The Lite version of Shopify is not the same as the Basic Plan. All Shopify members and subscribers start with the Basic plan, but the Lite plan is a smaller version of it.
The Basic plan costs $13 per month, while the Lite plan costs $9. With the Lite plan, you can only sell on social media. You won’t have your own online store.
Here, we’ll look at the Basic plan. Right off the bat, we’ll say that this is the better plan because it has more features than the Lite plan, even though the price difference is only $4 per month.
Here are some of the things that come with the Basic Plan.
Online store from Shopify
With this plan, you can build your online store and upload the products, their descriptions, and photos. You don’t have to know how to code in order to build an online store. You just have to pick a theme and replace the photos in that theme with your own.
Building a store is the same as making a page on a social media site. You can also add pages that you want, like your Shopping Policy, Terms and Conditions, Refund Policy, or even a blog section.
The online store already has a way to check out and a way to ship items. You can choose the type of payment gateway you want, such as PayPal, Stripe, 2Checkout, or others that are available in your country.
Lots of Products
Many online shopping platforms will only let you sell up to 50 items. You can add hundreds of products if you want to with Shopify Basic.
When you have a limited number of products, you can only show a small number of them. If you can only sell 10 products, you can only sell those 10 products. If you sell different models of cameras or other gadgets, you should only show a few of them in your store.
You have to upgrade and pay more if you want to show more.
You don’t have to pay more for Shopify. You can even make collections or categories, so that all of the products that belong to the same category will be on the same page.
Accounts of Staff
With this plan, you’ll have two staff accounts. Since you’re the owner, you won’t be one of them.
With the staff account, you can do more things at once in the admin panel. For example, while processing orders, one can work on adding new products or improving product descriptions.
When your employees have different goals every day, you can work faster, smarter, and more efficiently. This lets you focus on your customers’ needs and your marketing strategies.
24/7 Support
You can get in touch with Shopify support in three ways: by phone, by email, or by live chat. These help systems are available around the clock.
If you want, you can also use Shopify University. It’s a page full of articles that can help you set up your store or figure out how to deal with problems as you go.
Users say that the Shopify agents are helpful and know what they are doing based on the feedback they get. You don’t have to wait hours to hear back from them.
You can also use the community forums to learn from what other Shopify users know. You can ask a question there, and someone will answer it or give you a suggestion.
Sales Channels
With the Basic plan, you can sell to anyone who visits your online store. On your Facebook page, you can also sell things.
You can add Facebook, Amazon, Pinterest, and Facebook Messenger to your store. You can also make a “Buy Now” button or widget that you can use on other sites or sell on Instagram.
When you connect your Shopify store to these channels, all of the products in your store will also be shown on these channels.
You don’t have to put the products up twice. If you add a product to Shopify, it will show up on Amazon. If you take it off, it will also go away.
Discount Codes
The Shopify admin panel is where you can make discount codes. For instance, let’s say you want to offer a 10% discount in December.
You can make a code like DEC10 in the admin panel and then send it to your customers. In the admin panel, you can set up the billing section so that if a customer types DEC10 in a box, 10% will be taken off his total bill.
You can also choose when the code will work and when it won’t. After the date you choose, the code will automatically stop working.
You can also choose whether to use a percentage or a fixed amount when applying discount codes.
The SSL certificate is free
Secure Socket Layer is what SSL stands for. A website is safe because of this technical thing. Computers can talk to each other, and if your customer’s computer or anti-virus system sees a site that doesn’t have an SSL certificate, it will block access to that site.
That means you lost a sale. It won’t happen with Shopify because your site is automatically marked as safe. People will be able to get into your online store when anti-virus and firewall systems see this certification.
If you want to know if a site is safe and secure, look for “HTTPS” instead of just “HTTP” in the URL. This SSL is the same encryption technology that banks and other financial institutions use to keep security tight.
Fee for Transaction
The Basic plan has a 2% transaction fee. This means that Shopify will take 2% of the total amount of each sale. If you sold $100 in a single transaction, you would only get $98. Shopify will make money from the $2.
This is in addition to the fees you pay for the payment gateway you choose. For example, PayPal charges about 3% on average.
If a customer bought an item for $100, you would have to pay 5%, or $5, to both Shopify and PayPal.
You need to make sure that the prices you set for your products account for these two fees so that you still make a profit after the sale.
Making an order by hand
The term “manual order creation” means that the customer does not place the order online. For example, you may have talked to a friend and convinced him to buy, but he doesn’t want to go online or doesn’t have a credit card.
From the admin panel, you can make the order on your own. You need to put in the customer’s name, shipping address, tax, shipping rates, the items they want to buy, and any discounts that apply. This is also called a draft order.
This is great for orders that were placed over the phone, in person, or through chat or text. You can make an invoice, print it out, or email it. You can also use this to sell items that aren’t already on sale in your store at a huge discount.
This can also be used to manually re-enter an order if a mistake was made.
Summary
If you are just starting out with your online business, the Shopify Basic plan is the best option for you. It gives you everything you need to make a store, promote it, charge money for it, and sell it on other social media sites.
