Do you want to start selling products online as a side hustle or full-time business? Selling online offers you the opportunity to push your goods to a wider audience. What better way to start than with Shopify.

What is Shopify?

Is a type of Saas (software as a service) company that offers you an already built e-commerce website with built in store features where you can sell your products. You can customize this store to your taste and sell your products.

Shopify is one of the most popular Saas companies for e-commerce. You pay/subscribe for their service monthly or yearly.

Benefits of setting up a Shopify store?

• Inventory tracking. You can track your inventories among other things.
• Inbuilt shopping cart solution. Customers can add items to their cart and can even save items they will like to buy.
• Easy to use. It is user friendly and mobile ready. It has helpful resources like video guides and articles on how to set up a store
• Secure and fast. Since it is an ecommerce website, sensitive information like cards info are inputted into the website. It has a SSL certificate, which means data are encrypted so that hackers can't obtain it. Shopify makes sure that the servers are working well and not hanging.
• In built SEO and marketing tools. It has inbuilt SEO features that drives traffic (customers) to your store by helping you rank higher in search results. It allows integration of social media channels etc

How to set up a Shopify store?

1. Sign up on Shopify by going to      their website
2. Add products to your store
3. Customize the aesthetics of      your store by choosing color, fonts, templates etc
4. Create or add your domain to      Shopify
5. Activate your preferred payment      mode or processor. 

Tools that can help you run a Shopify store

• Slogan maker
• Burst
• Kit marketing automation
• Referral candy
• Business name generator

Shopify pricing plans: they're:

• Basic Shopify. This is going for $29 per month. It is ideal for new businesses.
• Shopify. Going for $79 per month. It is great for businesses that are growing.
• Advanced Shopify. $299 per month. Ideal for Businesses who has the money and wants premium features like advanced reporting.

Shopify payments, how it work?

Shopify offers you a payment option through "Shopify payments". You can access and manage customer payments through payment channels like paypal, stripe etc. The wonderful thing about it's that you don’t have to set up a merchant account with another provider like Square or Stripe.

In Shopify Payments there's something called "Pay period". It means the amount of time from when your customer places their order on your store, to the time funds are sent to your bank account. 

Also note that funds which come from orders placed on a Friday and during the weekend are oftentimes grouped together and sent as a single payment.

How does Shopify dropshipping work?

One of the main reasons why people love using Shopify as their online store building solution, is because of its flexibility.

You don't have to have a physical product before you sell it in your store.

With dropping shipping you serve as a middle man between the customer and manufacturer. For instance, you advertised a t-shirt on Shopify and when a customer requests it. You contact the manufacturer who sends the t-shirt to the customer. You will get your own commission.

Other features offered by Shopify includes: print on demand, sell on Facebook with Shopify lite etc

Conclusion

If you want to set up an online store and you don't want to go into the rigors of hiring a software developer, you can use Shopify. It is easy to use and mobile friendly. It offers amazing features or functionality like dropshipping, great payment system etc