Is Shopify Still the Best Ecommerce Platform to Use in 2024?
I'm looking for...
You’ve probably heard of Shopify as the best eCommerce platform. But, maybe you are in doubt whether it is the same scenario in 2024, and whether is still that worthy. Or, maybe you’ve heard about Shopify fall this year? 🤔
And yes, you are right! To start, it’s a smart move to wonder and start digging for your answer, and we will provide you with a detailed review about whether Shopify is still the best eCommerce platform to use in 2024, or not.
However, there are plenty of eCommerce platforms out there that are excellent replacements for Shopify and are performing very well. Some of them are very beginner-friendly, just like Sell the Trend.
Create Your Online Store in just 5 Minutes – For Free
Pick your niche, our AI builds your store, add 10 winning products and we teach you how start selling today. Start picking your niche
Top Ecommerce Platforms in 2024
An eCommerce platform is a MUST for your dropshipping business since it makes it simple and reasonable to create an online store with the features and functions you require to generate traffic, leads, and sales.
However, there are various platforms you can choose from nowadays, and all of them are different depending on price, features, ease of use, scalability, and more.
Hence, the best eCommerce platforms popping up in 2024 are:
- Shopify – Best overall
- Sell the trend – Best overall, Best product research tool
- BigCommerce – Best overall, Runner-Up
- Wix – Best User-Experience
- Volusion – Best budget solution
- Weebly – Best free platform
- Squarespace – Best for Creatives
- WooCommerce – Best for WordPress Sites
📝 Note: Explore the Best WooCommerce Plugins for Dropshipping.
As you can see, not everything is around Shopify, and all of these eCommerce platforms hold some TOP positions of their best.
💡 Tip: Read about Shopify vs. Custom Store for Dropshipping – What’s Better & Why?
Is Shopify Still Worth It?
As we all know Shopify is one of the best platforms. But, we should reconsider our thoughts and overview it, since there are a few falls in 2024.
What is Shopify?
Shopify is an all-in-one eCommerce platform that is simple to set up and manage, making it an excellent alternative for businesses with limited in-house technical help.
Users may sell items through an online shop, social networking platforms like Facebook and Instagram, online marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay, and in-person using Shopify’s point-of-sale (POS) system.
It provides users with a monthly subscription with access to an admin panel, where you can enter your store info, add products, and process orders.
So, we will list a few steps to cover the question of how Shopify works:
- Step 1 – Start your free trial or some of the monthly subscriptions, click on “get started” and enter your email, password, and your store name.
- Step 2– Get to know your dashboard, which contains a few categories: Home, Orders, Products you manage, Customers, Analytics, Marketing, Discounts, Apps, Online store, and Settings.
- Step 3– Manage your orders, see your orders, create drafts of manual orders, and abandoned checkouts
- Step 4– Add products to your online store, Manage your products, inventory, transfers, collections, and gift cards.
- Step 5– Manage customers, add new customers, import existing customers, manage their details, and review their purchase history
- Step 6: Discover analytics of your online store, review analytics reports, create custom reports, and see a live view of your store
- Step 7: Create and manage your marketing campaigns, marketing automation, etc.
- Step 8: Create discounts and discount code
- Step 9: Add apps to your online store for extra features
- Step 10: Customize your online store, choose a theme, set up navigation, create pages, manage your blog, and buy a domain.
- Step 11: Set up the back end of your eCommerce store, and learn about all the settings provided, like general, payment, checkout, shipping and delivery, taxes, navigation, sales channels, and more.
💡 Tip: Read about Shopify vs. Custom Store for Dropshipping – What’s Better & Why?
About Shopify Struggles…
Even though we know Shopify as the best eCommerce platform in 2024, it still has its falls.
Shopify can be short on some aspects, which as a dropshippier you should be aware of.
First, Shopify charges high transaction fees, which vary from 0.5% to 2%. However, users have the option to choose payments using Shopify Payments, so they can request that Shopify waive certain costs.
Next, although Shopify provides practically every essential feature, it lacks several advanced features that dropshipping businesses require. To obtain these advanced features, you must purchase add-ons. Add-ons can be expensive, and they can increase monthly subscription fees.
Furthermore, there are some content management issues, like duplicate content, duplicate page names, inability to change tag pages, forced URL structure, and limitations on page titles and meta descriptions.
The firm offers product subscriptions, but it also earns money through payment processing and currency conversion fees, implying that it is compensated in part by platform activity.
