Constructing your catalog

Before we talk about designing your site, we want to focus on the core element of any vibrant e-commerce store, your “catalog” or list of products for sale. What’s a store without products? Shopify has a central section entitled Products, which lets you enter your products for sale and also offers you the ability to track the inventory level as people place orders. You can update your inventory at any time, organize your inventory by different product data fields, and even import your entire product catalog at one time.

When you want to add a product to your store, follow these steps:

1. From the Store home page, click the Products link.

   The main Products page is displayed. The first time you go to your Products page, you see the option to add your first product or set up an import of products, as shown in Figure 3-6. For this example, we through the steps of adding a product directly.

2. Click the Add Product button to get started.

   The one-page Add Product form appears.

3. Complete the following information fields, as shown in Figure 3-7:
   • Title: Enter the name that you want your customers to see as the name of your product.
   • Description: Enter the item description in this field. Write a description for your product that you want customers to see when they’re looking at your item on your store page. Use the command buttons at the top of the text box (similar to Microsoft Word) to format your description so that it will show up on your store with specific font sizes, alignment, and so on.
   • Images: Click the Upload Image link to specify the path where the digital image of your product is stored on your computer and upload it to your store.
   • Product type: In this field, you select a category to assign to your product (for example, shirts, pants, socks, shoes).
   • Vendor: Enter the manufacturer or brand name of the product in this field.
   • (Optional) Collections: If you want to create a special collection (think custom category, for example) to assign your product to, this field is where you type in the collection name tied to the product. For example, you could create a Clearance collection, a New In Stock collection, or a themed collection like Movie Heroes.
   • Tags: In this field, you can define tags, or “keywords,” to be associated with your item for search capabilities. These tags won’t be displayed to your shoppers on the product page.
4. Scroll to the pricing and shipping section and enter more details about your product (see Figure 3-8):
   • Price: Every product must have a numeric price.
   • Compare at price: Think of this field as the “original retail price” and the price field as your sales price. When you use this field, your customers see both prices, with a line through the “Compare at price” number and the price highlighted.
   • Stock Keeping Unit: This is your ID field for the product, so create a unique identifier for each product. This is an internal measure so don’t worry about the public having to decipher this field. You can enter letters, numbers, or both in this field.
   • Barcode (ISBN, UPC, GTIN, and so on): This field should contain the identifier that came with the product, like a manufacturer’s UPC number, ISBN number, or a GTIN (Global Trade Identification Number). If the product doesn’t have one of these numbers, you can leave this field blank.
   • Inventory policy: You can pick from a drop-down list of options. If you pick Track Inventory, a new field appears where you can assign the initial quantity of units for this product. (As orders are received, Shopify keeps track of the inventory level and decreases the quantity accordingly.) If you pick Do Not Track Inventory, no quantity information will be assigned to your product entry.
   • Weight: Put the numeric weight of your item in this field. You can define the unit of measurement in the drop-down list next to this field.
   • (Optional) Harmonized system code: If you ship overseas, you can assign an internationally recognized harmonized system code for your product, and Shopify will include this code when the customs paperwork is prepared.
   • Fulfillment service: This option is mainly for the Advanced Shopify users, who have more real-time shipping options. For everybody else, the service is Manual as you fulfill your product sales. Make sure the “This product requires shipping” check box is selected for any product that’s a physical product you have to mail out.
   • Variants: If you offer the same product in different sizes or colors or other options, don’t create individual product entries for each option. You simply click the Add Variant link and assign an option name and option values, one line at a time, like this:

     Option name	Option values
     Size	Small, Medium, Large
     Color	Red, Blue, White, Black

     Do not use any other internal punctuation, such as a colon or semicolon, between the options. Shopify is looking for a comma between each option.

5. Click Save Product to store the item.

   When you save the product, Shopify takes you back to the Products page, confirms that the product was saved (see Figure 3-9), and offers you links to view (the product) in your online store or create another product.

6. Repeat Steps 2 to 5 for any additional products.

Opening the doors

Before you decide that your store is going to go live and be open for business, we recommend that you research and plan your store first. See what you like and dislike on other websites and come up with a plan for your website. See Book 3, Chapter 2 for more information on developing a website design.

When you’re ready to open your store for business, you should first think about the following steps:

1. Design your store.

   You need to create the web pages that display your products. You can add pages and then define the navigation of your store by creating a main menu and organizing the pages you create into a simple navigation structure between a main menu and a footer menu at the bottom of the screen. Building the actual store requires some design work, and Shopify provides you with hundreds of free and premium web templates that you can use to build your pages. You can also hire a Shopify Expert to create a totally custom design. These Experts are preapproved professional designers, marketers, and developers who can help build your store.

2. Add products.

   We cover adding products to your catalog in the previous section, “Constructing your catalog.”

3. Set up payment methods.

   You need to decide how you want to handle payment processing for your store. Shopify integrates with over 70 payment gateways around the world, from services like PayPal or iDEAL to systems like Bitcoin. Shopify also offers its own gateway, which offers competitive rates and allows you to accept credit cards. You can find more about payment processing in Book 4, Chapter 4.

4. Set up tax rates.

   In today’s age of Internet sales, you need to be aware of tax-collection policies. They vary from state to state, and new legislation is being considered as this book goes to press. Currently in most states, you need to collect sales tax from customers who live in the same state as your business. And in a growing number of cases, you may need to collect sales tax from customers outside your business state. Consult your local Chamber of Commerce, accountant, or state government’s business office for specific information. At a minimum, you need to set up the tax rate for your local business area.

