Start An Online Business

1. Course Introduction: Do you want to start an online business? You have a great business idea, but you need help in getting started. If that's you, you are in the right place. In this course, I will guide you step-by-step to plan and open an online shop. We will cover the key business concepts of marketing and finance, as well as the steps required to create an online shop with a branded website and a professional email address. This course is divided into two sections. The first section is for brushing up the concepts and planning the business. Because if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. And I don't want that. In the second section, we will go through the exact steps to set up an online shop. Using Shopify. We will learn how to upload the product, set up this door policies. And I will also introduce you to some apps to manage your business. Without any delay. Let's get started. I will see you. 3. 01 Business Basic and 4P Framework: So why do businesses fail? The failure of businesses can be categorized into two broad categories. One is failure due to planning, and the second is failure due to execution. A business can fail because there is not enough market research done while planning. So think of things like pricing or the product market fit is not right, or they have not researched it well, there can be failure in planning the financials, like how the product would be priced, how much you would be able to sell, how much you are earning, and what are your overall costs. If there's a failure in either of these two, then the business can fail. On the execution side, there can be failure in operations. So let's say you are hiring somebody, but you are having difficulty in retaining employees. You're having difficulty in sourcing the products. You are having difficulty in producing and delivering your products on time. There can be issues with marketing, so you're not able to acquire the customers. Maybe you're not able to attract customers by putting effective ads that will actually drive the customers to buy your product. There can also be issues with customer retention. So let's say you managed to find a customer and then the customer has a problem and you're not able to resolve their complaint, the customer decides to return the product and then they provide negative feedback to their friends, family, and even on the internet. There are multiple reasons why a business can fail and we need to address each and every aspect of business to make sure that we are as fail-safe as possible. So let's get started with the marketing strategy. This is the four P's framework. The first p is product. So this is a no-brainer. You need to decide what exactly you are selling. It could be digital or physical product. The second is price. That is, how much are you asking for it? The third P is placed. So where exactly are you selling your product? The final P is promotion. So that is how are you going to find your customers and how are you going to make that sale happen? Coming to product. The product can be either a physical products such as a phone, laptop, a watch, or anything tangible that you can hold in your hand. You can also create digital products such as e-book or video courses that the customer can simply download from your website. When we think about product, these are the three questions you need to ask yourself. The first one, why your product? That is, what is the value that we are bringing to the customer? And why should the customer be interested in your product at all? If it is a phone, the value that the customer is getting from a phone is that they can connect with their friends, they can surf the Internet, etc. The second question you need to ask about your product is what is the alternative? So let's say you are not creating this particular product. Where else can the customer go to get the same or similar value from an alternative product if you are creating a new phone than there are so many products in the market already, there is iPhone, there is Samsung. So the customer has plenty of alternatives. In this case, one of the most important things in business is product differentiation. If there are alternatives to your product and this product differentiation becomes the most important factor. So let's say I'm creating a new phone and I have to answer the question, why is my product better than an iPhone? Either it is providing same features for a cheaper price. Maybe it is faster, maybe it is lighter in weight, but there is something that needs to differentiate my product from an alternative. And as I said, this could be the most important question that you need to answer. Now, let's say I wanted to sell physical products. And the product I want to sell is it framed map? And this is a beautiful piece of wood work. It is a laser cut street view map of Miami. Okay. Now here are some questions that I need to answer. How will you get the materials? So taking a quick look at this, Let's say I would need some wooden planks. I would need some paint. I would need some packaging material for packaging and shipping it off. Okay. So I have to determine where I can get these materials. Can I go to a Home Depot? Can I get it on Amazon or is there any other supplier that I can find that can give me a better price or better quality or both. Now once I have decided how I'm going to procure the materials to create a process map for this. So the first thing I need to do to create this particular product is start off with a digital file because these are high resolution images that need to be first created only then I can start laser engraving and laser cutting to create this particular physical product. Do I have the ability to create these digital files, or am I going to outsource this process to someone? Let's say I know a thing or two about creating these digital files. So I will say, okay, this is going to be me. And if you take a look at this particular product, there are multiple layers. The first one is this. So the first layer has some engraving of these streets. These are the smallest fruits that you can see in black. So the first layer would need to have laser engraving. Can I do this in-house or will I have to outsource? Let's say I will be taking care of this as well. Then I see there is a top layer with more prominent streets. So those are laser cut. Can I do it myself or will I have to outsource it? Let's say I am outsourcing this layer. The base here is painted in blue. So that is, that is the painting job that I need to do. And let's say I am outsourcing that as well. Once all the layers are, once all the layers are placed on top of each other, then I'll have to do some polishing to make sure it looks like a high-quality product. So let's say I'm outsourcing that product as well. And the final two steps are packing and shipping. So maybe I can pack myself and I can ship it out myself as well. So once I have created this particular process flow, I will have some sort of idea in my mind as to how much time it would take and how much money it would cost. Now that we have our entire process planned out, Let's talk about price. In order to determine the selling price, there are a few approaches we can take. The first one is to do some market research. You can do some surveys and go and ask your customers what they are willing to pay for such a product. The second way is you can take a look at what your peers are selling for. That is, if I'm creating this particular frame map, what are similar products selling for? I can do a Google search for it. And the third is the cost-based pricing. So I simply take a look at all the cost that is of material, labor and equipment. Then based on the cost, I add a markup. So let's say it cost me $20 to create one particular piece of framed map. And then I add $10 on top of it and I determine that my selling price is $30. These are the three approaches you can take for determining your selling price. I would not recommend to start off with this. This could be a good strategy to check whether you are profitable or not, but I would not recommend starting off with cost-based pricing. So let's take a look at General Dynamics of how pricing can impact the quantity you are selling. So on the horizontal axis we have the price, that is the selling price of the product. And on the vertical axis we have the quantity. So generally when I'm selling a particular product at a lower price, right? So let's say if I'm selling that map at $20, maybe I will have a lot of customers. Let's say I have 100,000 customers willing to pay $20 for that map. But now if I decide to go here and let's say price it at $1,000. Maybe I will find five people who are willing to pay $100 for that particular map. I'm showing an extreme example, but you get the idea. Now this is how price can determine how much quantity you can sell for products in general, this supply curve looks something like this. If the supplier is selling their products for $20, maybe you will have only 100 suppliers willing to create that product for you. And if the supplier is able to sell the product for $100, maybe you will have 100,000 suppliers lining up because they are able to sell their product for such a high price. So as a seller, this is the curve that you are looking at when you are determining the selling price. You would want to be somewhere in this particular region so that you are not too highly priced, So that you are getting only five customers. You don't want to be too low on the pricing that you are getting a lot of customers, but maybe you are not making any profits. So you would need to find a sweet spot that works for you, that you are making a profit and you are able to sell more quantity as well. Now let's determine the selling price of the frame mapped we talked about you can do some surveys, but surveys can be expensive. So if you have the budget for that, we will consider doing a market research survey. But let's say we're not doing that now, since we are just starting out, I will just do a quick Google search to find similar products and what is the price range for them? So let's say I figure out that that a city map like that with the size eight inch by 12 inch sells for around $60 on average. And it gives me some sort of an anchor price and minds. So maybe I can price my product close to $60. So now I am deciding to sell my product for $603, but how much is it costing me to create that product? So let's say per map, I'm spending $5 on wooden boards, $1 on paint. The packaging would cause me to 50. Shipping would cost me eight bucks. The electricity for laser engraver and laser cutting is costing me $0.50. And let's say I have an employee that creates four of those in an hour. I pay them $40 an hour. So poor map, I'm paying them $10. I add all of this up. So 5.6 and 14, 17, 27. So the total cost is $27 per map. This is just the variable cost. I'm not considering any fixed costs such as renting a warehouse or the cost of my equipment. This is the variable cost to create one map. Now I'm selling it for 60. My variable cost is 2071. Rule of thumb I would suggest is to do this check whether your variable cost is less than 50% of selling price or not. And here I'm selling for 60, 50 per cent of 60 is $30. My variable cost is $27. Now, this is not a business rule. This is just a sanity check that I want to do. And the reason I want to keep it under 50 per cent is because first of all, a lot of this money will go into covering my fixed costs, such as paying for the equipment like laser cutter, laser engraver and all those things. And the other thing is if the cost of these things go up a little, I should still have some room to make profit, okay? So this could be a good rule of thumb. You can keep this at 40%, 60%, 70%, whatever you are comfortable with, I'm comfortable with 50% or more. Now we have figured out the product, we have figured out the pricing. Now, let's talk about the place where we can sell these frame maps. Now let's talk about the place where we can sell these framed maps. Do I want to be an online store or do I want to be a physical store? Or I can be both. Physical stores generally will have very high startup costs. So depending on the location where you are based, you would have to sign a lease for maybe a year or even a couple of years. That could mean a lot of money that you have to spend upfront. If you own a retail space, then you don't have to pay for the leaves. You have to determine if that is the best use of the space that you have. Okay. So let's say you are signing a lease and the place cost $5,000 a month, and you are doing 12 month lease, you have to spend $60,000 just to rent the place for a year. If you have a retail space, maybe you have to have an employee. Either you are gonna be in the store or you have to have an employee who would be present to take care of customers in case of a physical store location can be a very vital determining factor. A good location of a physical store is a huge advantage. On the flip side, the physical stores are restricted by public holidays, working hours, and in case of the COVID era, lockdowns, if you only have a physical store, your sales can get severely limited because of these factors. In case of an online store, the start-up costs are very low. You can even start on a month-to-month plans. So if you want to try out a particular idea, you can take a look at Shopify or some other service that will allow you to pay on a month-to-month basis. Online stores can basically run 20473625 in case of an online store, websites speed and design are important because you don't want your customer to be confused when they visit your website, it should be easy to navigate. The checkout experience should be smooth. There should be a search bar where the customer can easily search for any item if they're not able to see it straightaway. So the design and speed are very important. The challenge with an online store is that finding a customer may not be easy if you don't have the right marketing in place. So they're like billions of websites. And once a user logs onto Internet and goes on Google Search and types and for something, maybe they get like 1 million results for it. So you need to have a plan of showing up whenever a customer looks for your product. And we will talk about that in a bit. For my use case of selling these framed maps, I think it might be easier for me to just start off as a Shopify store. Shopify is just one of the providers. You can even get your own store made with your own checkout and all. But I like Shopify because of the integrations that are available and it costs me just $29 a month. And basically for $25 a month, I can set up this store. I can start accepting payments. I can get I can gather customer information, I can do marketing and everything. So Shopify could be a great starting point. There are some other competing services as well. But for this particular course, I will just focus on Shopify. But you get to decide which service works best for you. 4. 02 How to get a customer via ads: Now we have decided everything. We have decided the price, we have decided we are creating a Shopify store. We have decided the product and how we're sourcing and how we are shipping it. Now the most important part here is promotion. How do you find a customer? Or rather how does the customer find you? For new businesses that do not have any customers, the quickest way of finding a customer could be paid advertisement. So you can basically run paid advertisements on all of these networks. Google, instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. All of these platforms have advertisement features. You can even take a look at forums such as Reddit and Quora. And you can run your ads on those platforms as well. If you are advertising on Google or any other search engine that is called search engine marketing. You might have heard that term S, E, M, and this is basically what SEM is that you do paid marketing on search engines. How does paid advertisement look like for a consumer? So if I go to Google and let's say I want to buy a drone. So in the search bar I typed by drone. And Google will show me 244 million results in 0.92 s, okay, the first few results would be advertisements. So it clearly shows here that this is an ad. This is an ad, this is an ad, and this is an ad. So the top four results that Google is showing me our ads. And if I want to sell my product and I want to do search engine marketing, I can put my ad so that once a user says, I want to buy laser cut maps, and then the customer searches than if I have my search engine marketing setup, maybe my ad would come up here at the top. And every time a user will click on it, Google will charge me some money because they are showing my adds to that user. Now, let's understand the dynamics of acquiring a customer from Google search. I will start off by defining a target segment for my ads. So let's say my target segment is people in the age group of 20 to 35 years. And they love, they have interests in traveling. So I will use this information to create a target segment. Now this is the target segment that I have that could potentially be interested in my product. So I will tell Google to show my ad to these people. So these people see my ad. Then not all of these people that see my ad will actually read the full adder. So maybe my ad is not speaking to the desire and the customer. Let's say a fraction of these people will read the full add. A fraction of people reading the full AD will actually go ahead and click on the ad, so they will take some action. Now, this is also important because when I'm designing an ad campaign, I will want to have some sort of CTA, which is called to action. So think of a statement like by now or grab your ten per cent discount. Now, call this number now for a special offer, some sort of a call to action so that the user who sees my ad and reads my ad actually takes the action on clicking on it. Once they click on the ad, they would be redirected to my website or my Shopify store. Now, let's say these people are clicking on the Add. Now they're on my store. A fraction of these people who are actually visiting my store will end up purchasing something from me. So that user is now onboarded as a customer on my shop. I can gather some details from there like, where do they want the product to be shipped? What is their email address, what is their phone number? They are essentially onboarded as a customer. A fraction of those customers will come back and make a second purchase. So let's say there are ten people who are buying the product from me because they came through this entire funnel. Hopefully some of them will like my product and even without coming through the entire funnel on their own, they will come back and buy another product from me in the future. So I'm able to retain those customers for my business. A lot of people call this a sales funnel because it is shaped like a funnel. But if you think about it, it is kind of a leaky funnel because at every stage we are letting some people leak from our funnel. 5. 