Shopify: The best e-commerce solution in the world?

You have heard of Shopify but you don't know exactly what it is? So hang on tight and welcome to a new world you won't let go. Shopify is indeed the company and service that has changed the lives of millions of people the most around the world. Comment ? By allowing them to sell simply, easily and professionally to anyone on the planet by launching an E-commerce site.

Shopify is a online store management software which allows you to create your eshop, your eboutique, your merchant site, either in an extremely simple way in a few clicks, or with a hyper advanced version and configured to measure for the least of your needs.

Shopify is accessible, fast, efficient and it is not necessary to be a developer to take advantage of it because Shopify has been able to democratize its software so that as many people as possible can benefit from it.

Using Shopify to create an e-commerce site makes life easier for all the daily management of your e-commerce and working with the No. 1 E-commerce tool in the world

And if you get stuck, at any time you can call a agence Shopify competence like Pikka, to freelancers or E-commerce experts who will help you with the technical, marketing or commercial part of your site.

Shopify is not just a tool but a community of entrepreneurs all over the world. It's up to you to join the movement and create your Shopify site now!

What is Shopify?

Shopify is therefore a e-commerce software and fashion SaaS, software as a service, which allows you to create an online store (e-commerce) easily and quickly. There are many other e-commerce platforms or solutions like Magento, Prestahsop or Woocommerce to name only the best known but Shopify is recognized by all as the most intuitive and practical solution for doing e-commerce. 

There is no need to install Shopify, to take advantage of it, all you need is an email address and a credit card. Because yes, even if Shopify offers a free 14-day trial version, undertaking is investing. You will therefore have to pay the package even if you do not make sales. If your project is long in terms of development or you won't receive the products right away, you can also request a development store from a Shopify-certified agency, such as Pikka. You will be able to enjoy your store for free for an unlimited period of time but only for you. Customers won't be able to place an order until you choose a plan. 

Do not hesitate to ask us, through the contact page, a development store, it is always a pleasure for us to be able to help an e-merchant who wants to start selling online with Shopify. 

Who created Shopify?

Shopify was created almost 15 years ago because the three founders, based in Canada, could not find an e-commerce site creation software to their liking. Well at the time, it was still "the beginnings of the internet" and even if players like Cdiscount, Rueducommerce or Amazon already had a storefront, for the others, everything had to be coded from the start. 

It was enough for Tobias Lütke, Daniel Weinand, and Scott Lake, the three founders of Shopify, to decide to embark on a new business: the creation of online stores in the cloud. 

And what a decision! Fifteen years later, Shopify is the biggest e-commerce solution in the world with more than two million online stores around the world, warehouses in the United States, a Shopify Pay service available almost anywhere in the world, except in France Shopify Payments is available in France!, several thousand employees and of course an extremely powerful and flexible e-commerce solution. Shopify has become a company listed on the New York Stock Exchange and can compete, in terms of consolidated sales for all stores, with players such as Amazon and Aliexpress.

Indeed the cumulative turnover of Shopify stores is almost equivalent to the French E-commerce turnover as a whole! 

What a long way since the Ottawa garage in 2006. 

What is Shopify?

But more concretely, what is Shopify ? Does it install? No need to install. Shopify is an online subscription service, not a downloadable software. There is no "computer" version of Shopify, everything happens on the internet. This is the biggest advantage for merchants. You need almost nothing to run your Shopify site except a few ecommerce skills and of course a lot of time. 

But there's no need for technical or other skills to get started selling online with Shopify. You register, you have your "empty" shop in a few seconds and then you have to configure and configure everything.

If you've never done this in your life, if it impresses you, if you have specific needs or if you simply don't have the time, then entrust us with the realization of your Shopify project and we will make a pleasure to build the best site to sell.

But Shopify is not just an online e-commerce software. It is also a customer support, a payment service, a bank in the United States that can lend money to its merchants, warehouses, a e-commerce blog and many meetings on entrepreneurship.  

