Is Shopify Good for Beginners?
This is one of the first questions that someone with no prior experience asks when they want to start an online store and Shopify is recommended to them in order to start with.
And it’s a legit question as starting with a new thing like e-commerce, dropshipping, POD, …etc. comes with many things to learn, and the last thing you want is to start using a software or a platform that is not easy to learn for beginners.
This is what we will be discussing today, whether beginners should use Shopify or not, and what are the pros and cons of using Shopify for beginners.
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Is Shopify Good for Beginners?
Shopify is good for beginners, and one of the easiest e-commerce platforms to use thanks to the great company that developed the platform, the support they offer, and the ease of use that Shopify comes with.
Here are 10 reasons why Shopify is good for beginners:
1 – It Was Built for Ecommerce Specifically
Shopify is one of the easiest ecommerce platforms to use for beginners because it was built to be used as a platform to build online stores without further additions or customizations, which is why it wins when compared to WordPress-WooCommerce for example.
2 – Beginners Can Start a Shopify Store in 5 Minutes
Since it was created for e-commerce in particular, Shopify helps beginners start an online store in five minutes or less, by entering their email, the store name, the password, and done.
Now they can login to the back office of their Shopify store and start customizing the storefront to their brand and niche, add products, connect to payment gateways, connect to the domain name they want, and start marketing their store.
3 – Easy-to-Use Interface & Reporting Dashboard
The admin dashboard of Shopify stores is super-intuitive and easy to work with.
The tabs are on the left sidebar are clear and easy to navigate through, and it is easy to reach any setting or feature you want.
This makes beginners’ lives much easier as they are starting something new and there are many things they need to learn, such as researching, selecting products, setting shipping terms, pricing, marketing, fulfillment and support, …etc.
They don’t need a difficult to use platform that would take much of their time to set up and modify things.
4 – Shopify Themes Are Easy to Customize by Beginners
Shopify offers many free and paid themes that are developed by the company itself, or by third party developers.
And because these themes are essentially designed to work on Shopify’s platform, they are easy to work with, customize, and switch from one to another and back.
This makes it easy for beginners who are using Shopify in order to customize their stores’ forefront and product pages to appeal with their audiences and suit the products they are selling.
5 – Many Helpful Shopify Apps to Help Beginners
At the beginning, the basic features of Shopify are enough to start, operate, and grow the online store, which is more than enough for beginners.
But if they want to upscale their business and start building a long-term thing, increase the store’s average order value and customer’s lifetime value, then they need to use some important features and functionalities like the upsell and cross-sell feature, related products, currency converter, email marketing automation, …etc.
And these require using third-party apps that give the Shopify store these functionalities.
And luckily, there’s something that is called the Shopify App Store, where third-party developers can offer thousands of free and paid apps that can help beginner Shopify users to add the features they want to their stores.
And these apps are usually easy to install and use, which is good for total beginners that are using Shopify.
6 – Easy to Connect Many Payment Gateways
Shopify allows connecting the online stores with many of the available payment gateways in order to start receiving money online when orders are made by customers.
Shopify offers different payment gateways for each country where the store owner resides.
And it is easy to set up any payment gateway in few, easy steps, and without coding or technical requirements, which is one of the reasons why I prefer using Shopify for beginners in e-commerce.
The nice thing, is that Shopify store owners can set up two payment gateways at the same time, one to receive money through credit cards directly, like the Stripe gateway for example, and one to receive money through PayPal, which is preferred by many customers around the world.
Making it easy to set up different payment options helps increase the conversion rate on a Shopify store, which is great for beginners as a small difference in the conversion rate can make or break an online store.
7 – Suitable for Dropshipping & POD, The Easiest Ecom Models for Beginners
There are many business models that fall under the e-commerce big umbrella, and each one has its own pros and cons, and each one suits a certain type of people.
But two of the most suitable e-commerce models for beginners are the dropshipping and print-on-demand models, which help the store owner to list products that are still at the suppliers premises, and sell them at the price they (store owners) want and receive money before even paying the supplier.
And after that, they would pay the supplier their own price and tell them to ship the ordered items directly to the end customer.
These two models are amongst the easiest for beginners in e-commerce to start with, and Shopify makes it easy to utilize these two models thanks to the great apps that help beginners search and find products to sell, receive orders, and fulfill them with few clicks by paying the suppliers and forwarding the shipping details.
8 – Good Pricing with Different Plans
Shopify offers three main pricing plans, and each one comes with many features that help beginners start and manage their online stores with ease.
As a beginner, the Basic Shopify plan is more than enough and they don’t need to go to the upper plan unless they want to hire many people to help them manage their business.
This plan costs $29/month, and although some people might say that this is expensive compared to what a WordPress website would cost, but this is incorrect.
The reason I say that is that the shared hosting you normally buy for WordPress is not suitable for ecommerce, especially when it comes to speed and bandwidth, which is something that significantly affects the performance of ecom stores.