With recession worries and consumer budgets tightening – particularly on discretionary products such as those offered by e-commerce merchants, analysts expect Shopify will suffer from lower activity in the coming months.
👉 Learn How To Pause Or Cancel Shopify Subscription? [2024].
But, no worries, because there is a variety of Shopify alternatives for you! Let’s see.
Sell The Trends As One Of The Best Shopify Alternatives – Review
Are you looking for a fast, but best way to make money out of dropshipping and maintain your business? If you are, you probably have heard about Sell The Trend as one of the best product research tools.
Sell The Trend began as a single product research tool that assists dropshippers in finding popular items across many marketplaces.
It is well-known for its NEXUS AI-based product research tool, which automatically adds thousands of popular and trending goods to your dropshipping store.
However, today Sell The Trend evolved into a full-service dropshipping platform that handles everything from product research to competition analysis, Facebook and Instagram targeting, one-click order fulfillment, Ad tracking, and video ad production.
It also has a robust database that monitors what’s popular on Amazon, AliExpress, and Shopify retailers.
Sell The Trend may appear to be a simple data-fetching tool at first glance, but the benefits significantly outweigh those of other dropshipping platforms or programs.
It has shown itself as an incredibly fast, scalable, affordable, and beginner-friendly online platform.
👉 Learn How To Open and Manage Multiple Shopify Stores (Tips + Apps).
How does Sell The Trend work?
Sell The Trend offers you a variety of features that support your dropshipping business in everything from product research to integrating items into your store, modifying your store, negotiating with suppliers, and everything in between.
This online platform uses an advanced algorithm and searches for the most popular products on AliExpress and Amazon and analyzes sales data from high-performing Shopify sites.
Moreover, Sell The Trend Shop enables you to create your online shop in only 5 minutes. Their Dropshipping website builder allows you to create conversion-optimized shops in one click!
However, to explain how Sell The Trend works we might need to break down and explain all the features that Sell The Trend offers. So, let’s start!
Sell The Trend Review: Key Features
Sell The Trend claims to make your dropshipping business an “unstoppable profit-generating machine” while using its features:
1. NEXUS Product Research
The biggest and most amazing feature of Sell The Trend is NEXUS. At first sight, the quantity of data it can get for all of the listed goods in the library will surprise you. You can see information about products like:
- Total sales
- Selling price
- Product cost
- Profit margin
- Suppliers
- Product insights rating
- How many people ordered the item
- How many stores are selling the item
Furthermore, the NEXUS shows whether the product has high or low competition. It also gives insights into where the majority of customers come from.
While using the NEXUS explorer, you will have access to a variety of NEXUS sorting and filtering options, such as
- Niche
- Price
- Orders
- Content (video)
- Category
- US-based Dropshippers
- Top countries where most of the customers buy
Moreover, you can check out example product research using NEXUS here.
2. Product Explorer
Explorers accessible on Sell The Trend operate similarly to the NEXUS explorer. The product research tool includes the following explorers:
- AliExpress explorer
- Amazon explorer
- Shopify explorer
- CJDropshipping
AliExpress Explorer displays all of AliExpress’s hot products, new stars, and hidden gems. Moreover, you have numerous filter choices, such as price, order amount, positive comments, video, shipping info and methods, and so on.
Furthermore, when you apply filters and choose a product, you will have access to specific information about the product, such as its pricing, how many people purchased it from AliExpress, and so on.
Amazon Explorer can help you discover winning goods, new stars, and hidden gems on Amazon. But, unlike AliExpress Explorer, this one has few filters to search your products.
Shopify Explorer has a product explorer and a store explorer. It shows you which Shopify store sells the products, and gives you the ability to search products by product type, price, or published date.
CJDropshipping allows you to research products according to price, list amount, video available, date, reviews, categories, niches, etc. There’s a complete guide on how to use this tool here.
💡 Tip: Explore our list of the Best Niches for Dropshipping Stores.
While NEXUS is a strong product research tool, employing these explorers gives you access to all the popular items on AliExpress, Shopify shops, and Amazon.
3. Store Automation
Store Automation tool enables you to automatically set up high-converting product pages, and send shipment tracking codes to your customers.
With the store automation tool, Sell The Trend enables you :
- 1-Click push to Store – you can create high-converting product pages in a second.
- Automated product import – import automatically products from your Shopify, or WooCommerce store.
- Automated Order Fulfillment – helps you connect with many verified suppliers in the US and abroad, and fulfill orders automatically.