03 Organic Traffic, Customer Acquistion, Customer Lifetime Value: In the previous lecture, we talked about paying for advertisements and getting a customer that way. In this lecture, we will talk about getting a customer without paying for it. So we can do that via organic traffic. Getting organic traffic is a lot more challenging, but it is incredibly rewarding because essentially you pay $0 to get in Leeds and those leads convert to customers. And there is a whole science behind it. It is called search engine optimization or SEO. Seo techniques can work on Google search, Bing search, or any other search engine. Since Google controls about 85 to 90% of market share when it comes to organic searches, most of the people will associate SEO with Google itself. So if we go back to the same example where a user types in via drone and searches on Google. The first four results were ads, which were search engine marketing or SEM. The first result that does not have the add tag is the first organic result. Now here I am getting a result from dji.com. What that means is this website has not paid anything for getting featured here. It is ranking on top of Google's search based on the algorithm that Google uses to rank the website. And this rank of number one position is given by Google's algorithm based on the search term that the user uses in the search bar. It can also depend on location and the language that you're using on Google. Now how can you get organic traffic, the way Google decides which side would feature on the top or on the first page of a search result depends on many factors. The first factor is great content. If you're selling something, try and add a blog page which will tell more about the product, cry and add great product description so that Google recognizes that there is a good explanation of what the product does, what the specifications are. And Google believes that a user can get good information before making a purchase on your website. Another important factor is age of domain. So if I'm starting a website today and I'm buying the domain name today itself. And if I have to compete with a business which has their website for like 15 years already. Even if my quantum quality is high, Google will have more trust in an order domain because it has already established its presence and it has a history on the Internet. The third factor is internal SEO. So when I'm creating a site, there are certain things I can do on my website itself, like linking one page to another or making sure that the user can navigate from one page to another properly. And that all the pages are linked to some other page on the website so that there is a flow of traffic that can happen. The fourth major factor is external SEO. External SEO is something that happens outside of my website. So let's say I created this great website. I have done everything, I have written great content. I have linked my pages properly on my own website. But then Google looks for some trust signals. And trust signals can come from backlinks. And backlinks are simply some external website linking to your website. So for selling the maps, I have created this website and someone, let's say on the editorial team of Time Magazine, light my product and on-time dot com, they decided to write an article and they gave me a backlink. What that means is they wrote an article and somewhere in the article they give a link to my website, my website.com, and they made it a clickable link. So any reader who is reading this particular article, if he or she goes and clicks on it, they will be redirected to my site. So this is a form of backlink, since this particular back link is on a high authority sites such as time.com or New York Times are. There are plenty of well-established websites that will pass on great value simply if they have a clickable link on their website which sends the visitor to my website. Consider this a form of vote. And the more crusted the website is, the more established the website is on, the value of the vote is higher, then there are some social signals. It would also help if a lot of people are talking about your product or Instagram and Facebook and they are linking to your product or they are referencing back to your website. There are plenty of factors that go into determining how Google will rank your website based on more than 100 factors. But backlink remains one of the most prominent factors. So a new website can work on getting their great content written. They can work on getting internal SEO optimized, but they will not have age of domain because I'm just starting a website right now. What age does it have? It has an age of a month, right? External SEO, you have to work on it over time. If you keep writing great content or if your product is great, slowly and slowly, you will start acquiring these backlinks from crossroad sites. So this is a slow process, but SEO is important because the thing with ads is they are quick. They will deliver results very quickly, but they are expensive, right? So you should have a short, mid and long-term strategy. The short-term strategy could be to run the ads, but the long-term strategy should be to focus on organic traffic as well, because this is free once you are able to establish authority, once you are able to rank high in the Google search results, all the traffic that you're getting is basically free. Now, let's take a look at few important concepts of business. Would it not be great if you just open your store or you started your website and people are queuing up outside your store to buy stuff from you. The reality is a little different from this. As a new business, you might have to pay some money to acquire a customer. And it is very important to track how much money you are paying to get that one customer. That is the customer acquisition costs. That is, how much do you need to spend to get a new customer on average? So let's say you spend $1 on ads in a month, and that month you got 100 customers, right? So I will divide 1,100 and I get my cost of acquisition as $10. And knowing this number is very important. Now what is customer lifetime value? Customer lifetime value is the total value at customer can give you over their lifetime. And what I mean by that is, let's say you have a customer who comes and buys something worth $10, and then you are able to add them to your email list. And then later sometime you send them a different offer and they come back and buy something again from you, right? So in that case, Let's say they come in by another ten bucks and six months later they come and buy something worth another ten bucks. So you acquired this customer just once, and let's say you paid an acquisition cost of just $10, but the total value that the customer brought you is $30, okay? So in this case you are making a profit because you spent ten, but your customer is giving you $30 in profit. So this is a profitable scenario. So it is important to have an estimate of both your customer acquisition cost as well as the customer lifetime value. And that is how you decide if a particular marketing strategy is working or not. And we will do an example to see customer acquisition cost as well as customer lifetime value in action. Now let's briefly understand a few digital marketing terms. The first one is CPM, which is cost per thousand impressions. The m here is the Roman letter M, which stands for thousands. So a lot of people can get confused and think that CPM or cost per million impressions, but it is actually cost per thousand impressions. So some search engines or social media networks might charge you per thousand impressions. So if you're paying for an ad and if the search engine, let's say Google, Facebook or Instagram, they show your ad to 1,000 people. They might charge you for just showing the ad. So that is called CPM. The second digital marketing term I want you to know is CPC, which is Cost Per Click. Cpc is the cost you need to pay to Google, Facebook, or Instagram when a user clicks on your ad. So in the previous case, we were just talking about the users seeing your ad, which was just an impression. But CPC here is the cost you have to pay only when the user clicks on your ad. So no matter how many people actually viewed your ad, only you pay only if you click on the ad. And Google essentially charges you on CPC basis. Only Google does not charge you on CPM, at least as of recording this lecture, they can change the rules anytime. Now, CPC would depend on a lot of things like the country or geography you are targeting. So if you are targeting, let's say a US are one of the developed markets, your CPC would tend to be higher. And if you are targeting some developing or underdeveloped market, maybe your CPC would be lower. It would also depend on the niche in which you are targeting. If you're targeting downloads of a finance app, the CPC might be higher as opposed to if you are trying to sell a bracelet, then maybe the cost per click would be lower. It all depends on the competition and what your competitors are trying to bid on. The cracks of the matter is once you run the ads and only if the user actually goes and clicks, then you have to pay Google on a CPC basis. The next digital marketing term is CDR, or click-through rate. So CDR measures how many people who see your ad actually click on it to visit your website. So let's say your ad is shown by Googled 1 million people, but only 10,000 of them will actually click on it. Then we divide 10,000 by 1 million. We get a click-through rate of 1% divided into the number of impressions as a percentage value. Now that we have understood what customer acquisition cost is, what a customer lifetime value is, what CPM, CPC, and click-through rates are. Let's do a quick example of what a funnel looks like and let's understand all those terms in some context. Okay, so let's take a look at a sample customer sales funnel. So here I have created a funnel, after all, Google that I want to target people in the age group of 24 to 35 years. I want people who are interested in travel, and I want people in the United States to be shown this ad. So based on these filters, Google will try and target my ad and show it to people that fit this particular criteria. So let's say the target segment or the potential customer base that I have created. There are 1 million people who will actually see this ad. So 1 million people will view the ad out of these 1 million people when they see the ad. Maybe my ad speaks to the desire of 500,000 people who are more interested in my ads. So 50 per cent, or 500,000 of these million people end up reading the full AD. And after reading the full add, let's say 100,000 people respond to my call to action. So let's say I had put a call to action of get the offer now or buy now, or get 50% off now something that will speak to the customer and the customer will take an action based on that. So out of 500,000, 100,000 decide to click on the ad. So 20% of these people actually take action and click on the Add. 100,000 people are visiting my website. And let's say I have created a beautiful website. People like the product description. I have laid out the shipping policy, return policy, payment terms and everything neat and clear. They dress my quality and 50,000 of them decide to buy the product. So I have a conversion rate of 50 per cent between these two steps, 50,000 people are now my customers. They bought at least one product from me and on my website I set up a mechanism to collect their emails. And let's say some of them decided to opt in to receive promotions from me and I send them promotions a couple of weeks later and 10,000 of them decide to come back and buy again based on the communication that I did with them via email. And for this case, let's assume they just come back ones and buy one more item. So there's a retention of 20 per cent, as we see here. Now let's try and understand how these terms fit into this particular scenario. So let's say I'm running this ad on Google Search. Google does not charge me per impressions, so the cost per impression would be zero for me. But e.g. if I tried this on Instagram, maybe they would have charged me some money for impression. But for Google, let's say it has $0. Now, Cost Per Click, this is where I have to pay these CPC. Now let's say for my particular product, which is a framed laser cut map, the cost per click is $2.50. Now 100,000 people are clicking on my ad. So I will multiply this by 100,000. And here I will get a total cost of $250,000 that I have to pay to Google what the ad that they showed. And for the hundred thousand people that clicked on my ad, click-through rate is the ratio between the people who clicked and the people who viewed the ad. So 100000/1000000. So if I divide those two numbers, I get a click-through rate of 1%. Now let's talk about the customer acquisition cost. So here, effectively at the end of the campaign, I'm getting 50,000 customers because these 50,000 people actually ended up buying the product. And the cost that I pay to acquire these customers was here in this step when I paid CPC, when I paid the cost, click to Google, the total cost I paid was $250,000 and the number of customers I got is 50,000. So I will do to 50000/50000. And this is in dollars. So my customer acquisition cost is $5. Now, before I come to the customer lifetime value, I would have to understand the pricing structure. So let's say I'm selling this particular product for $50. The cost price, that is the cost of material and packing and shipping. Just the variable cost is let's say $30. So here I am not including the cost of renting a warehouse, our cost of salaried employees, If I have any, these items are not included here or even the cost of equipment. So let's say I bought a couple of laser engraver, I bought a couple of laser cutters. The cost of all those are not included. This is just the variable cost. So the contribution margin is selling price minus the cost price, which is $20 in this example. Here, my profit margin is basically the contribution margin divided by the selling price. And it is 20/50. I'm getting a contribution margin of 40%. And this is important to note, and a lot of people get confused with profit margin. And they think that you got a profit of $20, your cost was $30. And they end up doing something like this, 20/30, and they say their profit margin is 67 per cent. This is wrong. The profit margin is always computed on the base of selling price and not the cost price. One easy way to think about it is that the profit margin can never be more than hundred percent. Whereas if you do this calculation, chances are this number would be higher than hundred percent. So always remember that profit margin is computed on these tails are the selling price. So let's say per item, I am making a contribution margin of $20, 50,000 people bought the product from me here. So let's multiply that and see what the contribution margin is here. So here I'm making $1 million in contribution margin. And 10,000 of those come back and buy the product again from me. So here I am getting 200,000 or 0.2 million. The total contribution margin I'm getting from this campaign is 1.2 million. And the total customers that I got were 50,000. If I divide these two, I should come up with my customer lifetime value. A quicker way of doing it is this. We know the contribution margin is $20, that is selling price minus the variable cost price. So I do $20 and I multiply it with this number. So it is one plus the percentage of customers that are coming back to buy from me. So that was 20% or 0.21, 0.2 multiplied by 20. And I see that my customer lifetime value is $24. Now if I'm comparing the money that I'm spending to acquire a customer versus the money that I'm able to get in terms of customer lifetime value, this number should always be greater than this. Only then it makes sense to continue with the current marketing strategy. So one more thing I would like to mention here is in some cases, companies have a fixed budget for advertising, and in that case, the advertisement cost will not be considered a variable cost. It might be considered as a fixed cost. However, if you have a more dynamic digital marketing strategy, then you can consider your ad spend or advertisement cost as a variable cost, depending on that, the customer acquisition cost can vary. But the crux of the matter is that the customer lifetime value that you compute should be greater than your acquisition cost for your venture to be profitable. 6. 04 Business Financials: Alright, now let's move on to the basic understanding of financials. The primary reason anyone wants to start a business is some sort of financial benefit. So let's see what are the things we need to keep in mind when we are planning a business venture. The two most important numbers you will hear from people, our sales and profit and sales and profit are not the same thing. Sales is also referred to as the top line and profit is also referred to as the bottom line. And in a moment we will see why it is so undoubtedly sales are important because if you are making a sale, if you're selling something, you are getting some money from your customers. So that is definitely important, but we cannot ignore that costs. The costs are a real thing. And once we reduce the costs from the sales, then we arrive at our profits. And for any business, profit matters more than sales because you can sell $1 million worth of stuff. But if you're spending $2 million to get those sales of $1 million, then you're not really making a profit, then that business is not sustainable. For growth companies, it can be different because they're spending more money to get more market share. And at some point in the future they will turn profitable. Growth. Companies are different, but I'm talking about generic businesses here, such as selling my framed maps. So I would want to be profitable in the first couple of years, if not from day one itself. Okay, So this is what an income statement looks like. And here are few of the terms that we need to keep in mind. The first line, we have sales or revenue. So if I'm selling 100 framed maps for $100 each, my total revenue is 100 times 100, which is $10,000. And the reason why sales is called the top line because on an income statement, sales is mentioned on the top line. Then we reduce some cost, which is cost of goods sold, advertisement cost. We arrive at gross profit after removing our variable costs. And here I am considering advertisement cost as a variable cost because I'm using a dynamic strategy. So if my advertisement strategy is not profitable, I will cut off my advertisement strategy. So in a way, my advertisement cost is a variable cost and we will understand what variable cost exactly is in a moment. We remove other stuff like rent, utilities, SGA, which is basically salary and general administration charges. Then we arrive at profit before taxes or income before income tax. Then we pay our taxes, and then we arrive at the net profit or net income. And this is the net profit that matters the most because you, when your customers pay you, you are collecting revenue. But after all the expenses and taxes, what you get to keep as a company or as a business is your net profit. And as mentioned on the bottom line of the income statement. So that is why people call stale fast top line and profit as bottom line. So let's review some of the finance terms, sales or revenue. That is, how much money you collect from customers for selling them, your products. Selling price. Let's say I'm selling something for $50 each, and I'm selling 10,000 of them than the sales would be $500,000. Simple as that. And if I have different types of products, so let's say I have a different product and bigger size which I'm selling for $100 each, and I'm able to sell 100 of those, then I will just multiply these two numbers and add it here to get my total sales. So here I will add 10,000 more. So my total sales would be $510,000. Now, in order to make the sale happened, we have to create the product, we have to run the business, we have to do marketing. And there are some other areas where we need to spend money in order to run this business efficiently. So the money we paid to create, promote, and ship the finished products to customers, those are our costs. And in addition to that, the money you spend to operate your business is also a cost. So here it would be if you have an employee you want to pay their salary. And if you have a warehouse, you pay the rent and utility Internet, and all those things will make up the total costs. Now, costs can be categorized into two broad categories. First is fixed cost and the second is variable cost. The way you can think about fixed cost is, no matter how many units you are producing or selling, you pay the fixed cost, e.g. renting cost. So if you are renting an office for $5,000 a month and you're signing a lease for 12 months, whether or not you make a sale, you are signing the lease, and you will end up paying $60,000 to the landlord or whoever has least the retail space out to you. So here in this retail space, I can sell maybe one unit or 1 million unit are 10 million units. This particular cost that I am paying, the rental cost of $60,000 will not change for the year. Similarly, if I have an employee, like a salaried employee and I say, okay, I'm going to pay you $40,000 per year. Whether or not I'm able to sell one or 1 million or 10 million units. I still have to pay this person $40,000 per year. Now this is a salaried employee. So this can be considered a fixed cost. If I do some sort of contract where I pay the person on an hourly basis, like wages or on a unit basis, that I could consider those labor costs as variable costs. It totally depends whether the money that I'm paying out is dependent on the quantity or not. Variable costs are costs that depend on quantity you produce, e.g. raw material cost. So if I'm creating 100 of my laser cut maps and it cost me $3 to buy the word for one map. So I will be spending $300 in raw material costs for this particular map. Right? Now if I'm creating 100,000 maps, then the rate of three dollar in costs for wood would now be a total of $300,000 in raw material cost, right? So here my cost is depending on the quantity that I'm producing. So the cost of raw material is a variable cost. In some cases, companies will have a fixed ad budget. So no matter what happens, let's say the company has an annual budget and they have earmarked $100,000 that they will pay for TV ads or digital ads, right? The fixed budget can be considered a fixed cost for a company. So here, this is a fixed cost. However, if I'm running small campaigns, let Sam spending $1,000 on Google ads. And if I'm seeing that my cost of acquisition is too high via Google ad channel, then I will stop doing these ads here depending on the quantity that I'm selling, I can decide to start or stop a digital ad campaign. And in my case, I can consider advertisement cost as a variable cost. So depending on the situation, some cost items can either be classified as a fixed cost or a variable cost. So profit margin is the money you get to keep after deducting the variable costs from the sales. So let's say I'm selling just one product and the selling price of product is $50 per unit. And the variable cost on that particular unit is $30. So my gross profit in this case would be $20 and my profit margin would be 20. And that is divided by the selling price, which is 20/50, that is 40% profit margin. Again, I would reiterate that the profit margin is always computed on a base off selling price, not the cost price. Now profit can have multiple meanings because it can be computed at multiple stages. The first one is gross profit. When we take the revenue and reduce the direct cost or the variable cost, then we get a gross profit. So in our previous example here, when we were doing this calculation from 50, we remove 30, which was variable cost. This 20 dollar here was my gross profit. Then from the gross profit, if I reduce the operating expenses, such as the rental cost of the warehouse, the salaried employees, etc. Then I arrive at operating profit. From the operating profit, if I remove the taxes that I'm paying, then I arrive at the bottom line, or the net profit. So profit is a term which can be confusing because there can be a huge difference between the net profit and gross profit. So always make sure you are understanding what kind of profit is being talked about. If they are talking about the bottom line, they are talking about the net profit. However, if they are talking about margins and gross profit margins, maybe they are talking about this. If they are talking about operating profit or operating profit margins than they are talking about this. 7. 