Pietra and Shopify are two gigantic e-commerce solutions that would hardly have any match in the market.
Shopify has been ruling the market for many years. From numerous design templates to amazing marketing techniques, it has become a one-stop solution for creating your e-commerce store. With its enormous tools, it has become a versatile platform for e-commerce solutions.
Pietra, on the other hand, is another good name in the e-commerce field. It would allow you to create your e-commerce store by embedding its astounding themes, automation, and some good marketing tactics. Besides, it also serves as a good source of providing customized and agile solutions.
When you have two such great e-commerce solutions, decision-making is surely going to become tough. We will discuss both solutions to help you decide which would work best for you.
Key Takeaway :
Pietra and Shopify are both powerful e-commerce solutions, but Shopify’s advanced features and robust nature make it the preferred choice for most businesses looking to start an e-commerce store. Shopify’s extensive theme collection, strong marketing tools, and 24/7 customer support make it a versatile and easily accessible platform for e-commerce solutions, making it the ideal choice for your online store.
How Desku can do wonders for Shopify and Pietra Users
An E-commerce business, just like any other business, is going to need a strong customer support solution to serve its customers. When you have created your online store using Shopify or Pietra, it is common for all customer support solutions to not integrate with it. In such a situation, Desku can become your savior as it can easily integrate with both Shopify and Pietra.
When you have a Shopify store, you will need a strong customer support handle for managing customer queries, feedback, and order tracking information. Now, if you have Desku integrated with your Shopify store, it can manage it smoothly through its numerous customer support solutions. It can even conduct personalized customer communication through its personalization features.
If you have a Pietra shop, Desku can still become a helping medium for you in terms of customer support. However, there is no direct integration available for now, but things can be worked out by Contacting Desku. It will enhance customer engagement through its powerful solutions. This will ultimately build a strong reputation for your brand.
The astounding features of Desku are:
- Unlimited Tickets
- Multiple Email Inbox
- Customer Management
- Knowledge Base
- Multiple Chatbots
- Seamless Integrations
- Live Chat Feature
- Whitelabel and CNAME
- Shopify Integration
- WooCommerce Integration
- Social Media Integration
- CSAT
What is Shopify
It was in 2006 when Shopify was first introduced. Ever since its launch, it has turned enormous in terms of its wide range of e-commerce solutions. Over these many years, it has helped e-commerce startups of all sizes create and manage their online stores.
The only reason that has made Shopify this much popular is its simplicity. Its infrastructure is simple to understand. With the drag-and-drop functionalities, Shopify opens gates for all kinds of people, whether technical or non-technical, to create e-commerce websites with ease. Moreover, it is loaded with 70+ customizable templates that you can use on your website. All the templates have tempting designs. It will not at all require any sort of coding knowledge.
Besides store creation, Shopify serves you numerous store-handling functionalities like inventory management, adding products, handling customer information, and much more. Digital payments are going to be a concern for the customers. That’s why Shopify gives you a completely secure and easy payment process in your store. It integrates more than 100 payment gateways into it.
Once your store gets ready with all the necessary functionalities, Shopify helps you market it through its variety of marketing tools. It gives an ocean of sales channels like social media platforms to amplify your brand’s presence across all channels.
One tremendous thing about Shopify is that even small tricks like putting a great video in the banner section, connecting Shopify Forms to HighLevel, or even offering good service support can boost your business!
What is Pietra
Pietra is another e-commerce solution just like Shopify. If you are a newbie who is thinking of having an e-commerce startup, Pietra will become the perfect option to start with.
It will always have your back from start to end with its mesmerizing functionalities that include store creation, marketing tools, automation, and sales amplifiers.
What makes Pietra an awesome e-commerce solution is its no-code infrastructure. It gives you an open stage for creating your e-commerce website through its store builder without any in-depth coding knowledge. However, Pietra’s work does not end here. After letting you create your store, it helps you market your online store on numerous platforms to create your brand awareness.
With these many versatile functionalities, Pietra becomes a hubspot for all your e-commerce solutions. Those who already have e-commerce stores might think the doors of Pietra are closed. However, Pietra offers a solution for all of them. It is possible to integrate Pietra into any framework with ease. So, if you are thinking of adapting Pietra for their existing e-commerce website, you can make it happen. however, it wont create sales funnels for you like ClickFunnels.
