The Shopify phenomenon continues to fill the columns of the specialised and even general press, so much so that the solution is disrupting the landscape of e-commerce publishers. We have been following its development for a few years while waiting for its official launch in France in 2018. The craze was not long in coming, as we quickly noticed through our exchanges with brand creators. In 2019, several entrepreneurs contacted us to carry out projects based on Shopify, the choice of the solution was made even before consulting us.
Why do brands like Shopify so much?
Firstly, because it has a great head start in terms of user experience.
From project set-up to day-to-day management, Shopify offers a simple experience at all levels, where other e-commerce platforms have a reputation for being heavy and complex.
Shopify's target is the entrepreneur, not the developer as other publishers have always done. And that changes everything. Shopify builds its reputation around brand success stories and even runs campaigns for the general public. This is unheard of.
On the merchant side, but also on the customer side
The multi-step ordering tunnel of most of the solutions on the market has not evolved much, if at all, over the last ten years. Yet usage has changed considerably. Some optimisation initiatives have been carried out to limit the number of steps, sometimes grouped together on a single page, but most of these purchase tunnels pale in comparison with the Shopify standard, which is extremely efficient on all screen sizes.
Because a brand is not a retailer
This long-held belief is also reflected in Shopify's overall philosophy. By limiting itself to a list of essential and vital features for brands, Shopify carefully avoids the slippery slope of instability on which open-source platforms and large-scale solutions have skated since their creation. Less dispersion, but more focus on core needs like editorial, ignored by legacy publishers, when it is necessary to build a complete brand experience.
A more favorable business model
With its subscription-based model, Shopify makes it possible to start an e-commerce project without straining your cash flow. By choosing a pre-designed theme and a subscription with no options, a site can be online in about ten days. Unthinkable for a project based on an open-source solution (such as Woocommerce, Prestashop, Magento or Sylius) which must necessarily pass through the hands of a developer and a system administrator. This agility makes it possible to accelerate the marketing of the site as well as to stop it at a lower cost if the mayonnaise does not take. This is all the more reassuring for a young brand that wants to test itself.
It is mainly for these reasons that we have chosen Shopify for the redesign of the Easy Snowboards brand. If you would like to know more about the advantages and limitations of this solution (because of course there are some), we would be delighted to talk to you. We provide comparative analyses and budgetary assumptions to help you decide which solution is best suited to your project.
