Buying and selling goods or services on the internet has become extremely popular in the last few years. From handcrafted items and beauty supplies to fashion accessories and educational courses, people sell practically anything online. If you’ve been researching about starting your eCommerce business, you might have come across Shopify. If you’re clueless about what Shopify is and how it can help you build an online business, you’ve come to the right place.

Shopify – What is it
Shopify is an eCommerce platform that allows you to build your unique online store to sell your products or services. Shopify also has a Point of Sale (POS) app to sell goods in-person at a brick-and-mortar store, market, pop-up shops, or anywhere else. Every tool you need to start, grow, and run an online store is integrated into Shopify, making it a complete eCommerce platform.

How it works
Shopify is entirely cloud-based and hosted. You don’t have to worry about upgrading or maintaining software or web servers. It also allows you to access and operate your business from anywhere in the world with an internet connection. Shopify has an online store builder and themes that you can use to personalize the look and feel of your eCommerce store. It also has an array of business tools to manage products, inventory, payments, and shipping. It gives you the flexibility to sell in multiple places, such as web, mobile, social media, online marketplaces, and physical stores.

Advantages of using Shopify
Some notable benefits of using Shopify for your business include:

Easy to use
The platform has several free, ready-to-use themes that you can customize with an intuitive drag-and-drop tool.

Built-in SEO tools
The website automatically takes care of a few things to optimize your website and lets you enter SEO titles and meta descriptions for your homepage and individual product pages.

Multi-platform integration
In addition to your website, Shopify lets you sell your products or services on popular social media platforms and online marketplaces.

Modern design
The websites built on Shopify look clean, modern, and professional, thanks to Shopify’s native themes. And it’s no secret that most shoppers love good-looking websites.

Are there more platforms like Shopify?
Yes, BigCommerce, Wix, Shift4Shop, WooCommerce, Square Online, Adobe Commerce (formerly known as Magento), Weebly, and Volusion are all competitors of Shopify. You might want to research and compare these eCommerce platforms before choosing one that’s right for your business and within your budget.