, not Ebay, Etsy or Amazon.
Coding an ecommerce website from scratch would cost tens of thousands of dollars in developer fees. Plus, it would be a total headache to tame all that code for a non-technical entrepreneur!
Shopify’s ecommerce solution enables you to design and build an ecommerce store on the web in a few minutes.
I’ve become a little bit of a fanboy.
Read on to see my Shopify review, setup guide and pricing recommendations.
First, a little background on me:
I’m An Ecommerce Entrepreneur
I built an ecommerce company. It was actually a hybrid ecommerce/physical store company — but just the same, I grew it from nothing to a couple million in revenue.
As an entrepreneur I learned a lot — the rosy lessons and the tougher ones.
One of those nuggets of wisdom is that switching ecommerce platforms is hard.
My company, BeGood started on WooCommerce, but then switched to Shopify. Pulling the switcheroo was a headache, logistically and emotionally. As an entrepreneur, the last thing you want to spend your time fussing with is your ecommerce platform.
Get it right the first time.
Since it has been about three years since I last used Shopify, I decided it was time for another test run.
Read on to see my review and setup guide.
By the way: I’m giving away 2 growth hacks you won’t find anywhere else on the internet for FREE!
My Shopify Review
Between Magento, BigCommerce, WooCommerce and others, you have more than enough ecommerce platform choices.
In general, I look for a few things when reviewing software like this:
- Ease of use: we’re not all software wizards. Can the product guide me from start to finish easily?
- Integrations: can I add all sorts of apps and bells and whistles to make my store more optimized, prettier or otherwise?
- Design: can I get my store to look as I want it to?
- Optimized: is the store search engine optimized? In other words, if someone searches “funny Drake tee shirt,” my product better show up if that’s what I’m selling!
Shopify gets excellent reviews, as evidence from a simple Google Search. Generally encouraging! I was happy to dive in and create my own Growth Marketing Pro store!
Getting Started With Shopify
Getting started with Shopify is easy. Click below and sign up for yourself.
Click to Shopify
I decided I would create a store called growthmarketingprostore.com. I’ll probably cancel the subscription once my experiment is complete. So if you can’t access that domain any longer you know why!
Once on this landing page I entered my email and got started.
The 14-day Shopify free trial was actually free. I didn’t need to enter a credit card.
Add an address so that my ecommerce store can make moneys!
Next, I was dropped into the Shopify dashboard.
This is a prettier version of what I remember from a few years ago. The left rail has a bunch of features that allow you to see your orders, products, customers and how they’re all behaving on your website.
But before all that, Shopify’s dashboard does guide you through the proper first steps. I really liked how easy setup was from this point forward.
- Add a product to start selling
- Customize (design) your online store
- Add your own domain name
I started by “adding a product to sell” and “buying a domain name.”
Adding my first product was easy and intuitive. It required a little bit of information about the product including a photo, inventory count, title and description.
Buying a domain was also easy (and cheap).
Growthmarketingprostore.com was only $14/year. That’s as good of a price as you would get with any other domain host. Make sure to go to your email and “verify” your domain name once registering it. Doing so will activate it.
Shopify gives you free email accounts as well: [email protected] It even forwards those emails directly to the email address you signed up with. This was an awesome feature.
At this point, I went to growthmarketingprostore.com to see what it looked like.
It was kind of cool, because Shopify automatically creates a “coming soon” prelaunch page with an email capture!
These sorts of pages are useful if you are still creating your product, but want to begin showcasing your store and collecting pre-launch email addresses.
It’s never too early to start building an audience so if you’re going to start an ecommerce company, today is a good day to get going.
Companies like Harry’s, Jet.com and Everlane captured hundreds of thousands of email addresses before ever selling a product.
In order to launch your Shopify site, you need to buy a paid plan. To be honest, given all the features and functionality of Shopify, it’s a pretty affordable deal.
Five years ago, it would have cost tens of thousands of dollars to create an ecommerce website capable of selling product, managing inventory and delighting customers with a seamless experience. Even by spending a bunch of money on engineers, I don’t believe that any solution is better than Shopify.
