From the course: Shopify Essential Training

What is Shopify? - Shopify Tutorial

From the course: Shopify Essential Training

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What is Shopify?

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- [Instructor] There's something I'd like to cover before we even get started. What is Shopify? I find this question interesting because depending on who you talk to, you'll get different answers. One person will use Shopify as a way to sell products both in a brick and mortar store and online. Another person might use it to sell on Instagram and someone else could be using Shopify as a way to sync all of their inventory between multiple shopping platforms. Well, it turns out all of these are true. Shopify as a platform is designed to solve all of your ecommerce needs. Some of their core features are listing products for sale, shoppers can add products to their cart and check out, you can get real-time shipping rates and display those to your customers, you can set tax rates, display those rates and collect taxes for each order, you can collect payment for those orders of course, you can also manage orders and shoppers can create accounts for repeat purchases, account preferences and order history. Shopify is really everything you need to run an online store. It is also website software typically called a content management system or CMS. You can create basic pages and blog posts plus you can customize the look and feel of your site. Additionally, there are countless apps in their ecosystem which control the functionality of your store. They have affiliate programs, newsletter subscriptions, digital products and a whole lot more, all of which we'll be getting into in detail through this course. And this is actually one of the best things about Shopify. Their core functionality is very easy to use. There's no code to write, no http status codes or HTML syntax that you need to know. You can run an entire store on the Shopify platform without having to write or customize a line of code and they've done a really good job only showing you the most relevant options so you aren't going to be overwhelmed by choices and they do this by setting really smart defaults which you can later customize using their apps if you want more advanced or just different functionality. One can argue that Shopify has the best reputation of all the ecommerce platforms. That means that partners want to work with Shopify first. If you want an integration with a specific company, it's very likely that they've already built one for Shopify. Ecommerce is all Shopify does. They're a 10,000 plus person company and they only work on tasks related to selling online. They aren't distracted by other industries. Their entire business model relies on successful merchants. If merchants aren't successful, they're going to go out of business so you know that they're going to take care of you. Lastly, Shopify is big enough to have its own annual in-person conference. I've attended this several times and the people that work for Shopify are incredibly talented and passionate about this topic. I love that they're there not just for their job but because they love helping store owners and that's where you come in. If you're thinking about using Shopify for ecommerce, you know you're going to be in safe hands.

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