Published on October 7th, 2023
Updated on October 8th, 2023
As many long time readers know, we detailed how we started a business. That process has been slow. We need to print out and sign the paperwork. I know, I know, it’s been months. Three things made us kickstart the business on Shopify. We’ll cover the 9 steps Shopify asks you to do to start a business on their site.
- Regret: Bestselling author Dan Pink wrote about regret in The Power of Regret.
- Respondents overwhelmingly regretted things they didn’t do rather than things they did. (emphasis not added.) danpink.com (1)
- Mortality: Washington Post wrote on article on how US life expectancy trails the world. Gift link included: https://wapo.st/3RPz2g1 (2)
- Putting in our information and where we lived, their study shows I’ll live 34 more years. That made me really mad. Why am I wasting my life?
Why start a business now?
- Organization: We have too many Pokémon cards. We don’t know how to keep track.
- Storage has a cost in more sleeves, hard sleeves, and bins.
- It’s better to sell items and organize systematically.
Regret, mortality, and having a mess are why the time is right to start a business. Another reason, I am tired of feeling scared. There is never a good time to start a business, the conditions will never be perfect, conditions will always be changing, preparations will never be enough. Similar to adopting a dog for the first time, you learn more by doing. There is a case made for enough preparation and taking action. We’re at the action phase.
How Shopify makes it easy to sell
Set up your online store – 4 steps
Store settings – 3 steps
Launch your online store – 2 steps
Shopify gives you a free three day trial to test out the site. The next three months are billed at $1 a month. Basic plans start at $39 a month, or $29 a month if you purchase for a year. Some observations to make your life easier before you start.
- Have your EIN (Employer Identification Number) created
- Shopify has a few prepaid themes. The themes control the look and feel of your site. Test out different ones to see what works for your business.
- Have products ready to sell with photos. For us, it will be the Pokémon cards we don’t want to grade or have too many of.
- Have a business name picked out!
- Know what you want to name your website! Shopify can get you a custom website through their site. Cheapest we saw for a .com extension was $15. Make sure to use an outside payment option as default to pay for the domain.
- Create a logo. themandalorian found a good logo site we’ll share in our next post.
- Decide how to tag your products
- You can use tags to automatically populate Collections. Collections make it easy to sell different kinds of related products.
- What are your shipping rates? You can add multiple options to differentiate shipping prices by weight or price.
- Shopify can cater to a variety of businesses, not only those with physical products to sell.
- You can link to your existing social media accounts to advertise your business. We’ll be creating some social media sites for this purpose.
- If you are selling to the EU, you can add apps to create a privacy banner on data collection methods.
Our experience with Shopify is good. The sheer number of options may make a larger screen easier to navigate and learn from than on a small mobile screen.
We plan to launch our website soon! We’ll have another follow up post here when we do.
Update:
Our three day trial is almost over. Going through the Shopify app, we were unable to purchase a plan. We were able to pick the Basic plan without issue on the website. All plans are $1 for 3 months. The Basic plan has better credit card charge rates than the Starter plan.
Sincerely yours,
smilingdad
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Notes:
(1) danpink.com Summary of our mini-survey on regret https://www.danpink.com/summary-of-our-mini-survey-on-regret/
(2) Washington Post COMPARE YOUR LIFE EXPECTANCY WITH OTHERS AROUND THE WORLD https://wapo.st/3RPz2g1
smilingdad 