Shopify is a hosted e-Commerce building platform for online stores and retail point-of-sale systems. Shopify offers online retailers a suite of services including payments, marketing, shipping and customer engagement tools to simplify the process of running an online store for small merchants.

Unlike e-commerce solutions developed in open-source (e.g. Prestashop or Magento), this system is entirely based on operation in SaaS mode: Which means that you don’t own a copy of the software, you cannot install Shopify on your server, but you pay a monthly fee to use it instead.

Shopify is completely cloud-based and hosted, which means you don’t have to worry about upgrading or maintaining software or web servers. This gives you the flexibility to access and run your business from anywhere with an internet connection.

Shopify is recommended for those who want an all-in-one eCommerce solution. You don’t need to be a designer or developer to use it: Just customize the look and feel of your store with the online store builder and themes, and then add features and functionality to your store with apps. If you need extra help, you can contact their support team.

Shopify is a CMS used to date by 2.1% of all websites, that is a content management system market share of 3.7%. (3rd CMS behind WordPress and Joomla). Shopify powers over 1,000,000 businesses worldwide

Pros:

• 70+ professional themes, 100 payment gateways,
• Sitemap.xml generated, Natural SEO,
• 14-day free trial, 24/7 support,
• You don’t have to worry about the technical aspects of maintaining your site,
• Shopify is responsible for the security of your website,
• etc.

Cons:

• You are always going to have to host your site on Shopify’s servers.