ClickFunnels Shopify Integration Made Simple

Are you searching for the most detailed guide on integrating ClickFunnels with Shopify?

Both platforms are essential for increasing online revenue, and we will give you all the needed info for using them in tandem. Before diving into the details of Shopify integrations, we should tackle a more fundamental question — is it necessary to create an online shop?

Having a broad pool of customers in your target audience is essential to making the most sales. Retail sales are vital for revenue, but these have all kinds of logistical and geographical limitations. There's a glass ceiling to the money a small business can make in its locale, regardless of product quality. 

The globalization of most markets that came with the widespread usage of the Internet changed this as well. An entirely new sector of the shipping industry grew around the transit of products and services sold on the Internet. The same is right for marketing — there is no campaign without at least some online advertising. 

According to Oberlo, more than 15% of retail sales come from digital marketing. Such percentages are even higher when we focus on digital products whose target audience interacts with traditional media more rarely. 

This spectacular rise of e-commerce in the past two decades has resulted in a demand for more accessible online sales solutions. People want to construct shopping websites in a way that doesn't require them to learn web programming or hire expensive web design professionals. ClickFunnels and Shopify both solve a part of this issue.

Shopify 101 — What Does It Do?

Shopify is a SaaS product (software as a service) for the construction and maintenance of e-commerce websites. It gives you the tools you need to manage an online store, with some options for retail management as well.

It's a content management platform like any other, just with a tighter focus. WordPress has a broader target audience and many different functionalities, while Shopify focuses on online vendors. Storeowners can use Shopify to create a functional and professional e-commerce website. 

ClickFunnels has a focus more similar to Shopify than WordPress, but with a different approach. This platform is used by people who want to create sales websites for a specific product, not an entire online store. It utilizes the model of a sales funnel for digital marketing. To summarize:

• Shopify — used by people who want to create an e-commerce store and retail vendors that want to enable online orders

• ClickFunnels — used by marketers and entrepreneurs who want to make an online sales pitch for a specific product or service 

Shopify Pricing

Shopify gives its users the option of testing the platform throughout a two-week free trial. This trial gives you access to the primary functionalities of Shopify:

• Store construction

• Apps from the Shopify marketplace

• Sale processing

You need to sign up for a paid plan after two weeks. There are four different pricing plans for Shopify:

Shopify Lite is the most affordable option, available only to those who already have their websites. This package only gives you the option of adding necessary e-commerce capabilities to an existing website. The Lite plan gives you a WordPress plugin or code for a "buy" button for websites that aren't hosted by Shopify. There are also messaging options and invoice designs. 

The Basic package gives you all of the store-building functionalities that you don't get with the Lite version. The Shopify subscription gives you more staff accounts, while also providing more options for reports and inventory management for more retail stores. 

All Shopify subscriptions come with shipping discounts for major shipping companies, as well as lower fees for payment processing. You get more significant discounts if you opt for a pricier Shopify subscription, as well as better prioritization for customer support. 

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• Create your own software
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• Sell monthly subscriptions
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• Your own price, colors and logo

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Shopify Features

The most important features of Shopify are:

1. Store admin

2. Free content

3. Cloud-based SaaS platform

4. Progressive pricing

5. Shopify apps

6. Excellent support

7. Easy store launch

Online Store Administration

E-commerce depends on accurate data metrics far more than retail stores. The former faces far more competition, making every small detail count in the battle for sales. That's why Shopify gives you options for data analytics that show how well your products are performing. 

You can see how many orders you're getting in real-time, as well as which product pages are attracting the most visitors. If you integrate ClickFunnels with Shopify, there are even options for seeing where leads are in a funnel. Anyone who wants to maintain an online store in the long term can appreciate the diversity of Shopify's features for store administration. 

Free Content

Constructing an online store manually takes a tremendous amount of time and work, as well as web programming knowledge. You would also have to take care of the website aesthetic yourself or pay for a web designer to do it for you. 

