Shopify has rapidly grown into one of the world’s leading e-commerce companies, powering over 1.7 million businesses today. The year 2020 alone saw Shopify’s revenue grow by 86% and gross merchandise volume grow by 96%.
Sellers are seeing increasing competition on traditional e-commerce platforms like Amazon. Amazon also raised its selling fees this year. Without a multichannel approach, online business owners may face difficulties in adjusting to such changes.
Shopify presents an opportunity to diversify your e-commerce presence and gain independence as opposed to selling on a marketplace. In my experience helping e-commerce brands scale, I’ve seen countless brands increase their revenue and brand value by just adding a Shopify store to their existing sales channels.
Let’s take a look at some of the major benefits of Shopify.
It Enables You To Build Your Own Brand
Shopify is different from other sites like Amazon and eBay in the sense that it’s not a marketplace. Rather, it lets you build your own branded website.
While Amazon has its benefits in terms of the billions of users visiting the site and its brand pull, building your unique brand identity is often hard on Amazon, as you’re competing for eyeballs with millions of other sellers.
With Shopify, you can communicate directly with your customers via your customized website. Shopify’s free and premium themes allow you to create eye-catching landing pages optimized for a better user experience.
What’s more, you’re not competing on price alone. You can harness your brand power to build relationships with customers, differentiate yourself, increase your brand recall and grow your sales as a result.
You Can Leverage Useful Tools And Services
Shopify offers a number of useful tools and services to users:
• Marketing and SEO support: Shopify offers SEO support for optimizing your products for search engines and getting in front of the right audience. Couple that with Shopify Email, its native email marketing tool, which allows you to send automatic welcome, feedback and reengagement emails. Its seamless integrations with platforms like Facebook and Instagram make multichannel selling a breeze.
• Payment support: Shopify supports many payment options and has its own payment gateway, Shopify Payments, as well.
• Flexible design options: While creating your ideal Shopify store can be time-consuming, the platform offers a number of flexible themes to make it as easy as possible. Plus, you can take advantage of its free logo maker app.
• Sales and growth tools: Shopify’s abandoned cart recovery app and its powerful inventory system make it super easy to build and grow your e-commerce operation. You can then dedicate your complete attention to creating a powerful and magnetic brand.
You Can Begin Your Journey To E-Commerce Independence
You don’t have to leave other marketplaces once you create a Shopify store. Shopify should ideally be an addition, rather than a replacement, for other sales channels. For example, you can use Amazon’s vast user base to build awareness for your products, and once you’ve scaled enough, you can start transitioning to a Shopify model.
As Shopify lets you build your own website, control your own marketing and have overall ownership of your brand, you don’t need to be at the mercy of arbitrary rules and penalties of regulated marketplaces. Sellers getting banned, forced price ceilings, copycat sellers and fake negative reviews are only some of the real dangers of selling on these marketplaces.
Shopify lets you be an independent seller in charge of every aspect of your business. While that translates to extra legwork for you, it also means no one can damage your hard-earned business reputation.
Tips For Getting Started With Shopify
While you can start selling through Shopify in a few simple steps, there are a few things you should keep in mind while growing your store and brand:
• Make sure the Shopify theme you choose matches your brand guidelines. Brand consistency across all channels is essential for sustained growth.
• Ensure that your product listings are properly optimized for search engines. Since you don’t have the leverage of other marketplaces’ search tools when you create your own Shopify store, SEO becomes even more important.
• Marketing is the most important element when building your own brand. Make it a priority by either outsourcing it to an agency or spending sufficient time on it.
Diversification, building a direct customer base and creating powerful brand value are the keys to sustaining your e-commerce business in the long run. Being dependent on a single sales channel not only limits your sales potential, but it also exposes you to many business risks. A Shopify store, thus, can be an indispensable addition to your e-commerce business.
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