What we learned after using Shopify for 12 months
Farmodels.com has grown to become one of Europe's major suppliers of collectable farm models. In this guest blog post, Sean from Farmodels.com shares his experience after using Shopify for 12 months.
In late 2014 we moved our online toy store over to the Shopify platform. Farmodels.com has grown to become one of the world's most popular destinations for farm model collectors. Since migrating to Shopify we've been allowed to focus on business expansion while Shopify runs in the background.
Shopify is Easy
Easy is a generic term to describe such a wonderful service but it really is the best word to describe life with Shopify. Shopify is super simple to use. When you receive the sale notification in the top left-hand corner of your phone it simply makes selling online at absolute joy.
The mobile apps allow you to manage your store, product availability, prices and customer communication in one simple easy to use app. The Android application is a little featureless but I’m sure the folks at Shopify are working on that.
When you want to do some heavy lifting, such as major store changes and content addition, the full admin dashboard is always available.
Shopify Themes Rock
Another major advantage of Shopify is the theme store. With hundreds of pre-built designs, all tastes and preferences are catered for. Our store is built using one of the most popular themes in the Shopify theme store. The Retina theme by Out of the Sandbox is a super cool, highly converting mobile responsive theme that renders beautifully on all device types.
We now export to Australia & beyond
If you asked us 12 months ago what our goal was with farmodels.com, it would have been centered around selling locally, not over-charging our customers and building up happy repeat customers :). We were focused on customer service and keeping the quality of product images high on the site - general house-keeping tasks associated when building a successful store.
In fact, our first order on the Shopify platform was to the UK!! Roll on 12 months and we would never have thought we’d have shipped product as far as Australia, across to Canada and all over Europe. The Shopify platform, its mobile applications, theme store and apps store applications and platform support our store 24/7 allowing us to focus on expansion and store improvement. Knowing Shopify is always working means we can focus on our business and manage it from our phones.
Shopify support is cool
Who'd have thought customer service could be described as cool? We didn't either but the gurus at Shopify are a dream to work with. They know their product, understand customer service, appreciate the life of an entrepreneur, are ultra professional and understand e-commerce. If they don't have the answer they'll get it. Access by phone and chat makes them accessible 24/7.
The first 12 months using Shopify have been rewarding, fun and of course hard work. We’ve seen our business grow, and watched how Shopify has developed, succeeded and continued to make commerce easy.
Sean - Farmodels.com
