What is Shopify? Features, how to open a shop, advantages and disadvantages

This post is also available in: 日本語

Open an online shop with Shopify

An online shop, also known as an e-commerce site, is becoming increasingly popular as a way to do business online without having to have a store.

In recent years, there have been an increasing number of platforms that allow you to easily set up an online shop. All you have to do is register the necessary information and products, choose a design from a template, prepare it, and then you can open it as a store. There are various online shop platforms available, and this article will focus on Shopify to show you how it works and how to open it. By understanding the basic information, you will be able to choose the right platform when you open an online store.

What is Shopify?

Founded in 2004, Shopify is the world’s largest e-commerce platform with over 1 million stores in 175 countries, and has been dubbed the “Amazon Killer”. We’re a company that has been growing in share in the e-commerce market. You may not be used to hearing about it in Japan yet, but it’s a service and company that’s aggressively expanding its share of the e-commerce market.

With the establishment of Shopify’s Japanese subsidiary in November 2017, the company is finally gaining market share in Japan.

You can check out the Shopify website at this link.

What you can do with Shopify

So what can you do with Shopify?

Opening an online shop

The first step is to set up an online shop. Whether you want to take your physical store online or start with an online shop to bring your idea to life, it’s easy to create an online shop with Shopify.

Selling products through various sales channels

Shopify also allows you to sell your products through a variety of sales channels. You can use a wide range of sales channels to extend your reach, not to mention your online shop. For example, social networking sites are one of them: you can get people to buy directly from Instagram, or you can get new customers on your Facebook shop. You can promote and sell on your sales channels and Shopify will automatically track orders and inventory, allowing you to reach a wider range of customers while consolidating them in one place.

Design Customization

Shopify also allows you to customize your shop design. You can find the perfect template for your shop in the theme store, either free or premium templates. You can then use it as a foundation to combine simple settings and customize it to your own. The design settings editor allows you to see the changes as soon as you make them, so you can tweak them one by one to create the kind of shop you’re aiming for.

Also, using Shopify’s own easy-to-learn template language, Liquid, you can customize any part of your website’s theme at will, making it easy to tweak it.

Embedding into other sites

Shopify also allows you to embed it on other websites. When you create a buy button in the admin page, you can embed it on your website or blog, so that you can showcase the products that Shopify offers on your own blog and encourage people to buy them. This is a great way to communicate the appeal of your products to more customers.

Why use Shopify?

Next, let’s take a closer look at the benefits of using Shopify. Support for content and downloadable products

Shopify can also handle content merchandise and downloadable merchandise. 

When you think of an online store, you probably think of producing and selling goods. However, Shopify also allows you to book services, consultancy, digital products and courses on the shop. Some stores actually sell yoga class bookings on Shopify.

It’s also available for international customers.

Another advantage of this service is that it is also available for international customers. One of the major advantages of this service from Canada is that it is easy to transition to international specifications. It supports a variety of languages, currencies, and international shipping by default, so you can open an e-commerce site for international destinations more smoothly than other online shopping platforms. In fact, many e-commerce sites built on Shopify have been successful in challenging cross-border e-commerce.

It has a lot of extended features.

Another advantage is that it has a wide range of extensions to enhance your shop.

Since Shopify exposes its APIs to the outside world, there is a wealth of proprietary apps developed by many companies. There are now a whopping 3,000+ apps available, and Shopify users can enhance their shop by using the app from the APP store within the service.

You can create a highly original shop.

Shopify is a great way to create a highly original shop. It’s easy to build and update your website, but you can also customize it in any way you want. You will be able to create a shop that is particular about the world and convincing.

Disadvantages of Shopify

There are many advantages to Shopify, but of course there are also disadvantages.

Expertise required.

 The hardest part about Shopif for beginners is that there are parts of it that require specialized knowledge. While it’s easy to get started and easy to manage, if you want to go beyond templates and really focus on design, you’ll need specialized knowledge of HTML and CSS.

（Next）
Then we’ll go over how to open a Shopify account!