Is Shopify The Best Online Store?

These days, there are seemingly countless ways to sell products online, whether through a third-party plugin on your website or with a dedicated page hosted on a site like Amazon.com. It may seem like every solution is essentially the same, there are key differences in the way Shopify allows you to customize and secure your information that makes it an ideal build for medical practices’ web stores. Let’s learn more about what sets Shopify apart and why it matters for your unique goals.

Key Factors When Selling Products Online

Updating Inventory

One of the main mistakes you’ll want to avoid with an online marketplace is selling products you don’t currently have in stock. With many online stores, inventory is managed automatically when someone buys a product. However, this can quickly become more complicated if you’re also selling products in your office to where the inventory may be depleting more quickly than your online store reflects.

Shopify has a great solution with point-of-sale software that syncs directly with your digital storefront whenever someone checks out in your office. This allows you to maintain a hybrid sales environment without short-selling online products.

Handling Shipping

The biggest hassle with creating an online store is figuring out how to package and ship products. Many online store programs offer helpful tools like shipping label generation, online postage payments, and even custom logo or branding help, all of which makes the job of sending physical products from your store easier. However, with sites that act more like marketplaces, there’s often more infrastructure to outsource storage, shipping, and returns for your products if you’re interested. On Amazon, you can sign up for Fulfillment By Amazon, where you ship your inventory to their facility, and they handle the rest for a flat fee per item.

Shopify perhaps gives you even more flexibility, with options for logistics through Shopify Fulfillment Network, where you can utilize the fulfillment solutions of Amazon or set up your own if you’re feeling ambitious.

Marketing Your Products

Finally, you want people to be able to find your products and recognize that they’re part of your unique offerings as a medical practitioner. This is a key difference between software like Shopify and marketplaces like Amazon. With Amazon, your products won’t show up with your custom branding; it’s essentially embedded in Amazon’s sprawling digital store rather than being distinctly your own.

With Shopify, you get a site that is linked to your own website, with fully customizable drag-and-drop design features that allow you to look like your brand while ranking on Google search results, rather than being limited to Amazon’s search results.

Why We Use Shopify

At DLM, our marketing specialists set up Shopify storefronts for aesthetic and medical practices regularly, helping customize their look and logistics in tandem with what each practitioner is capable of. We prefer Shopify for its ability to link directly to clients’ websites, and therefore its ability to rank in Google search results, its design customizability, and the flexibility it gives our clients to add on services or tools as needed, rather than pigeonholing them into pre-packaged payment tiers.

Create Your Online Store With DLM Today

Shopify does a great job of making it easy to get started with a custom online store, but there’s a lot to consider from logistics to the design and layout of your digital marketplace that makes it worthwhile to have a helping hand. Our experts in design and marketing can help your store become visible in Google searches for the products you sell in your area to boost in-office and online sales. Learn more about how we can help bring your online store to life by calling our office or contacting our team online today.