Shopify feels to some like a new entrant compared to other platforms like WordPress. However, the Shopify platform has been around for over 18 years and was released only 3 years after WordPress. As a dedicated eCommerce platform, Shopify offers multiple benefits for online stores and its pricing tiers make it suitable for both large and small brands.
Shopify’s Growth
Shopify is now home to over half a million eCommerce websites and generates a staggering £60 billion in online sales. Around 160,000 of these stores are reportedly based in the UK. There are currently 4 pricing tiers to choose from ranging from £25 per month to £1800 per month – which is quite a spread. The main three tiers cover most scenarios, with a fourth “plus” tier aimed at much larger brands. Last year, more than 675 million customers bought products from a Shopify store which highlights the dominance of this growing platform.
The Platform
As above, Shopify is an eCommerce platform, making it suitable for B2C businesses such as online retailers. B2B focused organisations won’t benefit from using Shopify and will actually struggle with some of the limitations that streamline the platform for online shops. Historically, Shopify has been weak on the content management side of their platform but strong on the set up and management of products – which has appealed to online store owners. In the past, some of these issues have made the platform difficult to work with from an SEO perspective, however, more recent changes and developments have gone a long way to address these challenges. While the platform still lacks flexibility, it now goes beyond just the fundamentals to offer a much better set of marketing tools for both SEO and PPC which can be further enhanced through their App Store.
Easy integrations with Google Merchant Centre, social media product feeds, abandoned cart, email marketing, automations, international payments and variations and much more make Shopify a great option for online stores. While you may get more flexibility and cost savings over on platforms like WooCommerce, there’s also more pitfalls and clunkier experiences on some plugins (although still a great choice depending on your circumstances). It’s an important development note that Shopify also offers a headless ecosystem including APIs, frameworks and deployment options which really does open up the doors for brands wanting flexible solutions outside just websites.
Shopify SEO
In the past, Shopify SEO agencies had their work cut out as the platform was very limiting and even contained major issues that would hinder SEO progress. Thankfully, these problems have been fixed in the most recent versions of Shopify. Nevertheless, some challenges still exist and it requires careful planning and implementation to get things right from an SEO perspective. Common situations might include dealing with hundreds of tag pages, collections vs filters, robots.txt and performance – all presenting unique problems that must be overcome. As above, Shopify’s App Store offers some great tools enhance the platform’s based set of SEO features. In addition, while Shopify is a hosted solutions, you’ll still need to think about performance at the theme level, whether you’re building from scratch or choosing a theme. All in all, Shopify’s SEO capabilities have come a long way over the last few years and we love working with it.
Shopify Partner Agency
We’ve been a Shopify partner now for over 10 years. We’ve worked with a number of Shopify stores, from huge product catalogues to websites selling just a handful of items. Our team has excellent knowledge of Shopify and help our clients navigate the challenges and pitfalls associated with the CMS to ensure they get the maximum benefit of using it. If you’d like to learn more about our Shopify related services or any of our digital marketing campaigns, give us a call today.