Choosing the best eCommerce platform for a website can be a challenging task, especially when considering criteria like features, functionality, cost, support, and more. However, with Shopify, you can be confident that you have made the proper decision. This is a well-known and extensively used eCommerce platform that allows businesses to set up an online store without any technological knowledge.

Shopify is trusted by millions of people worldwide for selling, shipping, and processing payments from anywhere. As a result, whether you are already operating an eCommerce store or planning to get started, Shopify is always the best option because of its extensive feature set. Don’t wait any longer, let’s scroll down to take a deeper about Shopify features right now:

A Quick Overview of Shopify Platform

Shopify is a versatile eCommerce platform for establishing and managing online stores. With the ability to seamlessly sell products through a customized website or in person via a point-of-sale application, Shopify caters to a wide range of individuals, including novice dropshippers and even expanding direct-to-consumer (D2C) businesses.

For businesses seeking a comprehensive eCommerce solution, Shopify offers an all-in-one platform with highlight features like payment processing, inventory management, shipping discounts, easy-to-customize, and even professional marketing features.

shopify features

With Shopify plans starting at just $5 per month and ranging up to business-level pricing, Shopify features are certainly one of the critical elements that many people care about, thanks to their diversity and ability to satisfy customers’ needs.

To help you think more clearly before making a purchase, in this section below, BSS Commerce will take a look at Shopify features and how they work for your online business.

✨✨✨ SHOPIFY PRICING PLAN

List of Key Features Offered by Shopify Platform

To expand a Shopify online business, so critical to comprehend the potential of Shopify features. Shopify offers a plethora of functionalities to its clientele, facilitating the creation of visually appealing eCommerce websites and empowering them to monitor their business’s progress.

Additionally, it furnishes numerous analytical tools to assist users in making informed decisions to enhance sales and optimize website efficiency. Here are some noteworthy Shopify features:

Store Design and Customization Features

Custom Storefronts

With the ability to construct customized storefronts, Shopify supports businesses to provide convenient buyer experiences through high-performing storefronts that leverage Shopify’s speed, scalability, and power. Whether you are embarking on a new sales channel, enhancing the technological infrastructure, or transitioning to a new platform, Shopify offers an extensive array of commerce integration possibilities, granting you substantial creative control.

shopify features custom storefront

Moreover, the Storefront API enables to crafting of distinctive shopping experiences effortlessly. Utilize Shopify’s established commerce API layer to build any buyer experience you can envision. Seamlessly access commerce primitives and capabilities, including contextual pricing, subscriptions, optimized cart functionality, and more, all while enjoying a remarkable level of flexibility.

Metafields

Metafields allows to customize the Shopify store’s functionality and appearance by saving unique information that isn’t typically captured in the Shopify admin. You can use metafields for internal tracking or to showcase specialized information on your online store in various ways.

For instance, a candle vendor may want to exhibit the burn time for candles on their product pages, while a grocery store may want to display a product expiration date for canned goods. Other examples of specialized information include:

  • Part numbers
  • Color swatches
  • Launch dates
  • Related products
  • Blog post summaries
  • Files for download
  • Lists of ingredients

Bythere, you can easily add metafields to your products, collections, customers, orders, and other parts of your store directly from the Shopify admin page.

Metaobjects

Metaobjects allow you to add and store structured data to your store. For example, you can save product information such as features, specifications, and size charts. The data stored in metaobjects can be retrieved and edited via the Shopify admin. The metaobject API allows apps to access metaobjects. Metaobjects in themes can also be accessed using Liquid and the Storefront API.

Metaobjects consist of 2 main components:

  • The definition: This includes the fields that define the structure of the object. You can manage this in the Settings > Custom data section of your Shopify admin.
  • Entries: These are the actual content or data stored in the metaobject. Entries are created and managed in the Content > Metaobjects section of the Shopify admin page.