5. Set up shipping rules.

   You need to define shipping methods and rates for your store. You can choose from vendors such as USPS, UPS, and FedEx. If you define shipping weights for each product in your store, Shopify can calculate shipping rates for each customer based on the weight of the items in the customer’s shopping cart. You can also set flat shipping rates independent of the number or weight of items in the customer’s shopping cart.

When you have gone through these five steps, you should also take a look at the other settings and capabilities Shopify offers you as a shop owner. You can set up notifications, custom domains, and even specific apps that your customers can download and use with your store. You can choose from 100 free and professional themes to make your store look great. You can add a fully functioning blog to help communicate and market to your customers. You can build a robust About Us page to let your customers know about your business and why you started this store, in order to help better connect with your customer base and distinguish yourself from the competition.

Basic Shopify package: Starting out

Don’t let the name fool you — the Basic Shopify package isn’t a stripped-down, bargain-basement tool that holds only a few products. This package provides a rich set of features and is an excellent jumping-on point for new e-commerce retailers.

With the Basic package, you get the ability to build your own store, host any number of products, and design your site by using the Shopify tools. Some of the more advanced marketing and reporting techniques are reserved for more expensive packages, but most small businesses don’t need them.

Shopify package: Moving up

The medium solution is the Shopify package, which contains all the features of the Basic Shopify package, but also offers more advanced features that bigger e-commerce stores need to run their enterprises.

Some of the benefits you receive in this standard package include

• Five unique staff accounts (compared with two accounts with the Basic package)
• Better shipping label discounts
• The ability to view real-time advanced professional reporting tools
• The ability to offer gift certificates/cards for your website
• The ability to recover abandoned shopping carts

Advanced Shopify package: Building on solid ground

As e-commerce websites grew, Shopify needed a solution for its biggest customers. Although rich functions are important to bigger websites, you should care mostly about scalability — the capability to grow your website’s capability to match an increased number of customers or demand. Therefore, Shopify created the Advanced Shopify package.

The Advanced Shopify package focuses on providing the right amount of capabilities to make sure that the customer’s website brings in lots in sales just as smoothly as they were bringing in their first few orders. This is enhanced with an advanced report builder option and real-time carrier shipping options.

Marketing programs

You can spread the message of your business in many ways through the Internet and in the physical world. Most people find that their biggest limitation is time because there are many more programs than there are hours in the day. That’s where technology comes in. Shopify provides several ways to improve important merchandising features, such as the following:

• Built-in search engine optimization: Shopify provides total support for a lot of SEO best practices, like making sure your title and meta tags get filled in correctly for your website pages. They also update your sitemap.xml files so the search engines can detect any website updates automatically.
• Discounts and coupons: Shopify builds in functionality where you can provide specific discount codes as well as coupon codes to appeal to different customer bases and encourage repeat business.
• Social media integration: Shopify builds in buttons and functionality into its themes to allow your customers to share your products and store with their friend networks.

Customer-relationship management

You can build connections with your customers in lots of ways. The power of an online business is that you can reach your customers directly, one by one, rather than rely on a network of distributors, middlemen, and retailers to connect products with customers.

Shopify’s Standard and Advanced packages allow you to offer features on your store such as gift certificates. You can also provide automatic discounts to your customers, whether it’s a one-time promotion, a reward for their first purchase, or an incentive to come back for a new order. Shopify keeps track of the logistics so that you can provide a simple code to your customers that acts as a gift certificate or discount coupon and also update your customers’ orders when needed.

After you get to know your customers, you can follow up with Shopify’s built-in e-mail marketing tools from MailChimp (www.mailchimp.com). You can easily view your customer history with Shopify and organize customers into specific groups that you can market to directly. You can have the ability for customers to buy gift cards for your store to give to other people, and encourage those customers to write product reviews that would be stored and displayed on your store.

Some of these features are available only with the Standard and Advanced Shopify packages.

Sales reports

You must think that we love reports, the way we talk about them repeatedly in this book. We are fans of reports for one basic reason: You don’t know where you can go if you don’t understand where you’ve been. Shopify offers a number of sales reports to help you track what’s succeeding and what isn’t, so pay attention to these reports and make smart decisions about how to increase your business.

Simply click the Reports link from the main Shopify menu to see the different reports. Your sales reports give you a useful picture of how your website is doing overall. You can analyze sales by a number of factors, including time of day, customer, channel, and where the traffic is coming from. You can also analyze your visitors by location, landing page, or advertising campaign. You can use these reports if you subscribe to the Standard or Advanced Shopify subscription plan. You can even export that data to Microsoft Excel if you want to do further number crunching.

If you’re interested in doing your own data analysis with Excel, check out Excel Data Analysis For Dummies, 3rd Edition, by Stephen L. Nelson and Elizabeth C. Nelson.

After you see your customers’ orders, you can then see how they found you in the first place. There is a report that analyzes sales based on the traffic referral source of the customer. For each visit, you see the referring URL of that customer, which is the web address your customer was viewing before coming to your website. Shopify even ties together the orders that came from these links so that you can see the revenue per visit. This information gives you an idea of how valuable a new customer can be — so that you know how much to spend to get that new customer to return.

If the referral URL is from a search engine, pay attention to the URL closely. You see the exact search terms the visitor typed in the search engine to find you. Knowing these words should definitely influence your SEO marketing campaigns.

Finally, let’s talk about information you can learn that isn’t actual sales or visits. Your customers can type search words and try to go directly to the product page they need. To track this type of customer, Shopify also shows the most frequent words in your own website’s search engine. You see a ranked list of the top search terms your customers use every day to find your specific products. You can then compare this list with your inventory. Investigating the search terms used by customers can help you match the right product with the right customer. More important, you see a report of top search terms with no product results. This indicates a list of products your customers are looking for that you don’t currently stock, which shows you what new products you should consider carrying in your store.