A Shopify review:

Welcome back everyone to yet another review.

This week I will be discussing Shopify and my experience with them. In this post, I will be outlining what Shopify is for those of you who do not know.

I will then be going over how I came across Shopify and I will start to outline my overall experience with Shopify. With that why don’t we just jump in with what Shopify is?

What is Shopify?

For those of you who do not know, Shopify is a platform in which people can design and run their own retail store or brand line.

Wikipedia defines Shopify as an “ e-commerce platform for online stores and retail point-of-sale systems”.That sums up in a nutshell what Shopify is

. You must also be made aware that Shopify is not the only platform of its kind, you also have

1. Big commuters
2. E-commerce
3. Store envy

Along with several other platforms way more than I could possibly mention in this post alone. So you may be asking why am I just doing this post solely on Shopify? That is simple

1. Shopify is the only one of these platforms that I have had actual experience with.
2. They are the biggest and most well-known platform of their kind.

Hopefully, I have answered that question.

 

How did I come across Shopify?

I have been looking to be apart of the online world for a very long time. One day like so many others I was researching online and stumbled across Shopify. I almost immediately started research them.

The more I read the more I thought I can do this. Which is my way, so being me I laid out a plan and managed to come with the money to pay for an entire year subscription to Shopify

Which I might say was not easy to do with my limited budget but I managed anyway.

Let me point out that they have three different plans available and that most people start with their beginner plan at 29.95 per month.

 

I then came up with the money for my own domain.

I feel I should also point out that they do you give you a free domain name for your store.

And for about a month I used that domain name without any problems at all. You could very easily keep the free domain name.

I, however, chose to get my own domain name. I started off like with any other platform with building my own site up.

1. Picked my theme
2. Designed the site
3. Added products
4. I set up sales tax
5. Payment information
6. Shipping rules
7. Added all the proper plugins
8. Opened my store.

And for whatever reason thought with no experience in running a store of any kind I would find success quickly, or at least I was hopeful that I would.

They had tons of testimonials that said if you did these things you would have success quickly. Nope, I would quickly figure out that is just does not work that way at all.

Thank the lord that despite my hopeful nature I have the practice of being prepared, otherwise, it could have been a huge disappointment to not see all that success I was imaging.

 

So how does it work?

Well, let me just say that to open a retail store is a lot of hard work with countless hours in just building and maintaining the site alone.

It also comes with a lot of competition regardless of your niche. You would have to come up with an idea that would be interesting to people but not overdone (which in my experience is very rare) to have little to no competition in retail or really any business it seems.

Now in saying that if you are willing to put in the work, time and resources anything is possible and the sky’s the limit.

When I started this project I some Idea that it would not build overnight. I set in motion a plan to give this a try for one year.

At the end of the year if I still wasn’t making any money then I would close up shop and walk away in the knowledge I tried.

 

Here I was with a retail store.

Now what? I really had no clue. This is where things would become interesting and challenging.

When I first started it was never explained that you could not sell certain products. I did, however, find out the day of my first sell.

I had a friend contact me and tell me that they had tried to purchase something from my store and they were unable to do so. I was in shock, I let that person know I would get to the bottom of this as quickly as possible.

Called up Shopify and started asking questions. I came to find out that I could not sell certain thing from the sellers that they connect me with (Ali express and oberlo) and for as long as these items were attached to my store my account would be frozen.

My first thought was if you do not allow people to sell these items then why are they on a list of items to sell.

I was really confused but without argument, I deleted these Items from my store and waited a day to see if my store would be unfrozen.

The next day I checked, no, the day after that, no still frozen. I question them as to why and their response was we are waited for your account to be reviewed. So I waited a little long now it has been a week and still nothing.

To make a long story shorter It would take me two weeks and switching pay providers to resolve this issue.

My faith in Shopify

Reduced significantly after all that, needless to say, and my chances to produce a sell just became that much harder for me to achieve.

After this point, I put a lot of time and effort to undo the damage of that mishap. I started by learning ways I could advertise my store.

I would start all kind of business pages and attach my store to any kind of platform I thought I could draw eyeballs.

One of the things that Shopify offers is plugins

They offer thousands and thousands of plugins to choose from. Some of these plugins you have to pay for, some come with free trial periods and some are completely free. I worked to stick with the free ones as much as possible.

Now I had already downloaded plugins to help me run the store more effective and now I was downloading plugins to help me set up email lists and campaigns, plugins that would allow me to have an open feed between my social media sites and other platforms.

These plugins were added to my store all in an effort to be seen and to help me draw a following. After being with Shopify for several months I started to find some kind of success.

Final thoughts

To read more on this please stay tuned until next week where I will reveal some more about what you will get with Shopify along with the rest of my story and my over advising as to whether or not Shopify is a good platform to go with.