Shopify is a website that allows you to create your online store. It offers a variety of ‘themes’ that can be customized to meet your specific branding needs, and it allows you to sell both physical and digital products. Shopify is designed to allow beginners to create their online stores without the need for coding knowledge. The platform, however, caters to developers as well, as it provides full access to CSS, HTML, and Liquid (Shopify’s templating language).
Shopify is a ‘hosted’ solution, which means it runs on its servers and does not require you to purchase web hosting or install any software to use it. You build and manage your Shopify store in a web browser, so you can run a Shopify business from anywhere as long as you have Internet access. The platform’s “big idea” is to provide you with the essential tools you need to build and market an online store “right out of the box” Templates, a payment processor, a blog, and email marketing tools are all included in most Shopify plans. However, you can further customize a Shopify store by adding apps, more on these later, or by using custom code. Finally, rather than owning a copy of Shopify, you pay a monthly fee to use it.
Tobias Latke, a German-born entrepreneur, founded Shopify in Canada in 2006 after realizing that an e-commerce solution he had developed to sell snowboards could be used by, and sold to other businesses. Fast forward to today, and the platform has generated over $590 billion in sales and is now used by millions of merchants in 175 countries. Shopify currently powers around 4.5 million online stores, according to Internet stats company Builtwith.com. The company now employs over 10,000 people.
These statistics are significant because when you select a hosted solution for your online store, you are putting your trust in the company that provides it. Previously, similar services, such as Magento Go, have shut down, causing major issues for their users, who were forced to migrate their stores to a different platform on short notice. Given Shopify’s large user base and market share, this appears highly unlikely.
Shopify offers five different pricing plans. The monthly fee for the Starter plan is $5. The monthly fee for the Basic plan is USD 39. The monthly fee for the Shopify plan is USD 105. The Advanced package costs $399 per month. Shopify Plus is priced individually and begins at $2,000 per month. In the US, you can also take advantage of a new ‘Commerce Components’ plan, which allows you to choose which Shopify functionality you want to use and pay accordingly (on a modular basis). Pricing for this is not currently available; you must contact Shopify to discuss your needs and obtain a quote. The prices listed above are in USD; if you live outside the US, the plan names and features will be the same, but the fees will be in your local currency and roughly equivalent to the US ones.
If you pay for your plan annually, you can save a significant amount of money paying for your first year’s service in advance rather than monthly saves you 25% (which means the monthly costs for the ‘Basic,’ ‘Shopify,’ and ‘Advanced’ plans are reduced to $29, $79, and $299, respectively). Additional fees apply to use Shopify’s point-of-sale features, which allow you to sell goods in a physical location. There is also a three-day free trial period available. After this, you will be given the option of paying $1 for three months of full access to the platform. Following that, regular fees apply.
All Shopify plans include the basic e-commerce functionality you’d expect: you can create unlimited product catalogs, accept credit card payments, sell gift cards, offer discount codes on purchases, and use a variety of third-party apps. Shopify Payments, Shopify’s built-in payment system, is the cheapest and easiest payment processing option for users in countries where it is supported. You won’t have to pay any transaction fees if you use this, except on the ‘Starter’ plan. (If you’re on the ‘Starter’ plan, you’ll be charged 5% per sale when you use Shopify Payments, which is quite high). There’s also the credit card rate to consider in the United States, depending on your plan, you can expect to pay a credit card processing fee of 2.4% to 2.9% of each sale made on your online store.
Another option for accepting payments in Shopify is to use a third-party ‘payment gateway,’ of which there are more than 100 to choose from. If you do this, Shopify will charge a transaction fee on each sale. This is 0.5% to 2% depending on the plan you’re on on the ‘Basic’ plan or higher; a 5% fee is applied if you’re on the ‘Starter’ plan. So, unless you have a compelling reason to do otherwise, using the built-in Shopify Payments payment processor is usually the most cost-effective option. If you are not selling from one of those countries, you will need to use a different payment gateway provider, which will incur additional transaction fees.
Shopify CANCEL GUIDES
Get together the following account information:
First Name
Last Name
Phone Number
Email Address
Username
Password
Billing Address
City
State/Province/Region
ZIP/Postal Code
Country
Reason for Cancellation
Last 4 Digits of Card
Date of Last Charge
Amount of Last Charge
E-Mail
Follow these steps:
Compose an email including your account information
Ask for and write down the steps you need to take to cancel
