What is Shogun?
Shopify is an excellent tool when it comes to selling your products online – used by over 1,000,000 active users, it’s one of the most popular eCommerce platforms out there. However, when it comes to customization, it has its limits. If you love Shopify, but you want a personalized website that is totally suited for your ecommerce store – that’s where Shogun comes in.
Shogun is an app that allows you to create attractive, custom-built pages in Shopify. You can use it with any Shopify theme, and it’s built to be simple and easy-to-use. The pages are designed to be mobile-friendly, and you can preview how your page will look whenever you like.
Shogun also works with BigCommerce and Magneto, so if you’re on either of those platforms, you’ll be able to use it too. However, for the purposes of this article, we’ll only be looking at the Shopify integration.
AN ADVANCED PAGE BUILDER WITH PRACTICAL FEATURES
DOZENS OF CUSTOMIZABLE ELEMENTS
Whether you want to create landing pages, product pages or the U.X. of your blog, Shogun offers you blocks that allow you to customize each page.
It is very easy to create beautiful pages that respect the branding of your shop!
The fact that Shogun simplifies the layout process means that there is no code knowledge required to achieve this. Instead, you have access to a well-designed interface that allows you to adjust your pages to mobile, tablet and computer formats.
And if you are like me very often in need of inspiration, the Shogun team has planned everything with the possibility of importing pre-designed page templates, there are about thirty of them at the moment.
There are them for all types of e-commerces, whether they are generalist or nested!
MEASURE PAGE PERFORMANCE
Shogun also provides you with useful statistics and metrics to identify your best selling pages that convert best.
Thanks to the statistics interface, you have access to your number of sales and visitors, your conversion rate, add to card, the bounce rate and other data depending on the devices used.
This feature is mainly used to measure the impact of actions you implement for your sales or landing pages!
CREATE PAGE VARIANTS AND A/B TESTS
If you are not familiar with A/B tests, the principle is very simple. It’s a matter of creating several pages (at least two), with minimal differences such as button colors, calls to action or element positioning.
A/B tests are perfect to identify, thanks to the statistics that Shogun provides you, the variants that convert best and then create new variants, improve your conversion rate, etc.
This is one of the most effective methods to increase the conversion rate of your online store!
Since Shopify does not offer this option by default, the fact that it is integrated with Shogun is very welcome, since the functionality is also well designed.
You can create A/B tests to improve adding to cart, submitting forms (to retrieve emails or quotes for example) and clicking on a button or a call to action.
OTHER FEATURES
Indeed, there are several other small options and features that you can use to improve your working method:
- Work with a team where each member will have a specific role and will not be able to interact with the important elements of your shop.
- Launch an SEO audit to identify potential problems that could be harmful to your presence on search engines.
- Synchronize multiple stores and manage them directly from the Shogun interface, ideal for multilingual or to separate development and production versions.
- Programs the posting of certain pages in order to avoid updating your pages when there is a peak of traffic.
Shogun is a very complete page builder that is compatible with many e-commerce solutions. Among them, of course Shopify but not only since it is also available on BigCommerce, Saleforces Commerce and Magento.
Finally, if you want to create new elements, a suite of development tools is at your disposal!
Shogun Pricing
The Shogun app has a 7-day free trial for those who would like to try it out without paying a dime. Keep in mind that Shopify offers a free trial as well. So, if you'd like a full online shop with a nice drag and drop page builder for a free week, it's completely possible.
As for the monthly pricing, you can opt for the following plans:
- Starter – For $9 per month you get the drag and drop builder, a full responsive design, solid email support from Shogun and live preview functionality.
- Basic – This plan goes for $29 per month, providing everything from the previous plan, a page editor for the Shopify blog, custom templating for developers, and priority email support.
Pro – At $49 per month you receive all features from the previous plans, custom data collections and priority email and live chat support.
Who Should Be Using the Shogun App With Their Shopify Store?
I've always felt like the Shopify editor is pretty straightforward, but also quite limiting in terms of customization. A powerful drag and drop page builder like Shogun opens up all sorts of new possibilities for Shopify beginners and professionals alike. Therefore, I would highly recommend Shogun for ecommerce professionals that don't have the technical know-how to customize every little element on their site. This way, you can avoid the high fees that come along with hiring a developer to complete the work for you.
That said, we also like Shogun for developers with Shopify clients. The drag and drop features are enough to speed up your design process, and the custom templating/coding feature makes it incredibly powerful in terms of limitless customization. It’s also a great way to conclude a project with the client, and even if you didn’t use Shogun to build it, you can simply import your client’s site once it’s done!
If you have any questions about this Shogun review, feel free to drop a line in the comments below. Also, share your thoughts if you've tried it out in the past.
