Shopify Marketplace
Last year, I reviewed Shopify, which allows non-techie users create a professional online shop in minutes. The company, Jaded Pixel, launched Shopify Marketplace to provides a global search of products from any participating Shopify shop.
Image: Shopify Marketplace search
Shopify Marketplace is a Web 2.0 style product search. It returns products from Shopify shops according to your keyword. It support common search engine queries, such as “quotes” and -“exclude terms”. Related tags, product type, and vendors are listed in sidebar. There is a slide bar allowing you to set the price range. I like it!
For Mac users, there is a Shopify Marketplace widget for your dashboard.
Promote in Shopify Marketplace
To get your products included in the Shopify Marketplace, you only need to login your shop administration site, goto Marketing tab and activate the “Access Shopify Marketplace” under Online Promotion. It is a free service.
No more free lunch?
Shopify improved a lot and added many features (read their blog), however, now it charge for monthly fee. The Basic account is $24 USD per month.
Anyway, it is worth to try out Shopify if you want to sell stuff online but know nothing about online shopping technology. Plus, now your shop gets more exposure with the launch of Shopify Marketplace.
Anyone use Shopify? Please share your experience.
We’ve been using shopify for a lot of our clients, and so far it’s worked out really well. The interface is not just easy for us to build sites in (their desktop app ‘Vision’ is awesome for this btw), but also really easy for our clients to use, which just isn’t the case for most out of the box shopping carts.
The new marketplace has huge potential as a marketing boost to the shop owners who participate in it, and we’ll be watching closely to see how well it gets put to use. Hopefully people will use and enjoy our little widget, too!
The pricing changes did throw a wrench into the works and I was seriously mad for a while, but things are smoothing out now. Losing the pricing without the monthly fee does hurt us a bit, but ultimately it’s still a good platform run by cool people.
Cheers,
Matt Beck
CouldBe Studios