Shopify is a web application that allows you to create your own online store. It provides you with a wide range of templates that can be customized to meet individual users’ branding requirements, and it allows either physical or digital goods to be sold.

One of the main ideas behind Shopify is that users without much in the way of technical or design skills can create a store without the involvement of a design agency or web developer; however, people who are familiar with HTML and CSS will be pleased to discover that Shopify allows you to edit both, giving you a lot of control over the design of templates.

Because Shopify is a hosted solution, you don’t need to worry about buying web hosting or installing software anywhere; the idea is that pretty much everything you need to build and run your store happens ‘out of the box.’

That said, you can customise a Shopify store to meet more individual requirements through the addition of apps — more on which later — or using custom code.

Shopify is a software as a service (‘Saas’) tool – this means that you don’t own it but rather pay a monthly fee to use it. As long as you have access to a web browser and the internet, you can manage your store from anywhere.