05 Income Statements: Now let's take a quick look at the income statement of Apple. So this has been sourced from apple.com investor relations site. You can easily go and grab this from there. What I want to highlight is this structure of this income statement. So here you would notice on the top line we have the net sales. Sales and revenue are the same thing. The reason why they call it net sales is because maybe they had a product refund, maybe they had a subscription for which they had to refund their customers. So Apple is removing the refund from the sales. So even if you are starting your business, let's say you are selling 100 products and three of the products come back to you. You can reduce those refund amounts to arrive at net revenue or net sales. So Apple sells products as well as services because they are selling Apple TV subscriptions and iCloud subscriptions. And that is why they have both products as well as services. Next thing I want you to focus on is cost of sales. Some companies will write cost of goods sold, and that is basically the variable cost or the direct costs associated with selling these products and services. So here they have split the cost of sales for products as well as services. So this is the number two I want you to focus on. The third one is operating expense. So Apple spent a lot of money in R&D research and development. So here they have listed the expenses for that and then they have selling general and administrative. So here they have the cost of office, here they have the cost of salaried employees and everything on this particular line item. Then here I want you to come here for provision of income taxes. So there would be paying income taxes based on the income they're making. So they would be paying this much in taxes. And then at the bottom here we have the bottom line, or the net income or the net profit that the company is reporting here. So here are these five important points. Our net sales or net revenue, the cost of sales or cost of goods sold, operating expenses, which includes fixed cost, and then the income tax that you have to pay, and then the net profit or net income, gross margin or gross profit is here. Operating income or operating profit is here. And then net profit or net income is here. So these are the three types of profits that are mentioned here. And basically these are the important headers that you need to keep in mind even when you are planning for your own business, broadly, your numbers can be categorized into these numbers without going into too much accounting. I just wanted to show you what an income statement looks like. Okay, now, let's do some sort of projection for my business. Okay, so let's say I'm selling the map for $50 each. And my variable cost is a cost price is $30 per unit. So assuming I'm selling 50,000 units in a year, this is just my projection that I would be able to sell 50,000 units. Actually, let me go back to the previous example and pull some numbers from there. So my selling price was 50, cost price was 30. And I was selling 50 plus 1060000 units and my advertisement cost was $250,000. Let me just use those same numbers. So I'll take the 60. And my ad cost, which I have mentioned here, is $250,000. Okay? So my cost of goods sold would be cost price times 60,000 units, which is 181.8 million daughters. And my revenue or sales would be 60,000 units times $50. So this is how I am getting the cost of goods sold or cost of sales. And this is my revenue. So 60 times 50, this will give me a total revenue of $3 million. So my gross profit here would be $950,000. Okay, So my cost is 1.8 plus 0.25, which gives me a total variable cost of 2.05. And I reduce that from the sales and I get a gross profit of mine had ran $50,000. Let's say I'm running a small workshop and I'm paying $50,000 for that. So my rent and utilities included is $50,000 for a year. And let's say I have an employee who takes care of some of the administrative stuff and he or she helps me out with some of my work as well, and I'm paying them $50,000 per year. So basically, both of these two can be considered under SGA itself. But here I have just split it to show that rent and utilities are important. So before you go ahead and decide to rent an office, make sure you understand the cost associated with it and the impact of that. On the bottom line, I remove $100,000 from my gross profit. I arrive at $850,000. Let's say the tax rate that I'm getting is 20 per cent. Let's am a small business, so I'm getting a favorable tax rate for a first few years because my government is amazing. So I will remove $170,000 from here. And post-tax, that is, after paying my taxes, I am left with $680,000. So this looks like a good prediction for me. So I'm starting my business and in a year I'm making a top line. That is my revenues of $3 million. Even after taking off my variable fixed costs and taxes, I'm able to make $680,000 for the year. This is the money that I have at the end of the year. I can either take it out and enjoy life or I can decide to put that money back to grow the business further. 8. 06 Forecast Scenarios: So we just did one scenario where we forecast the sale of 60,000 units and we assumed thirdly an advertisement cost, etc. What I would recommend you is to forecast at least three scenarios because future is unpredictable and there is no guarantee that I'm going to sell 60,000 units in a year. There is no guarantee that my advertisement conversions would be as good as I'm imagining. So my suggestion would be to create three cases. One is realistic case, which you think is the most probable. One is an optimistic case. Sometimes, sometimes with this stroke of luck or the star's aligning, you might get better sales and better profits than you assume. So create an optimistic case for that. And I would also suggest to create a conservative case. So assume that not everything is going your way and there can be certain challenges. So factor those in and create a conservative scenario. So these three cases, I have just created three cases randomly. So my first case here is a realistic case where I'm assuming that 50% of my target segment out of 1 million people are sure desire and read the full add. 20% of them respond to my call to action. So 100,000 people click on the ad and out of that 50% end up buying. So out of 100,000 people that visit my website, 50,000 end up making a purchase. And I'm able to retain 20 per cent of them for a repeat purchase. So 10,000 out of these 50,000 people come back and make a purchase without me spending any extra dollars on them. So I'm assuming, okay, my cost per click is $2. So I'm spending this much in ads. I'm making a sale of $2.5 million from this first purchase, and I'm making additional $500,000 from the repeat purchase of these 10,000 customers. So here I've done my cost as 1.8 million and then my ad cost also I have considered as variable costs. So $200,000 is here. And on the revenue of $3 million, I'm able to make a profit of $1 million. So keep in mind, this is my gross profit, not net profit. I still have to take off the cost for an office space, warehouse, salaries, etc, from this and of course taxes. Second scenario is an optimistic scenario. So let's say my target segment for Google Ads is amazing and 70% of those people actually end up reading my ad. So out of 1 million people that I'm targeting, 700,000 or read my full add, 30% of them respond to my call to action. So 210,000 people actually click on the ad and 60% of those people who visit my website actually make a purchase, which is amazing. So 126,000 people make a purchase, and I'm assuming a high, high rate of repeat purchase. So 40 per cent of these hundred and 26,000 people are coming back and making a purchase. So if I use those same numbers, I'm selling products worth $8.8 million. So that is amazing. So my variable costs would be cost of raw materials and cost of goods, which is 5.3 million approximately. And since more people are clicking on my ad here, I'm spending more money on digital ads, so $420,000. My total cost is 5.7 million on revenue of 8.8 million, I'm making a gross profit of $3.1 million. Now the good thing about this is, let's say my fixed cost is $200,000 a year. And no matter how many units I'm selling, my fixed costs would remain $200,000 per year in all three cases, right? The fixed costs that I have to remove from this particular gross profit remains $200,000. So that is amazing. The third case is the conservative case. Let's say the target segment that I created for 1 million people, only 30% of them actually show the interest and read the full add. 300,000 are reading the full add. Only ten per cent of the people who are reading the full AD are responding to my call to action. So only 30,000 people are actually clicking on the ad and coming to my website or Shopify store. And only 30% of these 30,000 people actually are making a purchase. So 9,000 customers, and I'm assuming a repeat purchase rate of 10%. So only 900 out of these 9,000 people are coming to make a second purchase with me, the cost per click remains the same. The sales in this case is just $450,000. And I'm getting additional $45,000 due to the repeat purchase from these 900 customers. Here in this case, I'm making a revenue of $495,000, which is this plus this. My cost is 60,000. It is lower because fewer people are actually clicking on my ads. But that is not necessarily a good thing because my customer lifetime value is a lot higher than my cost to acquire a customer. So I don't mind spending more money. And by spending more money in this case, I'm making more profits. So lower cost is not always a good thing. So my total revenue was for 95, total cost is 357. I'm making a gross profit of $138,000. Now, here we have the problem. The problem is our fixed cost here is $200,000. If my gross profit is only $130,000, then in this case, if I have to pay $200,000 for all other things that are non negotiable, like rent and salary of my salaried employees, then here I'm making a loss. So we need to be realistic, but we also need to figure out multiple scenarios, such as an optimistic scenario and a conservative scenario just to make sure that we are prepared for all these scenarios. Now, the major question here is, can you survive the conservative case? If the answer is yes, then congratulations, you have a very solid business plan and most likely you will succeed. Now, if you're not able to survive the conservative case, you need to think about ways of making things right, even if things don't go your way. E.g. in this particular case, if you see that this fixed cost of $200,000 is too high and it is driving you into the red. That is, it is driving you into the losses. Think of ways of actually reducing your fixed costs. So if you're paying for an office, maybe see if you can use a garage space which can be cheaper. If you're thinking of getting a full-time employee, think of getting a part-time employee. So you have to see ways in which you can reduce your fixed costs. Maybe you can bring it down to $100,000. If that happens, then even in your conservative case, when you are making a gross profit of $130,000 with a fixed cost of $100,000, you will still make a little bit of money and your business will survive. Now having said that, this is just one year's projection. So if you believe that you can take losses for a couple of years and then you'll be fine if you start making profit in the third year or fourth year or even later, that's a decision that you have to make. But I'm just giving you a framework that you can use to think and optimize and strategize your business plan and determine what is the best particular strategy for you. I hope this was helpful for you. I hope this gave you insights into how to plan financially for your business, how to do predictions, how to understand sales and taxes than costs. And overall, I wish you great success in coming up with your business plan. 10. 01 Getting Set Up: So now that you have given a proper thought to planning your online business, it's time to take action and start your online business. So the first thing you want to do is identify the product or service that you're going to offer. You can offer a physical product, you can offer a digital product or a service. Physical product would be something that you can touch and hold in your hands such as a phone, a cup, a customized T-shirts, something of that sort. It digital product could be something like an e-book or a course that is hosted online. Service would be something like consultancy services. You can offer your customers help in digital marketing. You can help customers with their taxes. So offerings of those kind would be Services. So let's say I wanted to start my business by selling a physical product first. For simplicity, let's just start with a pen. So I have just one product which is a simple blue pen that I want to sell online. Now let's do a quick check on the model that we had talked about in the previous course, plan your online business. The first p is product. What are you selling? We have decided to sell a pen. Second, P is price. How much are you asking for it? And let's say I have done some market research and I'm comfortable selling this band for $2.99 per pen. The place where you are selling it. We will sell this spent exclusively online. So we will build an online store and sell the span online. We will have no physical locations where a customer can actually come and pay cash and buy the pen from us. They can just go to the website and buy it online. And the final P is promotion. So how you will find your customers. And initially, let's say this is the first time I'm starting a business. I have no existing customers. So I will have to rely on some online advertisements. So I will look for Google ads, Bing ads, social media ads on Facebook, instagram, Twitter, etc. Next thing we need to do is come up with a brand name and a tagline. There are some tips for finding a good brand name. Brand name should be unique, so it should be different from everything else that exists. I cannot really use a name of a business that is already operating. So I have to be careful while choosing the brand name. It should be easy to remember there is no point in complicating the brand name because they're easier we make for the customers to remember the brand name. The more likely it will stick in their mind, the brand name should be protectable. And here I am talking about the trademark. So let's say I want to name my company Apple, but I cannot really do that because there is an existing company, Apple, which owns the trademark on its name. So I will have to look for a unique name that I can protect by trademark. And I have to make sure that I'm not infringing on anyone else's trademark. So depending on the location where you are in, there would be a portal, a website where you can go and see if the name that you're looking for already has a trademark registered in somebody else's name, or is it something that you can actually get a trademark for? One more thing we need to keep in mind though it is not that important, but it is kinda important. And that is domain availability. So if I'm naming my company blue pens, there is a high chance that blue pens.com might already have been taken and we can make a little change to the domain name so that it still conveys our brand, but it is also available. So we will, when we do the domain search later in the course, we will see how we can tackle that. And let's say I don't really have a brand name in my mind. So what I can do is I can take help of the Internet. And let's say I go to Google and I type in brand name generator. And let's see what ideas google is throwing at me. So there are some options from wix.com, shopify.com. And let's just try these two and see what we can come up with. Okay, so widths result does not really take me to a brand name generator directly. So I will close this tab and Shopify actually takes me to this business name generator tool. And let's see how that is. Find a business name and describe your brand in one word, enter it into the sharp name generator. So let's say I want to sell bands and let's see what suggestions Shopify has for us. They have come up with 200 results and the results are here. Guardian pens, pens, high-tech bands, Record purpose bands, Hyperion pens, pens by red. And there are so many brand names you might like some of them, you might not like any of them. It's totally a personal preference here. Let's say I want to get more specific and make it blue pens. Here I get options like profitable sprint, Harold, A3s, let's say I don't really like any of the names that they have suggested and I will try and name my business royal blue pants. Okay, so let's go back to our slides. 11. 