There's a girl named Marie living in a small town named Elkhart who designs and sells handmade bags in her free time. She already has a full-time job that keeps her busy, and she sells these bags as a side hustle.
Earlier she was only selling bags among friends, family, local communities, and art fairs but in the past couple of months, she saw that there's an uptick in demand and now finds herself spending roughly 20-25 hours a week taking orders, designing, sewing and shipping the beautiful bags.
Due to the surge in demand, she wants to outsource some of the tasks like packing, shipping, and collecting payments so she can focus more time on designing and sewing the bags.
In short, she has been looking for a way to streamline the entire process of accepting orders, receiving payments, and getting it fulfilled.
Marie is not a businessperson and does not know how fulfillment works, but she's keen to try out a solution that will take care of all the things mentioned so she can devote more time to expand her business.
This is where Shopify comes in.
Shopify enables sellers like Marie to set up an e-commerce store by helping them overcome all the hassles that they would otherwise run into if they were building their own store from scratch.
According to the Shopify blog:
"Shopify is a commerce platform that allows anyone to set up an online store and sell their products."
This is a very simplistic definition of what they do, but their entire commerce ecosystem is incredibly sophisticated. They offer a host of services that when combined makes the entire selling process effortless.
1. Drag and drop website builder:
This allows anyone with rudimentary design knowledge to customize and build their own store. They have a curated list of free images, fonts, and website themes that helps building the website even easier.
2. Mobile-friendly design:
All of their themes are optimized for mobile, meaning a user can get the same experience no matter what device they are using.
3. Customer-friendly dashboard:
This is the central place to view all your past and current orders, track sales, and know more about your customers.
4. Marketing suite:
Shopify comes with built-in SEO, and automated marketing features that helps you target the right customer at the right time.
5. Multi-channel sales support:
It allows you to embed a buy now button on any website and helps you seamlessly integrate sales from all your channels at one place. And the best part? You can do so from within Shopify.
6. Shared inventory:
Your inventory is also synced all across channels at all times so your leave no order unfulfilled.
7. Shopify apps:
Shopify has a host of 4,000+ applications that you could integrate with your store to make your life easier. There's an application for every need so you don't have to look anywhere else.
All these combined makes Shopify a perfect one-stop destination for both first-time as well as experienced sellers.
If you're already having a store elsewhere and are contemplating the move to Shopify, then speak to one of Shopify experts who can help you make the entire process smooth and seamless.