[Music]hi everybodythis is Joe from ecommerce platforms andtoday we're gonna be talking aboutwhether or not Shopify is the rightecommerce platform for you so the bigquestion is when you're getting acompany started which platform shouldyou go with should you go withWooCommerce Volusion big commerce thereare all sorts of options free to choosefrom so the short answer to thatquestion is that Shopify should be ableto offer you all the functionality thatyou need to get your startup or smallbusiness up and running online the mainreason for this is because Shopifyprovides a very nice condensed packagein the shop in the Shopify dashboardwhich we can take a look at right hereso this is really the main Center forwhere you're gonna manage your entireonline store and the reason so manypeople like this is because you haveeverything you know you have everythingfrom orders to products customersanalytics discounts and then of coursethere's the apps and with the apps it'skind of like having an iPhone wherethere's a lot of features involved withit but you can always make it a littlebit better you know if there's somethingthat's not included with your onlinestore then you can include an app sopeople like this quite a bit especiallysince you don't have to go out andmanage your own website and get hostingdomain names all that stuff you knowit's all included here on the dashboardso you shouldn't really have anyproblems and what's also nice is thatyou can always upgrade with your onlinestores so if you're you know a littleworried about scaling up your businessShopify offers a lot of pricing plansand will roll through those a little bitlater but basically it's just a click ofa button and then you can expand yourwebsite whether it's with apps or it'swith you know just upgrade in your planso it really is an all-in-one solutionwhich is really nice and we were talkingabout the app store before so you knowif you're working through your onlinestore and trying to figure out whatexactly you need and all of a sudden yourealize hey there isn't a featureincludedShopify probably has it in it's onlineit's in the App Store so you can go hereand kind of peruse through thecategories and figure out alright maybeI want something for sales or marketingor accounting or reporting so forexample let's go back to social mediayou know some of the themes in Shopifydo have social media buttons but youmight want something a little bit moreadvanced so let's say for example theInstagram shot by snapped this is agreat tool it has really nice reallygood ratings and basically what it doesis it creates a gallery for you so thenan Instagram gallery so instead ofsomeone just seeing a picture they mightbe able to see this one or two and thenthey could click those and buy yourproducts so instead of just havingpictures once again it turns it moreinto an online store and like I statedthe reason Shopify manages to achievesuch a strong feature set is that theyeither have a tool built in or they letyou install it with an app so if we goto the settings page here you know forexample taxes and shipping are includedin the Shopify interface yet for most ofthe themes you're gonna have to find afree app for something like social mediabuttons and that's fine both optionswork but for say taxes or gift cards orshipping you know all of that's kind ofpackaged in here and I had just gone tothe Settings button way down here so ifI wanted to say click on shipping andthen that would give us the shippingpage which is really nice because youcan choose you know exactly where youwant to ship from the shipping rates atcheckout so you can set shipping ratesfor domestic and the rest of the worldthere's also options for shipping labelsand packages and additional shippingmethods such as post mates or if youplan on doing drop shipping which iskind of all the rage right now so youknow these are some great examples ofthe built-in tools here there's alsothings like sales channels where if youwant it to sell on a place like Facebookor amazyou know most online store stores todayaren't only selling on their onlinestores they want to get their productson Facebook or Amazon or even likesomething like Etsy so you know you canpush all of your collections all of yourcurrent products to a different placesuch as Facebook Shopify has alsoreleased a brand new design you knowthey even change the colors they havethis like purple and green it's allcompletely new and they have a greatsearch engine so you know if you wantedto type in something like shoes then itshows all of the shoes in your in yourstore you don't have to search aroundfor it in your products tab or anythinglike that and of course this is anexample of a product page it just hassome some random information filled inhere but what you would want to do is ifyou were to create a product you wouldtype in a title a description uploadsome images and then you know createitems like product types and select avendor whatever you wanted to do tocustomize your store so it's really niceyou can adjust the inventory and theshipping and wait it's all there for youand again we were talking