- Inventory Sync & Automated Tracking – keep inventory in sync with your supplier, and sends tracking information to consumers automatically for full shipment visibility.
Moreover, this tool provides you with the freedom for you to choose what should be done automatically, and what manually. Store automation tool brings you a lot of benefits, like:
- Increase customer retention
- Reduce store management
- Eliminate costly mistakes
4. Store Intelligence
This is a useful tool for spying on other Shopify dropshipping stores. Wondering how? Actually, it’s very simple!
You just need to enter the URL of a Shopify store and the Store intelligence tool obtains you relevant information such as the store’s product pricing, monthly visitors, monthly income, monthly orders, and top-selling goods.
The stores do not have to be in Sell The Trend’s database, which is a plus.
Moreover, Sell The Trend provides customers with very informative tutorials about how to use the Store automation tool.
💡 Tip: Discover How To Optimize Shopify Image Sizes In 2024 + Pro Tips
5. Supplier Database
Sell The Trend links you with about 1,200 verified and trusted suppliers in the United States and internationally, all of them are reviewed and evaluated based on shipment speed, product quality, and interaction.
By using their AI Supplier list, you will be able to price shop for the lowest price, shipping, and rating for any product in our 7 Million+ product database using our Supplier List.
They also provide you with:
- Inventory Management
- Fully automated shipping
- Supplier Rating system
Sell The Trend integrates with AliExpress and CJDropshipping.
👉 Read about Sellvia Review: How It Works and Is It Worth It In 2024?
6. Marketing Tools
Sell The Trend offers you a full set of marketing tools to help you in advertising your dropshipping business. It helps you reach the right audiences and deliver engaging messages that lead to sales.
Marketing tools you can find on their online platform are:
- Audience Builder
Facebook Audience Builder pinpoints the ideal audience for your unique product and boosts your advertising ROI. This marketing solution enables you to achieve more with less in terms of marketing budget.
They discover your prospective clients based on hobbies, online activities, and demographics, all for a low cost.
Furthermore, after they have selected your ideal campaign audience, you can transfer the custom audience data directly to your Facebook ad campaign setting.
That means you can go from having an automatically created audience to having an active campaign in a matter of seconds.
Sell The Trends provides you with full guidance on how to use their Facebook Audience Builder.
- Video Ads Creator
Video Ads Creator is a very easy-to-use tool. Simply insert the URL of your product to make your product video.
Next, select headlines, calls to action, animations, and music to create videos that result in purchases in only a few clicks.
Want to learn how to do it? Just click here.
- Engagement Rating Calculator
Influencer marketing is one of the most engaging marketing strategies, and Sell The Trend offers you an amazing tool for choosing an influencer you are interested in and get an instant rating.
Moreover, the engagement rating calculator shows you whether this specific influencer is worth the budget or not. You can search the influencers over Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter.
Sell The Trend gives you an informative tutorial about how to use the Engagement Rating Calculator.
7. Success Academy
With this feature Sell The Trend provides you with a course that learns you about basic and advanced techniques for your dropshipping business.
You can learn about store creation and setup, store business setup, adding products, influencer marketing, Facebook Ad Creation, Dropshipping store management, and many more!
Worth mentioning, that they also have a Youtube channel with various tutorials about dropshipping and usage of their online platform.
Sell The Trend Review: Pricing
Sell The Trend offers only one pricing plan, where you get all the features they have. However, they give you two payment options:
- Build Monthly – $35.97/month
- Build Yearly – $29.67/ month ( you get 2 months free)
Also, Sell The Trend offers a free trial.
Sell The Trend Review: Customer review
Sell The Trend shows excellent results on Trustpilot, having 4.7/5⭐️, where 94% of customers voted with 5 stars. Correspondingly, customers’ comments express positive and satisfactory experiences with this online platform.
💡 Tip: Check out Shopify vs Squarespace For Dropshipping – Which is Better in 2024.
Conclusion
As we all know, Shopify is one of the best eCommerce platforms of all time. As a matter of fact, while analyzing their performance in the past year, we can say that Shopify struggled with some issues, and is still dealing with them.
But, on the bright side of our story, various other eCommerce platforms can help you manage and sustain your dropshipping business.
👉 Learn How To Pause Or Cancel Shopify Subscription? [2024].
One of these platforms is Sell The Trend, rising from a product research tool to an all-in-one online platform for dropshipping success. This platform has shown itself as very scalable, affordable, and beginner-friendly!
In addition to this, we provided a detailed review of the Sell The Trend online platform and all its ways that help dropshipping businesses be successful!