02 Create Digital Assets: Now that I have decided the name would be royal blue pants, I will also come up with a tagline for it. But at this point I have to create some assets for my online shop. And three critical assets that I can think of, our logo, the brand logo, the cover image for the online store, and some product images for logo. What we can do is we can use a tool such as Adobe Photoshop. Which is if you know how to use Photoshop, that is a great tool. There is a free online tool called Canva. It is a drag-and-drop editor, which is very easy to use. And the third option here would be to outsource it to someone on Fiverr or Upwork. And you're going to explain to them how you want the logo to look and someone else will create it and deliver it to you in a few days. So these are the three options that I can think of for creating a logo. And among these three options, Canva is my favorite because it's very easy to use and you don't really need to have the skills for Photoshop or you don't really need to outsource it to Fiverr are up for work. I will show you how Canvas works. Here in Google, I will simply look for Canva. This is the first result. And if I click on this, I will create a new account here. So I will go to sign up. And I can use a Google account to sign into Canvas. So that will save me some time. And let's say I pick the Google account. Then it's science main straightaway. Here there are some options so you can use it as a student teacher, personal, but here we are a small business, so I will pick this one. If you are just starting out and you are the only member, you don't really need to create a team. You can choose maybe later. There's also an option of using Canva pro for free. They give you a 30-day trial and they give you some premium image as and premium fonts if you are subscribed to Canva pro. But for now, we're just going to use the free version. So I will click on maybe later. Here you can choose whether or not you want to get newsletters or emails from Canva. I will choose not now for now. So it looks like I am in this Canva portal and I have to create a logo. So what I will do is I will hit this particular button, create a design. And here I will choose a logo, 500 by 500 pixels. And there are so many templates that you can use for creating this logo. So there are some of them with this particular watermark which says Pro. So that is available only to the people who have subscribed to the Pro plan. For the free plan, there are still plenty of options. Let's say I like this particular logo. Okay? So the brand name is royal blue pants. And I can make this font a little smaller. I come to this area, choose a smaller font size, let's say 42. And all of this comes and fits in just one line. And here I will write, let's say something like best-in-class or something like that. Whatever the business brand and business tagline is, you can easily make it here in the logo itself. This one, I can make it a little bigger. So just by using a template, I'm able to create this if I want to add some more elements to the logo. So I can use this particular button on the left elements. And then I can search for, let's say, a pen. There are these options that I can add to this. E.g. I want to use this particular image and I pull it here like this. Let's say this is the logo I want for my business, royal blue pens, and that is the blue pen on top. I'm satisfied with the colors. If I want, I can change the color of the background. I come here, I click on this and I make it, let's say yellow. Or I make it blue. And for the sake of saving time, I'm just going to accept this logo as my business logo. And I come here, share, download. And I can choose this as a PNG or JPEG or other format. So for logo, I will prefer using PNG. And then I hit Download. I have this particular image downloaded to my computer. Now I have the logo ready. The second thing I want to create as an asset for my website is the cover image. For cover image as well. We have a lot of options. The popular options are Shutterstock, Pixabay, and Unsplash. Shutter stock has free images as well as paid plans. Pixabay and Unsplash have a ton of free images that are copyright free and royalty free so you can use them even for commercial purposes. Just make sure you read the details of each and every image that you want to use and double-check that they are okay to be used for commercial purposes. Let's take a look at all three options. Let's go to shadow stock and see what we have here. Shutter stock has plenty of images. And let's say I want something abstract, like abstract background for my website. Let's say I like this design. Here you would see that you have the options to purchase this image. Here you can choose the license type that you want to purchase for this image. So for standard license, you can use it for limited purposes in print advertising packaging, but you can use it for unlimited web distribution. And then there is an enhanced license as well. And based on the type of license you choose, there are these differences in cost. The standard license, one option is to pay €49 per month, which comes out to €1.96 per image. In dollars, it would be pretty much the same. And then there are other plants here as well. So if you really like an image on Shutterstock, you can choose a plan and pay. There are also on-demand packs. So for five images, you can pay 49 bucks, which is roughly 9.8 per image. So if you really like something on Shutterstock, you can definitely decide on choosing either a subscription or buying a on-demand pack. Or now I will show you the alternatives which are Pixabay and Unsplash. So on Pixabay, you have millions of images that you can use for your website for commercial purposes. So here let's say I want to look for the same term, abstract background. There are plenty of options that you can choose from. Say for my website, I want one of these. Let's say I like this image a lot. So I just select on this. And I make sure that the pixabay license covers these two things. It is free for commercial use, and there is no attribution required. You can just go ahead and hit the Free Download option. You can choose an image size. So for my website, I can use 1920 by 11, 52 pixels. I will just go ahead and download this. And if you sign up for an account, which you can again do with Google. So let me go ahead and do that. That makes it easy. I don't have to use the capture and prove that I'm not a robot. So I will just hit the button again after logging in Download. And I have the image downloaded already. So I have this particular image now downloaded to my computer, similar to pixabay. And there is another option for free images, which is Unsplash. And Unsplash also has a ton of pictures that you can use. So if you just search for abstract background, and let's say you want to use this particular image. Make sure you read the license. It says free to use under the Unsplash license. Okay? You can simply download this one for free or choose a size. Let's say I choose the medium-size and I hit Allow. And I have this particular image as well on my computer. So I'm saving these assets on my computer so that I can use them for my website. The next thing to do on our list is to have some product images. So getting a product image is tricky. Sometimes you can do it yourself. You can take a photo with your camera or your phone. But then you might not have the right lighting. You might not have the right background for it. But there are some workarounds for that. So e.g. I. Have a pen, I have my iPhone, I can just take a picture, which I did. And then what I will do is to make it look a little bit better, I will remove the background and there are some online tools available, such as Remove BG. In which you put an image and then they remove the background using artificial intelligence, they will identify the background and remove it. The third option is you can also outsource this work with someone on a website such as fever or Upwork. And you can take some images, you can send the images to them and they can remove the background or edit the background the way you want them to. So there will be some cost associated with it. It can cost anywhere between $20 to $2,000 based on the expertise level that you want. I will show you how I took a picture with my iPhone and how we can remove the background using Remove BG. So using my iPhone, I just took a normal picture. I took a notepad, I put my pen on it, and I took a photo and transfer that to my computer. So this is the photo that I have here. And now what I want to do is I want to remove the background. So let's say I don't really like this particular background of t notebook. For removing the background, there is a very amazing resource which is called Remove BG. If you just Google search for Remove BG, the first result would be removed. Rpg, click on this link. And it has a very simple interface. It tells you that you have to upload an image here and they will remove the background for you. So I click on this, I select the Pen image. I upload it. And I wait for the magic to happen and looks like, it looks like this result is pretty impressive. So this looks pretty good. I will just click on Download and I should have my image ready. So let's take a look at how it looks now. Okay, So this was the image of the band. And this is the image of the pen with the background removed. And honestly this is pretty good because the background is totally gone and it was all for free. I like this. However, you have to keep in mind that this particular image, the one from which the background is removed, is a preview. And the dimensions of this images for 33 by 577 pixels only. If you want a high-quality image, you can use the Download edge d option. And here it will ask you to sign up for the account for free. So let's go ahead and do that. We'll continue with Google. Okay, so now I can download this image in HD. Now you would see that this image is much better than the preview image because the resolution is much higher. So to compare, I will show you this. So even if I zoom on this versus if I zoom on this, you will see that this image is much better. It has a much finer background removal. The resolution is much better here, whereas this image gets pixelated if you want to zoom in on it. So if you're selling a product, I would say always have high-quality images. So this one makes total sense. I will go ahead and use this. So they also have a credit system. Let's see what this credit system is. The website explains that images up to 0.25 megapixels, that is off resolution 625 by 400 are free. If you want higher resolutions, up to 25 megapixels, they are available for one credit per image. And let's see what do they mean by a credit. If you want to get full resolution images, you have to buy credits. There are some subscription plans on a monthly basis. So there is a plan for 40 credits per month for €9. But it says for non-commercial use only. But I want to put it on a commercial store, a store that actually sells products, so I cannot use this. I can use this plan which is 200 credits per month, and that is €39 a month. And that comes out to be roughly $0.20 per image. If I pay yearly, I save ten per cent. The other option is to pay as you go. You can also choose to not use a subscription, but just by some credits for images. E.g. you want to use ten images and you don't really want the service on an ongoing basis. You can just buy ten credits for €9, which is $0.90 per image. For now, I will just continue with the one image that I have, but I'm just showing you these options that are available. 12. 03 Get A Domain Name: The next thing we need to do is to come up with a website address. And the website address is called a domain name. So whenever we see a website like www.google.com, the website address is the domain names. Google.com is the domain name. Likewise, we will look for something like www.myawesomebusinessname.com. I don't really want this particular domain, but this is just an example. And how do I get a domain name? There are plenty of options available in the market. The popular ones are GoDaddy, named cheap pork bun. So if you're looking for a domain name, always compare the prices and the features at multiple websites before you come to the decision of where to buy the domain name from. Let's go ahead and take a look at all three options. The first option was GoDaddy. Here on GoDaddy, I can look for the domain name, so my business name as royal blue pants and I wanted.com domain. Okay, so I just end a royal blue pants.com here and search if this is available or not. Then it tells me that my domain is available. Royal blue pants.com and it cost me $0.68 for the first year. And that costs 1999. But here, and they're giving me a promotion which cost me just $0.68 per yard. So let's see how that works. Because there might be a little trickier. It also suggests me that I can bundle up and get more domains with the extension.net.org dot info so that I can use all of these and redirect all the customers looking for these websites to my main website, which is.com, then it suggests me more TLD is and TLD or top-level domains, whatever that follows, the dot is called a TLD. Top-level domain. The most popular and the world is.com. But there are plenty of new options coming up these days. So I could buy dot edu, but there are some restrictions. So let's see what that is. Here. If you want to use a dot edu, the registry and contact address must be in the EU. So for now I am in Luxembourg, which is an EU. I can go ahead and actually register it, but it is not available to someone who is outside of the EU. And there are other options like dotnet.org, dot code or info. And plenty of those. Okay. Most popular TLD, as I said, is calm and if it is available, I will always prefer to use a.com domain. So let's see how much I'm actually paying for it on GoDaddy. So I go to make it yours. I don't really want to add anything here. I'm just shopping for domains, so no tanks. I continue to cart. Then there are some add-ons like full domain protection. Domain protection with prevents hackers from stealing your domain, requires approval via two-factor verification. All of these are nice, but I will compare and see if there are some other sellers that are providing this by default. And I don't really want to start my website, vet them for now. Email essentials. You can get an email address with ten GB e-mail storage, email plus with 50 GB storage, etc. So for now, I will just focus on the domain name and see how much it costs me. I will decline the wind protection. I will decline other add-ons. Okay, So if I choose one year, then it tells me that I can actually get this domain for just $0.68. Okay, That is good to know. If I want to use this particular domain for just one year, I can go ahead and use this $0.68. This is a promotional price they're offering me. I can actually go and do. I'm ready to pay and buy this domain for one year. But if I want to use it for at least three years, then it will cost me 40.66, which is not a bad price, to be honest. So GoDaddy is costing me 40.6, 643 years. And for one year, it is just costing me less than $1, less than €1. I will go ahead and delete this card for now because I want to compare the prices at other service providers. Also, the next option was named cheap. And in named cheap. Let's see what prices they are offering. I will look for the same domain name, which was royal blue pens.com, and see what prices they have. They are offering me this domain for €7.98 per year. And let's see if I do three years, what is the price for that? Ssl is a security certificate, which is very important. So if I take a look at this particular website, it will show a lock here, which simply means that this side is a secure site and the connection to this particular website is encrypted. So this is very important to have SSL. And here it looks like that name cubed.com is not giving me SSL by default. I will have to add this to the plan. So on top of the €8, I'm paying here, I have to pay five-year-olds almost to get SSL. So that brings my cost to €30 per year. With an SSL here we are paying almost €40 per three years. The next option I wanted to try was pork bun. They generally have very good prices. And let's see what they are offering here. And I will look for the royal blue pens.com. And here, royal blue pants.com is available for 9.73 barrier. It renews at 9.73 per year. Okay. So let's go ahead and add this. And if I go to check out, I notice this thing here that these things come free with every domain. We have this SSL certificate, which is already included here. Unlike in named cheap, they were asking me to pay €5 per year for the certificate. So here my cost is 9.73, but SSL is included. When I'm talking about port one, my overall costs would be lower. So I will go ahead and use this particular service, pork bun, to create this two. By this domain, I will create a new account here. And I will choose the password they suggest. You fill in the details and create your account. And then you can continue to billing. It will remind you to check the spelling of any domain registrations for one last time. So make sure there's no spelling or type of mistakes. There's royal, there's blue, there's pans, There's dot com. Okay, so I'm confident and I'll go ahead and continue to billing so I can use a credit card to make the purchase. I will fill in the details. And by this domain. 13. 04 Create Account With Payment Processors: Okay, so now I have made the payment, and this is my domain management page on pork bun.com. And here I see that I have this domain available in my account, and it is royal blue pants.com. And here I have some settings that I will need to use when I later configure my website. For now, I will leave it the way it is, and I will go ahead and continue with the rest of the course. Next thing we need to think about is how to accept a credit card payment or a debit card payment from a customer. We have an online shop. We cannot really accept cash from the customers. So let's go ahead and see how we can do this. Two of the popular payment processing services are Stripe and PayPal. I will go ahead and create an account with both stripe as well as PayPal so that I can accept payments from my customers. First, I will see what Stripe has to offer. If I come to this section, the products, Stripe offers online payments. It gives you a pre-built payments page for checking out. And there are some options to customize the UI, which is the user interface, which is the way the customer will interact with the website, the look and feel of the website while checking out. And there are some options for creating payments links, which is again, a very good feature. I will show you how that works as well. And you can create some invoices and you can also do subscription management through Stripe. Okay, so let's go ahead and create an account with Stripe. So I will go ahead and use this sign-up button to create my new account. I will use my e-mail. I will use my email address, my name, the country, and I will use the strong password suggested by Apple. So I will go ahead and get this thing verified so that they can verify my e-mail address. And I will just click on this verify e-mail address. So that's stripe knows this email belongs to me. Okay. Now I have to activate payments on Stripe. Then there are some questions regarding my business. So choose the location and business to get started. I have a registered business in Luxembourg, so I will choose this. You can choose United States if you are located there or the country that you are operating in, you can choose accordingly. Okay, then there are some more details to fill out like legal name, email address, date of birth, and some other things so you can go ahead and fill those in. I'm using a fake number. I do not want to show my real details because it can be tricky online. I will just put something like this. Then next step would also be to include your VAT number or your tax ID is if you have one. And I have to pick an industry. So let's go ahead and do that. I'm just selling a pen, which is their merchandise business website. I just bought my domain. So it is dark. Royal blue pens.com product description. We sell pens for writing or process. And then describe how you fulfill the orders in order to help stripe keep your business compliant, we need to know a little bit more about how you provide goods or services. So here I have a small business. I have pens in my house. I will ship them myself. Let's say I choose yes, here. And here they are asking, on average how long after paying well, your customers typically receive their goods or services. So within two weeks, so I will try and ship them as quickly as possible, maybe in less than a week. But there is no option of a week. So I will go ahead and pick two weeks. Now, we have to add the public details for customers. So when a customer is buying something using the credit card, on the credit card, what should be the descriptor like when we buy something on the credit card, we get something like this. And the website or the merchant name on the credit card statement should be this. So I will go ahead and keep this as royal blue pens.com. If you want, you can remove the.com and just name it royal blue pens. Or you can keep the entire website address so that they know where they made the purchase. The customers know that. Shortened descriptor, I will say our B bands and customer support phone number. Make sure you add a customer support phone number as well. We'll go ahead and hit Continue. Then there is the option to add the bank to receive the payouts. Here. Go ahead and connect a bank that you have. Most likely you already have a bank account. If not, go ahead and open a new bank account. There are plenty of online banks these days which have low account fees and better and favorable terms for new small businesses. I would recommend keep a separate bank account for your business so that it's easier for doing accounting. So you know, your business expenses, you know, the revenues you are getting, all of those transactions are happening from one bank account that will make your life so much easier when you are filing for taxes. So go ahead and enter all of these details. Here. They will give you the option to activate two-step authentication. It is also called two-factor authentication. And what that does is whenever anyone, including you try to sign into your account, it will ask you for a password. And there are some options like using SMS to receive that onetime password. You can use the Google Authenticator app. And you can also use a hardware key, such as a UB key. I already used this authenticator app. I will go ahead and use this option here. If you have never used the Google Authenticator app, you can download it from the App Store or the Google Play Store. And then what you need to do is simply open the app and look for the option to scan in new code. And then when you scan this QR code on your phone's app, the Google Authenticator app. Then