PRECIOVS is now live ! I built my e-shop on my own in only two weeks. I’m pretty proud of it. It has a lot of useful features and integrates great tech. I’d like to outline the different tools/services/plugins I used to make it.

Shopify

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Shopify is like a Lego box. You get everything in it with a manual to build what’s on the box.If you want to do something else on your own go ahead there are many posts on Shopify’s forums and tutorials all over the Internet.

What I love about Shopify is that it comes right away with the most important feature nowadays : responsive design. The free themes are built mobile-first and the experience is great. The edition mode is quite simple and easy to use. Of course, as a lot of other tools, you need to understand a bit about how websites work to get the best out of it.

The admin pages are well designed with a quick access to the most important stuff :

  • A dashboard with some key metrics
  • An overview of all the orders
  • Access to products and inventory (with inventory tracking)
  • The list of my customers with all the details needed (number of orders, contacts, etc)
  • Reports
  • Management of the sales channel (Shopify can be directly integrated in your Facebook page)
  • Manage and edit all the automated communications sent to my customers
  • Direct integration with Mailchimp and Google Analytics

Shopify costs me each month 29$ and they take a fee on all sales I make and with that I get all those things listed above without any other cost whatsoever. Well if you want you can buy templates for about 180$ and also add apps (plugins in fact) to your webshop. Most of them are subscription-based and it can cost you a lot.

Smooch

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Smooch is a Canadian plugin that lets you integrate a chat on Shopify, or any website if you can code a bit. In addition to that, it adds other B2C channels such as Facebook Messenger to the Smooch chat to help you deal with all the communications in one place. It’s pretty easy to use and you can also program automated answers.

Sendcloud

Bpost supports other e-commerce platforms such as Prestashop with a custom and free plugin that imports orders from your shop and send notification emails to your customer (tracking code for example).  It doesn’t for Shopify. They do support an app made by eSign but you have to pay a monthly fee of 30€ just to use it.

Hopefully I came accross Sendcloud, a Dutch service, that has an app on Shopify that does everything eSign does, for free. The only diffrence is that you pay Sendcloud to send Bpost packages and not directly Bpost. And you know what? They are even cheaper than the prices Bpost offered me. Moreover, they let you use the services of DPD and DHL if you want other types of services.

Stripe

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Stripe is a newcomer in the payment business. It eases a lot the payments with credit cards. It’s included with Shopify and offers a really better user experience than Ogone or Paypal. It’s faster and more intuitive too.

Mollie

I was looking for payment solutions to accept Bancontact because it’s the most commonly used payment method here in Belgium. The main provider is Ogone but, just like Bpost, it doesn’t support Shopify unless you want to code a bit. I came across Mollie, also a Dutch provider just like Sendcloud, it integrates perfectly with Shopify and let’s you customize the payment window to look like your website. It’s really neat and it’s even cheaper than Ogone.