When you first hear about Shopify, it can certainly sound too good: Can you really create a webstore in one night from your home and with no special technical skills? Wasn’t building a webstore supposed to be extremely difficult or at least very time consuming? In the relatively recent past I used Shopify to build an online store. And I did this as someone who I would describe to be a complete novice to e-commerce (on the seller side). In this article I will briefly describe my experiences of building a store with Shopify. These experiences should hopefully help you decide if using Shopify to launch your store is easy.
My experiences with Shopify:
Opening an account at Shopify. At this point of time pretty much all the respectable online service providers have figured out that if they want to acquire customers, they need to make the process of opening an account extremely easy. Shopify was no different in this sense: within minutes of arriving to Shopify’s website I was ready to start building my online store.
Designing your store. It is was very easy to design my store at Shopify. There were no special technical skills (such as coding) needed to create the store. A big help in this matter, was obviously the fact that Shopify offers ready-made themes for your store, so you don’t have to start from the scratch. In addition to the actual designing of the store being very easy, it was also extremely easy to, for example, add products to my store, write their descriptions and price the products.
In terms of the designing, it is however good to note that there are couple possible challenges: When you are for the very first time designing your store, you might not be able to immediately figure out where certain text elements, for example, go. And additionally, if you prefer to have your store in a language that is not automatically supported by Shopify, the translation work can be quite time consuming.
I wouldn’t say that it is difficult to translate your Shopify store, but it can be quite annoying, as it is quite repetitive and you need to pay good attention to the translations, so you don’t end up with spelling mistakes on your store (the mistakes might decrease the customers’ trust on your site and thus stop them from buying from you).
Adding payment methods to your store. This is an area where were you are from can have an impact on how easy it is to create a great store with Shopify. Per Shopify the easiest payment method to have on your store is the “Shopify Payments”, with which you can easily accept credit card payments. However, Shopify Payments is not available for all countries.
The countries, for which “Shopify Payments” is available for at the time of updating this (2021) are as follows: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Hong Kong SAR China, Ireland, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom (UK) and United States (USA).
Obviously, there are also payment options available for those who want to run a Shopify store from some other country, but in that case setting up the system to accept credit cards can be a bit more time-consuming. However, in that case, you can for example start with just PayPal Express Checkout, which is very easy to use on Shopify.
In summary: Building your store with Shopify can be quite or even extremely easy and, yes, you can get your store online even in just one night. However, it is good to note that if you are from a country that Shopify does not consider to be one of its main markets (see the list above), it can be a bit more challenging to create your store, than it otherwise would be. In case you want more information about Shopify, you might be interested in our Shopify review.
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