Shopify solves this quickly by providing you with many themes that are fully customizable and free with a Shopify subscription. Entrepreneurs who aren't concerned with their brand right away will find this useful, as the primary themes give you the storefront you need to start selling.

Many startups do depend on branding — for instance, software resellers who rebrand white label software make a livelihood on the popularity of their brands. Shopify also provides options for branding per your design. There are many fonts to choose from, and you can upload your images and select all the colors you want. Alternatively, you can peruse a selection of stock photos provided by Shopify itself. These are useful because they cover a wide range of e-commerce content. 

Cloud-Based SaaS

There are other online store builders out there with a range of features similar to Shopify. Apart from sheer quality, Shopify has another item for the “pros” column — it’s cloud-based. 

This may not seem like a big deal to someone who has never gone through the hassle of having server space, but cloud space is a huge boon. Even the best-maintained servers fail sometimes; it’s not a crucial problem for someone hosting a blog, but an e-commerce store loses a lot of revenue with each minute of downtime. There are shared hosting options, but these tie your uptime to the popularity of other websites on the same server. 

Basing your online store on a cloud network makes the risk of downtime plummet. Your business faces fewer interruptions, and Shopify knows this. 

Progressive Pricing

Running any kind of business means dealing with a lot of expenses. An e-commerce store means less overhead than a brick-and-mortar place, but it is still not cheap. Even if you use Shopify, you still have to pay for a subscription, the expenses associated with your products, costs for marketing, etc. 

That’s why Shopify has progressive pricing, allowing you to pay higher rates as your volume of business goes up. Those with the skinniest budgets can opt for Shopify Lite in the beginning and scale up over time. 

Shopify Apps

One of the greatest things about Shopify is that it’s not just a single software suite — it’s an entire ecosystem of applications for e-commerce. Shopify has its app store, with "applications" that add different functionalities to your e-commerce website. These are in the same order of magnitude as WordPress plugins.

Similarly to WP plugins, there are free Shopify apps and a lot of commercial paid ones. You don’t have to buy apps to run a basic Shopify store, but many of them add quality-of-life features that add enough value to be worth the additional cost. 

Excellent Support

Shopify realizes that its clients are its lifeline, which is why the platform is fully invested in the success of the online stores built on the platform. The Shopify staff provides plenty of support through a regularly updated blog that showcases advice from top experts in online sales. 

There's also a Shopify Academy — a niche version of Udemy or Coursera — where you can learn about e-commerce via free online courses. These are only available to Shopify subscribers above the Lite tier. The community of online vendors also supports itself through different groups on Facebook and other social media. People are more than happy to share their Shopify experience and help online entrepreneurs who are just starting. 

White Label Software

• Create your own software
• 3 minutes to install
• Free to set up
• Sell monthly subscriptions
• AI products to resell
• Your own price, colors and logo

Get Started. It's Free.

ClickFunnels — Online Marketing Solution

Shopify is a useful tool for e-commerce, but it's essential to realize what it can and can't do. It's a tool for sales logistics, not for digital marketing. Other products are used for lead generation and conversion, as well as the advertising that comes before.  

Funnel builders such as ClickFunnels are crucial for guiding potential leads towards your online store and products. Store management software solutions akin to Shopify are there to facilitate the sale, especially if a brand wants to have a constant online presence. 

ClickFunnels and Shopify aren’t adversaries in the world of e-commerce. Sellers and marketers achieve the best results when using them together. But before we describe the process of integrating the two, let’s see why ClickFunnels is useful for the marketing side of the sales process.

Image source: leadsquared

ClickFunnels dumbs down the process of creating a sales website, making it streamlined enough for entrepreneurs and small business owners without marketing experience. It's essential to differentiate these websites from Shopify stores. 

A funnel website made in ClickFunnels serves to capture leads and convert them into paying customers for an individual service or product. These websites can then redirect visitors to a Shopify store for payment processing or upsell offers. Shopify is there for online sellers who are stable vendors with long-term offers. 

Can You Connect ClickFunnels With Shopify?

