A great platform to start, grow and maintain a thriving online business

Shopify is a great platform to start, grow and maintain a thriving online business. It's the perfect balance of simplicity and complexity. The day-to-day running of your site is as simple and intuitive as it can be, but if you need to start creating a truly customised experience tailored for your customers, then it will entirely allow that.

You can start out with product imagery to begin selling, then when you have videos of your products produced, they can simply be uploaded instead. Some of your customers may want to see how your products will look in their living room - even Augmented Reality is built into Shopify when you're ready for it.

Shopify takes all of the technical worry away from hosting a website - they take care of the hosting, the backups, the SSL certificate, and PCI compliance. That's all done for you. Your customers will use the same, secure, reliable checkout that is trusted the world over - in a single month last year, $135 billion went through Shopify checkouts.

Unlike some platforms there are no maintenance costs involved. Once set up, Shopify will continue to run without having to engage an agency to update the site. Shopify continually improves the platform, but without any effort on your part. There are no hosting fees either, you'll just pay for the Shopify plan that you've selected, and any transaction fees according to the plan as well.

The Shopify admin lays everything out sensibly and in a very intuitive way. The tasks that you'll face most commonly are clear and simple. Editing content is a joy with Shopify's drag and drop interface. You can build beautiful looking layouts simply and easily - and anywhere you like. With Shopify's 2.0 update just launched, this means creating custom product pages, blog articles, or any other type of content on the site can all be done with this visual editor. There is a huge range of layout options that can be used here to cover almost any layout you can think up, but if it doesn't exist, we can easily create it for you to give you the perfect site for your brand.

Shopify has a very low barrier to entry - you can easily use one of the existing themes to create a great looking site, and then as your brand grows, we can then create a completely unique design for you and wrap that around your Shopify store. You don't even need any products - dropshipping is very easy with Shopify - so you can get started immediately. Shopify can also be extended in a number of ways. There is a thriving market place of apps that can help you tailor Shopify - either for yourself or your customers, and we can create completely customised options for your Shopify store as well if you require anything more out of the ordinary. Selling globally is possible with multiple currencies and multiple languages (on all but the Lite plan). And all of this can be added as you need - the store can grow with the brand.

Shopify themselves are on hand with live chat or email support, and they'll even help you write the boring legal content for your site (https://www.shopify.co.uk/tools/policy-generator). And here at Absolute, we can guide you through the process, recommending themes and apps to get you started. We can migrate all of your products from your existing site and make sure the site launches without hitch.

For more information and to get started, get in touch with us.