Top Takeaways from Shopify Unite

We recently attended the Shopify Unite conference in San Francisco. Not only did we have a good time, but we learned a lot as well!

Here are our key takeaways:

1) Partners are Paramount

What we mean by this is that Shopify really cares about their partnerships with agencies like ours that are experts at implementing their platform and providing marketing support to ecommerce businesses. In fact, that’s what they call us: “Shopify experts”.

Unlike most other store platforms which compete with their partners in sales to provide implementation services, Shopify takes the opposite approach. They want to focus solely on creating the best commerce software/platform possible, and rely on strong partnerships with their Shopify experts to implement their software and bring the vision of their clients’ stores to life.

2) Shopify is About Commerce (Not Just Ecommerce)

You might think of shopify as an ecommerce platform…and it is.

But it is also so much more.

It is a full commerce platform. It is a multi-channel commerce solution.

Many businesses have both an online and an offline component, and Shopify allows you to integrate all of these different points of sale on a single platform. Combining in store retail with online sales and even sales through social media platforms or third party sites, Shopify provides a single system to power all of these sales. You can even pop a store into your Facebook page and sell directly within Facebook, or drop a buy button on a 3rd party website and then pop customers directly into the checkout flow in a single click.

Not only does this improve the front end experience for your customers, providing a consistent experience through every channel, but it also improves back end data management. Shopify also integrates with your fulfillment systems and accounting systems to help your entire store run seamlessly.

The goal of Shopify is to be the hub where all of your commerce takes place with different spokes for each sales channel.

3) It’s Not Just for Small or Medium Sized Companies

In fact, Shopify has a specific offering for Enterprise clients called Shopify Plus.

This is big news for enterprise businesses.

In the past, these companies typically had to build custom commerce platforms from the ground up. Not only is this time consuming (taking about 18 months to complete) and expensive (in the range of several million), but it also requires full time staff to maintain the software.

Shopify provides a different way. Infinitely scalable and customizable, enterprises can now focus on their core businesses (what they do best) and leave the software to the experts. This is not only less expensive, but also liberating, freeing up time for enterprises to concentrate on their products and services, rather than on keeping their custom commerce platform up and running.

4) Made for Marketing

Shopify’s infrastructure was built to be able to create beautiful and simple experiences that customers love and are easy to use.

But don’t let the simple user interface fool you.

With Shopify, and its apps and integrations, you can run almost any marketing campaign you can dream of, whether that be social campaigns, on-site upsets, cart abandon follow ups, email marketing, and so on.

Shopify is built to give you all of the tools that you need in order to convert.