Having a good e-commerce store is not enough. You have to keep your eyes on every process for elevating the success of your brand. Through Pietra’s performance analytics, you can achieve a granular understanding of each and every e-commerce process. On the basis of the analysis, you can identify the loopholes and plan strategies for improving them. This would help you to mark your presence in this competitive world with ease.
Shopify Pricing
All e-commerce businesses, whether small or big, are going to have different needs and budgets. Taking this into account, Shopify presents its pricing plans, which would be affordable for all business sizes. Besides this, due to its scalable nature, Shopify will become highly adaptable to all kinds of changes in the future.
All of Shopify’s pricing plans are going to offer some basic functionalities in common. This includes control tools for entrepreneurs, 24/7 customer support services, and inventory management. In addition to these, you get to enjoy some extra functionalities like language translation and fraud analysis based on which type of pricing plan you select.
Shopify Lite – $5 per month
The Shopify Lite plan exists for small size businesses that do not need an online store for selling their products. Through this plan, they can either embed a buy button in their website or use a point-of-sale(POS) mobile app for selling in person. If you have a medium or large size business, this plan would not be perfect for you.
In the case of in-person sales, the Shopify Lite plan would charge a fee of 2.7% of the transaction, while for each online purchase, it would charge a 2.9% fee.
Shopify Standard – $79 per month
In Shopify’s standard plan, you will be able to enjoy every functionality of the basic plan. In addition, you will also get some extra features like analytics, gift card purchase support, five employee accounts, and an abandoned cart recovery tool. Through its offerings like country-specific domains and currency conversions, this plan also becomes helpful for businesses doing international selling.
Overall, Shopify’s standard does not charge any transaction fee. However, in the case of third-party payment integration, it would charge a 1% fee.
Shopify Advanced – $299 per month
Shopify’s advanced plan is meant for e-commerce businesses that have to deal with online and in-person sales on a large scale. It offers you great functionalities like 15 15-employee account limits, unlimited storage, automation, a third-party shipping calculator, and customizable reporting.
Although the advanced Shopify plan does not charge any transaction fee, it might charge 0.5% in case the transaction is led by a third-party payment gateway.
The last one is Shopify Plus, which is much different form other mainstream pricing plans fo Shopify. You can ready more about Shopify Plus in this guide.
Pietra Pricing
Pietra’s pricing plan allows you to pay either on a monthly or annual basis.
In order to give you the perfect insights, we have shared Pietra’s different pricing plans.
Note: Pietra is offering both paid and free versions. In the case of the free version, you will be able to launch your online store and get access to Pietra’s knowledge-power resources. However, you might not be able to source manufacturers through its free version. In order to achieve this, you will have to shift towards its paid plans.
Beginner: $39/mo
Pietra’s beginner plan is solely for small-size businesses that do not have more than 500 monthly shipping orders.
Along with the free features mentioned above, Pietra’s beginner plan offers some additional features as well:
- Low pricing rates for warehouse and fulfillment services ($1.50/order fulfillment)
- Allows you to sell your products on three different sales channels.
- Gives you a step-by-step business guide for launching your brand successfully.
- Provides you with great support in every fulfillment and logistics process.
- 24 x 7 chat and phone support plus multiple payment support.
Scaling: $89/mo
The scaling plan by Pietra helps businesses that are in their growing stage, having 500-2000 shipping orders per month. This plan offers you all the functionalities of the beginner plan. Apart from that, you will get some additional benefits of charge reduction in fulfillment services($1.25/order), shipping, and storage services.
Through its scaling plan, Pietra allows you to promote your brand on 7 different sales channels. You can even connect with 25 suppliers through this plan.
Professional: $199/mo
Pietra’s professional pricing plan is meant for large enterprises that deal with more than 2000 monthly shipping orders. This plan is the summation of the above two plans. In addition, it provides:
- Least charges in fulfillment services ($1.15/order)
- Allows you to promote your products on unlimited sales channels and connect with unlimited suppliers.