this account will get linked to that Google Authenticator app. And this account will be secure and it will require a two-step authentication, onetime password whenever you try to sign in. So this is additional level of security. And since this is a financial account, I would recommend that you enable those two-factor authentication. So I am doing this on my device. I'm using the scan QR code option and then I'm done. I hit Continue. It gives me the option to authenticate using the password. So here in the app I have this onetime password. I will go ahead and enter this. Then they will give you the option of this backup code. And it is important to save this backup code because what happens if you are not able to access your account? If you lose your phone, then you will not be able to generate the onetime password using the authenticator app, right? So in that case, you can use this backup code to come up with to recover your account. Okay, so you can add more methods for two-step authentication, but for now I will just use the authenticator app and I hit Continue. Now here's the option of doing automatic VAT calculation. This is EU specific. If you are in US, there might be options off automatic sales tax collections. I would recommend you enable that. It simplifies the life a little. So I'll make sure I select the right product category because the VAT calculation or sales tax calculation is dependent on the type of product. So I will choose general tangible goods. Because I am setting a pen which is a physical good, I will go ahead and hit Continue. Then there is the show customers who are climate commitment. With Stripe Climate, you can direct a fraction of your revenue from payments to fund the frontier carbon removal. You can set your contribution. You don't really have to do this if you are passionate about contributing to the people who are working towards making this planet better, like removing carbon. You can go ahead and enable this. A message will show when a customer is paying. A lot of customers actually support businesses that support the Earth as well. I will use this default value of 1%. You can also set a threshold like if my business has processed already 10,000 in revenue, then I will start contributing 1% of my revenue to defund. Or you can leave it at zero and right from the first transaction you will get to contribute 1% of your revenue towards this Stripe Climate. So I will leave this unchecked. I want every transaction to contribute to this cause and there is the option to review and finish up. So this is you are almost ready to start exploring stripe, take a moment to review and confirm your information. So make sure everything makes sense to you and hit Submit. All right, so now here we have this account. There is some analytics talking about gross volume sales customers, etc. But now we are just getting set up. So all of this data is just some default lines that they have drawn. Okay? And then you can customize your dashboard here by adding your logo. So I will click on Upload, and I will pick this logo that I had created on Canva. Okay. Then you can go to the branding settings and I will show you what options we have there. If you're doing this branding, there are some options. So whenever the checkout page shows up, you will see on top that there is a logo. Now there is this shortened name RB pens. And then some details that the customer needs to fill in. You can customize it. So e.g. I. Want the background to actually be black in color and my buttons to be green in color for some reason, then I can go ahead and do that. Okay. You can also change the font if you want. You can make it sharp. If you want. You can make it in pill shape if you want. So you notice the shape of the button is changing into a pill shape. If you keep it sharp, it is a sharp rectangle. If you keep it rounded, you get a rounded rectangle. So not only on the buttons, but also on the forums here. Okay, and then you can see the preview on mobile phone this way. You can also see the preview on a desktop this way. So you can switch the preview on top right-hand side. Okay, So let's say these changes. Then we go back to the home. So this is pretty much it for now on Stripe. Later on when I have to integrate my payment portal to some website, I will use the credentials to do that. For now we will continue with the course. The second option for accepting payments is PayPal. Paypal is also very popular globally and I will show you how to create an account with PayPal as well. Simply search for PayPal and Google. And I come to paypal.com. And it is also a very simple interface. There is a button to sign up for free. And here you can choose either a personal account or a business account. And I would recommend because this is a business that I'm starting, I will choose the right type of account. Enter your e-mail address to sign up for if does this account. So I will go ahead and do that. And here's the password. I will use this strong password suggested by Apple. And then some details that I need to fill. And some more details. Address. Make sure you have checked all of these details. Make sure everything makes sense, and then hit Agree and create account. Describe your business. I am a sole proprietor. Make sure you choose the right type of business. You could be an individual, you could be a sole proprietor or you could be a partnership or private company, public company. Whatever your business statuses, make sure you choose the right one here. Okay, so the next step is to put in the product or service keywords. Let's say I'm selling stationery stuff. So stationary stores, office and school supply. Okay. Website I will fill in the website details which is royal blue pants.com and CC statement name, I will keep the same as before. Rb pants as I kept in Stripe. And I have to fill in some more details. So I will go ahead and do that. Okay, once done with all of the details, make sure to double-check and hit Submit. Then some questions from PayPal, what do you sell? Let's say I sell goods. You can also choose services if you want. I haven't just big goods for now and hit Next. Next, how would you like to sell? Pick all of the answers that apply to you, dig payments on your website or in your app. I will go ahead and select this. Send invoices are estimates. I will select this as well and create a link you can use to request payments. I will select this as well. Your customers purchase your products, buy-in, single transaction and subscription. So I do not really have any plans of starting a subscription plan because I have just one product which is a pen. But if I want, I can start a subscription that goes like this, that a customer base, €9 per month. And they get three new pens every month, something like that. So for now, let's go ahead and select this as well. So what type of setup experience is best for you? I will go for the pre-built solution that doesn't require coding. There are other options as well. Custom solution that you can tailor to your business, let your developer take care of it for you. I want to keep this simple, so I will just use the pre-built solution that PayPal is offering here. So let's go next. So this is my dashboard in PayPal. Let's take a quick tour here. Here on the left-hand side, there is an overview of the account activity and money movement. Here there are some short quick links. Here. There are some actions like creating an invoice. So now that we have seen the process of creating a account with both stripe as well as PayPal. At this point, I want to tell you that I like Stripe better than PayPal. I like the way it integrates and the extra features that Stripe has. Now that we have our domain name, we also have the Stripe account configured. Let's move on to the next step of creating a Shopify account. And Shopify is a one-stop shop for e-commerce solutions. So there we can upload our product photos, product descriptions, and integrate the payment method so that we can receive the payments when a customer buy something from us. So let's go ahead and see what Shopify can do for us. 14. 05 Setting Up Shopify And Connecting Stripe: Alright, so now we are on Shopify and let's take a quick tour of what this website can do for us. Shopify is one of the most popular options for people who want to open an online store. And as they say, Bring your business online. Create an e-commerce website backed by powerful tools that help you find customers, drive sales, and manage your day to day. And we will see how Shopify actually achieves that. So one of the key features of Shopify is the option to sell everywhere. And you can use one platform to sell products to anyone anywhere in-person with POS, which is point-of-sale and online through your website, social media, and online marketplaces. So you can integrate your Shopify store, even with your physical store POS, and you can keep track of inventory and revenue and things like that. Shopify also gives you the option to market your business. And they have some built-in marketing tools that help you run the digital marketing campaigns. And sharp, if I also offer some cool insights into your business. So what you are selling, how many you are selling, what is the average order value and things like that. And as I said earlier, there are plenty of businesses in 175 countries in fact, that use Shopify and they have made 496 billion USD in sales. So they have had a collective revenue of 496 billion using Shopify. Okay, so now let's get started. Let's start here. On top right-hand side there is this option to get a free trial. Actually before that, let's go ahead and see what the pricing is. So depending on the region, the pricing would change. In Europe, the pricing is in euros. So shopify offers 14 days free trial without requiring any credit card. And there are three plants. There are actually four plants. I will go into the fourth one later, but it highlights three plants. The first one is Shopify basic. It includes everything you need to create a store, ship products, and process payments. The cost of this is €24 per month. If you are paying on a monthly basis, if you choose to make an annual payment, you can save ten per cent. So if I choose yearly, the effective cost would be €21 per month, but they will charge you 21 times 12. They will not charge you €21 per month, and they will give you one invoice for the interior. So let's stick to the monthly plan for now. What's included in the basic Shopify account is basic reports. You get to staff accounts and up to four inventory locations. With the regular Shopify account, you have to pay €69 per month. And instead of getting basic reports, you get professional reports. You get up to five staff accounts and up to five inventory locations. There is also the Advanced Shopify plan, which costs €289 per month. It has a custom report builder, 15 staff accounts, and up to eight inventory locations. So for most businesses that are selling a few products or even a few hundred products, this basic Shopify plan should suffice. There is also a fourth plan, which should be somewhere here. And it comes under the heading of alternative solutions for your business. There is this startup plan which costs €5 per month. And here you get to sell products through social and messaging apps. So you will not really have a full fledged website. You will just get a place to host the products. And you can share the links to those products either on social media or on a blog or other website that you already might have. So this could also be an option for getting started with selling something online. And then they have the Shopify Plus plan which costs $2,000 per month. And that is for enterprise companies. And that is the companies that can actually afford this kind of pricing. So in all three of these plants, basic, Shopify and advanced, you get to build an online store with Shopify is robust e-commerce platform, no coding required. And that is what is the difference here in the startup plan? You will not get this online store. Okay? So for this course, I will go ahead and pick the Sharpie five basic plan because I think it will suit 90 to 95% of the people who want to start a small business. I will take advantage of the Start free trial. And there are some questions straight up if you want, you can skip all of them. But let's see what they are asking. Let's get started. Which of these best describes you? I am just starting. Where would you like to sell initially, I would like to sell on online store. I would also like to sell on social media. And let's say I want to sell even on Amazon and Google. So I will select this as well. Which social channels do you want to sell on? I want to sell on Facebook, instagram, Pinterest, and that is it. Which online marketplaces Do you want to sell on Amazon? Let's say just on Amazon. What would you like to name your stores? So we already have a name which is royal blue pants. Okay, I will remove this. Actually, I can edit this link here. So this is the link that Shopify is providing to me by default. And later on I can connect the domain that I had purchased on pork buns. So I had purchased a domain, royal blue pens.com. I will connect this so that I get the customers to this website. And I can remove these dashes here. Okay, a store with that URL already exists. Alright, so I will go ahead and add back the dashes. Not a problem. Where will your business be located? So I have to put in the location. I will keep the location as Luxembourg. Now, there is an option to create a Shopify account. I can use email, I can use Apple, Facebook, Google. I will go ahead and create an account with Google. Let's give it a few minutes. Okay, so here I get a message that my trial has started. I can actually go ahead and select a plan at this point. So let me go ahead and do that. I will go for monthly payments for now. I will choose the basic Shopify plan and there are some additional costs to be aware of when you are processing payments. There is a transaction fee for all payment providers of two per cent. So there is this 2% that Shopify will charge me in addition to whatever my payment processors stripe or PayPal charges me. This is on top of that. So let's say Stripe charges me two per cent and Shopify charges me another 2%, I would be paying 4% total. There is a currency conversion fee of 2%. What that means is all of these costs keep adding up. So whenever I'm pricing a product, that is, I'm determining a selling price. I have to keep these charges into mind because these can add very quickly. I will go ahead and choose this plan. But before that, I want to show the difference between this plan and this plan. Here. In this case, if I'm choosing the regular Shopify plan, which is €69 per month. The transaction fee is half of this, so this is two per cent, this is 1%. So what that means is if I'm processing $100 per month, I'm paying $2 in transaction fees. If I am processing thousand dollars, then I'm paying $20 in transaction fees. If I'm processing $10,000 of revenue, then I'm paying $200 and transaction fees, right? So in that case, if I'm hitting 10,000 and monthly revenue, I'm paying $200 in transaction and 24 as the subscription, so I'm paying 224. Whereas if I am processing $10,000 in revenue here with the Shopify plan, I am paying only $100 in transaction fees because the transaction fee is 1% and I'm paying $69 or €69 in subscription fee to Shopify. So the total cost for me in this case would be 169 here in this case, for 10,000 in revenue, I am paying 224. So depending on how much revenue you are processing, this plan might actually be cheaper. So you have to keep that in mind as well. For now, I'm choosing the basic Shopify plan. So there are some savings if you choose a lock-in period of higher month. So if you are doing 12 months, save 30 bucks. If you are doing three years, you save 216 bucks. But for now I will just continue with the monthly plan. And Shopify guarantees you that they won't charge you until the free trial ends. So that is something good. And this is the plan we have chosen. The billing cycle is monthly, and then there are some details to be filled here. So country, firstName, lastName, address, apartment, postcode, see, and phone number. So make sure you fill in all these details. I will go ahead and do that. Okay, So save the address. And then since I have chosen a plan, so I will have to put the credit card details here even though they will not charge me until the trial is ending in 14 days, I will go ahead and do that. Okay. So they will verify the credit card details. And once the verification is done, VR setup on Shopify. Okay, I will choose the monthly billing cycle again. And I will hit the Start plan to get started. Alright, so congratulations, you have been successfully subscribed. How did you hear about Shopify? You can put in anything here, but I will choose a friend or colleague. And I will go ahead and do this. Or you can actually choose online video because if this is the first time you're hearing about Shopify, you can say online video. Next we get this setup guide. And the first step here is to customize the team, bigger team, and customize your content layout and typography to reflect your brand. So let's go ahead and do that. On top, you would see this message. Your online store is password protected. Only visitors with your password can access your store to let anyone browse and sharp removed the password. So this is a protection sort of thing because while we are building the website, I do not really want any customer to come and see all the things that are broken or not in the proper professional fashion the way I want it to look finally, while I'm building the store, I will keep this store password protected. Once I'm done and I'm confident that I can show it to customers. I will remove the password. Okay, so let's go ahead and pick IT. Team. The default team they're suggesting is Dawn. It team is simply the way everything is structured on the website, how the images show up, what are the fonts, how the menu bar shows up? All these design factors, these design patterns combined together is called a team. So for now, we have the team dawn, and there are some more popular free themes available on Shopify. There's refreshed craft sense, freedom to escape ride Studio. So if you want, you can actually go to the Theme Store and take a look at all the teams and decide which one speaks to you the most. There are also some paid themes, e.g. this one is for $200, this focal is for $320. Don is free. And here you can actually filter by free or paid. So I'm just looking for the free themes for now. Take a look at all of these teams and decide which one you like the most. So here, let's say I like to do. So I click on studio. And I go to try theme here. I click on my account. And then it gives me the option to add studio to your online store themes. I will go ahead and add this. Okay, So we will give it a couple of minutes. The team is getting added to my account. It might take a little while. Alright, so here we have this team Studio added to the account. I will click on Customize, and then I see some of the options. So here I have the navigation. I can use the element announcement bar, which is getting highlighted here in the main Canvas. Then there is header which is getting highlighted here. Then every element that we have here, be it a heading, we get an image. It is all showing up here in the sequential format. And I can highlight all of these items, or I can directly click on something on Canvas. And on the right-hand side I have the option to edit this. So here let's say instead of announcement, Welcome to our store. I can write something like, Whoa, you are having a great day. Enjoy shopping with us. Okay, so this is how you can edit an element. Then if I want to make some changes here, I can easily do that as well. There are plenty of options here that you can play with. So padding is the space between two elements. So here if I increase the padding, you will notice that this line, the royal blue pens, is actually getting further away from the top line. So if I reduce it, it gets closer to the top line. You can play around with these things or they're stopped padding. There is bottom padding as well. So you can increase or decrease it if you want. I will leave these numbers at default for now. I can enable this sticky header. And there is custom logo width. So here at this point I can also add the default logo. And I have created one already. So I will go ahead and select that image. I will upload it from my folders. So from Canva, I had downloaded this file, the royal blue pants logo. I will go ahead and select that. Alright, so I have my logo here. I will go ahead and select this logo. And there you have it. Can add an alt text. Alt text is simply the description of the image. So this can actually help you in Google search because we are describing the image. So I will write royal blue