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The Shopify platform hosts more than 200,000 stores, making it one of the most popular commercial ecommerce systems on the market. In fact, compared to its direct competitors, it blows every other company out of the water. The Shopify brand started in 2006, and it’s grown quite a bit since then, evolving into a publicly traded company and joining forces with various other companies to make the integrations for your ecommerce website that much better.

And that’s just what makes Shopify special. Users receive a full website building suite, along with beautiful themes and tons of apps to expand their stores. Other platforms put a focus on developing a structure where all the features are packed into the actual software.

Although Shopify does have quite a few features in its system, many of them are in the form of apps, which makes it similar to WordPress, where you can turn your store into something as simple or complex as you want.

Keep reading to learn more about Shopify and the areas in which it excels and falls short.

Shopify Pricing

 

Shopify pricing is one of the easiest to work with, since it opens up options for just about everyone. If you’d like a small store, you don’t have to pay much, and if you need a large store, there’s a plan with the right features for you.

• Starter – Starting at $5 you receive a point of sale, Facebook selling, Shopify Buy button and 2.9% + 30¢ online credit card rates. This plan doesn’t include an online store (just the Buy button,) and you don’t get a blog.)
• Basic Shopify – For $29 you receive everything from the previous plan, 2.9% + 30¢ online credit card rates, Pinterest and Twitter selling and a blog.
• Shopify – For $79 you receive everything from the previous plan, 2.6% + 30¢ online credit card rates, gift cards, professional reports and abandoned cart recovery.
• Advanced Shopify – For $299 you receive everything from the previous plan, 2.4% + 30¢ online credit card rates, an advanced report builder and real-time carrier shipping.

All plans allow for unlimited products, premium support, fraud analysis, discount codes and unlimited file storage.

 

Shopify Design

The platform has a wide selection of themes, including over 116 paid solutions that all look great. In addition, the free theme count is at about 21. Although an FTP account is not offered, you can go into your account and modify the CSS and HTML to make your own customizations. Some of themes are too similar, but the sheer amount of themes shows that you should be able to find something for your industry. Also, they are modern and clean, making them some of the best on the market.

Shopify Frontend Features

 

A wonderful checkout system pushes people through your site quickly, and even the Lite plan lets you sell items through the Shopify Buy button. Some of the plans provide selling through Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter, and you can accept gift cards and discount codes. Most of the design is done through the backend, but a few real-time design features are included for dragging elements around.

Shopify Backend Features

Advanced users have the ability to customize code on the backend, and beginners have tools for customizing colors, module placements and logos. The dashboard looks similar to WordPress and some of the tabs include spots for payments, checkout, gift cards, general settings and notifications. When making a product you have settings for inserting a title and description, along with areas for media, shipping, vendors and product types.

Shopify Marketing

Alt tags, image file names and more are offered when setting up your Shopify SEO. When talking about promotions, newsletters and social media, Shopify lacks the built-in tools for this. However, each of these marketing areas have apps for you to install and make work. You can also sell through places like Amazon, eBay and Google Products with the help of apps.

Shopify Statistics

The reports are high quality, helping you predict trends for the future with reports for gross sales based on product title, SKU and traffic referrer. You can also track sales by customer, referrer, channel and more.

Shopify Hosting and Security

Level 1 PCI compliance comes with your Shopify plan, and a hosting plan and domain are included as well. The automatic backups are nice, and it’s worth noting that the hosting is provided through the ServerCentral company, which is an enterprise level platform. Another plus is the content delivery network for those times when your traffic spikes.

Shopify Extensibility

The best part of Shopify is the app store, since hundreds of apps are provided for expanding your store with marketing, shipping and social media tools. In addition, you can filter by collections if you have a particular app in mind. To give you an idea of the types of apps, you can find anything for customer service, accounting, tools and reporting. It doesn’t require a download and upload, so it simply installs the app from the dashboard, making it one of the easiest app stores to work with.

