What is Shopify and How Does it Work?

What is Shopify?

Shopify is a complete commerce platform that lets you start, grow, and manage a business.

Our expertise and leadership in commerce comes from the experiences of millions of merchants on our platform. Their successes allow us to forecast and build the right features to not only power commerce today but to help shape and define what the industry looks like tomorrow.

How does Shopify work?

Shopify unifies all of your commerce onto a single platform.

With Shopify, merchants can build and customize an online store and sell in multiple places, including web, mobile, in person, brick-and-mortar locations, and pop-up shops and across multiple channels from social media to online marketplaces.

Shopify is completely cloud-based and hosted, which means you can access it from any connected compatible device and we’ll handle software and server upgrades and maintenance for you. This gives you the flexibility to access and run your business from anywhere with an internet connection.

On any given day, a commerce business requires an array of tools to manage products, inventory, payments, and shipping—and they spend a lot of time and money stitching the disparate systems and data together. Shopify groups those technologies together and ensures that you can easily access and integrate any other business tools you need to make Shopify work for your business.

Think of Shopify’s product as layers you can choose from to build the right stack for your business:

Layer 1: Shopify’s core product

This is what you get as soon as you buy any Shopify plan. It includes everything you need to turn your idea into a business and start selling: templates for the look and feel of your store, tools to sell in multiple places online and in-person, integrated payment processing, the best-converting checkout on the internet, SEO and marketing tools—these are all part of Shopify’s core product. This is the foundation upon which our other products and applications are built.

And for those who want to fine-tune their store and experience, you get access to Shopify APIs and development tools to customize your store’s capabilities even further.

Layer 2: Shopify’s additional products and services

Every independent business is unique. And as businesses grow, their needs evolve accordingly. That’s why we offer our customers powerful upgrades to help them grow their business on our platform. From easier access to capital to accelerated payments options, these products and services are exclusive to Shopify customers and are designed to help independent business owners have a leg up in the market.

Layer 3: Apps built by trusted partners

Shopify’s App Store has thousands of apps and features built by third-party developers to customize your store without ever once touching the code. Anything you can dream up, there’s an app that can help make it a reality. You’ll find the most cutting-edge tools to grow your business in the App Store, whether it’s the latest SMS app or the hottest new social media network’s ad tools.

There’s also a marketplace of Shopify Experts that you can hire to build custom solutions for your business. And if you want to dabble with the code yourself, you can do that, too!

Why Shopify?

• Shopify supports the entire ecommerce community. Online, offline and everywhere in between. We are home to the largest, most diverse set of entrepreneurs, merchants, developers, and partners.
• Shopify is global. We empower entrepreneurs around the world to create, connect, and innovate their businesses. With merchants spanning more than 175 countries, we provide entrepreneurs everywhere the platform, building blocks and tools needed to win in commerce.
• Shopify empowers creative expression. We believe there should be more unique voices, stories and experiences, not fewer, and that’s why we design our product with the greatest amount of extensibility, flexibility and expression.
• Shopify is the most integrated commerce platform out of the box. Shopify not only centralizes entire commerce businesses but also offers access to the widest set of commerce ecosystem integrations built using a shared technical framework. This deep integration and access ensures we have breadth and depth of themes, apps, channels, surfaces, products and experiences.
• Shopify absorbs unnecessary complexity. We know the world isn’t designed for independent businesses to start, scale and succeed. That’s why we make it as simple and accessible as possible to maximize entrepreneurs’ access to growth tools.
• Shopify is built to scale with you. No matter your technical maturity, growth, size, complexity, location—you will never lack access to technology and features to build your business, and you will never outgrow Shopify as your needs change, scale or evolve.