pens logo. Next I will come to this section and I can change the text here. I can say something like the best and in the universe. Okay? Then I can change the size if I want. I can make it small. I can make it large. I can even make it extra large. I will leave it at large for now. And then moving on, I will come to this element. And this element here is a slide show, so I can select an image here. I will upload the abstract image that I had here. And upload it. I will go ahead and add these pens. But for now what I'm doing is I'm just adding some random images. But what you can do here is you can actually add the images of actual products that you are showcasing to your customers, what products you are selling. Alright, so I have three images in this slideshow, 12.3. Let me actually change this. And I will add another image from the Internet. So I will go for free images, bands. And let's say I select this one. Okay, so here in this slide show, it catches the user's attention straightaway. You can actually display your high-quality product images. I have put some random images here, but you should of course go for whatever you think is right? Then you can have some collections on Shopify. Shopify when you are selling products, Let's say you are selling pens. You're also selling watches and things like that. You can create collections of products and you can create featured collections of products. So once you are uploading multiple products, then you would be able to do all of that. For now, I am leaving this the way it is. And here there's some more messaging for the customers. And you can write something like, we believe only in the best products. Again, you can add an image. You can write more things here, and you can link the sharp button to your product page. Then there's another section for Featured Collection and sharp by artists. So let's say you have multiple designers and you can feature the collections by artist if you want. Eric Ford from your brand's founder, or highlight a customer review. Maybe I can write something like maybe I can write something here. Like the pens are amazing. This is a review from a customer. So I will write. Sean Smith said this. Okay. Then you can add an image of the review of the person, something like that. Okay, so here we have seen how we can edit and make changes to the elements on the front page. I will go ahead and save it the way it is. And then I will hit Publish. Okay, so even though I have published it, The store is still password protected. The option of published was just to make sure I want to change the team from the default theme of Don. Okay. So now that we have a front page ready, partially, I will take a look at how we can add products here. So here on the left-hand side I have the option of products. And clicking on that, I get this. What are you selling? And I will hit Add your products. So I am selling blue pants, blue pen, and I will name the model, let's say a classic, I will write in these are the best value for money in blue pens available in the market. Write something like some description like Wait, I don't know, 25 g, size, 6 ", something like that. You can be as descriptive as you want here. The more the description, the better it is for the customer because they can take an informed decision. So make sure you fill this out wisely. Then there is the option to add the media. So I will add the file, the transparent background, one pen image with Remove Background. So the pricing was due 99, as I had talked about earlier in the course. And there is this option of Compare at price. And what this does is it can give you the option of showing that this product is actually at a higher price and you are selling at a discount. So what I can do is I can put like, okay, this product usually sells for 499, but I'm selling this to you for 299. So here I'm giving the idea, the impression to the customer that they're getting a deal on this product and they have the option of charge tax on the product? Yes. Cost per item. This is for myself. The customers won't be seeing this. This I guess, is for identifying if I'm making good profits or not. So let's say I procured these pens for a buck each. Then I can add an SKU or a stock keeping unit. So I can write a code like Ben 001. Okay, and then there is an option of barcode which I will not use for now. And then there is the option of cracking quantity. I want them to do that. And then there is this option of continue selling when out of stock. What this means is if I am putting the total quantity available here as 100. And if I've already sold 100 pens, do I want to have the option for newer customers to keep buying the pen? Ideally, if it takes me a long time to procure the product and send it to the customer. I will not continue selling when it is out of stock. Because then if the customer buys and they are already paying for the product, and then instead of getting the product in three days, let's say as I'm promising, they get the product in a month, the customer in that case will not be happy. Instead of that, what I'll do is I will simply disabled selling once I'm out of stock. So for now, I will keep this unchecked. This is the physical product. The weight is 25 g. And then there is some customs information, country or region of origin. I will pick Luxembourg. And then there is an HS code. So I will have to Google this for pens so I can Google the HS code for bands. Here I get that the US import and export data fountain pens, telegraph bands and other pens. The HS code is 96083 zeros. I will just copy this and paste this here. And then if you are selling products that have multiple options, so same product but different size or different color, then you can keep adding it here. So e.g. I. Have an eight-inch band. So I'll keep it as size. And I will make it eight inch, six inch. Okay. And then I can add another option, e.g. say color, and I will add blue, I will add red, and I will add black. So what this does is for the same product, it is giving the options of the size of six inch, eight inch, and in three colors, blue, red, and plaque. So if that is the case, go ahead and add them. But I have just one product of one size. So I will remove this. Okay, here at the bottom we have this search engine listing. And what this does is if this product shows up in Google search, how exactly you want this to look? I will choose blue pen classic, and I will add something like royal blue pants. And here is the description. I would just add shape and best value for money. I already have that. Okay. Maybe I can add shipping in three days. And the URL handle is this one. Here I have the option of keeping it active or draft, so I will keep it active and I will sell it online and Facebook and Pinterest as well. Alright, so let me go ahead and save my product. Alright, then I have the option of inventory. And here I have the quantity hundred set. And if I am making sales, this quantity will automatically adjust. Then there is an option of managing your incoming inventory. You can create collections. So you can create a new collection name at featured bands. And you can write these are the and select the best bands from our election. Okay, for now I will choose manual. And here if you want, you can add an image to this. I will use the default image of this blue pen. I will save this. Alright, so here in this collection, what I can do is I can browse for the product. Since I have only one product, I can choose only that. But if you have plenty of products, you can pick and choose which products you want to add to this particular connection. Okay, so now we have created a collection as well. Go back. There's option of gift cards as well. So if you have a store and if you want to give your customers the option to buy a gift card, you can enable that as well. The customer tablets you import customers. If you have existing customers, you can import it from a file if you want. So you can use a CSV format which is comma separated value. And if not, if you have only a few customers, you can add them manually as well. And let's say I have no customers because I am starting a brand new business, I will leave this option. Then there's analytics for total sales. The total sessions that is number of times your store actually received an online visitor and then returning customer rates. So a customer visiting your store wants. Then they came back again. So what percentage of those are returning customers? Then conversion rate. How many people are adding the product to the cart, how many people are reaching the checkout and how many people are actually buying product from you. So you can track all of that. Average order value is simply the total sales divided by the total number of orders. And you get the average order value, total orders. And some more stuff that you can track here and analytics. And here you can also offer some discounts to your customers. So let's see how to create a discount here. There are few options, amount of products. So if it is a 50 dollar product and you are offering $10 off, you can create a discount of that type amount of order. So not only one product, but no matter how many products they have in the cart, you can offer a discount on the entire order value. You can create something like by X, get Y. So buy one, get one by to get one by three, get funds, something like that. Then you can give a discount code for free shipping. So e.g. like Amazon does, is for Prime members, Amazon offers free shipping no matter what the order value is. But for others, there is a minimum order value only above which Amazon offers free shipping. So let's see the first option. The first option here is amount of products and the method is discount code. I will hit this Generate button and it creates a discount code for me. Okay? So this is simple as that. If you want, what you can do is you can also create something like new buyer. Then I have manually created this discount code, new buyer ten. And here I can choose it as a percentage or a fixed amount, okay? So I will choose it as a percentage, ten per cent, and it will apply to specific collection or specific products. So I click on specific product. When I browse, since I have only one product, I can choose that if you have multiple products, you can choose which items to apply this discount code on. Minimum purchase requirements, you can set that this trend per cent will only apply if the purchase quantity is 20 bucks or something like that. So I will keep this as no minimum requirements here. You can let all customers use the discount code or you can allow only specific customer segments to use this discount code. So I click on this and I hit browse. The default options that Shopify gives me are these customers who have not purchased. So these are basically brand new customers. I want to enable this discount for them, and I will leave the remaining unchecked. So when I created this discount code, new buyer ten, my intent was to incentivize a new buyer or a new customer to make a purchase here. And here, I've set the eligibility that only the customers who have not purchased anything from me before, that is those customers or new to me. Only they will be able to use this discount code to get the ten per cent discount, then there are more controls here like you can do, limit the number of times the discount can be used in total. So let's say I want only the first 100 customers to get this discount. So I can set a limit here. I want. I can let it be ongoing forever in perpetuity. So all the customers who are first-time buyers will get that discount. Here I have the option of controlling the coupon combinations. So new buyer ten can be combined with other product discounts are shipping discounts. So I will leave this unchecked because if I'm already giving them a 10% discount, I do not want them to collaborate with other discounts available. Alright, and then you can set the active dates. So when does this promotion start? You can also put an end date to this promotion, but I will let it go forever. So now that I have created all of this, here is the summary. The code is new buyer ten, the type and method is amount of products and they have to use this code. The details are available on online sales channels. Ten per cent of blue pen classic that is only on one product. No minimum purchase requirement. And it is for customers who haven't purchased before, no usage limits and can combine with other discounts. And it is active from today itself. And I click on Save discount. This discount is now active. Now, let's go back to the discount store. And customize this here. So here I have this featured collection showing up here, and I have just one product here. And this is the blue pen classic. Here I have the selling price to Euros and 99. And this was my Compare at price because I wanted to show that the customer is getting a deal. I had put a compare at price of 499 and the user is able to buy it for just 299. So if I click on that, I come to this product page. It gives me some more details like blue pen classic tax included. The quantity I can change from here if I want. And it gives me more details like these are the best value for money. Blue pens in the market. The way it is 25 g, the size is 6 ". I can go ahead and hit buy it now. And it takes me to the checkout page. Here are the customer gets the option of adding the discount code. And the discount code was new buyer ten. I want to make sure it works. Okay. It is working and my new total is €2.70. So my promotion code is also working. Okay. And then I can fill in all the details continued to shipping and make the purchase. Alright, so now we'll come down here to settings on the left-hand side, bottom, and I click on it. I come to the Payments tab and I want to integrate a payment processor. And here I have the option of choosing a payment provider. I have the option of using PayPal or Amazon. I prefer to use stripes, so I will go ahead and see if stripe is supported with Shopify or not. So I do choose a provider. It says be compliant with PTSD to payment regulations in Europe. And I have stripe as one of the options. So I will go ahead and select Setup stripe. It automatically redirects me to the stripe platform. So here you would notice it is connect dots striped.com. And since I already created a Stripe account, it is identifying that I have this account with Stripe. I hit Connect. Okay, So here I had used the apple password, so I will go ahead and select this and authenticate this and login. Now for Stripe, I had used the two-factor authentication. So on my mobile phone, on the authenticator app, I will get the one-time password code, and I will go ahead and enter that. So I select the account I want to connect royal blue pens. It will connect automatically to Stripe and get back to Shopify. Alright, so now I get the message that stripe is activated and you are now compliant with European PSD do payment regulations. Okay, so my payment is now setup. Here. I have one more option, the option of capturing payment either automatically or manually. So for most cases, capturing the payment automatically makes sense because if you have the product in inventory and the customer can actually come and make that purchase. You want to take the payment then and there from the customer. In some cases, let say I am selling a handmade painting and I'm not sure if I will be able to deliver it to the customer in by the desired timeline or not, or if there is some customization that the customer wants. And before accepting payment, I want to make sure I can deliver on that customization or not. In that case, I will select manually and I will read the customer's messages and make sure they are okay with what I am delivering and then I will accept the payment from the customer. The problem with automatic payments is in cases where you are charging the customer and for some reason you are not able to deliver the product or service to the customer because of the customization, because you're out of stock or something like that, then let's say the customer is paying you $1,000 for that order. And then you realize you cannot really Delaware it and you can refund the customer. So the customer will be happy because they get all of their money back. But the problem is, for every transaction you are getting charged by Shopify, which is two per cent. You are also getting charged by stripe, which is two per cent. So you will have to take a hit of that four per cent processing fees, even if you are refunding it, the customer, So the customer gets the money back, but you are now out of 4% of 1,000 bucks, which is 40 bucks. So in that case, when you are not sure if the customer's requirements can be met straightaway, it might make sense to switch to manual. Otherwise, if it is a standard product, it makes sense to do automatic captioning of payments. Alright, so the payment is also set. 15. 06 Policies, Markets, Menu, Domain, Email Marketing: So in the previous lecture, we were able to connect stripe to Shopify. And now we can go ahead and do some other things to our Shopify account. So here one important thing is to have the right policies on the store. So let's go ahead and click on policies. This link takes me to all kinds of policies like Store policy, privacy policy, terms of service, shipping policy, contact information, and legal notice. So if you know someone who can create good policies for you, like an attorney or someone who is familiar with this topic, always go ahead and consult with them how to formulate your policies. If you want to use a template with shopify provides like something over here. If I click on this, I get a default template that actually defines the refund policy. So e.g. here they are doing a 30 day return policy. If you want to change it, you can manually make the edits. So if I wanted to 14 day return policy, I can edit this. And I can edit this. Similarly, you can go ahead and make sure read it line by line and make changes were required. So here you have to insert your own address or the address where the returns can be sent. And similarly, go ahead and make sure you are okay with the policy that you're publishing. Next is the privacy policy. And if you want to use Shopify template, you can just hit this button. And then you have this thing here. You can again go ahead and read it line by line and make changes as necessary. Next is Terms of Service. Again, I will use the template. And then there is a shipping policy. Shaping policy is tricky because it depends on where your customers are located. If you are distributing only in one country, maybe it gets a little easier. But if you are shipping out globally, then you will have to determine which customers get free shipping, which customers are charged for shaping. What I generally would recommend is to go for something like terms of shaping as free shipping on orders above 49 bucks or whatever this number you are comfortable with. And I can even make it free global shipping on orders about 49. So what I will do is I will take a look at the shipping rates to most locations and then I will choose whatever the shipping costs are added into the price itself. So if a customer is buying safe products worth 49 bucks from me and I have margins of, let's say, 30 bucks on it. And shipping is eight to ten bucks on average. For global shipping, I will include that cost into the price of the product, right? So $20 is the cost of the product. $10 is the cost of shipping. So my total costs are 30 bucks. And I am pricing the product at 50 bucks and telling them that I'm offering free shipping. So this is this strategy you can use or you can choose to charge for shipping extra depending on your preference. Then there is contact information so you can leave your email for customer support. You can give a phone number as well. So okay, something like this so that the customers know how to reach out to you in case of any issues. So we can do this legal notice. I will leave this blank for now. And this is, of course a fake number. I do not own this number. Okay. Then here we have the option of configuring the checkout experience. So let's go ahead and do that. First is the checkout style. You can change the logo, colors, fonts, and other things. Then we have the option of customer accounts. I can make accounts mandatory for all customers. I can also keep it optional so that they can check out as a guest. So I would actually keep this account creation as optional so that the customers, if they are in a hurry and they do not want to create an account, they can just check out as a guest. Or if they want to create an account with us, they are welcome to do so. Customer contact method, you can choose both phone number and email. I prefer emails more than phone numbers, so I will just go for email. And then here in customer information, I would want to have bought their first as well as last name, company name, I will choose optional