Shopify Support

Support comes in the form of live chat, email and phone discussions, all of which are available at any time of the day or week. The forum is a great place to chat with other people who use the platform, and the Ecommerce University area is filled with content that guides you on how to improve the outlook of your store. You’ll also find a blog that gets updated on a consistent basis, showing you that Shopify is constantly thinking of ways to help its users.

Conclusion

If you’re a beginner just getting started with building an ecommerce store, Shopify is a viable platform for you. It doesn’t require any coding, but if you’re more experienced and would like to make your own CSS/HTML changes, that option is there as well. Also, the app store has all the tools you really need to scale up your store and get prepared for the time when more and more people come to your shop. The pricing is on point, and if you ever realize that you need to upgrade, you have the chance to do so at anytime. Shopify leads the way in terms of ease of use, and the template designs are great, so consider this when looking for a platform for your next shop.

LiveAgent is a full web-based help desk appplication with multichannel support which integrates all channels (Email, Phone, Chat, Facebook and Twitter) into one interface.

LiveAgent Review: Pricing

LiveAgent offers 3 pricing plans:

Ticket

$9 per agent/mo

Main features include:

Custom domain parking
E-mail support – Ticketing
Contact forms
Forum & Knowledge base
iPhone/Android app

Ticket + Chat

$29 per agent/mo

Main features include:

All Ticket features
Live Chat
Real-time visitors monitoring
Chat invitations
Feedback management

All-inclusive

$39 per agent/mo

Main features include:

All Ticket + Chat features
Facebook & Twitter
Call center support
Video call
Time tracking
Gamification

Features like Live Chat, Real-time visitors monitoring, Chat invitations or Feedback management are only available starting with the Ticket+Chat, while Facebook & Twitter, Call center support, Video call, Time tracking, Gamification are only available for the All-inclusive plan.

The 14-day free trial starts with the All-inclusive plan, and there’s no credit card required during the trial period.

 

LiveAgent Review: Design

LiveAgent‘s design is not as up to date, the dashboard is a bit cluttered but intuitive. You may customize it up to one point by adding custom branding.

The interface seems to be geared towards users that have some experience with this kind of software so if you’re just starting out you might need to go through some video tutorials first.

LiveAgent Review: Features

LiveAgent has more than  170 support features and some of the most important include: Automation, SLA, Ticketing, POP3 accounts, Email piping, Departments, Priorities, Statuses, Tags, Rules, Ticket Routing, Canned/Predefined messages, Macros, Email templates, Performance Reports, Voice integration and call recording. Most importantly, LiveAgent also has an integrated live chat feature.

Live Agent Review: Backend Features

The Dashboard gives you overall information about what’s happening into your account. In the Chat section you can see your online visitors running in pending chats, and in the Tickets section you can view all the communication between you and your customers. Next, the Reports tab gives you insights on overall performance, agent performance, department or channel reports. Customer portal allows you to create, manage and customize your online knowledge base.

LiveAgent Review: Reports

LiveAgent has a strong reporting section. Even if you’re running a a one-man business or a medium size organization, every report tool is available, from department reports, usage statistics, performance reports, agent rankings, customer satisfaction ratings and detailed insights of every communication channel: Email, Live Chat, Call Center, Contact Forms or Social Media messages.

LiveAgent Review: Flexibility

LiveAgent has a great set of features making it one of the most competitive help desk software out there, therefore a native iOS and Android app is available, so you can provide customer service while on the go. The app will allow you to transfer and respond to tickets, chat with your customers  or get push notifications of new tickets or chats.

A big plus for LiveAgent are the 39 translations available, so your agents can use LiveAgent in the language they prefer.

LiveAgent Review: Extensibility

There are only 41 integrations at the moment but most of the popular online services are available: MailChimp, AWeber, Braintree, Shopify, Facebook, and Twitter.

If you’re code savvy and you’re really tied to a particular web service, there is an API available for creating integrations.

LiveAgent Review: Support

The support section is not as friendly and well organized as you would expect. There are 25 video tutorials available, a getting started section, a technical section (including FAQs) and a support forum.

If you need some fast answers, a live chat option is available on the homepage or you may reach their support team by email, phone and social media.

