Is Shopify a Viable Option In Australia? Find The Answer Here…

Unlike the days when Amazon made its first baby steps, starting an eCommerce business today, is so easy.

It also makes sense to have at least an online store for your business, especially if you already have a physical brick-and-mortar retail store.

Like everywhere else, the Australian market also witnessed a seismic shift toward eCommerce and digital payments.  According to market research, this shift helped many small companies compensate for their loss due to the pandemic.

Therefore, starting an online business in Australia is an impressive idea today.

Platforms like Shopify makes it easier to do this. However, there is still a question you’d want to ask: is Shopify a viable option in Australia?

Here, we have discussed everything you should know about starting an online business in Australia using the Shopify platform.

You’d get to know the advantages, disadvantages, and legal aspects of how you should use the said eCommerce platform.

What is Shopify?

Shopify is primarily an eCommerce platform that makes it easy to create online stores and sell their products. As opposed to creating an online store from scratch, starting a Shopify online store doesn’t require coding knowledge or technical expertise. 

Although it began as an online-only platform, Shopify has spread its coverage into brick-and-mortar stores, especially helping them create a hybrid commerce environment.

Worldwide, thousands of small, medium and large businesses use Shopify to manage their online stores. It’s also worth noting that Shopify works with not only physical products that you drop-ship but also digital products, services, memberships, ticketed events, classes, and rentals.

Long story short, Shopify can help you set up the perfect online store regardless of what you want to sell. It can also assist you in managing the online store with excellent control.

Integration with drop-shipping services, order fulfilment tracking, customer profiles, and email templates makes Shopify a capable solution. More importantly, you don’t need a third-party payment gateway when you have Shopify. 

It all happens in a single suite.

Instead of paying for multiple services like domain name, web hosting, payment gateway, and the CMS, you can pay a simple subscription fee. This fee will cover everything you need to keep the online/hybrid store on the right track.

As you can guess, this multinational company makes it easy to scale your business just as you gradually grow.

Dropshirt has an Integration for Shopify. A place to connect the products in your Shopify store to our print-on-demand service. When a customer orders connected products from your store. We offer an easy ‘click to order’ fulfilment button. Create an account here.

How Big Is Shopify in Australia?

Understanding the potential space in Australia, Shopify expanded to the region years ago.

It’s currently one of the popular choices of those who want to create an online store and move their business online. Yet, it’s essential to know more about Shopify Australia before you commit to its services.

The official website of Shopify Australia doesn’t tell us how many people use the eCommerce platform, but the numbers are in the thousands. We checked the statistics provided by the website Built With, which helps us detect the CMS/platform that a website is running on. According to these records, 40,000+ online stores use Shopify in Australia. 

While this isn’t an official figure, it gives us a good idea about how famous and widely-used the platform is.

Something you can find on the official website is some success stories, though. These are features of businesses that went online using Shopify and had massive success.

Some of the brands include Tokyobike, Brooklyn Museum, and MESO Goods. A simple Google search would also tell you about the Australian online stores that had skyrocketed their profits/reach through Shopify.

Services from Shopify Australia

Let’s now look at what Shopify Australia offers. You can find the following services on the Shopify Australia platform.

• Online Store: This service lets you create a custom online store that can sell products/services online. You can choose between 70+ themes and use the drag-and-drop site builder for further changes in the design. Shopify also offers support for inventory management, payment tracking, custom domain names, and plenty of integration options.
• Point of Sale: This service will allow you to digitise the in-person selling experience at your store. You can rely on the powerful yet easy-to-use software from the platform and manage everything via the unified dashboard. People go for a combination of Online Store and Point of Sale so that they get to bring the best of both worlds.
• Buy Buttons: This is a more portable way to sell things online. Instead of creating an entire site, you can place a Shopify Buy Button on your sites powered by platforms like WordPress and Squarespace. These buttons are designed for a mobile-friendly experience and offer a secure checkout process for everyone.

Shopify also lets you market your business through channels like Email Marketing, Shopify Ping, Google, and Facebook Ads. As we said earlier, you can control everything from a single dashboard, which is convenient.

Dropshirt has an Integration for Shopify. A place to connect the products in your Shopify store to our print-on-demand service. When a customer orders connected products from your store. We offer an easy ‘click to order’ fulfilment button. Create an account here.

How Much Does Shopify Australia Cost?

Get 14 Days Free to Try it Yourself

As we mentioned earlier, Shopify is a subscription-based platform. You need to pay a specific monthly fee to avail the features we have discussed above. The Shopify pricing plans for Australia are as follows.

Depending on the features you need and how much you can spend, Shopify lets you choose between three plans: Basic Shopify, Shopify, and Advanced Shopify.

1. Basic Shopify

It is the basic plan of Shopify, and it costs $29(USD) per month. With this plan, you can create online stores that have unlimited products and two staff accounts.

You also get support for features like free SSL certificates, discount codes, gift cards, 24*7 support, print shipping labels, fraud analysis, and the ability to accept up to 133 currencies. As for the fees, you have to pay 1.75% + 30 cents AUD for Australian credit card payments and 2.9% + 30 cents AUD for international/Amex credit cards.

2. Shopify

This plan adds more features and costs $79(USD) per month. For instance, you can now access professional reports and manual foreign exchange rates. You can also sell products in up to 2 languages instead of one.

You can also create country-specific domains to boost the international SEO of the online store. You also get some discounts on payment processing. You can pay only 1.6% + 30 cents AUD for Australian credit cards and 2.8% + 30 cents AUD for international/Amex credit cards.

3. Advanced Shopify

It is the most expensive plan, priced at $299(USD) per month. Making it worth your while, this plan gives you access to up to 15 staff accounts, an advanced report builder, third-party calculated shipping rates, and support for up to 5 different languages.