address. Line two would be optional shipping address, phone number. I can leave that as optional as well. Show tipping options at checkout. If you are selling something creative, you can leave this option checked. If you are selling general products, I would not really give this option for tipping. Require a confirmation step. Customers must review their order details before purchasing. This is good for the customers, but it also increases an additional step in the process. So you can take a judgment call whether you want the checkout to be quicker or you want to add this additional step, okay, so here you can choose whether or not you want to fulfill the orders automatically. That is, Shopify will consider the order is fulfilled or you can make periodic checks in the Shopify account and manually mark the order as fulfilled as you actually fulfill the order. Okay, There's plenty of options that you can configure here. Then there is also an option of abandoned checkout emails. Now, this is a cool feature because if a customer comes to your website and they add something to their cart and they do not end up purchasing the product, then you can send them abandoned checkout emails automatically. So this is a cool feature that we have in Shopify. So we can do anyone who abandons their checkout send after 6 h, 10 h, 24 h. So Shopify recommends 10 h based on maybe some research they have done. I will leave it at 10 h. Then I will hit Save. And we have shipping and delivery. Here in shipping, we have some shipping rates that we can configure. So let me go ahead and hit Manage. If my product is shipping to Luxembourg itself, then I am offering free shipping. But let me see what options I have here. Standard and price is zero. But I want to add the condition that the minimum price on the order, that is the total order value should be 49 bucks for the free shipping to trigger. Okay, and for the rest of the world, I will do the same thing. Here. I will make it standard, and I will add conditions based on order price. A minimum order of 49 gets you free shipping. So I select this and then I save my shipping policy. Next, take a look at taxes and duties. So here I am putting the option of all prices include tax. I am not a fan of this because the taxes can be very high and it will eat up into my profit margins. Also, since taxes like VAT and sales tax have to be given to the authorities, I will prefer to add them later. That is on top of the product price so that I know exactly how much I'm getting and how much I have to give to the authorities like VAT or sales tax and charge tax on shipping rates, charge VAT on digital goods. All of that is now taken care off. And then it's another option to collect duties and import taxes so that if you are shipping internationally, the customer does not have to pay the import taxes. So let's take a look at what this is. If I hit compare plans. Okay, So they are telling me I have to upgrade to advance Shopify if I want to enable that option. Sales tax and VAT can be a little tricky as well. So depending on where your customer is located, you might have to collect VAT and deposit to that country. So this is a little complicated and as Shopify suggests, you should talk with a tax expert if you're not sure where you have the tax obligation and you can add new countries and regions by creating a shipping zone. And you can configure what taxes you have to collect from people. So in case of taxes and legal matters, always consult a professional. In this market stab, you can choose where you want to sell your product and where you want to sell your product. E.g. if I want to enable this international market here, which is 28 recommended countries and regions. I can manage this by clicking on this. And here, I will click Activate and see what happens. Now I get this message. Your store will recommend localized experiences. Geo localization app is installed. So now this is active in more markets. Okay, so here is a list of countries that you do not sell to. So if you view them, there's a lot of countries. If I want to add a market, let me go ahead and click this option. And let's say I want to sell to entire North America or at least two countries and North America. And I add countries and regions. So let me go down and look for United States and Europe, United Kingdom. So let me add these two countries. I also want to add, let's say Canada to my list. Alright, so I created a market. I can name it us, CA, UK. Okay, so I have added three new countries and I have created a new market by the name USCA and UK. So I'll go ahead and save this. So I am selling in my primary market, Luxembourg, I'm selling in 25 more countries in international, and I'm sending in three more countries because I just created a new market and activated it. If I hit Manage here that we see which are the countries that I am selling to. I'm setting do Australia, Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, etc, etc. So you can see the complete list here. Now we come to apps and sales channels. There are plenty of apps that shopify supports. And by default they are integrating facebook, the online store of course, and Pinterest. And we will take a look at Shopify apps later in this course. Now, let's go to domains. Here. You would notice that Shopify has given me a web address, which is Royal dash, blue dash pens dot my shopify.com. But what I want is I want the users to access my store by logging onto royal blue pants.com. That is the domain name or the website address I bought on pork bun earlier in the course. So let's see how I can do that. There are two options here. You can buy directly from Shopify also. So let's say I did not buy the domain earlier. I click on buy new domain and I want to check what is the pricing on Shopify. So let's say I look for royal blue pens, new domain. Okay? So this is a random domain name that I have typed and Shopify is charging me $15 per year for this domain, which is not too bad. But I got a better deal at pork bun where I was paying less than ten bucks per year. And that included the SSL certificates. So I do not need to buy it from here. I will go ahead and connect an existing domain. And I will type in royal blue pens.com. And I hit Next. Then I get some instructions for connecting my domain. To connect your domain, follow the instructions to change your provider account settings follows settings instructions. Let me click on this. And then I get redirected to a page. And let me see where are the instructions for this. Looks like I have to select somewhere here. Connect automatically. So it looks like this does not work for me if I'm choosing domains. Because when I did this, they did not give me the option to connect automatically. Let me try again. Okay. So the only option is to follow settings, instructions. And apparently I have to watch a video, which I am not a big fan off for technical details. So I will choose connect manually from here. Okay, so connect your third-party domain to sharp. If I manually. Before you begin to complete this procedure, you have to have this particular thing, okay? All right. Step one is to change your DNS records in your third-party domain provider account on a domain providers website, login to your account, find the DNS settings. So I will login to the pork bun account. Here for this domain. I will go into the details. And then I will create two separate windows so I can keep them side-by-side. On your domain providers website, login to your account, find the DNS settings. So let me go ahead and pick the DNS records. So here I have the DNS records and then point the air record to the Shopify IP address. So here I can pick in the type a record. And what I can do is point this to this particular IP address. Alright, if necessary, change the host name to add symbol. But I'll try and leave it blank. Delete any other error codes on the domain if there are present. So I can take a look at all the records and point the CNAME record to the name www to shop start my shopify.com. Let me first add the record. Okay, so I will go ahead and delete these records. And then I will add a record to my DNS records. So the first thing I had to do was point the error code to Shopify IP address 232273, dots X5. So I did this record and I pointed it to the IP 232-27-3865. And the second thing I have to do is point this CNAME record with the name www to shop start my shopify.com. So here in type, I will choose C name. And then I will put www here. Then I will point it two sharps. My shopify.com. So I will copy this and paste it here and then add this record. Okay, so I have done step one. Next from your Shopify admin go to settings and domains, and click Connect existing domain. And then click Next to confirm your domain is connected, Verify connection. Okay? So I come to the settings and domains and I come to connect existing domain. And here I will type royal blue pants.com and hit Next. And since I've already made the changes in my DNS settings in port one. I will go ahead and verify connection. Okay, so now I see that this domain is connected. So royal blue pants.com is connected to my Shopify store. So it takes just a couple of steps. It may sound too technical that you are changing records and settings and things like that. But if you just follow these steps, it just took me two steps to connect this to Shopify. So our domain is also set up now. So any customer who clicks on royal blue pants.com will be brought to my Shopify store now. Alright, next is brand. So here there are some logos. I already have a logo, so I will go ahead and do this import. Okay, So they're telling me your logo is less than 512 by 512 and may not be used by some apps and channels. Alright, so now I will create a new logo and I have to change the size and facts. So let me go ahead and add a custom size logo, and I'll make it 512 by 512 pixels. And I will use this logo. I will select an item, do Command a to select everything, command C to copy. And in the new size, I will paste this. I'll make sure everything is positioned center. Okay? And I will bring them down closer to the center. And the background. I can make it blue. I can leave it white if I want. Okay, so let me go ahead and download this logo. Okay, so now I have that image on my computer. I will change this and upload the new one. So this one is d phi one to pixel. I will choose this and I will upload this. Alright, so now that message that we're showing up is gone. And I will do the same here. I will change it and pick the 512 pixel. And that message is coming from here as well. Alright, and you can see the previews of the logo and circle and square and fab icon. So fab icon is the icon you see on the top. So for pork bun, this is tears for Canvas. Does this for Shopify, does this. You see it in the browser tab, which is kind of small, but that is what it is. And then you can choose your brand's primary colors. I want my brand's primary color to be this color. Let's say basically you can do whatever you want here. And the contrasting color would be, let's say black. You can use secondary color. You can choose a cover image. So I want to choose this as the cover image. Add a slogan. Slogan I have is best-in-class. So I will do best in class. And short description. We create great blue pens that wow, our customers. Then you can add a social link if you want. If you, if you have a Facebook page, Twitter page, and all these profiles, you can connect all of them. For now I will just save this. Let's go to Notifications. Now. Here you can customize the e-mail templates. So change the look and feel of email notification to your customers. Receive, add your logo and color themes. So let me go ahead and do that. This is the order confirmation template. The email goes with the header, royal blue pants or the number. Thank you for your purchase hydrogen where getting your order ready to be shipped, etc. etc.. And then the details and how much they paid and customer information and stuff like that, and the payment method as well. And here there will be a generic line in the footer that if they have any questions they can reach out on this email address. Here I can also add the logo. I will choose the 512 pixel logo. Here it is. So the first email was order confirmation. Then the second one is order updation. Then we have the invoice and it gives the order gets canceled. We have to send the cancellation e-mail. So there is a template for all the emails that the customer will receive based on the activity. Okay? This is pretty handy because you do not have to craft these e-mails. These emails get automatically trigger to the customer based on the action that the customer is taking. Then there's plenty of other options for emails. Here at the bottom, this is also important. The marketing options. There is the concept of double opt-in. What that means is, if a customer comes to my website and the customer enters their e-mail address and says they want to be subscribed. What I will do is I will send them an e-mail on the same e-mail address. And I will send a link in that email only when they click on that link, I will consider that they have agreed to receive newsletters or promotions from me. This is a good way to confirm that we are not spamming someone and we are sending e-mails and promotions only to people who are genuinely interested in our business. So for e-mail and SMS, I would prefer to have customers that have double opt-in because I don't want to send emails to people who never read them. And sometimes someone can use a fake email and someone else's e-mail. And then I send promotions to them, which is not really the best thing to do. Okay, So this is what we have in notifications. If you want to change the text or something off an e-mail template, you can do that as well. E.g. you want to change the text and the order confirmation email. You can click on this. And if you understand a little bit of HTML, you can get this done. If you do not know HTML, you can still make minor edits. But I would say don't do it because you have the risk of actually breaking something in the code. So if you know HTML, it's well and good, or you can seek help from a friend. Or a freelancer on Fiverr or Upwork who can help you with customizing these e-mails. Otherwise, the default works for most of the people. Okay, So we have taken a look at a lot of these menu items. And what I want to do next is I want to come out of the settings and I want to go back to my team. So I go back to my online store. Okay, So now I'm here in my online store. I want to make some changes to the team. I hit Customize here. And here. In the footer section. I want to make some changes. So first of all, this mission thing, I don't know if I want to put the mission here. I could just put some contact details and just a phone number and maybe the email address. And then I want to add a block here, and I want to add a menu. And here I see that I have this option of footer menu. And let's see what a footer menu is. So let me go ahead and click on this link. Here I have the footer menu, which as of now just has this search bar. I want to add a few things to this. So I want to add some policies like privacy policy. I will add that. I will add more policies like shipping and return policy. So shipping policy and refund policy as well. And I will also add the terms of service here. So I have data as well. Okay, so in the footer menu I have these items added. I will save this menu. Now that we are in menus, I will also make some changes to the main menu. So in main menu we have contact, catalog and home. If I want, I can add a blog page as well. So here is blogs. Okay? So I will save this menu also. So now if I go to the team and customize, my top menu has four items, home catalog, contact and news, which is the blog menu I've added. Just now. Here I have these things. I can actually remove one of the blocks. This sharp I can remove. I have the Info, which I can just write navigation. And I will save this. Okay, so here I have the navigation menu. If the customer wants to read privacy policy shaping, policy driven policy terms of service, they can come to the bottom of the page and easily read these policies. So that is also taken care of. Now you would also want to give information to your customers about some generic things about the product, right? So you don't only want to sell the product, you also want to tell the customers something like, if I wanted to create a new blog post, I will write something about why riding with blue pens is a sign of intelligence. I don't know, I'm just making this up. And then you write a long blog post. And what that does is it helps you find a place in Google search results. So if there is some person who is curious about now blue pens, and if there is a correlation of using blue bandwidth intelligence or IQ, then they can come to your blog post. And that is one way to attract people to your website. And if the company or blog post, maybe you can link the products there or you can put a link to the shop and they can actually. Go ahead and buy the product from you. So this is one way of getting traffic from search results are written random words. So I will just delete this for now. But you can very effectively use blogposts to drive traffic to their website. Okay, next, I want to tackle marketing. In marketing, you can create a campaign on top and you can use Shopify email. They allow you 10,000 free emails per month. And for every additional 1,000 emails, you have to pay $1. Okay, so I will go ahead and click on this. Alright, so there is this email app which is provided by shopify itself. This app would need certain access. Like they would need access to information about your customer and store. And they would be able to see the customer information and edit store information. Which makes sense because if you want to send emails to your customers, you will have to send their names and e-mail address to the app. So I will go ahead and click on Update app. Alright, there are plenty of templates that you can use. Let's say you want to talk about the seasonal sale or do you want to talk about new arrivals? So I will click on this. And I will select the template and I can make some edits to the template to suit my taste. So I can send it to all these subscribers, which at this point is zero. And then you can also choose other segments like email subscribers, abandoned checkouts and things like that. Subject, I would say, let's say hello. We have new products. New products you will love. And a preview text is something that you will see on your email app. You can leave this blank if you want to discover the latest additions to our store, sharp arrivals currently loving. And this section I can delete. There's browse more and then there's the basic information about the website, about the store. And then there is also an option to unsubscribe. We have to respect the customer's opinion in case they do not want to receive any promotional e-mails from us. We always have to give them the option of unsubscribe from our list. So all of that is cool. I will just go ahead and review this. At least one subscriber is required. If I want, I can change the e-mail colors. So content background is white, the border is gray, which I'm okay with it. But if you want to change, you can change it to, let's say a black if you want. You can send a test e-mail to see how it looks like when the email actually reaches the customer. I'm sending an email to this email address and I will send it and see how it looks in my Gmail. Ok, so this is the email that I received. I will report this as not spam. And here I have new arrivals, the season discovered the latest addition to our store. And I have this e-mail in my inbox. So that is cool. Once you start building your email base, your customer base with their e-mails, you have more and more subscribers. You can take advantage of these email marketing campaigns as well. For now, I will exit this. 16. 