Try Before You Buy (TBYB)

You have the option to include try before you buy (TBYB) as a purchase choice, allowing you to ship orders to customers prior to collecting payment and subsequently charging them at a later date. Additionally, you have the ability to authorize the customer’s payment method in full before fulfilling the order and making sure they can pay for the product at a later time.

If you have a try before you buy an application installed from the Shopify App Store, you can conveniently manage the settings within the Shopify admin. Once a customer makes a TBYB purchase from you, the product details and payment status will be visible on the admin page.

NOTE: Customer payment information is securely stored by Shopify, ensuring utmost protection. Once entered, access to your customers’ complete credit card details is restricted.

Theme Customization Options

Once a theme has been selected to establish the fundamental appearance and atmosphere of your online store, the theme editor within your Shopify admin allows you to tailor the theme to align with your distinctive brand. Through the theme editor, you have the ability to preview the chosen theme, modify its settings, and seamlessly incorporate, eliminate, modify, and reorganize content.

shopify features theme customization options

To ensure a smooth theme customization process, BSS Commerce Shopify suggests completing the following tasks:

  • Create a duplicate of the theme as a backup copy to easily revert to the original version if necessary.
  • Familiarize yourself with the available support options and their respective levels.
  • Acquaint yourself with the guidelines and best practices for uploading images.

Search and Discovery

Shopify’s Search and Discovery feature is designed to advance the online shopping experience for customers. It boasts robust search capabilities that enable customers to swiftly locate desired products.

Not only that, this feature also offers smart product recommendations based on customer behavior and preferences, which can boost sales and customer contentment. Can say that the Search and Discovery feature is really useful for merchants to customize search results, optimize product listings, and monitor customer search analytics, ultimately enhancing the visibility of their products.

Customizable Checkout Process

You can customize and manage the functionality and appearance of your checkout separately from your theme editor using the checkout editor. With this editor, you can add checkout apps and customize the branding of your checkout.

To customize the branding, you can add the brand’s logo, pick a background color or image, change the colors, and customize the font. Some of these branding options will automatically apply to your new customer account pages.

Additionally, you can install checkout apps from the Shopify App Store and integrate them into your checkout using the checkout editor. App developers and Shopify Partners can create apps that provide extra functionalities for your checkout.

For instance, you can install an item upsell app and include it in the order summary area of your checkout. Bythere, customers can easily add more items to their cart during the checkout process.

Product Management Features

Product Reviews

Customers who purchase products through the Shop app or an online store can leave a review in the app. These reviews help in getting feedback while offering useful insights to possible buyers and readers. Comments and feedback can be provided for the product only by people who have personally bought it from you. Commentary can consist of 1000 characters and user reviews and star ratings are displayed publicly on the product detail page.

Once a consumer posts a Shop Product Review, it is screened in accordance with Shop Product Review Policies prior to its publication. It should be noted that while the Shop bears no responsibility in regard to the authenticity and consistency of inputted reviews.

Product Catalog

Product catalog is one of the Shopify features that you can add all the products in one place using the product catalog feature. Adding, editing, or customizing the new product listing can help you represent your store’s inventory in an appropriate way.

Retailers can offer full product descriptions with product titles, descriptions, prices, variants as well as images for more authentic visual presentation of their assortment items.

These features give merchants the choice of tagging, collection or category making it easy for a customer to find their goods in online stores. At once, it also improves their overall shopping experience, thus raising the chances of them locating the goods that they desire to purchase.

Pre-orders

With the option to offer preorders for products that are currently out of stock or not yet available. Shopify pre order feature can be utilized to gauge the demand for a forthcoming product or to generate anticipation among customers for a new release.

shopify features pre orders

Based on the preorder choices you provide, customers can make full, partial, or no payment at the time of placing their order. Through collecting payments, you securely store the customer’s payment details, enabling you to fulfill the order and collect any remaining payment at a later date.