Shopify is indeed a vision rather than a software: anyone can become an e-merchant and take advantage of Shopify to create their business and make it prosper. And this is the case of thousands of people around the world. So why not you ? 

Shopify Review – Should you create an e-commerce with Shopify in 2021?

Shopify remains the simplest and most practical e-commerce solution for almost all e-commerce projects. So yes, almost because there are some exceptions. Let's take a direct look at the perfect cases for Shopify and the ones where Shopify can still improve. 

You want to sell to individuals 

Do you want to sell shoes, clothes, accessories, products of any type to individuals? Then in 99% of cases Shopify will be the perfect solution for you. Shopify is indeed the leader in e-commerce solutions for selling to individuals, especially if you don't like the development and technical part. 

This is THE great strength of Shopify, the e-commerce B2C, or business to consumer. There is, to my knowledge, no best e-commerce solution in the world for this type of e-commerce. The interconnection between Shopify and social networks like Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok make it easy to find thousands of individual customers.

You sell personalized products

If you sell personalized or customizable products, such as embroidered, customized or personalized items on behalf of the customer, Shopify is a good solution for your e-commerce site but it will require specific applications or developments to obtain the personalized products.

You sell in B2B 

Let's be clear, if you sell in B2B, then Shopify today may not be the best e-commerce solution for you. You may need to consider Prestashop, Magento Big Commerce or another. 

The B2B function of Shopify Plus may be sufficient for a lot of people, but Shopify Plus is reserved for e-commerce sites generating several hundred thousand euros in turnover per month.

In addition, if you do eprocurement or you want payment authorizations per week or other or management of the order validation workflow then clearly, Shopify does not currently offer any of this. 

Note that this could well change in the future because Shopify is working on VAT management and the latest Shopify updates show us that this B2B E-commerce position is seriously worked on by engineers and developers. at Shopify. And of course if you do "simple" B2B

You want a marketplace

Marketplaces are trendy and even if it would take an entire article to talk about marketplaces with Shopify, I prefer to summarize by saying: Avoid setting up a marketplace with Shopify as much as possible. There is only one real marketplace application on Shopify, which greatly limits the possibilities. 

In addition, this application will necessarily take over basic functions of Shopify, in order to manage the marketplace, and therefore make it impossible or difficult to use other applications. In short, unless you have no choice, a marketplace on Shopify is complicated for the moment. Notice to Shopify agencies, there is a huge market to take I think! 

The main advantages of Shopify

Shopify has many advantages over other e-commerce solutions. What made us totally switch to 100% Shopify at Pikka were two main qualities: 

• Simplicity for end customers
• The extraordinary modularity of Shopify for SaaS 

But in use, we realize that Shopify has another advantage up its sleeve: allowing customers to focus on the development of their business development and not on the technical part.

Connecting new services or upgrading Shopify can be done extremely simply. No need to update or risk your site's security if you don't have the right service from your host. With Shopify, you free your mind from many technical constraints. 

In addition, even if Shopify is indeed a SaaS service, that is to say Software as a service, "in the cloud", it is possible to modify a lot of things on your Shopify site.

What are the benefits of Shopify?

All design is fully configurable from A to Z if you use the right Shopify agency. It is possible to install a ready-made theme for 200 dollars in one click or to build a 100% custom site unique to your image.  And it's really a strength to make the technical part so "simple" on the user side while allowing this flexibility in terms of design and graphics. 

Afterwards, like any software or tool, Shopify is not 100% perfect of course, but the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages. For example, it is not possible to have more than 10 million coupons in a Shopify site. Well, it's the kind of limit that we don't reach every day. But they exist.

Switch to Shopify

Switching to Shopify is therefore a good way to gain e-commerce productivity and free up time, one of the most precious resources when you are an e-merchant. 

Admittedly, data or site migration can take a little time, between 1 month and 6 months depending on the size of the projects and the responsiveness of all those involved, but once in Shopify, you will not regret your choice. 

It is quite possible to transfer all the information from your current site, regardless of its technology, to Shopify. Note however that if you are already on a SaaS solution, such as Shop Application, Oxatis, Wizishop or other, they will have to be asked for access to the source data in order to be able to import them. 

