Learning about WordPress and its options this semester opened up a world of questions that I had in regards to CMS. Upon learning WordPress was used by a decent percentage of the websites already out there, I figured it would be the best solutions for every type of business right? Well in last week’s lecture we learned just about how wrong that statement could possibly be. Every website and business is different, they have different goals, different functions, different users, so how could I say as a designer to a business “oh yes WordPress is the right solution for you because a decent number of the people use it for theirs and I learned about it”? I realized that was just not going to work.

Since I can understand why WordPress would be the solution for a wide variety of businesses as their CMS option I continually wondered about e-commerce organizations that have products and give the users the ability to buy them online. In our lecture last week Shopify was briefly mentioned in regards to this and so I thought I would try and learn a little more about this type of ecommerce solution.

In researching it was very interesting (yet almost cliché) to learn that Shopify started because they wanted to fix their own needs (but then that’s how everything starts these days don’t they?).  For a company that is celebrating their 10th anniversary this year and have over 275,000 active Shopify stores online I was wondering why I was only hearing about this type of a business now (I mean there could be a handful of reasons, but let’s keep going). So what does Shopify bring to the table as an ecommerce solution?[1]

  • Shopify provides free and paid themes to help present your site to your users.
  • Continually they also offer free and paid plugins through their app store to enhance the functionality of your website.
  • The ability to accept credit card payments form your buyers.
  • A dedicated support team, whether it be searching blog articles, needing to understand how to design your site, or just questions about your Shopify plan.

Although this e-commerce solution is only free for a 14 day trial they do offer three different types of plans suitable for any business need which start at $29 a month, for more information on their plans please visit their pricing page. [2] https://www.shopify.com/pricing

Who are its main competitors? Well from what I could find BigCommerce and Volusion seems to be its competing turnkey ecommerce solutions and non-turn-key such as setting up your own store. Curious to know what is the best ecommerce hosting plan for your business here is a quiz you can use to find out: https://www.shivarweb.com/guides/best-ecommerce-platform/

This is so much more to Shopify than this post covers, but it’s good to have a general understanding of an ecommerce solution especially since it can feel overwhelming with a wide range of solutions to choose from. Again this solution ecommerce is not guaranteed to solve all your problems but it is one that has been on the radar for many individual business owners and one that should be on your radar to look into if you find the need.

Below is another article on the best e-commerce platforms for your online business: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/10-best-e-commerce-platforms-your-online-business-rohit-uttamchandani

Happy Designing!