CAUTIONS: To utilize preorders for selling products, the critical thing need to adhere to the regulations of the business and customers’ jurisdiction, as well as the Shopify Terms of Service, the Shopify Acceptable Use Policy, and the Shopify Payments Terms of Service for the country where the business is located. Preorders are currently exclusively available to merchants utilizing Shopify Payments or Paypal Express. View a detailed comparison of Shopify payments and PayPal.

Inventory Management Tools

Inventory refers to the amount of a specific product that is available for purchase. However, to prevent selling out-of-stock items or to keep track of when to restock, inventory tracking is essential. In the Shopify platform, you can easily manage the inventory through setting up tracking, viewing the inventory, and even adjusting levels as needed.

With managing inventory quantities, this element mainly depends on the business needs, you may need to manually adjust inventory levels due to factors such as product popularity, sales, or seasonality. Maintaining accurate inventory levels on your Shopify store is crucial for providing a seamless customer experience.

🎁 Check out: Best Shopify Inventory Management Apps

Marketing and Sales Features

Shopify Marketplace Kit

Shopify Marketplace Kit utilizes Shopify’s technology and expertise in commerce to offer a range of APIs, webhooks, and UI components that expedite the development process of the marketplace. By connecting your platform and its users to millions of Shopify merchants and their products, Marketplace Kit serves as a channel app.

This app is created by partners and installed by merchants in the Shopify admin. Merchants can then publish their store’s products to the channel app, which in turn displays these products on the platform. When multiple merchants publish products to the channel app and buyers make purchases on the platform, a basic marketplace is formed.

Shop Chat

Engage with your customers effortlessly through the Shop app! With the Shopify chat feature, you can easily communicate with customers who have reached out to your store. When messaging with them, you can enhance their shopping experience and boost your conversion rates.

shopify features shop chat

Bear in mind that customers can initiate a chat with your store at any time, even if they haven’t made a purchase yet. To enable this feature, make sure you’re using the Shop Channel and have Shopify Inbox set up.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is another feature in the list of Shopify features that allows for automatic multi-channel communication with customers through email, SMS, and push notifications. By utilizing multiple platforms, customer engagement and conversions can be increased.

When utilizing a template to create marketing automation, it is possible to customize the automation’s specific settings. This includes the ability to modify the timing of the abandoned cart email, sending it after a designated timeframe when a customer abandons their cart. Once the automation has been configured, it can be activated immediately or saved as a draft.

NOTE: Marketing automation is designed for connecting with customers who have subscribed to marketing from your store and should not be utilized for transactional emails, such as order confirmations.

Built-in SEO Features

Online stores come with built-in SEO Shopify features that help optimize content. Some SEO tasks are automated, such as adding auto-generated canonical tags to prevent duplicate content in search results, generating sitemap.xml and robots.txt files, and including your store name in title tags.

To further enhance the content’s optimization, Shopify provides you with the ability to customize various elements:

  • It is flexible to edit the title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs for blog posts, webpages, products, and collections to match these elements to align with the SEO strategy and enhance visibility in search engine results.
  • Customize the alt text for images, allowing to optimize their descriptions and improve the discoverability.

✅ Discover now 6 best SEO apps to optimize your store to the best

Shopify Collabs

Shopify Collabs facilitates the connection between businesses and creators through using a marketplace-style app.

To establish a connection with creators, you have the option to send direct invites, share commission offers within the Collabs Network, or create an online store page to accept affiliate applications. With Shopify features like Collabs, you can also send gifts or discount codes, monitor affiliate sales, and conveniently make payments to your affiliates.

For creators, the app offers the ability to search for products and generate commission links. In addition, they can apply to various affiliate programs managed by different businesses utilizing Shopify Collabs.

Sharing on Social Media

Sharing on social media is an effective method to advertise online store and approach to customers. Let’s create social media accounts for the business can assist in establishing brand, enhancing SEO, and driving more traffic to store.

With the online store’s product pages and blog posts feature buttons, you can easy to share content on social media. From your Shopify admin, you have the option to instantly share the product page directly on various social media platforms. In other words, copy the link of the product page and share on the social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, and more. View now 5 pillars of social media marketing for Shopify stores.