If you're on open source technology today and want to experience the benefits of Shopify, then it's possible to pull customers, orders, and products into your new Shopify store.

In any case, during a migration (transfer of your site to Shopify) the current code cannot be taken over. This means that our team of Shopify experts will have to recode your graphic charter in Shopify if you have a luxury brand for example. 

When to use the Shopify platform?

We have already seen it a little in the previous paragraph but today Shopify is the most widespread solution on the web for create a merchant site. Here are some examples of using Shopify. These are called "use cases" in the jargon.

To create your first e-commerce store

Shopify is the ideal solution to create your first online store because its simplicity will allow you to focus on the essentials. Forget about wasting time configuring technical stuff you didn't even know existed a few minutes ago. Forget the nights surfing technical forums to understand error messages. It won't necessarily make e-commerce easier, but at least you focus on the essential problems of your eshop: bringing in traffic, managing your catalog and developing your sales. 

To digitize your business 

If you're an existing business, whether it's been four or five years old or over 200 years old, Shopify can help you go digital fast with the right budget. Indeed, managing a Shopify project and adding a little automation to it to manage the flows, allows you to set up a digital strategy in a few weeks or a few months and to catch up with any delay you have in your sector. 

In any case, first run away from tailor-made development projects that will take a year or two (or more).

To attack a new market 

Shopify is also extremely suitable for a company that already has one or more e-commerce sites and wants to develop a new market or a new activity. Launching a Shopify site to attack the German or Spanish market without taking any risks can turn out to be a good strategy! And who knows, once conquered by Shopify, you will probably consider migrating your main store to Shopify 

What is the best alternative to Shopify?

If you are still unconvinced by Shopify but are simply looking for a competitor or an alternative, well the question is simple but the answer is complex. 

Shopify indeed covers a very wide technical and functional perimeter, especially with the help of its appstore but also with the possibilities of modifications. In addition, its scalability allows it to serve very small shops as well as shops generating several hundred million dollars in turnover per year. 

Here are some examples of competitors to Shopify depending on your size: 

If you are artisan, TPE and you really need a limited number of pages and very simple management, a Wix site with the e-commerce option can do the trick. Wix is much poorer in e-commerce features than Shopify but to start and make some sales, it can sometimes be enough. 

If you are already an online seller or you are going to achieve a turnover of several hundred thousand euros, a Wizishop may be right for you if you do not want to manage the technical part. If you prefer open source then a Prestashop will do the trick.

Do you have a large catalog or specific or cross-channel needs to work on? so if Shopify does not seem to suit you, already, contact Pikka to discuss it because there is a good chance that your project can be done in very good conditions under Shopify. But if not, turn instead to a Magento or a Proximis, or even a BigCommerce. The case of Bigcommerce is a little different because it is a company very similar to Shopify but with a few years less. 

Need more? Large volumes, SLA, a tool for large accounts or even very large accounts? So why not use Salesforce Commerce Cloud (Ex Demandware)? Be careful, the prices will sting a little on the development and license side but you will have what is most expensive on the market (or almost). 

Note that if you want more efficient and cheaper than Salesforce Commerce Cloud you can always ask us for a quote for a site Shopify Plus. 

The list of the main features available on Shopify

The exhaustive list of Shopify features would be far too long to fit into a single article. Let's take a quick tour of Shopify's flagship features to study their functional scope. 

Create products

This is obviously one of the basic functions of any e-commerce solution, modern or not: to offer product creation. With Shopify and les metafields you can create products of any type, with one or more photos, native 3D views and of course a product description and manage the product's SEO: url, meta title and meta description. 

There's basic Shopify everything you need to manage products, including combinations (called variants). Please note that each variant can only have one image. But there are applications or solutions to circumvent this 

Create Collections

In Shopify, there is no real category/subcategory system. The categorization goes through the collections. They can be automatic or manual and are groups of products according to characteristics defined by you. 

