Shopify is a complete commerce platform that lets you start, grow, and manage a business. Shopify is completely cloud-based and hosted, which means you don’t have to worry about upgrading or maintaining software or web servers. This gives you the flexibility to access and run your business from anywhere with an internet connection. Shopify has become so popular due to 3 main reasons:

1. 1. It allows you the ability to Create and customize an online store 
   2. It gives you the opportunity to sell in multiple places, including web, mobile, social media, online marketplaces, brick-and-mortar locations, and pop-up shops 
   3. It allows you to manage products, inventory, payments, and shipping

In the past when websites wished to set up an ecommerce element they had no choice but to use the designs that the ecommerce software they were using offered unless they had the budget to hire a designer and a programmer to code to make the online shop look unique and stand out. As most businesses did not have this budget they were stuck with having a very visually restrictive and uniformed look that every other website had. Thankfully things have changed alot since those days and nowhere is this more prevalent than with Shopify. With Shopify you can choose from a whole library of unique themes that are well designed and contain beautiful pre-made design themes for your ecommerce website. You can rest assured that any theme that you select from Shopify’s theme store is of great quality. This is because all themes that are in shopify’s theme store are all rigorously evaluated firstly by the whole shopify team. Shopify themes are very flexible and customisable and are suitable for all budgets. This is what makes shopify so special as unlike the old days you no longer need a huge budget to have a unique and beautifully designed online shop on your website.   In terms of doing custom design and reskins on shopify there is a lot of debate on whether one should customise further or just use one of the existing shopify themes as they are so uniquely designed anyways that further customisation is not required to make it look visually unique and different from the rest. Three main reasons why you shouldn’t over customise your Shopify theme are the following:

• It’s usually not necessary

Most times when users want to make changes that require customization it’s because they want to change a visual aspect on the website. While making little visual changes here and there may be nice to do the bottom line is that these types of little visual changes usually have very little if any real impact on the actual online shop when it comes to sales etc..

• It’s expensive

While it’s true that Shopify is very affordable and offers themes that suit all budgets, when one starts to get in the customization end of things of their purchased theme they can see costs rise. Even simple customization can see costs inflate. The main reason Shopify was created was to provide to small and medium sized businesses with the opportunity to have a unique designed template for an online shop for their ecommerce website so that they can launch with a working website.

• You can always customize later

The most important thing with any website is that it is actually successful, therefore if it’s an ecommerce website the main goal is obviously to sell as much products as possible to make the website and the business commercially sustainable. By first placing your focus and the majority of your efforts on ensuring that your online shop and website actually sells well rather than worrying about tweaking and fine tuning visual elements you will be much more likely to build a successful and sustainable ecommerce website. Only when your website is successful and running well should you begin to start looking at customization. The bottom line is that Shopify is an excellent commerce platform that lets you start, grow, and manage a business. If your business is small or medium sized or even just has a limited budget, then selecting one of the themes off of Shopify themes for the online store on your ecommerce website makes perfect sense for you. When you have got your website established and your shop is performing well then would be a good time to look at customization if you wish to have a visual overhaul of the website. To find out more about website design Contact 2Cubed today! You can also contact us on 01 905 8114 or 051-440425, email hello@2cubed.ie