5 reasons why Shopify is great for your customer experience
Creating a successful online business all starts with selecting the right platform to build it on. When you finally settle on one, you want to know that you’ve picked a winner.
Today, let’s talk about one of the biggest in the ecommerce business - Shopify. We’ve compiled the top 5 reasons why Shopify is a great platform for your customer experience. Maybe you’re currently in the market for a new platform, or you’re a long-time Shopify merchant reviewing if it’s still right for your business.
#1 - Highly customizable storefronts
Your on-site customer experience starts with your storefront. Building a store that looks and feels like your brand is essential to those first impressions. Shopify makes it easy to get started quickly with a customizable storefront with little or no coding experience required. The Theme Store offers a range of free and paid-for themes that can be customized quickly right from Shopify Admin. These can also be further enhanced with low and no code integrations from the App Store that allow for more customization options creating landing pages, custom widgets, animations, and more.
Shopify makes it just as easy if you want to bring on a development team to get into the nitty gritty of customization, allowing for as much tailoring as you want. You can base your store off an existing theme, or build one fully from scratch. Whatever road you choose, Shopify allows merchants to make their store as unique as their business.
#2 - Build your store experience with apps
Shopify is a great platform out of the box, but there’s so much more to building your customer experience. There are over 8000+ apps available on the Shopify App Store - if you can think of something you want to do with your store, there’s probably already an app for it!
Apps range from free-to-install or free-to-use, to tiered price plans, to Enterprise apps designed for high growth businesses. There are apps for subscriptions, customer support, user generated content, in-cart upsells, and more. You can enhance your post-purchase experience using apps like Order Lookup, improve your in-store time management with ClockedIn, or even boost discoverability with SEO Manager.
The experience you offer is so important to acquisition and retention. Shopify and its extended ecosystem gives merchants the tools they need to build the best customer experience possible. All apps are built and maintained by Shopify experts, meaning you don’t just have the power of one platform behind you - you’ll have the support of every team behind every app you install.
#3 - Top level security as standard
Security and privacy online are huge concerns for consumers. 59% of consumers are more worried about online payment fraud, and 76% regularly check ecommerce sites for HTTPS before making a purchase. Being able to demonstrate your site is safe and secure is the foundation of turning a casual browser into a loyal customer.
Shopify maintains the top level of PCI compliance, meaning you can guarantee your customers a secure shopping experience. Shopify regularly performs risk assessments on their security, and conducts annual on-site assessments to ensure compliance. All domains registered with Shopify also have SSL certificates generated automatically, for that extra added security.
#4 - Fast and reliable Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Merchants work hard on the site content - from those perfect product photos, to carefully crafted videos. These form such an important part of your customer experience, and that’s why they need to load fast every time. Page load speed and poor quality content can put a damper on an otherwise great customer experience.
All merchants benefit from Shopify’s CDN, or Content Delivery Network. This is a group of globally distributed servers that are all interconnected and deliver content to users. Rather than having a single server in one region, Shopify stores are serviced by many different global servers. That means a customer in the UK won’t be waiting for a server in the USA, they’ll be connected to a UK server. This speeds things up, and doesn’t leave customers waiting!
#5 - Simplified navigational structure
The way your site is put together and how pages connect is called navigational structure or architecture. If you’ve ever found yourself on a site and struggling to find the right link to the content you want, that may mean you’ve experienced an example of poor navigational structure. Or maybe you’ve tried to copy a link with lots of random characters and it doesn’t work.
Shopify stores all follow a simplified navigational structure. That means all the pages are organized in a way that makes sense for an ecommerce store. Typically that will involve the homepage, catalog, collections, product pages, blogs, and so on. This keeps things simple for the customer, allowing them to navigate with ease. They don’t have to wonder where something is - it all makes sense.
And this simplicity extends to the way URLs are set up. In Shopify, URLs use standard characters and a simple, readable structure. This makes it easy for the customer to fully understand the link they’re following, and it’s also better for your site’s SEO.
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Shopify keeps things simple for both merchants and their customers. Behind the scenes, you can create a fully customized store using a combination of themes and apps. And on the front end, customers get a fully optimized experience that’s designed to acquire, convert and retain.