What is Shopify & How Does It Work? [E-Commerce Beginners: Start Here]

hey I'm Mike and I'm here to answer the question of what is Shopify and how does it work so you might have heard about Shopify from other people online maybe you're looking to move a physical business to an online business maybe you're looking to start a brand new online store and so whatever your reason is in this video I'm going to dive into what Shopify is what it does what the benefits and the drawbacks of it are as well as go into some examples of other Shopify sites and get you started with the first steps moving forward so Shopify is a complete and comprehensive e-commerce platform meaning it does pretty much everything you need to sell online it has millions of merchants using it to run their online stores to run their businesses to run their blogs and Shopify automates dozens of jobs for you so you can run an online store with as little effort and as little payroll as possible so instead of hiring a web developer and someone to track inventory and all these different jobs Shopify automates many of these jobs with free built-in software so in just over maybe an hour maybe two hours you can make a stunning professional website with no web development background at all so you can see why this is so appealing to so many people to be able to make a really clean and professional online store with really no experience and also automate their inventory and things like that they're advertising all built into Shopify so going a little bit deeper Shopify first of all lets you build a website you can choose from a lot of different templates build your website design your website customize it for your own needs then you can list products you can have many different kinds of products I'll talk about that in a minute you can track your inventory you can organize your marketing campaigns you have a lot of different apps and plugins so they integrate with a lot of other software out there and it really does have nearly everything you would need for an online store and one other important thing to note here is that it is cloud-based so if you make this on your laptop at home you can access it from any desktop anywhere in the world or your phone or really anything obviously with an internet connection the templates as I mentioned before do make this a really easy way website builder and so it's not only very customizable of course you can do anything you want there but you can also start off from a really nice base level having a template so you can just look at you know dozens of different templates some of them are free some of them are paid and once you find a template you like you can start building on that you can change the font you can change the color you can change the images and then you'll have a really nice looking website with very little effort because you didn't have to design the overall layout the spacing of things all of that you can choose with a template in the very beginning but of course shop finds much more than just a website builder shop is in the name so obviously the intent here is to be selling things on Shopify and you can really think of it like instead of selling on Amazon or on eBay you're selling on your own store your own website your own online store here and so you can actually sell many different styles of products too which gives you this extra layer of flexibility of course you can sell physical products online I think that's the first thing people think of but a lot of people don't realize you can also sell digital products on Shopify you can sell services so that could be like a coaching or something like that you can sell gift cards as well so that's another way to boost your business and you do have some point of sale or POS opportunities that mean that you can sell things in person and do that through your Shopify store like so if you have a storefront and you have an online store you know you want to track your inventory together you want to have all your payments go the same way so a point of sale is really a nice feature that works well with Shopify as well and on top of that you can sell on social storefronts so by this I mean an Instagram storefront for example you can sell directly through Instagram using Shopify and of course Shopify integrates with many many different social media platforms and really a lot of other software's out there as well Shopify also has their own payment process there so Shopify payments but you could accept PayPal and just you know a lot of different ways to accept credit cards on there so accepting credit cards in person or online again another benefit because it's very reputable and many consider it to be very safe I keep mentioning out this video that you can track inventory of course when things are being sold online or using the point of sale you can track the inventory like I said but you can also get low inventory alerts so you're able to not have to spend time going through and looking at your inventory and instead it'll just notify you and you can place another order for more of your inventory of course you can also dig into analytics besides just what's in inventory you can look at who visited your website how long they were on there what they bought what was added to cart all these different things that can help you optimize and if you have multiple products it's a great way to figure out which products are working well like which ones do people like but then they don't actually go through and buy them maybe the pricing's not right the analytics can really go a long way and besides that you can actually also have a Blog on Shopify so the blogging capabilities here allow you to get a little bit of a larger Reef so for example if you sell kitchen supplies maybe a cutting board or something like that maybe you would want to have a Blog about some different recipes or maybe you want to have a Blog about like top 10 kitchen supplies and in there if you start ranking in Google you get that organic traffic people are coming over for free reading your article and in your article maybe you have a subtle little plug saying by the way this is our cutting board that way you're getting some free extra traffic for people that could buy or potentially buy your cutting board your kitchen supplies whatever it is you're selling and another thing I keep mentioning is the Integrations so I want to elaborate on that a little bit more as well you have the ability with Shopify to get apps so to speak so these are plugins or Integrations with Shopify so if you're using Shopify you can have an integration with printful for example where you could do a print-on-demand drop shipping where you don't actually have the inventory but you're selling like actually I made this sweatshirt I wasn't trying to wear this for this video but I I like I made the sweatshirt in a tutorial where I showed you guys how to do that essentially it's like if I was going to sell this sweatshirt I don't need to hold any inventory I just have printful connected when somebody orders this sweatshirt through my website printful makes the sweatshirt and ships direct to them so so that's an example of one of the cool Integrations but there's many more from marketing to like an email campaign with MailChimp different things like that and in addition there is a Marketplace full of experts to help you if you get stuck along the way but I honestly hope that never happens because we have several tutorials on how to use Shopify like I said I have a like about a two and a half hour tutorial on how to use Shopify to do print on demand Drop Shipping with printful but of course other tutorials on just using Shopify alone I'll link those down below by the way we do not sell any course some content out there sells courses so you watch a video and then you get upsoles we don't do that so I promise everything that I think that you need to know to make a Shopify store is in fact in that video on YouTube for free just go on down click that link and you can head over to that and now I want to actually get into some examples of Shopify stores these are ones that I found and I'll show you what to look for to identify a Shopify store but the first one this is Anchor a pretty reputable brand actually a really large brand that makes you know different Electronics they make battery Banks they make chargers for your phone they also make different things like projectors and even headphones and speakers so a pretty wide sprawling brand pretty big brand and they're using Shopify to sell their stuff another one is Oregon you can see that they're in grocery stores all over they make protein powder so really Shopify is obviously very popular among big Brands including Kylie Cosmetics like the Kardashians Kim also uses this um you can see like there that's a massive brand it's a huge business and of course with that they're running most of their sales or many of their sales through Shopify Additionally you can see climate right here I really like how they designed theirs more of an outdoorsy feel of course because they're selling uh camping pads or sleeping pads so those are just a couple examples of some Shopify sites the way that I usually go about identifying them is I will go to any website a website that usually is an individual seller you go to their online store and then if you go to uh you know more tools on Chrome for example you can go to inspect there's other browsers that have something similar some some type of inspect and you'll be able to search for Shopify so if Shopify shows up odds are they're using Shopify for their online store so what are the drawbacks with Shopify really there aren't a lot of huge ones it's a pretty frictionless experience that a lot of people really do enjoy of course if you wanted a little bit more customization something like WordPress could be a good option and I have tutorials on how to do that as well it's definitely a lot more technical but you could save a couple extra dollars and you could customize it a little bit more so I would say for about 95 percent of users out there Shopify is probably your best bet for making an online store it's just the easiest everything is bundled together and ultimately like it's just a really frictionless experience but if you want to get started I do have a full tutorial linked down below you can also go on over to centromedia.com Shopify that's where you can get started you get a free trial that is an affiliate link so that is how we keep our content free no courses all free information it doesn't cost you anything extra but if you do start a Shopify store and you use our link we do get a commission from that so I really appreciate the support for the channel if you enjoyed the video consider liking and subscribing I'm Mike O'Brien from Central media thanks for watching see you next time

Channel: Santrel Media

Views: 194,875

Keywords: nate o'brien, mike o'brien, santrel media

Id: tqqg1Bv5Ikg

Length: 9min 16sec (556 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 09 2022