Jewelry Industry and Retail News
We permanently get informed by our friends and partners from around the Web - about news, trends and/or best practice advice, loosely related to the jewelry retail business. Therefore, we present you here the most interesting or most useful of this information every month - from the following 3 top categories:
| Trends | Sales | Tech |
|---|---|---|
| Hot new/continued jewelry trends as presented to your customers from around the Web. See what they see when they scour the Web and think about your inventory. | Marketing news and related info that you could use in your daily operations. How to get your name out there, wherever you can and get people to know about your business. |
Tools and Trends (mostly tech related) that can make your business life easier. These are tools or trends that can help your business grow, get more organized, save more money, and/or streamline operations. |
Hopefully, you will get some tips/suggestions for your own business activities from this!
January 2016
Shopify: A solution for beginners or real pros?
The Canadian company Shopify launched its online store platform in 2006. The goal was simple: provide an easy way to sell products online that frees sellers from all technical hurdles.
Shopify states that there are already 150,000 businesses that rely on their platform to sell products. Given the fact that there is only a free trial but no free plan, this is an impressive number indeed and makes them one of the leading store builders worldwide.
In our test, we’ll find out how easy or hard it is to setup and maintain a Shopify online store. How much knowledge do you need beforehand and what are the limitations? Is Shopify a reasonable alternative to other big players like eBay or Amazon’s marketplaces? We’ll also take a look at the differences between their paid plans to give you a better picture of which plan makes the most sense.
Let’s find out the secret behind Shopify (or rather, if there is any secret to it)!
Pros / Cons
Ease of use: Fortunately, you don’t have to worry about technical stuff at all. Everything can be done with a few clicks. Shopify provides great beginner guides and extensive documentation.
Designs: Both quality and quantity of their designs are excellent and they are mobile-friendly (responsive). In case you don’t find one that fits your needs, you can either create your own or buy one.
Flexibility: The core system and templates are already great, but it doesn’t stop there. You have full access to the code and can add new functions via their app market or API (for programmers).
Scaling: Shopify is very powerful, but still user-friendly. It’s easy to scale for small and big online stores.
Future Proof: Shopify is one of the biggest and most successful ecommerce solutions out there. The chances that this platform will be shut down are close to zero.
The Shopify Online Store in Detail
| Criterion | Comment | |
|---|---|---|
| Ease of use | yes | Shopify has many features, but it is logically structured. Setting up an online store is not really complicated. Only the designing part could be a bit easier since you adjust all theme colors in the backend. |
| Basic functions | ||
| Product presentation | yes | Zoom function, picture gallery, video - it’s all possible. |
| Product variants | yes | First you define up to three options (e.g. size, color, material), then you add the variants (e.g. S,M,L,XL). From that Shopify will then generate all possible combinations, which can be up to 100. If you need more you can use one of their apps. |
| Cart function | yes | In the “Professional” plan there is an “Abandoned cart recovery” feature integrated. Among other things, it allows you to remind your visitors with an automatic email to complete their purchase. |
| Article numbers | yes | Add your own SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) numbers to each product. |
| Mobile view | yes | Optimized for smartphones and tablets with fully responsive layouts. For store owners, there are iPhone and Android apps that let you manage your store on the go. |
| Checkout, payment and shipping | ||
| Payment options | yes | Credit card (via more than 70 processors including Stripe and Authorize.net), PayPal, manual payment options and even BitPay for Bit Coins. They have even introduced their own Shopify Payments Gateway, which will waive the Shopify transaction fee for all plans (Currently available in the U.S., UK and Canada only). |
| Sale of digital goods | yes | It is possible to limit the number of downloads or the time of availability. Delivery is handled via email. Supports the new rules on charging VAT for digital goods in the European Union. |
| SSL encryption | yes | Customer data and payment transactions are encrypted via SSL (https). Included at no additional cost. |
| Customer log-in area | yes | Visitors can check out with a guest account or create their own personalized login. It’s even possible to let your customers decide whether or not they want to create an account. |
| Coupon codes | yes | Fixed price, percentage, free shipping. You can set a maximum amount of usage and expiry date. |
| Shipping cost settings | yes | Shipping rates can be set for each country individually or by shipping carrier (UPS, FedEx, etc.). You can also choose fulfillment/dropshipping with services like Amazon. |
| Tax settings | yes | Is able to pull US tax rates automatically. Individual tax rates for other countries can be set individually. Allows you to display VAT prices on your product pages. |
| Backend | ||
| Article management | yes | Shopify tracks all items you have in stock. There are also settings to receive notifications automatically. There is even a new POS system to manage both your online and offline inventory. This also allows you to take offline payments via an iPad. |
| Customizable e-mails for order confirmation | yes | Yes. You can edit every notification email as you wish. |
| Importing/exporting product data | yes / yes | Product data can be imported from Magento, eBay, WordPress and CSV. This saves a lot of time and makes moving previous web stores to Shopify easy. Exporting a CSV-file is also possible. |
| E-Commerce analysis | yes | Shopify offers reports in its “Professional” plan and higher; product reports, order reports, and more are available (you can see how orders vary from month to month, for example). Moreover, it’s always possible to integrate Google Analytics. |
| Exporting order data | yes | Export your orders in a CSV-file. |
Conclusion
After having tested Shopify for a whole week, we have to admit that we are quite impressed. To compare it with small-scale online stores like Weebly or Squarespace almost seems unfair as they easily beat them in every single category – except price.
Adding products as well as setting up payment and shipping options works absolutely painlessly: no important service is missing. That makes both ordering and paying easy for your clients. Their layouts can be modified to a large degree without any programming knowledge.
But Shopify is not only an online store. You can also use it to do content marketing via a blog and also add content pages. And that’s what we find so fascinating: Shopify can be handled by an absolute beginner while at the same time providing a great looking, cutting-edge online store.
Just in case you’re missing a function or want to change the layout, most of the time you are only one click away. New templates and apps can be installed with one simple click via their app store. If you should need a function that doesn’t exist, it’s possible to create it since Shopify has a powerful template language called “Liquid.”
No matter how fast your business and requirements grow, with Shopify you don’t have to be afraid of moving to another platform and restarting everything from scratch (unless you become another Amazon, that is).
Shopify makes it easy to open an online store by providing all the tools and help you need.
Click here to try it for free!
Still looking for flaws in Shopify? We’ll give you one: you won’t be able to set up a multilingual store out of the gate. However, we found a bilingual template and there is also an app priced at $17.50 per month that can help you create a multilingual store.
If that’s not an issue for you, Shopify might be THE answer to all your ecommerce questions!
by Armin Pinggera @ websitetooltester.com
