Published on October 14th, 2023
It’s been a whirlwind over the last week. We started a Shopify business, had no idea what we were doing, and stumbled through. We added products, collections, themes, and legal policies. We’ve been bombarded by experts who want to help. Our grand opening is tomorrow. Shopify’s site, customization abilities, and customer service are top notch. It’s better than what Mr. Beast promised!
What we’ve learned so far
What we’ve learned having our Shopify business for a week.
- Everyone wants to help you have the best Shopify site ever (perhaps too many people offering their services)
- Be wary of unsolicited collaborators, they have access to your whole site. Hire them from Fiverr with a good reputation and give them only the access they need.
- People will contact you on your contact form or inbox chat to sell their services. This was unexpected.
Fiverr has a ton of folks with good reviews for Search Engine Optimization , Customer Relationship Management, website design, and Google Merchant Center. Point us to your previous work, have good reviews, show how you added value and we’ll talk. It’s hard to invest when there is no revenue.
Shopify has free sites to create a return policy, terms of service, privacy policy, and shipping policy. This is super helpful for those taking a leap for the first time into running an online store. Once created it is easy to customize and add them on the site’s footer.
https://www.shopify.com/tools/policy-generator
https://www.shopify.com/tools/policy-generator/refund
https://www.shopify.com/tools/policy-generator/terms-and-conditions
https://www.shopify.com/first-sale/shipping-policy-template
What else?
- Choose the right theme for your site. We chose Dawn, allowing us to have menus, filters, products, collections, and announcement bars. Different themes have different looks and features.
- Keep your homepage simple
- Use your menus to showcase your items
- Tag everything. It comes in handy to create product collections later.
- Use the Shopify how-to guides to navigate around and add features
- Somethings are better on the mobile app and some are better on the website
- Ask for help! Shopify has 24/7 support, which is amazing.
- Get a business email, maybe two. One for customer interaction, one for keeping track of needed items.
- Have your EIN handy.
- Use your EIN to register your shop with your business from the beginning, unlike us.
- We registered our site on Instagram, Threads, Youtube, and Tik Tok, for future use.
- Adding things to a website makes you figure out what you want to sell, what you want to keep, and how to organize it.
This was the logo we selected. It has a nice font, mixture of colors, and asymmetry. We have no sales yet. Starting tomorrow, we are running two promotions, buy 1, get 20% off the 2nd, and buy 3 items get 15% off the whole order. Shopify makes adding discounts easy.
Why a business? On these pages we describe having a side gig, to boost your opportunities in life, add value to the world, and reach your goals. Very few people get to a level of comfort working for other people. If we want our kids to learn about a business, we have to lead the way.
Wish us luck! Maybe we’ll get some orders tomorrow. We need to visit Daiso and get some small boxes, ribbon, and candies to ship with our orders. I want to try it out, as a differentiator from mindless shipping.
Sincerely yours,
smilingdad
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