I’ve spoken with a lot of ecommerce entrepreneurs at this point. In fact, when I spoke with the founders of online lingerie company, ThirdLove they were in the process of switching to Shopify, which was in lieu of hiring several new software engineers.
From this article, I would estimate they are doing over $30 million per year. On a Shopify store!
Shopify’s pricing is pretty straightforward.
A great solution for beginning your ecommerce adventure. I chose the $29/month basic plan, which includes:
- Two staff accounts (admins)
- A small shipping discount
- 2.9% fee + 30 cents for every online sale
- 2.7% + 0 cents for every in person sale (if you are going to use Shopify to sell at events or stores)
This plan should totally suffice for your beginning needs.
Shopify and Advanced Shopify
These solutions are great for growing ecommerce businesses. Eventually, paying a little more per month will save you a lot in merchant fees. Plus you will be able to have more admins — which for a growing team is important.
The more advanced plans also have a couple of neat features that allow you to optimize your business, including gift cards, abandoned cart recovery and better credit card rates.
Again, for the first-time ecommerce entrepreneur, the Basic plan is great.
Finishing Shopify Setup
All that remained to finish setup was choosing a Shopify theme (store design) and removing the password from your storefront so that users can begin shopping!
Choosing a theme is quite easy. You will do it from your Shopify dashboard. All of the themes are pretty nice. They’re also stable — meaning you’ll never have code snafus that will bring your site down or cause you hassle.
I built a pretty lame store. I didn’t spend much time (any time) designing it. But it’s very straightforward.
My finished shopping site looked like this:
Definitely nothing to write home about — but the store is fully functional and took about 15 minutes to build from start to finish.
Add in a couple hours of designing, adding products and tweaking and I could be open for business by this afternoon!
Some Stores Built on Shopify Ecommerce
It’s usually good to check on who else is using the platform in question.
Through my consulting work, conversations with entrepreneurs and some research, see these beautiful stores built on Shopify. Many of them are names you’ve heard of:
My Shopify Review in Summary
Shopify is the best ecommerce solution. As I said, I rate software in terms of 1) ease of use 2) integrations 3) design 4) optimization.
Shopify pretty much hits the mark across the board.
Ease of Use: 5/5
Shopify setup was the easiest setup I can imagine. I didn’t have to pause once. From start to finish, Shopify took 15 minutes to set up. I promise, I don’t give the 5/5 rating often.
I also love that you can buy your domain name in the Shopify platform. This saves you from having to deal with a domain host.
As far as making product pages, managing inventory and filling orders: Shopify checks all those boxes too.
I give Shopify the highest marks possible in terms of ease of use.
You should never have to write a line of code to make an ecommerce store. Integrations make your life easy by enabling you to do custom things to your site to really make it your own.
Shopify has integrations. In fact, there is a Shopify Integrations and Plugin Store. This is basically the App Store for Shopify.
Many of my favorite tools and extremely useful tools including Mailchimp, Instagram shopping plugin, email capture plugins and a subscription billing service for subscription ecommerce companies.
Designing with Shopify is as easy as choosing a theme. The basic themes and paid themes are beautiful, safe and fully customizable. Hard not to give Shopify a 5/5 here.
Of course, if you just want a sexy, functional store out of the box, Shopify has you covered.
Shopify used to have poor search engine optimization. This meant that people searching for your product on Google may not have found your Shopify store. However, it appears they have corrected this — allowing you to add tags to improve your SEO. In terms of website speed (also important for optimization): Shopify scores very well.
The only thing to note is that if your business is very dependent on a blog and/or Google organic traffic, you should definitely create a WordPress blog and link it with your Shopify store.
Shopify is optimized on site, however. You’ll notice that the checkout flow is simple and seamless out of the box. Additionally, product pages are sleakly designed to encourage users to add items to cart.
Shopify knows what they’re doing.
Shopify is a great product. I couldn’t recommend it more for the budding ecommerce entrepreneur!
Shopify is the easiest, most functional ecommerce solution out there.
–> Click here to create your Shopify store <–
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