Why did I choose Shopify?

• It looked very professional, and has many templates to choose from - see sample below
• I wanted to be able to update every aspect of my website using one solution (rather than having to switch between different solutions for basic content updates
• It’s a well-established solution used by thousands of business owners worldwide
• The CMS was straightforward to use (at least once you've set your pages up)
• The pricing was very reasonable, much more affordable than feebay (eBay)
• The examples of Shopify in action (i.e., customer stores) were strong
• It has many apps, (like social media apps, marketing etc.) which are very easy to install

Things I like about Shopify

Picture above: Just one of the many sleek templates available

• Its easy to use! Full integration of shopping cart, PayPal etc etc. Awesome!
• Looks great, most templates are responsive... so it will look good on any screen
• You don't need to mess about with installing any software / templates or configuring servers - you just sign up for a free account online
• Start building your store is very straightforward. There's no technical stuff to worry about.
• The free templates have a slick, professional look and feel.
• It’s fairly customizable. Control panels allow you to edit basic elements like fonts, colours and so on, and if you are technically minded, or have very specific design requirements, you can tweak the HTML or CSS stylesheets used in the site to implement your own layouts.
• You can build and manage whole sites using it – it’s not just a tool for creating e-commerce pages. You can create and update as many regular web pages as you like (home / about us / contact etc.), as well as sell goods.
• You can map your Shopify-built site/store to a domain of your choosing – i.e., your store can sit happily at www.yourstore.com
• It comes with blogging functionality built in, which is really important if you want to do any inbound marketing.
• It’s dead easy to optimize your site pages for search – you can edit page titles, page descriptions and meta data very easily. All very good from an SEO point of view.
• It plays nice with Adwords and allows you to insert tracking code easily so that you can measure cost per conversion.
• It offers good functionality for tracking and fulfilling orders, and capturing customer data.
• It allows you to sell both physical and digital goods.
• You can try Shopify for free, for two weeks before committing to a paid plan.

Things things that could be improved.

• A few more flexible design/layout options
• Shopify need to provide some more free templates. The ones that are available for free are nice, and more professional-looking than some of those I’ve seen provided by Shopify’s competitors, but nonetheless a wider range of templates would make this product a lot stronger. That said, the free templates are very usable and a good starting point for building an online store. In fact this site is build with a free template!

Shopify review conclusion.