about thesearch bar at the top here it really ispretty amazing because when you have alarge store even a small store it canget very confusingyou know for example if you forget whereall of your collections are located andall you have to do is go up to the topand type in collections and then it'lltell you if you would like to Road askyou if you'd like to create a collectionor maybe go to all of your collectionsand they also even have resources whichis really nice you know if you'd like tobuild a product collection and learnabout that let's say we just wanted tolook at our collections right now so Ihave just shoes and my homepagecollection which is where I wouldprobably feature a gallery of my myfavorite or top selling products so onceagain that search tool at the top itinstantly shows you where you need to gomaybe what you're lookingfor let's see if I have any other yeahso I had a computer on here this is justa test page but you know I type incomputer and it would bring up all thecomputers in my website so that's prettynice it's a lot easier than trying tonavigate through this this menu on theleft hand side and it really is a trueadvantage of the Shopify platform interms of some of the main features youwill be working with this menu over hereso you know if you wanted to check yourorders or your customers you canobviously click on those the Shopify amain dashboard is pretty nice if theypretty much walk you through everythingyou need to when you're setting up yourstore so if I wanted to add my domainit's right there if I wanted to findphotos for my online store or blog theyactually have a whole collection ofawesome photos you can download them forfree and include them on your websiteyou can also use this developer toolswhich is interesting because it's it'san option for developers who want tohave their own web design businesses andkind of have the sandbox interface tocreate Shopify websites and then kind ofsign them over to their clients so let'ssee if we can bring that up here reallyquick alright so this would be anexample of the Shopify partners platformit shows all your development stores themanage stores I just have a few handfulof test stores down here and you canbring those up and basically what itdoes is it gives you a regular Shopifyplatform and you can go into the CSSHTML the website files and edit whateveryou want and then kind of sign it overlike I said to your client and then theycan start paying for it and I justwanted to give a quick overview you knowif I were to click on orders you couldcreate an order if you wanted to but ifany of the orders come in through yourwebsite you little show a list righthere they also have some nice thingslike aand checkouts and then of course ourproduct list not sure if I showed youthis yet but you could also search foryour products or search for your itemsup here but yeah that's really nice youcan create your own gift cards and Imainly have shoes on here but yeah soit's a really easy way to kind ofnavigate through your products then ofcourse your customers are shown here sowe have all of that information you cansee how much those people have spent andyou can make your own customer notesit's all nicely managed and you can kindof test for fraud with your customers aswell you know Shopify has plenty offraud tools included to minimize thatbut you can kind of see if there's anyweird activity going on in your storethen of course there's the analyticswhich will show up on your maindashboard but you should be able to seethings like total sales online storesessions as well as things likeconversion rates so it's pretty complexin in the analytics area and it's nicebecause you can print out reports andkind of customize exactly what you wantto see for your website finally we havea discounts area where you could I havea bunch of old discounts here where youcan actually create a discount and it'snot too difficult to do honestly youknow you would just create a discountcode so if you wanted to do somethinglike spring sale and that's exactly whatthey would type in if they wanted to getthat discount and then you can set upsomething like the percentage or andthen set the discount value but forpercentage you would do something likeyou know 20 percent off that's what thatdiscount code does for your customer andthen of course there are other optionslike the fixed amount or free shippingbuy one get one free lots of options fordiscount codes like for fixed amount youmight do or free shipping that's areally popular one so you know ifsomeone wanted to buy some products fromyour store but you would say somethinglike if you buyminimum purchase amount of say $50 thenthey would only get free shipping forthat $50 so it's pretty cool but yeahthose discounts are really nice andthat's kind of the last tab that we havehere on on the dashboard but other thanthat I figure lots of people arewondering about design you know how whatis my website gonna look like andbecause there's so many differentdesigns across different ecommerceplatforms so if you were to click onthis online store button it would bringup your current