Shopify, A Very User-Friendly Platform

You have now launched your Shopify store and you are hoping to make your first sale.
This is an exciting time and many store owners refresh their admin area for hours hoping to see just one sale. The very first sale happen.
Eventually, you will get that first sale, but it makes take some patients.

But before you are so far so you can launch your Shopify store you must know if a product is right for your Shopify store or not. Many people have product ideas or niches that they would like to start stores around but they aren’t sure if their product idea is viable or not.

How To Decide If Your Product Is Right For Shopify

There are some really great ways to evaluate product ideas and determine whether or not you should make time and monetary investment in starting a store around them.

Here are three ways that you can evaluate products specifically for the Shopify platform or for an eCommerce business in general.

Are You The Person To Market This Product? – This is the first question that you should ask yourself if your niche is a competing niche on Shopify. You do that by being an expert in your niche. If you are selling products that you know nothing about and that you are not willing to learn about, then those products are definitely not right for your Shopify store or any other eCommerce store you are considering.
Do People Want The Product? – The next thing that you are going to have to figure out is whether or not people want the product. This can be done in a few different ways. Obviously, you could do market research or have a company do it for you. But this usually is expensive. A much better way to do market research before you buy products is to create listings for them and then make them out of stock. Then, you can try to get people interested in your “out of stock” products. This way you can see whether or not they would be viable for your Shopify site.
Can You Compete? – Another thing you have to decide is whether or not you can compete in this particular niche. Large corporations dominate the biggest markets out there but there are also some pretty solid companies that are dominating the smaller market too. You need to look at the competition and determine whether or not you can rank for any of the keywords that you’ll need to get people into your site. You also have to look into if you can sell products at a low enough price to compete with these big-name companies that are likely able to get wholesale prices that are better than yours. If not, then you should choose a different product.

Make Your First Sale With Your Shopify Store

Your Shopify store is now open and you are waiting for your first sale. But to make salespeople must know about your store.

Here are some ways you can use to increase your chances of getting that first sale sooner.

Your Family & Friends – Your family and friends are going to be an invaluable marketing tool when you first launch your store. They may want to buy products from you themselves, just to support you. But more likely they’ll tell their friends and eventually, someone will need something that you are offering. Any sales organization will tell you that you start with your family and friends and then network from there.
Advertising – Advertising used to be something that only the most successful businesses could do because it was expensive. This was before the internet and the only way to advertise was through TV, radio, or newspapers. But now, advertising has gotten quite a bit cheaper. You may be able to find a website that appeals directly to your customers and advertise there for a very low price. In addition, there is Facebook advertising, Google AdWords, and various other low-cost methods of getting the word out there.
Deeply Discount Or Give Away Products – Another method that you can use to get your first sale is to give out huge discounts. Obviously, when you make your first sale you are going to make very much money on it and in fact may lose money. However, the word will spread and you may be of the make a profit on other products that you are discounting. Giving away products doesn’t seem to make sense wither but some companies set aside a certain budget for marketing and then use that to make up the cost of the items that they’ve given away. Then they advertise the free items by describing them as “for a limited time only” which usually brings quite a bit of traffic some of which may be something else.
Make Some YouTube Videos – Finally, you could make some YouTube videos. They can be advice videos or you could just be talking about how you are able to get your Shopify store off the ground. Adding links to your Shopify store may bring in traffic that will give you your first sale.

Shopify Costs Versus Potential Sales

Many people are hesitant to start their own eCommerce store. One of the reasons that they never follow through with it is that they are concerned that it will cost them more than they will make in sales. Obviously, this is to be avoided, and many people that are considering starting an eCommerce store are already having trouble with their bills and don’t have the budget to pay for a store until it makes a profit.
So you have to do some calculations to decide whether or not the cost of doing business with Shopify is going to be worth whatever price you will be paying.

Your Shopify Plan – Your Shopify plan is the first that is going to determine whether your sales are going to outweigh your cost or whether it is going to be the other way around. There are four Shopify plans to choose from.
$ –The first plan, Basic, is only $29 a month.
$ – The second one, Shopify, goes for $79 a month.
$ – The third plan, Advanced, cost $299 a month.
With each of these plans, you get various benefits and features for your Shopify store. You also get discounts on things like Shopify shipping and on credit card processing fees so factor this in as well.
Your Product Choice – The next thing that is going to influence whether or not you will be above or below water with your Shopify store is what products you have chosen and whether or not you have chosen to fulfill orders yourself or you are using a third party like a drop shipper. On the product side, your profile will depend on how much you can save by buying the products wholesale and how much you can mark them up before selling them to the customer. However, if you are selling the items yourself and keeping them warehoused, you are going to have overhead and cash flow issues that may affect your profits.
Your Add-ons – The other thing that will determine how much you are spending versus how much is making is what sort of add-ons you have and how much you are spending on them. Some people have third-party applications that they use to manage their social media. Other people have Shopify apps that they are paying a monthly subscription for and there may be other fees or costs covered under this miscellaneous umbrella. How much you can keep these costs down correlates to whether you can afford your payment or not.

You can read more about Shopify’s different plans and what include on Shopify’s website.

What Is Shopify Lite Membership?

Many people that are starting to work with Shopify for the first time wonder about the very first membership level that Shopify offers.

Shopify Lite is a membership that is offered for just $9 a month. But what is this actually give you? Is this membership enough for you to actually make money with eCommerce?

Here are some of the things you will get with the Shopify Lite membership and who it is appropriate for to decide if you can stick with the nine-dollar-a-month level or if you need to upgrade.

General Information – The first thing that you need to know about this membership level is that it doesn’t actually include a Shopify store. This is difficult to understand until you realize that it does allow you to use the integrated social media By buttons that are included with Shopify. However, you are not able to create a store with your products in it. I will get to which other features are missing from this membership plan here.

Fees – The next thing that I want to discuss is fees and other costs linked to your Shopify store. There are of course fees to your membership and costs to your monthly Shopify plan. The credit card transaction rates are exactly the same for the lite plan as for the basic plan. As you move up the scale those fees go down. the transaction fees that come with the membership levels are also the same for both of these memberships. So, when it comes to fees, there is no reason to move up to the next level, Basic membership. But if you find you are doing a huge amount of volume you will lose a lot of money on processing fees and transaction fees if you don’t upgrade.

Other Features – Some of the other features that you don’t get access to by using the light version might be a good reason to upgrade to basic. For example, you don’t get access to Twitter or Pinterest integration but you do get Facebook. Since Pinterest is a very good marketing tool for real-world products, and you can incorporate a buy button with the next level it might be advisable to upgrade.

Wrapping Up

Shopify is one of the most robust and user-friendly eCommerce platforms on the market today. It is easy to set up an account with Shopify, upload products, and set up your own Shopify store. With Shopify, you will be able to start selling and launch your Shopify store in a low time.

Shopify also offers very reasonable prices and takes care of everything from shipping to payment gateways.

Shopify also has a mobile app that allows Shopify store owners to manage their store directly from their mobile devices. The platform has become immensely popular among just about everyone in the eCommerce industry. Shopify had made it easy for people to start their own eCommerce website and is hosting some very large and prestigious online retailers.

With all of the options available that are native to Shopify and all of the add-on options that you get, you can’t go wrong with Shopify!

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