Shopify hosts millions of e-commerce websites, and helps small businesses sell online. How can shoppers shop on Shopify stores? With the right tools, it’s easy to discover new shops and support small businesses.
These are the three best ways to search for items and shop 🛒 on Shopify stores.
About Shopify
Shopify is the Canadian based e-commerce platform that has been growing like crazy. Often referred to as a competitor to Amazon, you might find yourself thinking that you would like to check out the Shopify experience to see what it’s all about. Or maybe you are looking for an alternative to Amazon and would like to use your shopping dollars to vote for the little guy. See Amazon and the off-shoring of American Buisinesses for a deeper dive about why we think this is important.
Shopify is a not a marketplace (like Amazon or Rakuten)…. It isn’t a website that you land on and start searching for 👠”red shoes” 👟 or “cbd oil” or “Italian pasta” 🍝 or “Rolex watch” ⌚ and see search results of items for sale.
Shopify is a platform. It is a tech company that has created a website builder to allow shops, manufacturers and merchants to easily build a very functional, very beautiful website to sell their items online directly to the consumer. Shopify is what allows small business owners and huge brands alike to easily get online to sell you their goods.
Because Shopify makes it easy to build a website for e-commerce, more than 1.7 million businesses (as of 2020 according to Backlinko) have been using the Shopify platform to establish their e-commerce presence or make their transitions from brick-and-mortar only, to also offering their items for sale online in an effort to compete with online marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart. But because Shopify isn’t a marketplace like Amazon or Walmart or Rakuten, being able to search 🔎 for items and compare the offerings from many Shopify hosted stores hasn’t been easy…. Until now.
🔎 Search Shopify stores with Vendazzo
Vendazzo is a shopping search engine that allows shoppers to search for anything that they are looking to purchase, and get results from tens-of-thousands of Shopify shops. If you want to shop from smaller, independent retailers, or direct from the brand or manufacturer, we can help you do that.
We currently index around 100 million items, so there’s a good chance that we can help you find what you’re looking for.
Once you have found what you are shopping for on Vendazzo, with a single click you are taken to the independent Shopify store where you add the item to your cart, complete the sale, and they look after you as a valued customer.
What can I buy from Shopify Stores?
In the chart below, you can see just how many different items are available through Shopify’s millions of vendors. This chart is a per category count of the items currently indexed by Vendazzo’s list of approximately 140,000 Shopify stores. Small businesses selling through the Shopify platform bring you a huge variety of items to search and shop.
If you would like to browse from a sample of the millions of Shopify stores, check out our directory of shops.
Shop Local – Online
Vendazzo helps you to search for items from shops close to you. Using the location filter, you can search for items sold in your city. Don’t see something close by? Widen your search to the state level and see if there’s a retailer in your state or province that has what you’re looking for. Still don’t see what you’re looking for? Remove the search radius altogether and search every item in the index.
Vendazzo is working hard to help shoppers discover online stores from across America, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand to be discovered by caring customers like you. With such a large index of shops from each of these countries we can help connect you with stores near you that have what you are looking for. In this way, we are doing what we can to support local economies and support local communities.
One of the biggest challenges for a small e-commerce business is the process of discovery. Getting noticed on the internet for the items that you sell can be exceptionally difficult for small businesses. In order for a shop to have their products discovered by potential customers they often rely on paid advertising on platforms like Facebook or through the Google Ad Network. This type of advertising comes at a direct cost, and doesn’t always turn into a sale for the shop. Vendazzo was built to help these stores reach new customers without the high cost and expertise required to navigate marketing tools like Facebook advertising and other ad networks.
Filters are your friend 🙋🏿♀️
In order to get the best results out of your shopping searches, use the filter button to select the desired currency, location, price filters, and category of product. These filters will help you get the best results from your search, and allow you to start local, and move further out so that you can try to support local small businesses first.
Shopify’s Shop App
Of course, Vendazzo isn’t the only way to search and shop from Shopify stores. You can also support small businesses by using Shopify’s own Shop App. This is Shopify’s purpose built, in-house designed effort to help drive traffic to the businesses hosted on their platform.
With the ability to search for items, and browse through curated lists, the Shop App is a quickly evolving solution for shopping from Shopify stores.
Like and favourite items for later, and browse items from your favourite shops.
Shop App also helps you keep track of your e-commerce purchases and helps you track your items shipping progress.
Google Shopping
In mid 2021 Google and Shopify announced entering into a partnership that would allow Shopify stores to have their items listed into Google Shopping’s index of items.
This is done at the store level, where Shopify store owners that would like to participate begin their partnership by installing the Google channel plugin to their site.
So far, thousands of shops have installed the Google channel plugin, with over 5,000 reviews on the plugin’s webpage. While it isn’t known how many Shopify shops have installed the Google channel plugin, and are listing their items through Google’s broad reach, we know that given the number of reviews for the plugin, the total number of installs is likely to be in the thousands of shops.
Shopify released a slick video on their YouTube channel highlighting the benefits to the shop owner of integrating with the Google shopping channel. You can view that video below.
The benefit to the shop owner is that they achieve a tight integration with Google Shopping, and that allows them to not only show up in search returns through the Google Shopping search engine, but also makes it easier for the shop to advertise their products through Googles universe of product placement ads. Through Google’s powerful ad placement network, Shopify stores are able to leverage one-click shopping and reach millions of new eye-balls through pay-per-click advertising with Google.
The benefit to the shopper is that you are introduced to new products through the ads in your digital life. It also means that thousands of products are searchable at your fingertips through Google Shopping’s search engine.
Conclusion
Even though Shopify isn’t a marketplace website like Amazon, Walmart or Rakuten, you can still find almost everything you could want from the millions of businesses hosting shops with them. You just have to know where to look, and have the tools to help you out 🤜 🤛🏽.
When you shop at Shopify stores, there’s a good chance that you are supporting a small business. With the right tools you can even shop locally online. Vendazzo is working hard to give you a hand in supporting small businesses directly by helping you find what they are selling online.
This was the most informative information online regarding Shopify.
I was been debating about a Shopify store to sell a service.
Thought it best to 1st check out how easy it would be for prospective customers to find it. Chances are, they likely won’t.
Thank you for this.
I learned a lot, and will certainly check out the Vendazzo website.
Hey Ellen,
Thanks for taking the time to add to the conversation. While getting started with a Shopify store can be intimidating, I do believe that it can be worth the effort.
Site’s like ours are working to help small businesses be discovered so that they can more easily compete.
Thanks again
daniel