New experimental food shop built using Shopify

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

February 26, 2008 [3798 views]

I have been building a new ecommerce site http://www.marketquarter.com over the past few weeks to test out the new site building tools offered by Shopify.

It would be worth any students with ecommerce projects taking a look at both the finished site and at the tools with which they have been built.

The site is a partnership with a stall holder at Borough Market and sells French Food products such as foie gras.

Here is a breakdown of some of the key things I have discovered in my experimentation:

• Shopify is built using Ruby on Rails and is extremely elegant and easy to use.
• The shop building tools are very powerful allowing integration with a variety of payment (mainly US) and fulfillment partners.
• A shop can be built for free as long as it contains fewer than 10 products and until 5 orders have been taken through the site. Then you must upgrade to the next tier of membership which will cost around £13 per month.
• A site will have a shopify URL to start with such as http://marketquarter.myshopify.com but it is easy to point a new domain to this address
• I have used Google Checkout as the payment partner for this project. One advantage is that as long as I use Google Adwords there are no charges from Google for processing payment. It will be interesting to see how many sites start offering Google Checkout as a payment mechanism.
• Out of the box, Shopify provides a set of predesigned templates. These are fairly basic but they are fully editable. They have been developed in a templating language called Liquid which seems fairly easy to learn.
• The content management system behind Shopify is easy to use but I would have liked easier ways of importing and exporting product data. This was perhaps the largest job (apart from the photography) in the construction of the shop.
• The big challenge now is to market the site both using Google Adwords and by building inbound links.
• The site has by the way had its first order! For £13.90.

I will be using the site in my future teaching as it allows me to show the whole process.

 

  

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