For the longest time, I have been thinking of starting a Shopify store to sell some stuff from my website.
In February 2016, I finally leaped and decided to rebrand one of my web stores as a Shopify store.
First things first though - before I could even think about launching a store on Shopify, I needed product inventory.
I had started with Amazon FBA, but after a while, it became too much of a headache for me so I sold off all my Amazon FBA products at steep losses just so that I wouldn't have to deal with them anymore!
So back to square one - how do you start selling things online?
Option 1: Selling from Your Website -
This option is good if you have an established website that is already getting traffic. However, I did not want to spend time and money on building a website from scratch just so that I could sell products online - it just didn't make sense.
Option 2: Selling Through Amazon FBA -
Amazon FBA has the huge benefit of being very well recognized by Amazon customers. If you are selling through Amazon FBA then you also do not need to worry about shipping out your products or even handling returns! Just send your product in bulk to Amazon, they will take care of everything else for you! The downside though is that their fees are quite high - 15% referral fee plus storage fees! You also need to be able to handle large orders, because Amazon FBA only lets you order a fixed number of units each time.
Option 3: Selling Through Shopify -
This option is good if you do not have a large following or established website from which to sell. Unfortunately, I did not want to use this option either because there are no referral fees involved with Shopify and you need to be able to handle returns yourself!
So that left me with two options - Option 1 and Option 2.
I decided that since I already had experience selling physical products using Amazon FBA in the past, it would make more sense for me to stick with selling through Amazon FBA instead of building my brand new website just so that I could sell things online.
Step 1: Setting up my Shopify store -
I had heard that Shopify was pretty easy to set up, but boy were they not lying!
I created a new account on Shopify and installed the free trial version of their theme. It didn't take long at all - within an hour or two I had already found a theme that I liked, customized it to look the way I wanted it to look, added in some products from another website of mine...and voila! My very first Shopify store was ready!
The only problem now though was choosing a proper domain name for my shop site. Since this whole thing started as just experimenting around with different eCommerce platforms, I did not want anything fancy. I decided to go with mystandardtaxi.com for now since it is easy to remember and short :)
Step 2: Getting the Shopify theme tweaked to look exactly the way I want
After creating a new account on Shopify, you are taken through their 'Theme Wizard'. This wizard helps you choose a theme that looks best suited for your needs. Depending on how much time you have to spend and how picky you want to be about things, this process could take anywhere from 1 minute (in the case of a really simple website) to an hour or more!
I had already installed the free trial version of one of the themes designed by Shopify so I wasn't too fussy about finding another theme. However, as soon as I started customizing my theme I realized that this theme had a lot of fancy features which I had no use for - things like the product zoom feature, special blog posts on one side and shop information on another, etc...
I wanted something simple, clean, and easy to navigate! So instead of looking for another free Shopify theme to install, it made more sense for me to just get the currently installed theme tweaked a bit. This way not only would I be able to create a website exactly how I envisioned it but also save myself some money by avoiding having to pay any extra license fees :)