Shopify Audiences

Shopify audiences generate a list of potential customers for advertising platforms. It focuses on customers in the United States and Canada who are likely to make purchases from your store. These lists are automatically sent to your digital advertising account, allowing to launch targeted ad campaigns.

The exported audience lists from Shopify are securely transmitted and cannot be downloaded from the digital ad platform. The raw data is used to match the records of the advertising platforms and is then deleted. Shopify Audiences can be used with Meta, Google, Criteo, Pinterest, Snapchat, and TikTok.

Email Marketing Tools

Sending email marketing in a bid to widen the business operations and reach out to the customers. Writing newsletters to customers who sign up for the mailing list is an excellent method to keep them up to date on new products and forthcoming deals.

Plus, Shopify features like email marketing that allow to create, design, and send out email campaigns within Shopify itself. And this is a great way of sharing information about the website since you can brand it as well as directly linking to products to customers.

shopify features email marketing tools

Merchants paying for Basic, Shopify, Advanced Shopify, and Shopify Plus plans can access Shopify email marketing. It offers different pricing plans by the number of emails you send. For example, if you mail out an advertisement to 800 subscribers, it would be considered 800 emails. The pricing tiers for monthly email volume are as follows:

  • Free for up to 10,000 emails
  • $1 USD per 1,000 emails above 10,000 emails
  • $0.65 USD per 1,000 emails above 300,000 emails
  • $0.55 USD per 1,000 emails above 750,000 emails

Discover more: 10+ Best Email Marketing Shopify Apps – Free & Paid

Payment and Shipping Features

Shipping Insurance

If you ship orders from the United States and purchase Shopify Shipping labels, you can buy shipping insurance to protect your orders for up to 5,000 USD. This insurance coverage safeguards your shipments from loss, theft, or damage.

PRO TIP: If you’re on the Shopify, Advanced Shopify, or Plus plan and have Shopify Payments activated, each eligible label automatically includes 200 USD of shipping insurance at no additional cost.

When purchasing shipping labels, you have the option to insure your shipment and file claims directly from the Shopify admin. Shipsurance serves as the insurance administrator for the coverage you purchase through Shopify.

Shopify Checkout

You can build any checkout experience you want with Shopify checkout. It is extensible, allowing developers to bring any vision to life. Refer to the highlights and features of Shopify checkout below:

  • Address autocomplete: Improve checkout speed by providing selectable suggestions for input fields.
  • Flexible payment options: Reduce cart abandonment by 28% on average with Shop Pay Installments, or offer other installment apps like Klarna and Affirm.
  • Reach local customers: Provide local payment methods, dynamic address fields, and calculate duties and import taxes with Shopify Markets.
  • Boost sales with pre-orders and subscriptions
  • Expand your global sales by localizing your checkout process in over 50 languages, providing localized experiences for customers.
  • Allow shoppers to conveniently pick up their purchases in-store, providing them with another quick option.
  • Provide flexible shipping choices to customers
  • Text messaging consent
  • Show accurate delivery dates
  • Express checkouts and advanced bot protection

Shopify Bill Pay

With Shopify Bill Pay, you have the convenience of paying external business bills directly within the Shopify admin, consolidating all the financial transactions in one centralized location. This feature empowers you to customize the payment methods while ensuring that your vendors receive payments in their preferred manner.

When it comes to domestic payments, you have the flexibility to settle bills using a bank transfer, business credit or debit card, or your Shopify Balance account. Consequently, your vendor will receive a bank transfer payment or a paper check via mail.

For international payments, you can effortlessly pay bills in USD through a bank account or your Shopify Balance account, with your vendor being promptly remunerated via a wire transfer. Whether it’s compensating vendors, settling business phone bills, remunerating freelancers, or paying any service that invoices your business, Shopify Bill Pay is always the go-to solution worth experiencing.

Shopify Multi currency

Multi-currency in eCommerce is when a merchant can facilitate buying and selling internationally, between currencies. This feature is typically enabled through software within an eCommerce platform.