Conclusion

LiveAgent is easy to learn, use, and implement and it’s perfect for small and medium size businesses. If you’re looking for a live chat option, there’s one included, you’ll just have to sign up for the right plan.

Overall, they do a really good job, they have good documentation and strong reports.

If you’re running a medium size or small business then Help Scout might be the ideal help desk software for you. It takes minutes to set up, without having to deal with backend and configuration complexities.

Help Scout Pricing

Help Scout offers 3 pricing plans:

Basic:

$8/mo/user

Main features include:

1 Mailbox
Beacon
Saved Replies
Help Scout for iPhone
Help Scout branding

Standard:

$15/mo/user

Main features include:

All Free features
5 Mailboxes
1 Docs knowledge base
Reports
Workflows
Satisfaction Ratings

Plus:

$27/mo/user

Main features include:

All Standard features
Unlimited Mailboxes
3 Docs knowledge bases
Teams
Custom Fields
Free inactive Users

Annual payment earns you one month free. You can start with  a 15-day free trial, with no credit card required. For annual billing you’ll get a 10% discount.

Help Scout Design

Help Scout integrates with your email service, therefore the interface is quite simple and the UI has a clean look and feel.

Help Scout Features

Helpscout’s main features include: shared email inbox for managing tickets, Docs (for building a help center or knowledge base), saved replies, reports, office hours filtering, phone conversations or voicemail integration.
50+ voicemail services are supported out of the box for logging phone calls on your computer.

Help Scout is packed with great features and some of them are only available with the Plus plan. Be sure to check the full feature list before committing to a plan.

Help Scout Backend Features

The user interface is uncluttered and pretty intuitive.

There are five menu items on the top left side of the screen:

• Home: This is where you go when you first login. Once you get started you can add several brands, products or email addresses into your account. These options will appear on the dashboard.
• Mailbox: You can support several brands, products or email addresses from a single account. Each mailbox has unique permissions, settings and folders.
• Docs: Here you can create up to 5 knowledge base sites so customers can find answers from any device.
• Reports: This section will help you keep track of all the important support metrics, employee performance and customer satisfaction.

Help Scout Reports

The reporting interface is really great.

The reports available (four or five depending if you have Docs installed or not) can be viewed at any time via the Reports dropdown menu.

The Conversations report shows you how much volume you’re handling during a certain time period, the Productivity report measures efficiency across the help desk, and the Team and User will give you insights about how members of your team are doing. The Happiness report will show how your team is being rated by customers. If you have Docs installed, this report will help you understand what your customers are searching for in the knowledge base you have created, and how helpful the information is, as well as what percentage of customers are still sending an email after browsing the knowledge base.

Help Scout Flexibility

An iPhone app is available for replies on the go. You can check in on your mailboxes, manage conversations, and share tickets with your team members.

A well-documented APIs is available for developers to create their own integrations.

Right now a live chat option is not available out of the box but you can easily integrate third party apps like Olark or ClickDesk, HipChat, and many more.

Help Scout Extensibility

There are 40 web app integrations available at the moment, so you can account with your favorite apps and services like:

• Talkdesk
• FollowUpThen
• Hively
• Capsule
• Nicereply
• HipChat
• Campfire
• Slack
• MailChimp
• Magento REST API
• Shopify
• Mixpanel
• Bigcommerce
• Campaign Monitor
• KISSmetrics
• Infusionsoft
• Olark
• Pipedrive
• SnapEngage
• WooCommerce
• Constant Contact
• PipelineDeals
• FreshBooks
• FullStory
• Bronto
• Google Apps Integration
• eBay and Amazon Integration
• Smooch

The free plan doesn’t give access to integrations.
A well-documented APIs is available for developers to create their own apps.

Help Scout Support

There are more ways to contact their support team:

Email: via a direct email address or a web form.
Phone: you may schedule a call with one of their experts.

A decent knowledge base is available (with walkthroughs and video tutorials available) as well as a blog.

Conclusion

If you need an easy to use help desk application, look no further than Help Scout. They have a great reports section, and an extremely easy to use interface.