You can also save in terms of Shopify payments since you pay only 1.4% + 30 cents AUD for Australian credit cards and 2.7% + 30 cents AUD for International/Amex credit cards.

Shopify charges 2.0%, 1.0%, and 0.5% as an additional fee when using payment providers other than Shopify.

You may want to keep that in mind if you’re going to hook up the Shopify online site with a third-party payment gateway. Similarly, all three plans offer you up to 33.6% shipping discounts while using Sendle.

PS: We don’t offer Sendle for products that we drop ship. We use Australia Post to ship products integrated through our print-on-demand service.

Also, note that these rates are for the Online Store service from Shopify. You may have to spend extra money if you want to get compatible hardware to extend Shopify to your brick-and-mortar store. You may have to handle additional processing fees as well.

Dropshirt has an Integration for Shopify. A place to connect the products in your Shopify store to our print-on-demand service. When a customer orders connected products from your store. We offer an easy ‘click to order’ fulfilment button. Create an account here.

Advantages of Shopify

Let’s look at the noticeable advantages of using Shopify to run your online store.

• Easy to Use

Setting up your online store and taking care of it is incredibly easy with Shopify. You don’t need any technical knowledge or coding experience. Instead, you can use the setup wizard and the drag-and-drop interface to create your store.

Once you have added the products to the inventory, management is like a breeze. There is even an option to do it using your Android or iOS smartphone. Therefore, no matter how big or small your online business is, ease of use a definite advantage of Shopify.

• Well-Optimised

Because Shopify takes a balanced approach in every sector, you can maintain a well-optimised online store without much strain. For instance, the online store is 100% mobile-friendly and performs well in SEO.

Simply setting up the site would give your business a boost you would need to pay for other platforms. We should also consider that websites using Shopify have better loading speeds when compared to many other CMSs.

• It’s Comprehensive

The services offered by Shopify are comprehensive enough to power your online business. From inventory management to revenue analysis, you can handle everything from a single dashboard.

As we said, you can skip paying different fees to host, CMS, and domain and pay a single subscription fee. This structure makes it easy for everyone to shift to an online store with minimal effort. You can also link in-person sales options to the Shopify account.

• It’s Scalable

When you build an online store using Shopify, you don’t have to worry about bandwidth, hosting fees, or any other technical aspect. Instead, you can get sufficient resources as your business keeps growing.

It means you can focus on things that improve your business, such as marketing, customer service, and tech support. Meanwhile, the Shopify eCommerce platform can scale itself according to the needs. And, as we have shown, you can always upgrade to a better plan when you feel like it.

• Innovative

It’s worth noting that the Shopify team keeps adding innovative features to the package. These features can make things easier for someone new to the online commerce business. For instance, let’s say you like to start a t-shirt drop-shipping service.

Shopify features like abandoned cart saving and email marketing can help you get the best output from the business idea. We should also appreciate how customisable Shopify features are. If you are from Australia, Shopify can customise the options as per your laws and regulations.

• Integrations

Shopify allows you to integrate your online store with several apps and services. More than 3000 apps are available on the Shopify app store. They can help you with different needs like store design, reporting, marketing, finances, shipping, inventory management, finance management, and security.

While many plugins are paid and require subscriptions, they can improve the eCommerce experience by a long shot. You can always find plugins that offer services specific to your country.

As you can see, these advantages contribute to making Shopify the best platform to build virtually any kind of online store. 

Dropshirt has an Integration for Shopify. A place to connect the products in your Shopify store to our print-on-demand service. When a customer orders connected products from your store. We offer an easy ‘click to order’ fulfilment button. Create an account here.

Disadvantages of Shopify

Since Shopify isn’t perfect, you should know about its disadvantages before you jump in.

• Pricing

Pricing would be one of your major concerns while choosing Shopify over a custom-made online store builder for your business. As we have discussed, the basic plan of Shopify would cost you $29 per month, which isn’t a small amount.

The bigger problem is that this isn’t an all-inclusive charge. For every transaction done via Shopify Payments, you will have to pay a commission of between 2.9% to 1.4% + 30 cents AUD. Unless you make a considerable amount of money from the store, this isn’t an amount you can quickly negate.

It is also worth noting that the said commissions are available for payments via Shopify. If you want to use a third-party payment gateway like PayPal or Google Pay, you have to pay 2% of all transactions as a fee to Shopify.

Once again, unless you have a huge amount of payment coming through the site, this is an amount you can’t ignore. While there are considerable discounts as you move to the advanced plans, it also depends on whether you want to pay $299 per month for your online store.

• Customisability

We don’t want to sound contradictory, but there is an end to how customisable Shopify websites are. While you have options for some level of scaling, you will have to stop after a point.

For instance, you may find that the 70+ themes on the Shopify library aren’t enough for the online storefront that you imagine. Because it’s a balanced service, Shopify doesn’t allow code-based editing. Sure, you can place the payment button on an external website, but that’s it.

Therefore, if you want the online storefront to reflect your brand and vision, you may find a dead-end with Shopify. Until that point, however, you are good to go.

In short, the advantages of Shopify mostly deal with how you are forced to pay too much for the advanced features of the platform.

Get Help Setting Up Shopify For Dropshipping

Wrapping Up

In the end, Shopify seems to be a viable option in Australia, especially for those who are getting started.

Its no-hassle setup and powerful integrations can help virtually anyone create their eCommerce store within a few minutes. While there are certain disadvantages, such as the relatively high subscription fees, you can compensate for them through the ease of use and scalability of the platform.

As long as you keep track of the legal aspects, the whole path of a Shopify-powered eCommerce store is super-smooth.