4. Marketing and Promotions
What's good:
There is a Shopify marketplace where buyers can search for products from all Shopify stores. One of the biggest challenges of moving your online business from eBay to your own online store is getting those first few customers. Just because you launch a store on the Web doesn't mean people will start flocking to it. Having a built-in marketplace to get those first customers is a boon to new online retailers who are plenty busy setting up their store, optimizing their fulfillment and shipping pipeline, and dealing with the hundreds of other details that come with opening a new store. The marketplace lets you start selling to actual customers quickly.
Shopify lets sellers create discount codes (coupons). (Coupons are only available on the $59/month or higher plans.)
Shopify also provides an automatically generated sitemap you can submit to search engines. Though not necessary for search engine inclusion, sitemaps tells search engine crawlers what pages to index, which gets your pages more quickly indexed. Sitemaps may also help your store rank higher on search engines.
Shopify has a built-in blogging tool. You can create one or more blogs for your online store. A company blog is one of the best ways to promote your business and get your store in front of search engine users. Using Shopify, you don't need to setup and maintain separate blogging software. The blogging tool is another way Shopify eliminates the need to deal with frustrating technical details.
What's bad:
Unfortunately, Shopify does not offer features standard on more mature ecommerce platforms like cross-selling/up-selling on the checkout page and sales (temporary store-wide or category-level temporary price reductions). There is also no way to issue a gift certificate.
5. Payment and Fulfillment (Shipping)
What's good:
Shopify has built-in support for a many payment processors including PayPal, Google Checkout, Authorize.net, and dozens of other payment gateways. You can also accept payments using money orders, COD, or bank deposits.
Shopify easily integrates with 3rd party fulfillment services like Amazon Services, Shipwire, Webgistix, and others. This is a feature I haven't seen on more popular ecommerce platforms like Yahoo Stores or osCommerce. This feature is especially useful to home-based retailers who may be using a drop shipping supplier.
What's bad:
Parcel carrier integration is only in beta. That's the feature that lets you calculate real-time postage prices with USPS, UPS, FedEx, etc. Without this, you have to create a shipping charge ladder -- $10 for 10 lbs or less, $25 for 10.01 - 20 lbs, etc. Real-time postage calculation is a critical part of ecommerce, and it's good to see Shopify adding this feature.
You can't charge shipping based on number of items. You can have shipping rules based on the order's total price and/or total weight. But not based on the number of items sold. This makes the common "$5 first item, $1 each additional" shipping policy impossible to implement.