theme and it's one ofthe great things about Shopify that theyhave all these different themes some ofthem are paid some of them are free andactually the free ones are really niceI haven't entirely customized this themebut we can kind of take a look at itlet's scroll down here and if you clickon the customize button right herebasically what that does is it brings upthis beautiful visual design area whichis called Shopify sections so this isrelatively new where what you would dois you would drag your elements so Ihave a video up here it doesn't lookexactly that great but you know it's nottoo bad I have a logo you know a menubut if I wanted to say drag this videodown all you have to do is click anddrag and it drops it below so now thetop element would be this module whichis considered its kind of like a productlarge product with the Add to Cartbutton so you know it depends on whatyou want to have at the top you know ifyou're trying to really sell a productright off the bat then that's apossibility but these all just dragaround they're just kind of likesections or rows that you drag up anddown and then you know you can scrolldown and they have all these pre-madesections which are really nice so youhave like an FAQ or say let's see ifnews looks like this is just a sliderimage slider and then crowdfunding youknow that's an example or an option forplenty of stores outthere yeah then if you wanted to editjust one of these sections you couldclick on the settings and then you knowlet's say I wanted to maybe change theimage I could do so there or I couldchange the text color to light thatlooks a lot worse so I'll change it backand then the heading you know you mightchange the text and include a YouTube orVimeo link so this is obviously you knowa large video that you would have at thetop of your website and you know you candrag it up and down on the website oryou can simply adjust the settings andwhat's cool is thatShopify kind of caters to beginners andmore advanced users so the advancedusers can tap in to the website filesand customize whatever they want butpretty much everyone would start offwith a Shopify theme and so this is kindof the theme collection that we havehere and it's really nice you know theyhave it organized into collections funand lively or if you want a minimaliststyle website or if you wanted to gowith an industry so let's say I don'tknow let's say we're selling art andphotography now that would bring up allthe art and photography styles and thenyou could narrow it down to the freeones there's also the paid ones andwe're gonna go into pricing a little bitright now since this is kind of a goodsegue so for the themes you will have topay let's take a look herearound maybe 150 to 200 dollars if youwant one of the more advanced themes andlet's take a look at one of them just togive you a taste you know so this is areally nice modern looking theme forKurt says showcasing services andproducts and what's interesting aboutall of the Shopify themes is they havedifferent styles and they're drasticallydifferent so this looks like a greatwebsite for like a plant shop Victoriathat looks like something for maybe aclothing shop but then it tells you allthe theme features like a custom formtestimonials image gallery everythingyou need you know to get started withwebsite but if we were to jump back nowyou have to keep in mind that there arefree options here so if you're lookingto save a little bit of money we havethis minimal theme there's plenty offree themes actually if we clear out theart and photography and we just go tofree you know there's there's quite afew so you can kind of scroll throughthese and figure out exactly what you'relooking for if you clicked on the debuttheme that's pretty good looking for afree theme so you might want to besaving money and but just keep in mindthat you might be spending around 150 to200 dollars just for your theme if youwant a premium one other than that let'stalk about some of the other pricing soin order to set up your store you'regoing to have to sign up for a monthlyplan now Shopify does provide that nice14-day trial so there's no credit cardrequired you can get set up if youwanted to you can work through Shopifypartners and kind of create your ownwebsite but that's mainly for developersbut overall you know we have this basicShopify plan but there actually is asmaller plan if we go down here it'scalled Shopify Lite that's nine dollarsa month so that's the minimum thatyou're gonna be paying and the ShopifyLite plan kind of provides an option tosell on Facebook and chat with yourcustomers on messenger um you can alsoadd products to another website on so ifyou had a wordpress site already runningthis would be a great option at ninedollars a month and then you also getthat Facebook integration but it's notit's not the full Shopify package it'snot a a real shopping cart you're reallykind of just sending people to aseparate Shopify checkout so it's anoption it's cheap if you already have awebsite but they're the main one isgonna be basic Shopify twenty ninedollars a month it's pretty on par withthe