What Is Shopify?

Shopify is the leading e-commerce platform for building, running, and growing an online store. It's the software that powers everything from a first-time entrepreneur's side hustle to some of the largest direct-to-consumer brands in the world - over four million active stores in more than 175 countries.

If you've bought something online in the last few years, there's a very good chance the store you bought from was built on Shopify. And if you're thinking about starting your own store, it's the platform most experts (including us) point to first.

The short version

Shopify is a hosted, subscription-based e-commerce platform. That means you pay a monthly fee and Shopify handles the hard parts - hosting, servers, security, payments, PCI compliance, uptime, updates - so you can focus on your products, your customers, and your brand.

You don't need to be a developer. You don't need to install anything on your computer. Your store is built and managed entirely through Shopify's admin dashboard in a web browser, and it's live the moment you're ready.

What Shopify gives you out of the box

Every Shopify plan includes the essentials you need to open an online store, including:

A storefront - a website with product pages, a homepage, collection pages, a cart, a checkout, and everything else customers expect.
A secure checkout - Shopify's checkout is one of the highest-converting on the internet, and it comes built in.
Payment processing - accept credit cards, digital wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay, Shop Pay), PayPal, and dozens of other methods.
Product and inventory management - a full backend for adding products, tracking stock, managing variants, and running promotions.
Order management - a single dashboard for viewing, processing, fulfilling, and refunding orders.
Customer accounts and marketing tools - email capture, abandoned cart recovery, discounts, gift cards, and more.
Analytics - clear reporting on sales, visitors, conversion rate, and traffic sources.
Mobile and multichannel selling - sell on your website, on social media (Instagram, TikTok, Facebook), on Google, and even in person with Shopify's point-of-sale.

Themes and customization

The look and feel of your store is controlled by a theme - a template that includes fonts, colors, layouts, and pre-built sections. Shopify includes several free themes (Dawn, Craft, Refresh, and others) and offers a large marketplace of paid themes designed by third-party developers.

Themes are edited through the visual Theme Editor - no code required. You can drag sections around, change images, tweak colors, and preview everything before you publish.

Where themes fall short is variety. Most themes ship with a handful of "sections" - a hero, a featured collection, an image-with-text block - and once you've used those, that's it. That's the gap Abra Sections fills. We create additional customizable sections that install directly into the Theme Editor, so you can build unique layouts without hiring a developer.

The App Store

Shopify's App Store extends your store with tens of thousands of third-party apps - email marketing, reviews, upsells, subscriptions, shipping labels, translation, inventory sync, loyalty programs, and just about anything else you can imagine.

Apps are powerful, but they can also add cost and slow your store down. We generally recommend starting lean, adding only the apps you actually need, and looking for lightweight solutions like sections before reaching for a subscription-based app.

Pricing at a glance

Shopify plans start with a modest monthly fee and scale up depending on the size of your business. All plans include hosting, checkout, and unlimited products. Higher tiers unlock better shipping rates, deeper analytics, and lower payment processing fees.

Every new store gets a free trial so you can build and test everything before you commit to a subscription.

Who Shopify is for

Shopify is designed to work for stores of every size and stage:

First-time founders selling their first product from a spare bedroom.
Growing brands that need reliable infrastructure without hiring a technical team.
Established retailers moving from a legacy platform to something faster and easier to maintain.
Wholesalers, subscription businesses, digital sellers, and service providers - Shopify has flexible tools for all of them.
Enterprise brands using Shopify Plus, the platform's high-volume tier.

Why we build for Shopify

We've been building websites since 2005 and working with Shopify specifically for over a decade. Of the many e-commerce platforms we've tested, Shopify consistently offers the best balance of ease of use, reliability, feature depth, and design flexibility.

It's a platform that lets small businesses focus on their business - not on servers, security patches, or how to process a credit card - and that's why we chose it as the home for Abra Sections.

Ready to try it?

Shopify offers a free trial with no credit card required to get started. If you're ready to open a store, start here. And when you're ready to make it look and feel truly your own, come back and browse our library of premium Shopify sections.