The answer is a definitive "yes" — the two platforms bring the most value when used in combination. There are two distinct ways of achieving this, with varying degrees of complexity:

1. Integrating Shopify and ClickFunnels with WordPress

2. Connecting ClickFunnels and Shopify directly

Integration with WordPress

WordPress is the most widely-used content management system on the planet, trumping both Shopify and ClickFunnels. The reason for that is simple — WordPress offers the most significant versatility in terms of what kind of websites you can create. It was designed primarily for bloggers, but its considerable number of plugins have expanded the platform's potential to pretty much any kind of website. 

Shopify is great for e-commerce, and ClickFunnels is excellent at funnel building, but both are lacking when it comes to websites with a broader scope. WordPress is the best option if you want to build an online portal that combines the features of both while also hosting additional content.

The developers of both Shopify and ClickFunnels are aware of the advantages of WordPress's more comprehensive array of functionalities. That's why they've created WordPress plugins that allow users to combine all of the features mentioned above to their liking. 

After you create a website in WordPress, you can browse your admin dashboard for the ClickFunnels and Shopify plugins. 

The Shopify plugin is used to facilitate Shopify Lite users who do not have the option of hosting a dedicated online store on the Shopify platform. The plugin allows you to add product descriptions and “buy” buttons for your online products, but the design of the sales pages must be handled in WordPress. 

The ClickFunnels plugin gives you the simple option of importing all of the pages you’ve designed in ClickFunnels to the WordPress ecosystem. You can edit them further there and add functionalities from other plugins, including the Shopify one. That’s one of the ways of integrating ClickFunnels and Shopify through a third platform. 

How to Merge ClickFunnels With Shopify

Shopify and ClickFunnels have options for direct merging as well, without third-party solutions such as WordPress. This is a more streamlined option, but it allows for less freedom in web design for your online store. 

ClickFunnels supports an impressive number of third-party integrations, including Shopify. It’s important to note that this type of integration only allows ClickFunnels to communicate shipping information to the Shopify platform — payment processing is only done on the Shopify itself. 

If you have a product that you’re marketing via ClickFunnels and want to sell it via your Shopify store, you need to complete the integration process for your two accounts first:

1. Use a web browser to access the Shopify dashboard

2. Open your ClickFunnels account in a second web tab while staying logged into Shopify

3. Find the Account Menu in your ClickFunnels dashboard

4. Access the “Integrations” section and pick the “Add New” option

5. Type “Shopify” in the search bar or select from a drop-down menu

6. Fulfill the field requesting the URL for your Shopify store

7. Click on the “Connect” button

Now you have connected your Shopify store and your ClickFunnels funnel. This is only the initial connection of the two software APIs — the import of product information from one to the other needs to be handled separately. 

When you create a Shopify product that you want to connect with ClickFunnels, make sure to assign an SKU designation. If you try to import a product to ClickFunnels without one, you will face an “access details” error. 

Once you’ve done that, you can add the define the product in ClickFunnels:

1. Navigate to the order page and access the “Products” section

2. Choose the “Add New” option

3. Enter the required information for the product

4. Access the “Shipping” section found within the product settings

5. Tick the “Shopify” box

6. Choose Shopify among integration options

7. Enter the SKU for your product

Note that the SKU information you enter for your product in ClickFunnels must match the information you’ve entered in the Shopify dashboard as well. The integration won’t succeed otherwise. 

When entering product information in Step three, remember that you cannot select Shopify as the payment option from within ClickFunnels.

Connecting ClickFunnels with Shopify — Is It Worth It?

Should you go to the trouble of integrating ClickFunnels and Shopify?

The answer is yes, in most cases. It depends on the type of product you’re selling and on your long-term intentions. If you want to add a smaller passive income to your revenue stream, you may not need a complex combination of storefront capabilities and funnel design. 

People looking to make a more significant portion of their income through online sales or via value-added reselling should consider integrating multiple platforms. A long-term online sales plan requires more diverse functionalities than either ClickFunnels or Shopify can add on their own.