And to make a WordPress site suitable for ecommerce, you need to buy some upgrades that would finally make the cost increase significantly, and maybe even more than the cost of Shopify’s basic plan.
But Shopify was designed and built to serve ecom business in particular, which means that you can rely on their reliable, powerful and fast hosting without worrying about buying upgrades like it is with WordPress hosting providers.
Add to that, WordPress sites don’t offer the e-commerce functionality unless you add plugins, which further slows down the site, and comes with potential subscription costs.
In any case, if you already have a WordPress site and you want to use Shopify to sell products and receive payments without building a complete storefront, then you can use the Shopify Lite plan that allows you to take advantage of Shopify’s powerful ecom platform without setting up a complete store.
With this plan, you can add products and embed a “Buy Now” button to your WP site, which people can click on in order to check out and pay using Shopify’s powerful platform.
It also allows you to add a store to a Facebook page or to an Instagram profile that you own and start getting sales without building a complete store on Shopify.
9 – Quality Platform with Great Support
The last thing you want as a beginner is to use tools that require your help and time instead of giving you help and time.
And Shopify is the best option for beginners in this case as it was built with great quality and rarely that it goes buggy.
This means that usually you don’t need to contact the support because you don’t face real problems with the platform and its integrations.
There are lots of very organized and easy to understand educational material about using Shopify that helps the absolute beginner do what they want to do with their store, and there’s a community forum where you can ask others for help and you will find Shopify experts giving you answers.
But on top of that, there’s a 24/7 support from Shopify’s team that you can contact through email, phone, or live chat.
This helps beginners to ecommerce to remain focused on building their business and growing their customer base instead of worrying about technical details.
10 – Easy Integrations for Marketing (Analytics, Ads, SEO, Discount Codes, …etc.)
There’s no point in starting an online store if you don’t market it and bring targeted people to it.
And while this is overwhelming at the beginning, but Shopify makes things a bit easier for beginners as it allows them to easily integrates their Shopify stores with the different marketing and analytics channels such as: Google Analytics, Facebook’s Pixel, Pinterest, …etc.
Add to that, Shopify makes it easy for beginners to do the basic SEO settings and create blog posts for content marketing.
Also, Shopify allows creating discount coupons, which helps in increase the conversion rates.
All these channels and techniques require learning some skills, testing and optimizing until you succeed with them.
But Shopify helps you skip big part of the technical side of things as it allows for seamless integrations with the different marketing channels.
With the previous ten reasons, I can tell you that Shopify is really good for beginners, and probably the best e-commerce platform to start building your e-commerce business with.
Issues That Beginners Face with Shopify
Although Shopify is the best e-commerce platform for the beginners, but there are still some things that you should be aware of before you start using this platform to build your online shop, such as:
1 – Multi-Language Stores
With Shopify, you choose one language for your store, and it will be the language that everyone will see content in when they visit your store, regardless of which country they are in.
However, you can use a third-party free and paid apps that can help translate the content to other languages and redirect visitors to the version that has content in their language.
Just wanted to mention this fact.
2 – Additional Transaction Fees
In addition to the main fixed fees of each Shopify plan ($29/month, $79/month, $299/month) there other fees that are associated with each order that you receive (in addition to the original transaction fees of the payment gateway or processor).
These fees are a percentage of each order value, and the percentage is different from one plan to another:
- 2% for the Basic Shopify plan that costs $29/month.
- 1% for the Shopify plan that costs $79/month.
- 0.5% for the Advanced Shopify plan that costs $299/month.
But in my opinion, the time it saves beginners to use Shopify allows them to grow their business past the point where they would worry about this fee, especially if they decided to upgrade to the Advanced Shopify plan when surpassing a certain level of sales volume.
3 – Closed Source CMS
Shopify is different from WordPress in the fact that it is built with a closed-source software.
This means that you can’t just take your Shopify store and host it on a different hosting provider like it is with WordPress sites.
However, it is still more time and cost-efficient in my opinion to build a store on Shopify and grow it, especially that it is a respectful company that offers a reliable service, and they have been there since 2006 and they keep getting better.
As I mentioned earlier, Shopify beats WordPress-WooCommerce when it comes to building online stores because it was built for e-commerce, and it is reliable and easy to use.
In any case, you can later hire someone to migrate your Shopify store to a different platform like WordPress, or Magento.
It takes some work, but it can be done.
Conclusion – Should Beginners Use Shopify?
Yes. Shopify is great for beginners who want to start an online store and grow it without technical hassle thanks to the reliable and quality platform, easy to use interface, many available themes and useful apps, and the really good pricing when it comes to what it offers.
If you are still not sure, remember that you can use Shopify for free for 14 days before paying anything, and you can cancel before you get billed for the first month if you don’t like it.
If you still have any questions or concerns, or if you have other reasons why Shopify is good for beginners that you want me to add to the list above, please, feel free to tell me in the comments’ section below and I will be happy to respond to you asap 🙂