Shopify is a fully hosted ecommerce solution. This means that every platform brand is hosted on Shopify servers. Those who choose Shopify will benefit in a number of ways.
Painless attitude
An unhosted platform requires a certain level of web development and programming skills to empower your business. Many brands don’t want that. On the other hand, if you sign up for Shopify, it will tell you how to get started.
Sort your domain name
If you already have a domain name that you want to keep, it can be easily sorted and requires only minor configuration changes to the DNS settings during setup.
You can also buy a new domain name through Shopify if you wish. The bonus of this is that there are unlimited email forwarding addresses. They route all incoming email to your existing email account and keep your local brand contact information consistent and professional. As an example:
Your domain name: yourbrandname.com Associated email addresses you may wish to send: hello@yourbrandname.com, careers@yourbrandname.com Email to: [specific existing accounts]
There are no additional fees
Many of the competing platforms are referred to as “self-hosted”. This means brands using it have separate server costs that they need to consider. Although they can start small, they can soon raise up to thousands of pounds a month for managed services. Although no Shopify brand has ever paid a penny for external hosting.
There are no excessive costs due to unlimited bandwidth
For alternative platforms, consider the costs of getting traffic and products. Every new visitor and every new product that comes to your online shop uses up additional bandwidth. Most e-commerce platforms limit your available bandwidth and charge you to exceed that bandwidth.
Shopify, on the other hand, offers unchanging bandwidth. Meaning, you won’t be penalized for heavy traffic, but welcome! Better yet, every Shopify plan comes with unlimited bandwidth.
Your company and your customers are safe
Another great thing about Shopify hosting is that all the stores are PCI DSS Level 1 compliant and not ready yet. So you can be sure that your customer payment information and business data are always safe. Plus, it’s easy to accept payments using the payment gateway you choose.
Immediate software update
With Shopify, you are not only eligible for software updates at no additional cost, but everything is processed for you automatically. This means that you can quickly access any new features before you even think about them. Some of the most recent examples are Apply Pay, Multi-Currency, and Augmented Reality.
Fast and reliable charging worldwide
Shopify uses a large network of servers around the world to host online retail stores. We call this a Content Delivery Network (CDN). Shopify CDN is operated by Fastly which has a strong reputation. With a CDN, Shopify promises that all stores can load as fast as possible, no matter where customers are located.
Suitable for large quantities
Apart from speed, processing capacity is another aspect that takes away your hosting worries. Nothing is more biased than having thousands of visitors to your store, all ready to buy out of the blue. Luckily, Shopify handles a lot of traffic. Your business will run about 4,000 boxes per minute before the throttle is activated – and that is the equivalent of over 99.999% of all the businesses you will ever see!
So what’s the catch?
The main difference between Shopify as a hosted platform and a traditional self-hosted platform is that you don’t have access to the full codebase. In all fairness, this can make customizing certain features for your online store quite complicated. But does it go beyond what has been said above? We don’t believe it.
All listed benefits are possible because Shopify offers cloud services. This is a rather minor compromise. If you want to call it that, the Shopify app marketplace and thematic level actually gives us enough flexibility to meet the needs of businesses large and small while keeping your business going in the future.