Ella James
A cost effective ecommerce website showcasing the best of luxury brand Ella James, on the Shopify platform.
Make an impression with a striking ecommerce site on this cost-effective SAAS platform. Shopify is the fastest-growing ecommerce provider with a 20% share of the top million websites*. It's a proven ecommerce platform for many business’s needs, and an alternative worth considering if you’re a smaller online business migrating from Magento.
Sometimes clients choose online platforms to trade from that are over-specified for their needs. Shopify offers the perfect balance as an ecommerce platform that’s rich in features, offers compelling themes, whilst being significantly cheaper to develop.
Using pre existing themes to deliver the styling, updated to reflect your branding and content, and for ‘conventional ‘ customer journey i.e find a product by category and filter by an attributes then checkout with an option to cross or upsell - ideal for start up and smaller businesses
Furthermore, Shopify host and support your ecommerce website as part of your monthly Shopify fee, so you can forget about downtime and server maintenance.
For a simpler user journey that doesn’t require features such as multiple storefronts or internationalisation, ERP integration etc, Shopify is definitely a platform you should consider. You’ll still benefit from a reliable payment gateway and lightning fast speeds, but at a fraction of the initial set up cost. This assumes that any third party integrations already exist on the Shopify App store, since if they don’t using Shopify’s API can be time consuming.
Need more from your Shopify site? A host of vetted apps are available to expand your store, or you may find a more comprehensive ecommerce platform would be more suitable.
Browse our library of Shopify sites and get in touch to see how we can help you launch a successful ecommerce store on Shopify.
Shopify Basic costs $29 per month. Standard Shopify costs $79 per month and their advanced service is $299 per month. This includes monthly hosting of your online store too.
Shopify offers it's own payment gateway as well as Paypal. Perfect if you don't already have a payment gateway set up. If you'd prefer to use your own payment gateway, Shopify integrates with many external providers such as Sagepay, Worldpay First Data and many more.
On Shopify Basic, using Shopify's payment gateway will cost you 2.2% + 20p per transaction. Using your own payment gateway will cost you 2% of the transaction fee.
Shopify offers basic import and export functionality via CSV. Whilst importing and updating product data is possible via CSV, we'd recommend using a verified Shopify app that allows you to import additional fields such as product attributes etc.
Shopify offers 100s of out of the box themes to choose from. Whilst your chosen theme may offer everything you need it to do, you may find it requires some customisation as well. If you need to make changes in a theme that cannot me made within the theme settings, Shopify allows you to fully customise theme template and CSS files to truly make a theme your own.
As Shopify is a Software as a Service (SAAS) provider, they will host and maintain your online store (included in your monthly fee). It's not possible to host a Shopify website on your own server.
As Shopify host your online store, they are also responsible for maintaining your site and ensuring it is kept up-to-date. This is included in the monthly Shopify fee, and it relieves site owners of the burden of having to keep websites constantly up to date.
Recently Shopify and Mailchimp announced they have stopped offering an integration between the ESP and ecommerce platform. Therefore it's no longer possible to automate the synchronisation of customer account and order details between the two systems. However, there's nothing stopping you from adding Mailchimp embedded signup forms to your Shopify site (for newsletter subscriptions etc).
If having customer and order details present in your Mailchimp databases is important, you can always manually export and import this data via CSV.
Trading in multiple currencies is possible with Shopify only if you use Shopify Payments as your payment provider. If you want to apply custom rounding rules (for example if you'd like your converted prices to always end with .99), then this feature is only available with Shopify Plus. Otherwise you'll need to make do with the price as per the exchange rate at the time of purchase.
You'll also need to enable a currency selector on your theme. Most themes don't include this, so this would likely require development work to achieve.
You can easily integrate your Shopify store to link with your Merchant Centre account. All you need to do is install the Google Shopping app on your store to link your product catalogue to your Google Shopping feed.
Absolutely. You can add the Facebook Pixel code (generated from your Facebook account) to your Shopify store under the preferences section in your Shopify account.
If you find the theme you have chosen for your store doesn't do everything you want it to, Shopify gives you access to the theme's template and stylesheet files so you can customise it how you wish.
If your current ecommerce platform can provide you with CSV exports of product data and customer data, then you're off to a good start! To migrate your data, you'll need to amend the format of your old data files into the CSV format accepted by Shopify. If the data from your old platform follows a logical structure, then this will make the process a lot smoother.
Shopify allows you to import and export data via CSV, where additional apps can extend the capabilities of Shopify's import / export functions.
Standard Shopify offers a host of great features which most businesses will find more than adequate. However, if you need to take your store to the next level, Shopify Plus may be the way forward. In addition to the great features you get with Shopify, Shopify Plus also offers:
