Our Guide to Using Shopify to Grow Your Ecommerce Brand
You might be leaving growth opportunities for your small business on the table if you’re not using Shopify for your ecommerce. With hundreds of features and thousands of integrations, Shopify allows small business owners to take control of their brand’s financial success without breaking their bank. Since VVITCH often uses Shopify with our ecommerce clients, we thought who’d better than us to help you decide if Shopify is right for your business.
Don’t know much about Shopify? With so many marketing and business tools available for small businesses, it’s hard to keep track of the latest and best platforms to use. Shopify is an integrated ecommerce platform that can offer shoppable websites and retail Point of Sale (POS) systems that share single product inventory at your brick and mortar. Additionally, Shopify has a vast arsenal of features and integrations that make it stand out for businesses of all sizes who have products they want to sell online.
Why Shopify for eCommerce?
How does Shopify differ from other website platforms like Squarespace, WordPress, or WooCommerce? This question comes up a lot for us with our clients when they’re deciding which platform meets their ecommerce needs. While there are plenty of options beyond these four, Shopify stands out the most for a few reasons when comparing it to Squarespace and WordPress specifically.
Squarespace is a wonderful platform, don’t get us wrong. Small businesses can enjoy selling a few products using it but it doesn’t have as many tools as Shopify, which are needed to make it easier for businesses with large inventories to manage. As for Wordpress, as a platform it doesn’t offer the best ecommerce functionality but you can add a popular plugin called WooCommerce.
Darling x Dashing came to us for a website audit and Shopify website redesign and build. We launched the site and sent over training videos so that the owner, Linnea, and her team felt confident making updates to the site in the future
While WordPress might be an acceptable option for some small businesses with tons of custom content, it still doesn't have all the features and integrations that Shopify offers you. With Shopify, you’ll be able to upload a product CSV, edit multiple products at once, and add custom product fields and create product variations for your ecommerce business.
These are the main reasons we outline to our clients when helping them decide between Shopify and other website platforms. For years, Shopify has remained our digital agency’s platform of choice for brands whose primary focus is ecommerce.
Shopify Features We Love
With hundreds of features and integrations, there is a reason our agency loves using Shopify with our website design and build clients. From integrated inventory with a Point of Sale (POS) system, to integration with other systems, like Faire for wholesalers or those for consignment shops, all of it makes your life easier as a business owner.
Shopify’s POS system features everything you’ll need to run your brick and mortar retail business. It has omnichannel selling to connect your back office to sell in person, online, on social, and other marketplaces. It accepts many payment methods at a competitive transaction rate.
You can handle customer management within it, such as customer insights to improve buying experiences. Plus the additional ways you can customize the terminal, plug and play with other apps for functionality you need, and more. You can get a free POS system from Shopify based on the plan you have for your ecommerce website.
Whether you’re brick and mortar or online, the power of analytics you’ll have at your disposal with Shopify is another feature we love. You’ll have tools like abandoned carts, easy email integration with Shopify Email App, shoppable social accounts, loyalty and rewards programs, advanced order tracking, and so much more.
With Shopify Email App you can easily integrate with your business’ email account (i.e. Google for Business) as well as create email automations and workflows that allow you to build better customer relationships with welcome email nurturing sequences, abandoned cart emails, and abandoned browse emails.
Shoppable Social allows you to sell your products directly on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest using Shopify’s shop inventory integrations. For ecommerce brands using Pinterest, this is a great way to increase your visibility as each product becomes a pin, allowing you to link product pins from other image pins for a “Shop the Look” style approach.
Bev Sidders Skincare came to us for a full rebrand including content strategy, logo and brand design, product labeling and photography, and a Shopify website design and build. We knew the capabilities with Shopify were better suited for helping owner, Bev, achieve her goal of increased sales.
Have an ecommerce business that sells adult products? There is age verification for alcohol, tobacco, and THC/CBD products with Shopify.
Want more visual functionality based on the products you sell? Shopify has before and after image sliders, color swatches, and more to enhance your product offerings.
And the standard features are all available with Shopify too – from product bundling, dropshipping integration, SMS and MMS marketing, and store pickup or delivery functionality. The best part is if you sell your products on other marketplaces, like Amazon, EBay, and Target, you can use Shopify’s Marketplace Connect App!
As long as the key goals of your ecommerce site are identified, you have the option to add what helps you achieve those goals when working with Shopify as your website platform.
Camille Gerrick Art came to us for a Shopify basic website design and build for her handmade art and prints business. We built out a website that functions better for her ecommerce business after moving her site over from WordPress.
Who is Shopify Great For?
As a digital marketing agency, we know that Shopify can be used by several business verticals, small and large. With our clients we’ve found that it works best for those with fashion (whether new or secondhand clothing) boutiques, food and beverage brands like breweries and catering, CBD product brands, skincare and beauty products, and artists with handmade crafts or gifts, florals, subscription style businesses.
Bagel’s Florals came to us for brand refinements, including moving their site from Squarespace to Shopify. Bagel’s website needed to be easy to navigate for a variety of customers. We worked with them to use Shopify Apps to add custom features to the site and reworked site navigation.
Take our client Darling x Dashing for example. Owner, Linnea, had a template she was happy with in Shopify but realized she needed more functionality for her consignment and secondhand clothing boutique in Charlottesville, VA. Our lead designer worked on mockups to provide Linnea with different templates that met her functionality goals – things that would be easy to update in the future between herself or her store team. The end result was a beautiful, functional website that makes shopping and searching Darling x Dashing products easier.
Similarly, with our client Bev Sidders’ skincare brand of the same name, we helped her shift from in-person skin care services to effectively selling her skincare products online by designing and building her Shopify website.
When Bev came to VVITCH she was using Squarespace. Our recommendation was to move to Shopify because her brand’s focus was more ecommerce due to the shift in being less location-specific as a skincare business. We also knew that with this transfer to Shopify, Bev Sidders Skincare would achieve increased sales online.
With an updated layout of her Shopify site, making it easier for users to navigate and receive suggested products when considering Bev’s variety of products, everything fell into place for the full rebrand of Bev Sidders Skincare – from content strategy, logo and brand design, product label design, and social media templates. You don’t have to stop at just your website with us!
And for small businesses who sell art or handmade goods, the value of having a Shopify website is even greater. Our client Camille Gerrick sells colorful hand-painted art and prints online and in-person. She came to use to handle a basic Shopify design and build after using WordPress and Instagram to sell her art. Camille knew she wanted to take her ecommerce brand off of WordPress and make the move to Shopify for improved functionality.
Since she has lower product inventory with her handmade arts and prints when compared to a t-shirt brand or a custom-hand bag ecommerce brand, we kept it simple by starting the Shopify build with a pre-chosen theme/template. This always helps small businesses understand what the end result of their site will look like without overwhelming them with all the bells and whistles.
We used Camille’s branding and applied it to her Shopify theme to make it more personalized to her business, and the end result was as colorful and exciting as Camille’s handmade art and prints.
Whether you are growing your small business online or have always wanted to make the switch from your existing ecommerce platform to Shopify, we have great client examples of how feasible and easy taking that leap can be.
Need help? Hire us!
Our team will research solutions for you, develop a set of functional requirements, bring our best and brightest designer onboard to develop mockups, and much more. You don’t have to be the business owner, marketer, accountant, and developer all at once when you work with us.
We’ll also have our SEO team optimize your site’s metadata and our project manager always helps our website design and build clients with very clear video instructions on how to make updates and edits on your own once your project is complete. At VVITCH we absolutely hate gatekeeping.
Ready to see how we can work magic over your website design and build?
Meet the Authors
Jen Siomacco - Founder and UX Designer
Jen has worked in technology, marketing, education, and publishing since graduating with an architecture degree from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. While working as a user experience (UX) designer and product manager in the corporate world, Jen traveled the world conducting user research and interviewing customers to ensure their company’s products and services were well-designed, accessible, and a delight to use.
Brittinee Phillips - Copywriter
Brittinee has worked in marketing for a little over ten years. She has a passion and talent for storytelling. Brittinee's philosophy is that storytelling is the most integral part of the consumer and product experience, which is why she makes it a focal point in her approach to product and brand messaging.
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