1. Shopify is SaaS
After self-hosted, open-source platforms like Magento and WooCommerce have thrived for years, many brands have come to realize the advantages of Software as a Service (SaaS).
What is SaaS? The concept of Software as a Service has become pretty established over the past few years, so you might not need any further explanation. Just in case, allow us to summarise it here:
SaaS is about eliminating all the hassle from IT. It centres on the cloud: instead of companies buying and owning licensed software suites or, alternatively, installing and maintaining open source software on their own servers, they can now lease their software for as long as they need it and access it online, from anywhere.
The software or platform is owned by the company developing and maintaining it. That company - let’s call them Shopify, but Google, Apple, Adobe and a host of other companies work the same way - is responsible for keeping the platform in the air, making it secure, and adapting it to developments in tech and users’ changing needs and expectations. The company employs an army of specialists to do just that. If they don’t, users will simply leave them by terminating their subscription, and move on to a more promising competitor.
With Shopify, you are always using the latest version of the platform and you will never face the end of life of the version you’re using. With Shopify, you don’t have to run security updates. Ever.
With Shopify, hosting and bandwidth is off your list of things to worry about. And Shopify never crashes: it has a 99.98% uptime. With its infinite scalability, Shopify Plus allows you to process more than 10.000 transactions per minute.
Is your brand running on a self-hosted, open-source platform? These symptoms are a good indicator that it’s time to consider SaaS.
2. Shopify simplifies tech
How does Shopify make its platform effective and profitable? First of all, by relieving merchants of any worry about the technology behind their online store. This alone frees up plenty of time for e-commerce teams to focus on revenue-making activities like sales and marketing. With the tech reliably taken care of, merchants can look ahead and start making plans for the future.
When those plans involve anything tech-related, Shopify has already cleared the path. Shopify Plus helps you automate any recurring, manual tasks that slow you down, by handing you Shopify Flow and Launchpad. Thanks to its fast API, Shopify Plus allows for unlimited integration with other IT platforms.
The Shopify App Store provides an entire ecosystem of functionality that is fully compatible and easily added to any store. Since Shopify is such a big player, important apps and third-party technologies prioritize integrating with Shopify over other platforms. This causes a majority of new technologies and trends to be available only to Shopify merchants.
What’s more? Shopify makes it easy to elevate your reach by selling your products across diverse channels from a single hub: Shopify. Ensure a strong omnichannel presence by tapping into social media and popular marketplaces where your potential customers dwell. Choose Shopify POS to offer a seamless in-store experience, manage staff, keep a tight inventory, and more.
3. Shopify improves conversion
We’ve seen it happening at almost every migration we guided: an increased conversion after migrating to Shopify. How come?
At Domaine Europe, we have always admired Shopify’s checkout-first approach and their constant devotion to making it the best, safest and most trustworthy checkout out there. No surprise that research proved Shopify’s Checkout is the best-converting in the world. While Shopify’s checkout is best-in-class, you can customize it by adding upsell and cross-sell possibilities, customer-specific discounts, local shipping options and payment methods - all serving to generate more sales.
4. Shopify has the same goal as you: making your brand successful
Shopify’s Pricing is built up according to a 'revenue sharing' model (USD $2300 a month or 0.35% of your online revenue, whichever is greater). By asking you to share revenue instead of charging a fixed sum, Shopify allows for your sales figures to fluctuate throughout the year.
Even with revenue sharing, Shopify is cheaper than most competing platforms — open source or not.
Because of revenue sharing, Shopify’s business goals align very nicely with a merchant's. Both have a vested interest in making the merchant as much revenue as possible. If Shopify succeeds in making its users money, it will share in their profits through revenue sharing. Hence, Shopify has a very clear incentive to make its platform as effective as possible.
5. Shopify’s innovation power is unprecedented
Shopify is the only platform with over 4,500 engineers continuously working on maintaining and improving the platform, headed by CEO Tobi Lütke (CEO and former developer). Every 6 months, Shopify ships a mind-boggling amount of new features. All you have to do is take a look at the latest Editions Report to get an idea of the value this brings to merchants.
This pace of innovation is unprecedented, which is why we believe custom solutions or industry-specific platforms are fundamentally flawed - there will never be enough innovation power to keep up with Shopify’s pace.
