3 Reasons to Choose Shopify as Your Skincare Business Platform

As a seasoned handmade skincare business owner, there is almost nothing I love more than talking about e-commerce platforms, how they work, and which one is best for a given individual.

I have hosted my businesses on Wix, Woocommerce, Shopify, Squarespace, Etsy, and a variety of other small marketplaces. I can say with solid experience that if you are READY to dive into making a stellar website all of your own but are SHORT on tech skills and TIME is your most precious resource, Shopify has your name all over it!

In this post, I’ll cover the extreme ease of setting up on Shopify, how it saves the busy skincare entrepreneur TONS of time with its integrations, and the solid metrics behind Shopify’s checkout reputation.

Get ready to take action when you discover that Shopify may be the answer for YOU and YOUR skincare business!

Why Choose Shopify As Your Skincare Business Platform Skin Social Image

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Shopify’s Simple Setup and Maintenance

If the idea of having to set up your own skincare business website has you pausing because tech is NOT your thing, take a deep breath.

There is no e-commerce site that is easier to set up than Shopify, and the following seven points will ease your mind and squash your overwhelm:

Intuitive Interface

Shopify’s user-friendly interface makes setting up your online store a breeze, even for beginners.

While any new tool or platform takes getting used to, the acquaintance period before feeling comfy on Shopify is incredibly minimal.

No Coding Required

You don’t need any coding knowledge to get started with Shopify. Whoop whoop!

It has a ‘drag-and-drop’ structure that allows you to customize your skin care site without needing to know any fancy computer skills or programming language.

Pre-designed Themes

A theme is like a fancy outfit for a website. It’s a pre-designed style that makes your website look unique and organized. Just like how you choose clothes to match your style, you pick a theme to match your website’s vibe.

Themes include things like colors, layouts, fonts, and other design elements that give your website its branded look and feel (and yes, of course you can change themes up with your own color palette and fonts).

While it’s tempting to spend money on a theme (the previews make them OH so enticing!), stick to a free one for your skin care business, especially at the beginning.

Shopify’s on-the-house themes are gorgeous and this will free up money in your budget for other startup necessities.

Check out some of Shopify’s Themes here!

App Store

After you pick your favorite Shopify theme for your skincare business, you can also add apps to your website to make it even more unique and powerful.

These apps can do all sorts of things, like showcase customer reviews, add an Instagram carousel to the footer of your site, enable the selling of digital products or subscription products, etc. They’re like tiny tools that you can use to make your online shop even better.

Shopify’s extensive app store offers hundreds of plugins and integrations to enhance your store’s functionality, some free and some paid.

Seamless Payment Integration

Easily integrate various payment gateways like PayPal, Stripe, and more, allowing you to accept payments from customers worldwide.

Mobile Optimization

The majority of people who read *this* website are using a desktop or laptop to view (because you’re likely in work mode), but most people who shop for skincare, fashion, or home goods are now doing so on their phones.

With mobile commerce on the rise, Shopify ensures that your store is fully optimized for mobile devices, providing a seamless shopping experience for customers on the go.

(If you’ve ever tried to design a website before only to find out that you have to design ONE version for desktop users and a completely DIFFERENT version for mobile users, you will understand how POWERFUL and TIME-saving this feature is!)

Comprehensive Support

Shopify offers 24/7 customer support via live chat, email, and phone, ensuring that help is always available whenever you need it during the setup process.

Shopify’s Integrated Time-Saving Tools

I know what it’s like to run a business solo. YOU know what it’s like to run a business solo.

Anytime we can find a tool that does more than just ONE thing, it’s a jackpot that means more time and money saved.

When I first started selling with Shopify (way back in 2015!), you needed additional services for communicating with your customers, setting up email marketing, and gathering names for your newsletters.

No longer.

Shopify continues to add what e-commerce business owners need and is ALWAYS sprinting ahead to give us features like AI chat boxes, customer opt-in forms, and automated emails.

All are included in our monthly (or annual) fee – no extra payments for these must-have e-comm features:

Shopify Inbox

Thanks to the power of Shopify and AI, you can set up an Inbox (chatbox) to cut WAY down on the number of customer emails you receive asking about order tracking, return policies, ingredient guides, storage recommendations, and more.

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This tool automatically responds to your customers’ questions WITHOUT you having to be online 🤯.

Shopify Forms

If you’ve ever shopped online, you know alllll about opt-in forms, whether you know it or not!

These forms are the pop-ups that appear when you’re on someone’s website that asks for your name and email in exchange for a coupon, a free download, a webinar masterclass, and more.

This is the legal way to gather someone’s email address for sending marketing to their inbox and is a 100% absolutely necessary tool for any successful online business.

Shopify makes this insanely easy, without the need for other email service providers (which, again, hasn’t always been the case)!

Shopify Email and Automations

Once you gather an email address from the Shopify Forms discussed above, you are free to send that individual marketing messages and branded newsletters.

If you have ONLY marketed through social media before, prepare to be blown away by your conversion rates through email marketing!

99% of people check their email every day, and over 50% of people buy from a marketing email at least once a month.

Shopify offers marketing automations so that emails go out for new subscriber welcoming, abandoned carts, and promotional periods and holidays.

All emails are customizable for your skincare brand, and Shopify has tons of templates so that you don’t have to design your emails from scratch.

This is a HUGE benefit of selling on Shopify that will earn you back your monthly subscription fee (and way more) every single month.

The Power of Shopify Checkout

The Shopify checkout process is one of its strongest features, which is incredibly important in the skin care industry (especially for handmade businesses that aren’t known as a ‘big brand’…yet 😉).

There are four powerful things in Shopify’s favor that they have worked HARD to earn as feathers in their e-commerce hat:

Scale

Shopify currently powers ~10% of U.S. e-commerce, has processed over half a trillion dollars of GMV (gross merchandise value), and supported 561 million unique online shoppers in 2022 alone.

Consumer Trust

Have you ever gone to a website and decided not to complete a purchase because the checkout seemed sketchy or was a platform you didn’t know?

Same. The familiarity of a checkout process is absolutely everything when shopping online.

Because hundreds of millions of people use Shopify Checkout every year, the look, feel, and flow have become highly recognizable and immediately trusted.

Innovation

Shopify has more engineers working just on making checkout high-converting and high-performing than some other companies have working on their
entire commerce solution.

All of this manpower goes towards building a platform that is always on the cutting edge of checkout technology.

Best Converting Checkout

Shopify partnered with the ‘Big Three’ global management consulting companies and asked them to study the checkouts of all major commerce platforms on the planet.

The result? Shopify’s overall conversion rate outpaces the competition by up to 36% and by an average of 15%.

This metric is no small potatoes.

With an abandoned cart rate at an average of 75.6% (which is highest in fashion and retail, which is what skincare is classified as), Shopify’s conversion rate of up to 36% is incredibly impressive, and very much due to: