Laurent
Cortés

“In my opinion, Shopify is first and foremost the opportunity to put a store online in a very short time, with clear and extremely inexpensive pricing. Customers can also simply manage their content, and even create their own e-shop without any technical knowledge. The greatest advantage of this solution, when you want to launch a product or get started in e-commerce, lies in the fact that you can sell quickly at low cost. You can then use the budget initially earmarked for website development for communication and marketing to promote your site to the full, thus reversing the distribution of costs (20% for the online platform and 80% for digital campaigns). This is all the more important as competition in today's online retail sector is increasingly fierce - particularly with the Covid crisis, which has seen a proliferation of e-shops of all kinds - and it's not easy to stand out from the crowd. 

In Switzerland, people often want their e-shops to be tailor-made and polished, whereas after all, everything in this field has been standardized for years. The end customer, in 90% of cases, doesn't necessarily need an immersive, “wow” platform, but an efficient navigation that doesn't lose him. This online sales process has been democratized by giants such as Zalando and Amazon, and users are now used to it. No need to reinvent the wheel.

One of Shopify's key strengths is an integration system optimized for dropshipping. You sell what you want overnight, without stock. It's important to realize, however, that the message conveyed by this process, which encourages easy consumption, is not really in tune with the environmental crisis in which we are now immersed... 

"Shopify makes it possible to start selling effectively on a budget of less than CHF 5,000."

For our customers, who are mainly SMEs, Shopify represents the opportunity to start selling effectively for a budget of less than CHF 5,000, whereas before they needed a budget of CHF 20,000 for basic open source solutions. That's a 4-fold reduction in the cost of launching an e-shop!

As with everything, there's a downside: when you launch an e-shop with this type of solution, you're selling your soul to the devil. Your data is stored beyond your reach, it doesn't really belong to you, and you're at the mercy of their policies, particularly in terms of pricing. They don't ask you what you think: if prices go up, you have to go along to keep your place with them. So, this is a viable solution for getting into e-commerce at a lower cost, but if things turn around for you within 5 years, the ideal solution would be to develop your own platform, with your data in Switzerland, and have control over them.

Several parameters will therefore come into play when choosing Shopify: price versus data integrity, trust in the institution, etc... It will depend in particular on the positioning and mindset of the customer.”