Recently, we had the chance to design one of our client’s site with Shopify. We were impressed with it’s ease of use, design capabilities and inventory control system for small retailers. Most often, when designers or retailers that launch their lines or open retail locations, they spend an average of $10-15,000 for a well-designed, SEO friendly website. Shopify solves that; clients can have beautiful, fully functional websites for under $5,000!

Web maven Anaiis Flox sat down with Shopify’s Vice President of Marketing, Dimitri Onistsuk, to explore the Shopify platform.

Shopify is a site that enables you to launch a hosted, fully customizable, secure store on the web without the trouble of having to code it yourself or installing any programs to manage it.

One + Only Built On Shopify

The process looks something like this:

You pick the plan which best suits your needs from their available selections, which range from $24 per month for a basic account to $699 for a premier account.

You choose a theme for your store or design your own using their theme editor and fill it with your products and descriptions.

You select a payment getaway, such as PayPal to handle transactions.

You start selling.

Shopify takes care of the SSL certificates and security enhancements for your store.

“Everything is hosted, so you don’t have to worry about backups and security,” says Dimitri Onistsuk, Vice President of Marketing. “The shopping cart is secure; we go above the standards required by the credit bureaus. We use geolocation to help fight fraud.”

Shopify has plugins for specific uses, much like the Apple store has apps and WordPress blogs have plugins.

“If they want to sell digital downloads like an ebook or sound files, we have a plugin for that,” says Onistsuk. “It’s called Fetch. You can use it to sell albums digitally, or songs. We have plugins to print labels, do integration with accounting software. Just about everything.”

The only thing they don’t do, basically, is handle payments and ship items for you. Everything else, though, is fully taken care of—even marketing.

“We have a partnership with Google and what they do is provide credits to all our clients credits that allows them to create an AdWords accout and start an Adwords campaign,” says Onistsuk. “We provide clients tutorials to learn to use AdWords. We’ve got great series of tutorials coming up with an entirely new set of mailings that train people in specific things for Shopify, like AdWords and how to use social media.”

Nest Living Built On Shopify

These tutorials are not yet available, but Onistsuk hinted they employed some of the most popular available social media platforms today, Facebook and Twitter, right through the Shopify admin panel.

“We’ve also partnered with a company called Direct Edge, so when you purchase a product, you get recommendations,” says Onistsuk. “It uses algorithms to learn from existing costumers and creates recommendations based on what’s been bought. Reviews and requesting reviews is a great way to drive purchases. So we have partnerships with a third party which has developed this applications for social reviews. You get an e-mail after a couple of weeks and put in a testimonial and star rating and that encourages dialog. New customers can come to the product thread and ask a question, so the original costumer gets a notification and they can answer it. That’s social media at its finest: encouraging people to have a dialog about your product.”

Shopify also understands how important mobility is for this generation of merchants.

“One of the main concerns for people is they’re running a business which is their full time job,” he says. “We make it as streamlined as possible. You can have a store running in under five minutes and you can do it from your phone. We recently acquired MNDCreative, which developed StoreSync, and this will allow us to penetrate the mobile market.”

StoreSync provides instant mobile access to Shopify store sales stats, order processing data, shipment status and product and customer information from an Apple iPhone. But understanding that this is a fast-paced market, Shopify is continuously looking to expand its app offerings.

“Going forward, we will combine our e-commerce and mobile application expertise to deliver more robust, richer applications that reflect the features and functionality that Shopify customers want and request,” said Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify, in a statement regarding the acquisition of MNDCreative.

The only limitations to what one can sell on a Shopify store are imposed by government regulation and the credit processor you choose to use.