Can Shopify be used effective for the sale Accounting Services

Shopify Discussion
1

We are an eCommerce business in the process of starting it up. We provide a full range of accounting services to businesses who need help with their bookkeeping, monthly financial statements, bill paying, payroll, taxation, budgeting and all other services directly related to accounting. A portion of these services are provided by trusted third party experts.

We need a platform that can effectively reach potential clients. A platform where potential clients can provide us with their unique business environment in order for us to provide a quote for our services.

Information about their environment might include:

  1. size of business,
  2. revenues,
  3. number of employees
  4. Trial Balance for prior year and year-to-date
  5. And the fee they currently pay for these services as we will aim to better the price they currently pay.

Is this the kind of service business that can be effectively offered and managed with Shopify?

Thank you!

WBK

2

Disambiguation

  1. You want to use shopify as your online STOREfront to sell services
  2. You want to sell services TO shopify merchants with their own stores

Here i’m going to assume #1, for #2 get listed on the experts.marketplace.

We need a platform that can effectively reach potential clients.

Using platform X makes no guarantee of reach.

At the most simplest version of your description, yes shopify is fine for the following:

potential clients can provide us with their unique business environment in order for us to provide a quote for our services.

You’d use a RFQP app to collect the #5 data points, generate a draft order, notify the customer with the order, and they’d checkout and pay. Done. That could be put together in a few hours by an expert, or a weekend for a beginner.

But after that for all other accounting logistics you’d use other software to fill in the gaps, email for communications, dropbox for files, etc.

That’s the simple version.

Anything more advanced and a main issue you’ll face with Shopify for services like accounting is appointment scheduling, or other person to person logistics. There is no appointment management or native booking system on shopify.

There is also no real CRM features, it’s a barebones contact/customer group system.

In other words no ongoing FILEs attached directly to a customer.

There is also no organizations, so you can group customers with tags but that gives little in the way of managing an organizational-customer, especially if you need hierarchy.

And for those #5 customer data points you wouldn’t be able to create custom fields to represent those in the shopify admin as the shopify admin is locked down in the regard of customization. Making you have to cram that info into little customer notes.

It does not have a full fledge invoice system.

Customer accounts and customer templates are very basic, no files sections, no discussions history,etc

So if you need features like that to be first class features, use another platform for the frontend and backend.

Shopify still works insanely well as the payment system working internationally and in wildly various methods.

Yes, you could still use shopify for everything an accounting service needs but there will be a heavy investment in filling in just those gaps I’ve listed and more probably.