- Allows you to have 1:1 guiding sessions with a Pietra specialist to solve all your doubts regarding e-commerce, sourcing, and fulfillment.
Also read: Magento to Shopify Migration Checklist: A Step-by-Step Guide
Pietra Pros & Cons
Pietra Pros
It is a complete package of eCommerce platform solutions that allows you to manage your eCommerce stores and activities from one place.
Pietra’s features are solely meant to help e-commerce retailers in their every e-commerce solution.
Pietra offers an easily scalable cloud-based infrastructure to adapt to all your future business needs with ease.
Pietra Cons
Every good thing has some darker side, and the same thing applies to Pietra. Despite having numerous e-commerce solutions, it is falling back in providing some advanced-level features. It might happen that when you desire to add some higher-level functionalities to your online store, Pietra might not be able to help you out due to its simple features.
Secondly, as Pietra is completely new in the market, you would have a hard time understanding it as its learning resources are very few.
Moreover, Pietra’s cost becomes a disturbing factor. Although it is offering cost-efficient services compared to other e-commerce solutions in the market, its pricing plans might look costly in terms of the services it is offering. However, you can select the pricing, taking into account your budget and business needs.
Shopify Pros & Cons
Shopify Pros
Shopify gives its users plenty of reasons to love it. One reason out of many is its robust nature. It provides a huge list of e-commerce solutions for businesses. Through its vast and amazing theme collection and plugins, Shopify allows you to create attractive e-commerce stores for your business.
Besides this, Shopify also allows customization while creating a domain for your e-commerce website. In addition, it also helps you market your online store through its strong marketing tools like social media marketing, email marketing, and marketing
Also, Shopify provides you with powerful 24/7 customer support. This would assure your customers that you have their back all day. Moreover, Shopify’s interface doesn’t require any technical knowledge. Through its drag-and-drop functionality, it becomes an easily accessible platform for all. Also, only a few businesses need a license to operate via Shopify. This platform also provides with tax documents.
Also read: Does Shopify Provide Tax Documents: Shopify 1099 Form
Shopify Cons
Even though you get a lot of themes and customization options, Shopify somewhat lacks flexibility compared to open-source solutions like WooCommerce. Also, the functionalities they offer require expertise in the development field. For example, Shopify’s template language.
Shopify operates on a subscription-based model. Although there are different plans available, monthly costs might not be suitable due to being relatively high for small businesses or startups.
Another drawback is the lack of SEO solutions. Shopify provides some SEO tools, but SEO experts found Shopify is not as efficient as some other SEO-friendly e-commerce platforms. These limitations can hinder you if you own a large store with extensive product catalogs.
How to Handle Excessive Customer Support Queries?
Regardless of whether you’re managing a Shopify or Pietra store, customer support is a factor you can’t compromise. Even if you have a small business, customer engagement is essential if your plan is to grow your audience.
Now, if you want to hire a dedicated chat support team, it can be highly costly. So, what’s the solution that doesn’t keep your customers’ queries waiting? Well, Desku is a perfect addition that ensures a robust customer support strategy. This platform highly helps you in increasing orders.
If you have heavy loads, Desku’s ticketing system will ensure that your team can efficiently manage customer interactions and provide a seamless support experience throughout the entire customer journey.
Also, their automatic AI-powered chatbot will reduce the simple queries from customers and help your team focus on complex ones. You’ll be amazed to know the amazing features Desku provides at a reasonable cost. Guess what? You get a 14-day free trial as well just by signing up for Desku!
Also read: How To Add Apple Pay To Shopify Store: 4 Mins Guide
Pietra vs Shopify for eCommerce and Dropshipping in 2024: Conclusion
Now, finally, it’s time for us to decide which platform you can choose for your e-commerce store management.
One thing that is common between Pietra and Shopify is that both offer amazing e-commerce solutions to their users. Whether it’s about online store creation, marketing, or payment processing, both e-commerce platforms will always have your back in every process.
However, after going through various pros and cons of both platforms, we can say Shopify will become a perfect e-commerce solution for all businesses. The only reason is the list of advanced features that Shopify carries with it.
