Sell Your Way to Success on Shopify

By Gini Graham Scott

SELL YOUR WAY TO SUCCESS ON SHOPIFY features the basic steps to setting up a Shopify store and successfully marketing and promoting your products to increase your sales. The book covers these basic steps to selling:

- Developing Your Store Idea

- Getting Started on Shopify

- Selling Your Own Products

- Finding Other Products to Sell

- Choosing a Theme

- Finding Photographs of Your Products

- Organizing Your Products into Collections

- Getting Payments and Shipping

- Adding Appropriate Apps

- Creating Coupon and Discount Codes

- Setting Up Sales Channels and Advertising Your Store

- Planning Your Strategy

The book includes over 250 full-color screen shots from Shopify stores and apps to guide you through the process. It draws on the author's experience in creating and promoting her own Shopify store.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Changemakers Publishing
• Release date: Jul 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393623069

Gini Graham Scott

Gini Graham Scott, Ph.D., CEO of Changemakers Publishing and Writing, is an internationally known writer, speaker, and workshop leader. She has published over 50 books with major publishers on various topics and has written over 3 dozen children's books. Her published children's books include Katy's Bow, Scratches, The Crazy Critters First Visit, and Where's the Avocado? published by Black Rose Writing. She has published 8 children's books through her company Changemakers Kids and is a member of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. She does workshops on self-publishing and creativity. She also helps clients write books as a ghostwriter and self-publish or find publishers and agents. Her websites are www.changemakerspublishgandwriting.com and www.ginigrahamscott.com.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1: WHY HAVE A STORE ON SHOPIFY

If you have a line of at least six products to sell or want to add products from others, you can use a Shopify store to build your brand, increase your audience, and make sales. You can sell them using drop shipping, a process where you receive an order and send the customer the product yourself or with the help of an assistant. Or you can use a fulfillment service set-up through your store that makes the shipments for you.

Shopify makes a good case for having a store on its website, which indicates how easy it is to set up your store and arrange for shipping.  Here’s a brief overview from Shopify on why you should have a store and how easy it is to set up. You can set up a store for any kind of products, including books with a broad market appeal, such as self-help, how-to, popular business, and inspirational books. Shopify even has an integration with Facebook and Google advertising, so once your store is set up, you can advertise it.

How You Can Sell Everywhere—Both Online and In-Person

The big advantage of Shopify is that you can sell everywhere.  While most selling is online, you can use Shopify to take orders when you sell at an in-person venue, such as at a trade show, flea market, or pop-up store.  You or your customer can use a mobile device to place orders.

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One of the advantages of Shopify is you get a dedicated ecommerce website, which provides templates for building your store, rather than starting from scratch on your own website.  You can use various themes to feature your products and list them in various ways—including best-selling, featured, and by name, listed from A to Z or Z to A. Your shop is then integrated with various systems for shipping and advertising.

Shopify also offers assorted backend tools to enable you to better manage your inventory and send out mailings about new products or special sales to current or prospective customers. 

As an alternative to creating your store with Shopify templates, you can integrate a current website or blog into Shopify.  This way, if you already have something created, you don’t have to create it all over again in Shopify.  However, be careful here! If you don’t have a well-organized and showcased online store, it may be better to start again, select a template and theme from Shopify, and add your products there.

Another advantage of using Shopify rather than your website is you can expand your reach as an ideal complement to selling on Amazon.  You can further expand your reach through promotions on the social media. Shopify makes it easy to tap into the biggest online markets and social media places like Facebook and Instagram. You can tap into the power of eBay, too.

Shopify has various tools to help you find and reach out to your ideal target market. Once you determine your market, Shopify helps you automate reaching out to that audience, and it offers insights on what did well, so you can repeat what works best and modify or stop doing what didn’t perform up to standards.

Shopify also provides assistance in connecting with your audience, such as by creating a blog on the platform where you write original content or adapt it from articles you publish elsewhere.  It additionally has SEO tools to help you know what keywords to use to help people searching for particular types of products find you.

Another advantage of using Shopify to sell more is that it integrates with the two major advertising platforms—Google and Facebook. On both platforms, you can target your ad to particular markets based on demographics, interests, and locations.

If you don’t have the time or interest in doing the marketing or don’t have someone to do it for you, Shopify has a virtual marketing assistant to help you drive sales and email customers, called Kit.  I didn’t use Kit, since I work with a virtual assistant, but check it out for yourself.

Another tool Shopify offers is marketing research so you can check what is working and what isn’t in your campaigns. You can see what is performing well by using the graphs and charts Shopify creates based on your ad campaigns and the number