Easy eCommerce with Shopify; Hosted Online Store Solution

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Introducing Shopify, A Hosted eCommerce Solution

I just found out about a cool new ecommerce solution called Shopify. The site is a beautifully designed web 2.0, Ruby on Rails hosted ecommerce site. According to the few reviews that I found about the site, setup was extremely quick and easy.

The site is free to use, and you are only charged a 3% commission once a sale is complete. This can drop down to 2% if you sell over $10,000 in goods. Users can use Paypal or a merchant account to handle payment and everything from security to maintenance is handled by the Shopify team.

From what I saw, all of the ecommerce shopping sites created with shopify look incredible. They are attractive and easy to navigate. Other key features that caught my eye were: timeline based order tracking and the ability to track orders through an RSS feed.

The biggest problem I see is that it is a hosted solution. In its current form, I would have no way to set up a shop on my server using Shopify. I’d have to send all my traffic to their site (my subdomain) if I used them. This presents a problem for me.

It looks like I’ll be passing on Shopify, and another hosted solution I found called RightCart, but if you don’t care if you host your own shop, I think it is certainly worth a look.

Here are a few other reviews of the site:
TechCrunch: Shopify was worth the wait
CNet: Shopify makes quick work of setting up shop

Sample Shopify Website:
Conrad’s Coffee Company