Shopify multi currency feature in eCommerce refers to the capability of a merchant to seamlessly conduct cross-border transactions, allowing for the buying and selling of goods and services in various currencies. Below are some advantages of implementing multi-currency in eCommerce are manifold, including:

  • Satisfied international shoppers and ensured a positive shopping experience for customers from around the globe.
  • Increased conversion rates and encouraged international customers to complete their purchases.
  • Enhanced control over international pricing, along with optimizing the pricing strategies for specific regions.
  • Customizations matched to specific markets to cater to the unique preferences and demands of different markets

Returns Management

Returns management involves managing the flow of returns between customers and businesses. This includes connecting with customers, handling returned orders, receiving returned products, and managing returned inventory. Returns have a significant impact on various aspects of the retail supply chain, for instance, warehousing, inventory management, and profitability.

In today’s business landscape, returns have become an essential part of eCommerce Shopify stores. The way a retailer handles returns can greatly influence a customer’s likelihood of making future purchases from that store.

Bythere, by making simple changes to improve the efficiency of the returns management process, you can enhance customer satisfaction and build trust in your brand. The returns experience should receive the same level of attention as other stages of the buyer journey, and getting it right can give a competitive edge efficiently.

Analytics and Reporting Features

Live View Reports

Utilize Live View to keep track of the online store’s activity and sales across all channels. Live View feature is particularly beneficial during peak traffic times, like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and when you need to gauge the immediate impact of marketing efforts, discounts, or other promotional activities.

In addition, live view offers a two-dimensional world map and a three-dimensional globe to display the origin of the store’s activity and key metrics in real-time.

Customers Reports

If you’re using Shopify, Advanced Shopify, or Shopify Plus, you can access detailed reports on the customers. These reports provide valuable insights such as average order count, average order totals, and expected purchase value. The reports include:

  • Customers over time
  • First time vs returning customer sales
  • Customers by location
  • Returning customers
  • One time customers
  • Customer cohort analysis
  • Predicted spend tier

Keep in mind that the reports may not show all activity from the past 12 hours, but the First-time vs returning customer sales report is up to date within a few seconds. In the event that more than 250,000 customers, let’s use Google Analytics to access their data.

Customer Behavior Tracking (Behavior Reports)

Behavior reports provide insights into customers’ shopping habits. With the Shopify plan or higher, you gain access to the Online store cart analysis report. These reports offer information to enhance your business in the following ways:

  • Improve online and offline marketing strategies for the products.
  • Identify and target the best audience for upselling opportunities.
  • Create effective promotional pricing and product bundles.
  • Boost the average order total.

For instance, if the online store includes a search bar, the Top online store search report reveals the terms your visitors use to search for products. Additionally, the Top online store searches with no results report highlight the search terms that yield no results.

By utilizing the data from behavior reports, you can optimize store layout to ensure customers easily find what they need and are motivated to make additional purchases.

Shopify Features – The Final Verdict

Shopify is the top choice in the eCommerce platform industry due to its user-friendly interface and seamless integration with sales channels. It offers a range of dynamic and helpful features to assist users in building and controlling their online eCommerce websites.

With high security, numerous third-party integrations, valuable analytics, a user-friendly interface, and other Shopify features, Shopify is a great eCommerce platform worth trying. Whether you’re a startup or a high-volume seller, Shopify remains unbeatable in terms of simplicity, sales reach, growth potential, and affordability.

On the other hand, customers looking to bring their business online can easily choose Shopify for its significant advantages over competitors. Despite its minimal blogging capabilities, limited store customization, and basic SEO tools, Shopify’s extensive selling opportunities and essential business management tools outweigh these drawbacks.

BSS Commerce Shopify hopes the list features in this post are useful for you as well as cater to the specific requirements for online business. If you want to learn about the eCommerce industry, the BSS Commerce Shopify blog is a fantastic page to gain the latest knowledge and refer to tips and tutorials in the same field.