For example, this can be a manual selection of products that will be displayed on the homepage (it's a collection) or of course the more classic "Sports T-shirt" collection, for example if you have a sports e-commerce store.

Each tag, price or condition can be used to create dynamic and automatic categories. It may only lack the possibility of creating an automatic "top sellers" category. 

Shipping options and inventory management

Of course, who says E-commerce says shipments and inventory management. At this level, the Shopify interface is simple and efficient and allows you to update the stock automatically via API or by hand one by one or in volume via a dedicated interface. It is therefore possible to massively modify its stock fairly quickly. 

Payment options and transaction fees

An e-commerce site without a payment system would be unheard of. Shopify therefore integrates a whole bunch of providers of payment in one or more instalments, traditional payments such as the possibility of paying by check or bank transfer, payment via Paypal of course or more traditional banking solutions. The choice is wide, but keep in mind that Shopify will take a commission on all payments made online. The commission varies between 0.5% and 2% depending on the Shopify plan you have chosen. 

Cart Abandonment Recovery

This feature is key to boosting your turnover and good news, it is included in Shopify. You can easily enable cart retrieval to allow your customers to complete their order. 

Multi-channel integration and marketplaces

Today, an e-commerce site cannot remain "all" alone in its corner. It must generally be connected with marketplaces and price comparators or advertising agencies. It is therefore a whole ecosystem around the e-commerce site that must be built. And today, Shopify is the ideal solution to integrate with the most modern e-commerce ecosystem. Tik Tok, Facebook, Instagram, Google, Amazon, Cdiscount or other, it is extremely easy to make your site a central element of your digitalization.

How to optimize your Shopify site?

Although many features are already included as standard in any Shopify site, regardless of the Shopify plan chosen, you may want to add features or applications to further enrich your merchant site. But which features or apps are the most important to improve your Shopify? 

Customer reviews

Clearly one of the features to add as quickly as possible to your eshop. Customer reviews are a real lever for business development and revenue growth. This is called "social proof". If customers have already placed an order and left a review, then it's easier for others to feel confident. 

This is the whole purpose of customer reviews. Note that reviews can of course be in text, video, photo mode or even all 3! The more reviews you have, the better! 

And THAT 

Shopify is a solution as powerful as the other technical sides for natural referencing. SEO is not just about technique, it's also about content and links. A "basic" Shopify site may lack some optimizations. But then, what are the 5 basic SEO elements to optimize on your Shopify store? 

Create content on all your category pages. Essential to hope to reference them, this simple step is however often ignored. Yet it is a fundamental element of a good Shopify site. 

Create links from your blog to your products. You want people to come to your products, to buy them. So remember to write blog articles (free and unlimited with Shopify) to insert links to your product sheets. Guaranteed effect to boost your positions on Google. 

Work on your Titles. Basically, Shopify uses the title of the page that you have in the back office both on the url and on the meta title. Attention, the meta title must encourage the click! this is what the customer will see displayed on the search engine.

Feed the "alt" tags. It is possible to add alt tags to all your images on your Shopify site. It's a shame that Shopify doesn't do it for you automatically, but in any case, it's up to you to be sure to gain visibility in Google Image. 

Use the search console and ahref. Well, this advice is valid for all e-commerce sites, or even all sites. But using the Google search console and that of Ahref, both free, to obtain information on its site is essential.

Shopify Review and Reviews

If we were to give Shopify a review, which we have already done in detail here, see "review on Shopify", it would be the following: 

We are extremely happy to see that an e-commerce solution can be modern, flexible, powerful, robust and yet affordable. 

Shopify is not necessarily a 100% nocode solution and it seems illusory to succeed in making a complete and professional site without calling on a Shopify freelancer or a Shopify agency, unless you only install a theme and a system of payment. 

However, for all entrepreneurs wanting a robust, serious and above all extremely scalable e-commerce solution, Shopify is certainly the best choice and the best possible investment at the moment. 

