All your hosting and bandwidth requirements are taken care of with Shopify. You can upload as many photos, PDFs, products, and pages as you want. No matter how busy your store is the platform will handle it – even if you go viral and get a huge rush of visitors. Shopify’s servers are based in Dublin, Frankfurt, Virginia, Singapore, and Toronto and your website is hosted (stored locally) in all locations. This gives your customers worldwide very fast access to your website.

Shopify analyses all orders against known fraud indicators and will prevent any order it knows to be fraudulent and will flag any order that looks unusual. In over 100,000 orders across our clients Shopify stores we have never seen a fraudulent order and we have never seen a chargeback.

Shopify allows you to create manual orders for people who order by phone or in person. You can also add to orders, edit orders, and hold stock for customers.

Shopify also comes with the option of a class leading till and point of sale system that ensures your real-world sales are managed and captured on the same platform as your web sales. This system is perfect for everything from busy retail units to pop up shops or markets.

There is a comprehensive system for implementing offers such as XX% off, X for X, BOGOF, and add X to car and get Y for €Z. You can also setup individual codes for VIP customers, mailing list subscribers, or “club” members.

Your site will come with excellent functionality for emailing customers who have abandoned their cart and tempting them to come back and finish the transaction.

Subject to your Shopify plan you can have as many individual staff accounts as you need. Some staff might have basic order fulfilment permissions and others might be only able to run reports.

One of the strong points of Shopify is how it handles inventory. You can have inventory in various locations, handle inventory in various ways (i.e. sell only when in stock or pre-sell or ignore inventory levels), and handle supplier orders with incoming stock lists. If a customer orders two products that are in two separate locations Shopify will charge two postage costs (if appropriate) and assign the two fulfilment tasks to the appropriate employee/location.

Orders in Shopify can be managed for almost every possible scenario from partial fulfilment, refunds or partial refunds, return management, adding extra products, adding on the fly discounts, etc.

Products can also be managed for almost every possible scenario including variants, tax rates, stock levels, bundles, gifts, add-ons, etc.

One of the most powerful features of Shopify is that it can be automatically integrated with Google Shopping, Google Adwords, TikTok Shop, Facebook (Shop and Advertising), Instagram, eBay (UK only), and Amazon (UK only) and many more marketing and sales platforms.

You can also heavily integrate Shopify with Klaviyo or Mailchimp for powerful email marketing.

Your customers can buy gift vouchers on your store (for themselves or as a gift) and later redeem them at the checkout. This is a great income stream as it brings two new customers to your store (the buyer and the recipient or future buyer). The money you bring in from gift vouchers is essentially very positive cash flow.