main competitors such as bigcommerce and Volusion so I consider itquite reasonableone of the mainVantage's is going to be if you useShopify payments here you don't have topay any transaction fees but if you usean external payment gateway you knowthere's gonna be some fees involved butother than that seventy nine dollars amonth and then $2.99 per month forAdvance Shopify and it all depends onwhat features you want if you would liketo keep your credit card rates down butyou know if we scroll down a little bitthe advanced version has I'm sorryyeah the advanced version has anadvanced report builder you can also getthird-party calculated shipping rates orif you did let's say the Shopify planthen you get a few extra features likegift cards you know those are pretty bignowadays and then there's alsoprofessional reports but in general Iwould say a starting shop should be finewith basic Shopify and if you reallywant to test the watersyou might try Shopify Lite but it'smainly for people who already havewebsites and don't want to create acompletely separate one and then ofcourse there's the Shopify Plus optionand that's an enterprise-grade solutionwhich would be custom it would be somesort of custom pricing alright so interms of pricing keep in mind you knowyou're gonna be paying probably aminimum of $29 a monthand what's great is that includeshosting it includes a domain name andother than that you might buy a themeyou might have to pay for some sort ofapp but most of the time you can findapps for free so in general you know itreally your main expense is going to bethat monthly fee from Shopify sinceeverything is pretty much included okayso we touched on this very brieflybefore but if we wanted to go to thesettings area it is important to knowexactly what you're going to be workingwith in terms of payment providers so ifwe click on that like I said if you gowith the Shopify payments option andthat is powered by stripe you won't haveto pay any transactionso they kind of pushed that on you itworks pretty well I mean if you've everworked with stripe some businesses andother countries aren't able to to workwith stripe but it's all managed hereyou would collect complete the accountsetup but you do have options likePayPal Amazon pay and then alternativepayments if we take a look at this likebit pay or pay later with clarinha youknow there's all sorts of interestingpayment options and then of course youcould do something like manual paymentslike cash on delivery or a money orderand then you would just save it downhere okay so finally I want to talkabout customer serviceyou know Shopify really is a greatplatform overall but there's always thatquestion you know how is the customerservice if I'm gonna call in am I gonnaget an answer are these people going tobe knowledgeable and Shopify really isone of the better it has one of the bestcustomer service teams in the industryeven if you just go to the main Shopifywebsite they have all sorts of resourcesfor youthey have guides the Shopify Academywhich is really just this hugecollection of articles for you to learnhow to sell online and then there'spodcast success stories you know theyhave forums here if we go to the forumtake a look at that and or I'm sorrythis is ecommerce university so this iskind of a little taste of the types ofguides they have the ultimate guide todropshipping 50 ways to make your firstsale it's all great and we can go to theforums but in terms of the direct thedirect customer supportnow Shopify does have this beautifulHelp Center so you can type in whatevertopic you want whatever keywords youwant and you can find the documentationfor it so if you did an introduction the and you can also look at thearticles down here so they kind of tryto get you to read the articles beforeyou contact them but if you go to thebottom you can go to contact Shopifysupport they're available all the timeit's mainly through a ticketing systembut some of the plans do have more Iguess important or VIP customer supportbut other than that it's really a niceplatform Shopify and another thing toconsider is that they do have this areacalled Shopify experts so if you neededto hire someone for example to set upyour store or to design your store or todevelop it or market it whatever it isif you need a photographer they havepartnered with reputable professionalsso you don't have to go out and go onCraigslist or some sort of marketplacelike that and it's great because you canyou know if I wanted a designer I couldfind people in say you know London orNew York let's say okay so and then thatwould bring up all sorts of options ithas testimonials you could view theirprofile and see how much they'recharging for those projects so forexample this one a thousand bucks formost of their projects or maybe that'swhere they start off so you know this isa great option instead of going out andseeking out your own designer or askinga friend or something like that butoverall yeah that is our Shopify reviewif you have any questions please let usknow but thank you for watching
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