Shopify even tends to widen the gap with its competitors and becomes every day more and more the reference on the market in terms of e-commerce solution. In case you are launching a business to consumer (b2c) brand Shopify is what is called a "no brainer" . No need to think any further, choose Shopify. 

Overall Shopify Rating

If we were to give an objective rating to Shopify, we will already have to start by cutting it into several parts to obtain a real rating that can reflect the entire Shopify offer. Here is our rating out of 100 for Shopify: 

Ergonomics: 9/10

We will not put 10 because there are a few points on which the ergonomics could be improved, language management is sometimes a bit complex for example. But overall we are well above competing solutions like Wordpress (what a mess), Magento (what complexity!) or Prestashop (but where are the elements stored in prestashop?) 

Features: 8/10

We're a little tougher on features because it's a shame that Shopify hasn't caught on to the wave of marketplace creation. Even if things are changing, this point is really penalizing for a lot of merchants. And then on the subscription side, there were small hiccups in France which meant that everything was not perfect. Good after that remains a good note because the Shopify App store is extremely rich! 

Price: 7/10

Good Shopify is not free (unfortunately) and is also not very expensive even if one would obviously always like to pay less, see Shopify prices and tariffs for more details. However, it must be recognized that by adding the applications, we can sometimes end up with beautiful bills. And if you have a second site in parallel, almost no app allows multi-site sharing. A bit of a shame therefore and certainly a margin of progress to be made for applications and for Shopify in the coming years.

Technique : 9/10

It's difficult to put 10, but you have to be at 9.5 or 9.7, so Shopify understood that technology and development had to be at the service of merchants and customers. It is possible to deploy a site, certainly basic, in 24/48 almost without any technical skills and that is a real tour de force. Good for more complicated projects that often require tech skills or Shopify developer. 

Accompaniment: 6/10

It's not a weak point, especially compared to other solutions, but it's not Shopify's strong point either. There is a lot of information on the Shopify site and blog to launch any type of e-commerce site, but if you want a Shopify coach, you either have your back office with some relevant and personalized advice, or a expert Shopify. 

Web marketing: 9/10

Another big highlight of Shopify. Integrated by default with Tik Tok, Facebook, Instagram and more, Shopify allows you to deploy a marketing strategy extremely quickly and very powerfully without getting your hands dirty. There may only be natural referencing or Shopify shows a little less help on the subject, but with the right applications, this can be corrected without problem.

Ease of use: 9/10

Here too, we don't put 10 because it is always possible to improve, but overall, Shopify is super easy to learn. For example, we can actually create an e-commerce site, simple, all alone . It is almost impossible with an open source solution for example. 

Ecosystem: 7/10

Even though Shopify certainly has the biggest app store of E-commerce solutions, there is still a lot to do! Especially in France where many players are not yet fully on Shopify. Many logisticians, WMS, OMS, CRM or other do not offer native connection with Shopify or application. This is not very serious because everything can be automated via APIs but it is less practical all the same. 

Lifespan: 10/10

And yes, it is an essential element to take into account when choosing e-commerce software. A Shopify site can last a long, long time. You can stay on the same site for more than 10 years and yet benefit from all the updates and evolutions of Shopify without calling on any developer. This is the big strength of Shopify: foolproof scalability. 

International : 8/10

Well, international e-commerce remains a complicated subject for all e-commerce solutions. At this level, Shopify is doing well, even very well, but can do even better. And that's good! The upcoming arrival of Shopify Markets will enable real cross-border and international e-commerce directly without applications. Well, Shopify Payments is still missing in France and we hope that this will be able to change quickly and finally bring an essential component to multi-currency e-commerce. 

Overall Shopify rating: 82 out of 100

We are therefore clearly at the top of the basket of e-commerce solutions available on the market. Not considering Shopify as an e-commerce solution these days is clearly a mistake, except perhaps if you are a web developer. 

Shopify is way ahead of its competitors and has the luxury of often being cheaper and not suffering from performance problems. Unless you need very specific developments, it seems reasonable to us to include Shopify in every e-commerce tender or in any serious analysis of the market for e-commerce solutions in France, Europe and around the world.