07 Set Up Professional Email: In the previous lecture, we talked about sending emails via Shopify. And this is the test e-mail that I was able to send to my own e-mail address. Here you would notice something. If I click on the details, it will show that the email came from my Gmail address via Shopify email.com. And if I want to give a professional look to my e-mail communications, I would want an email address which says something like contact at royal blue pens.com rather than this Gmail address. So let's go ahead and see how we can fix that. To do that, we come to the Shopify store. And here at the bottom left hand side, we have these settings. We choose the store details. Here. We see that there is this Contact Information tab. Here there are two e-mail addresses, so the first email address is the Gmail one, and Shopify uses this to contact you. So if Shopify has to communicate something to me, they will send me an e-mail over here and this second email address is for the customers. So when I'm sending an email via Shopify, the customers get to see this email address. And that is why in this tab here, when the test e-mail was sent, it came from the Gmail account. So if I want to change this and make it look professional, there are a couple of steps for that. For that, let me go ahead and make some changes. The first thing I will do is I will click on the edit here. And here in the sender's e-mail which the customer C, I will make it something like contact at royal blue pens.com. I will go ahead and save this. Now this is just the first step of the change. Here. There is this message that emails you send me show up differently in some customers inboxes. So what that means is the via Shopify, email.com, which was here, will still show up. So let's see how we can remove this. I will click on this fixed this option. Here it tells me about the customer communications. And here it tells me that the email may show up in inboxes like this contact at royal blue pens.com via Shopify email.com. So that is what we just talked about. And if I want to remove it, I have to authenticate my domain. And here it shows that the domain status is not authenticated. Once I'm able to authenticate my domain with Shopify, this via Shopify email.com will disappear. And this can definitely help with your brand building. So let's see how we can authenticate the domain and remove this particular line. Okay, so here it says to authenticate your domain, you will need to create for new records with your domain provider. And I had bought the domain on pork buns. So my domain provider is pork bun. It says in a separate browser window, login to the admin of your domain provider and navigate for DNS management and create for new CNAME records with the host names and values below. So here are the four records, 123.4, all are of the type C name. So I will go ahead and show you how to do that. Okay, so now I have my work when I count here, I will login. Here in the details. I will go ahead and open up these settings for DNS. So here is the option of DNS records. I will click Edit. And here I have to make these changes. I have to add four records, 123.4, all are off types C name. So in pork bun, in the first field, I will choose the type C name, which is the canonical name record. Then in host, I will copy this value, which is six K5 point underscore domain key. So I can just click on Copy. And I do Command V to paste it. And the value DKIM one dot this long string. I can simply copy this and paste it here in this answer field. Okay? Tdl, I will leave it the Vedas and notes if you want. This is for your personal reference. I can write maybe for Shopify, email, verification. You can leave it blank. I'll just put in a note, but this does not affect the DNS settings at all. Okay, so I add my first record like this. Alright, now I can see it here that the first one is added. Then I have to add second, third, and fourth. Now, I will focus on two for now. So the host is, again, I will just copy this here. Paste it in the host field, and the value will go in the answer field. And I will add this. So the second record is also added. Next again, this is a CNAME. I will copy the hostname, put it here. I will copy the value. I will put it here and add this. And finally, the fourth one, I will copy this and the host name. Add the value and add this. So I have added for CNAME records. So all four of these values are now added. I will now hit this authenticate domain button and see if Shopify is able to authenticate this. So DNS settings take a little while to propagate and come into effect. And here, shopify says that this should take about an hour, but it may take even 24 h once the custom DNS records have been authenticated by hosting provider, your sender email will be confirmed. So DNS settings generally take time, even when we were connecting the domain name to Shopify that time it happened very quickly, but it can take anywhere between 1 h to 72 h. So we will wait for this particular verification to be over and check back on this later. Okay, so now we have given it some time and now Shopify is able to authenticate the domain. And thanks to the setting changes we had made, this domain is authenticated. So which enables you to send emails from Shopify with this domain. So now that the domain is authenticated, I will go ahead and try and sand another test e-mail and see what is shown as the sender in that e-mail. For that, I will go ahead and close the setup guide. And I will go to marketing. Here in marketing, I will go to Create Campaign, go-to Shopify, email. And what I will do is I will just go to the same e-mail template I used last time. Actually, I can go here previous e-mails. I can duplicate it. Here on the right-hand side. Here I have this option of sending a test e-mail. So I will go ahead and click that. I will send it to the same Gmail address. Alright, here it says test e-mails sent. So let me go ahead and see what it looks like in my Gmail inbox. Alright, so now I am in my Gmail account, and this is the fresh email sent by Shopify. And here if I see the details, it says from royal blue pants and the e-mail addresses contact at royal blue pens.com. So unlike last time where it was showing the Gmail address that is gone and now I have a professional email address. And I also don't have the text which said via Shopify gmail.com. Alright, so now we have this professional e-mail setup with our business name or our domain name in Shopify. Next, I will close this and I will take a look at some of the other things we can do here. 17. 08 Quick Check & Open Store For Business: Now let's take a look at this setup guide. We have completed all of these steps here. So customized team first product, we added a custom domain and sales channel. As of now we have just one sales channel, which is the Shopify store. And if you want to extend it to Facebook and Instagram, you can go ahead and do that as well. For Connecting Facebook, you would need a Facebook business manager account. So you will have to set up and fill in more details regarding what your business is about. If you have any tax ID is et cetera. So that varies from region to region. I will not be covering that for now. And Shopify apps as of now, we have just added the email app, but there are plenty more apps that are very good. Some of these Shopify apps are free, but most of them are paid. But later in the course, we will take a look at some of the Shopify apps that can add some good value to your store. For now, let's continue to see what suggestions we have. Here. We have some suggestions regarding improving the store quality. Make these changes to build trust with your customers. So I will click on the recommendations. And here it tells me two things that need to be done. First is to add an About Us page and that makes sense. So let's go ahead and do that. Alright, so I will just name it difficultly about us and you can write your story. Like we are a team of experts who are passionate about writing. And then you can actually write your story. What inspired you to start this business? And anything else that you want to write about you basically. So this is your space. This is one of the opportunities where you can tell your customers or potential customers your story and why you started this. And you can be as candid as you want. So for now I will just leave this here and I will just write my name and I will save this page. So I will go back. And I will go here to home. Let's take a look at what are the recommendations are there? The next recommendation is to add product photos or videos. Help customers feel confident in their purchase by including at least two photos. So we have added just one photo. Okay, so what I can do is I can click on this and hear in the media section, I can add more photos of this particular pen. So for now, what I will do is I will just include one image with the background because I don't want to take more images for this course. I will add one more image. And it actually makes sense, right? Because if I'm buying something online, I would want to make sure what the product looks like, maybe from different angles. And maybe if the product has variants and it is available in different colors, I would like to look at the images of different types from different angles. So for now, let's have these two images here. And I will go back here. If I go back to the Home tab, it tells me that the store quality has improved. So if I click on Review, I see a checkmark because I added a refund policy. I added an About Us page, a privacy policy, product photos. And I have said the product as active. Okay, so the next thing here is if you want to create a shortcut to come to your Shopify store admin, you can just bookmark this link. So I do Command and D, and this particular thing gets bookmarked on my browser. Now that I have made all the changes, I will take a quick look here. If I click here close to the online store, I can see my online store. So I have this banner on top. I hope you're having a great day. Enjoy shopping with us. I have the logo, I have this menu, and I have this slideshow with images of pens. Actual images would be better, but for now we have these three images from the Internet. And then collection, we have just one product. So if I click on this, I get to see the details. So this is my pen, this is the second image. If I click on this, it will show up in a large size. This is the first image, this is the second image. Here I have this problem that if I'm scrolling, this header is actually blocking most of my screen. Now how I can fix that is by disabling this sticky header. You can keep it the way if you want. But it can be annoying to customers that this good percentage of the screen gets blocked by these sticky header. So you can disable that. But for now, let's take a look at the product details, the price, the quantity. If you want, you can change it to whatever quantity you want. You can add the product to a cart. You can go to view my cart. You can check out and traditional fashion. And since I'm using Safari, it also lets me use the Apple Pay button. So let's go the traditional route and checkout. Then it will give the customer the option to put in their email address. And they can also subscribe to the newsletter and promotions if they check this box and here are the details for shipping, they can fill in the details. Let me go ahead and add some details so that I can show the entire checkout process. Okay, So I have my details filled in and I want to make sure I had created a discount code. And I want to make sure that the discount code I had created, which was new buyer ten, if that is working as well. So I hit apply and it's working on it. And this code has been applied. So here at this point, I have a 10% discount on my order. Okay, so all of this is working fine. So now what I will do is I will click and close this tab. And I will continue to see what else I need to do. If at this point you are satisfied with the way the store looks and feels, and you have a presentable website that you want to show your customers. What you can do is you can come here and where it says your online store is not open yet. You can remove the password. What that will do is if the customers come, they can actually see the store now. So let me go ahead and do that. Here I'm redirected to the area where I can disable the password. So as of now it was protected by a password. I will go ahead and uncheck this box and that should do the trick for me. So I go and click Save. And I get a message from Shopify that your store is open for business. You put a lot into your business and now your online store is open and ready to make sales. Alright, so I will close this box and I will open a private window and Safari and see if now I can see the Shopify store or not. Okay, So this is a private window because I want to be logged out and see what a normal customer would see when they visit my store. Now, the browser takes me to my Shopify store and I'm not logged in as an admin. So this is what a customer will see when they come to my website, royal blue pens.com. So as a customer, I can come here, take a look at all of the things. There are still some sections which are not really filled. But when you are publishing your store, when you are opening your business, make sure all of this is presentable. Either you can remove this section or you can add some valuable content to this. And here I have my catalog. In my catalog, I have just one product. So let's go ahead and see what that is. Let's say I want to buy this now. So if I do add to cart, I go to view my cart. I go to checkout. Here. I want to try the discount because I'm a new customer. I want to get my 10% off. Alright, so now I have the 10% of applied. Here. I can fill in the details for getting this particular order delivered. So let's say I'm using some other details apart from the administration details. Alright, so let's say I will look at it. Shipped. Alright, now I hit continue to shipping. Now I am getting this thing here. This order cannot be shipped to the address you have entered. Review your address to ensure that all fields have been entered correctly and try again. I'm pretty sure I have entered a correct valid address. So let's go ahead and see what's going on in the backend. Okay, so let's go to Settings and this option, shipping and delivery, and see what else we can do to make sure that a customer is able to check out. So here I have created two rates for domestic and rest of the world. If I click on this again, I see that I have added two plants. One is 49 and up local Luxembourg. It will be delivered for free, but I haven't really specified the shipping plan if the order value is less than 49. So let's go ahead and do that. So set up your own rates. So the rate name or I can write something like paid shipping. And here I will say that the prices, let's say 299 for shipping this. And the condition is if the order prices maximum 49. In that case, the customer will be able to get it shipped by paying tonight. Tonight. Okay. So far zero to 49, we have a shipping price off to 99, and I have 4092 up, then the shipping is free. Similarity for rest of the world, I will do the same page shipping. And the price is, let's say for global it is 399. And the condition would be if the order price maximum is €49. Alright, so it looks like we have covered the basis here. I will save this. Okay, so now let's go ahead and see if the customer is now able to get it delivered or not. So now I have restarted this session in a private tab, in a private window in Safari. And here I am on the website again, royal blue pants.com. So let's go to catalog. Let's go to Ben's. And here let me add just one pen to cart. View my cart. I will remove this and make it just one. Ben. Continue to check out. And here I have this discount applied already. And now based on the address that you have entered, the shipping cost is getting calculated. So I have set up an address outside of Luxembourg and the order value is less than 49 bucks. So I am paying the page shipping rate of 3.99. So it gets added and the total I need to pay is 6.69. Then I can continue to payment. And here I get the options to fill in the credit card details and then I can use the P&L button to make the purchase. So my sharp is now fully functional. The pages are working. The customer is able to fill in the details, get a final price, and enter their credit card details to make the final purchase. This store is now in business. 18. 09 Final Touch Up And TEST Order: There are a couple of changes that I want to make here. I want to disable the sticky header because I don't really like it. One thing I can do is I can come to the Shopify admin page, click on online store. Go to my theme and customize this. And here in the header section on the left-hand side, I can select it. And I can uncheck this option here, which says enabled sticky header. So if I uncheck this, then the header does not block any portion of the page. One more thing I can do here is change the way this looks. So let's say I want to make this logo a little smaller, say 80 pixels. And instead of this logo showing up on top, I can move it here and make it middle left so that it is taking less space. Then the menu and logo are side-by-side instead of top and bottom. Okay, So I like the way this looks. And at this point, if you want to enable this sticky header, you can do that because the menu has become smaller. So even if it occupies space, it is not taking up that much space on the screen. So at this point you can take a call. I will still remove it. And now I like the look of the site better. I will go ahead and save this. I also want to show how the ordering works. And I don't really want to charge the customer and then refund them, but I want to see if my payment gateway is working or not. So here in payments I have my Stripe integration already done. But here what I can do is instead of automatic payment capture, I can change it and make it man. Well, okay. So now what I will do is I will open a private window and actually make the payment using the Pay button and see if this stripe connection is working or not. Okay, so I have opened here a private window and I'm browsing here as a customer. So let me go to the catalog. Big my product. Add this to cart, checkout. And here I will again try my discount code. New buyer ten. Alright, I got my discount. And here I will enter some of my information. Okay, continue to shipping. And here I have the option of doing a pitch shipping, which is fine. I will go ahead and enter my credit card details here. Alright, so now that I have filled in all the details, I will go ahead and play and see if this tribe integration is working or not. Okay, So the order is being processed. Give it a couple of seconds. Alright. So now I see that I get a confirmation. It says the order number. Thank you. And your order is confirmed. And then I have all of my details here for billing as well as shipping. So as a customer, I am getting this order confirmation. Now let's see what happens in the Shopify admin, as well as this stripe area. So I will close this. Now I will go into my Shopify admin. I will look at this particular option orders. Here. I see that there is an order number, there is a date and time, the customer name, the channel is online store, the total amount, the payment status is authorized. So let's see what we can do here. Okay. So at this point I see that this order is unfulfilled, of course, because I have not shipped anything and in payments I see it hasn't been authorized. That is the credit card details have been confirmed. However, the customer has paid 0.00, so I have not yet captured the payment from the customer. What I can do is if I want to take this order and ship the product, I can hit this button, capture payment, and take the money from the customer. But as of now, I have not taken it from the customer. Here at the bottom we see the details that the order confirmation e-mail was sent and this payment was authorized. But I don't really intend to place this order because I placed the order and my name only. So I will go ahead and cancel this order. And I can do that by coming to this section where it says More Actions and this option cancel order, I can just click on this and you can select a reason here why you are canceling it. So I will just select any reason and do cancel order here. Okay, So now the order is canceled. The order is white and we should be good to go. I also want to see what email the customer gets. So when the customer is placing the order, this is the order confirmation email. So it is very simple. It has a logo or the number. It says, thank you for your purchase and we are getting an order ready to be shipped. We will notify you when it has been said. This is the classic Shopify template for the customers when they place an order. And then they have some details here. And the customer information below. This is the e-mail you get when you place the order. And when I canceled the order, the customer gets an e-mail with the same details, the order ID, etc, and the notification that your order has been canceled, which product got canceled, and you have been refunded as well. So the communication from Shopify is pretty standard where it is helpful. It is keeping the customer in formed and in loop. So that is something good that is inbuilt into the Shopify ecosystem. And now let's see if we get anything in Stripe or not. Okay, so I have my two-factor authentication for Stripe. I will go ahead and enter that. So on Stripe dashboard, if I come to this area, the payment section, I will see that there is a transaction of €5.69 and it will say that the order was canceled. And that is because I actually canceled the order. So it will show that at this particular time the payment started, the payment was authorized by stripe, but it was not captured because I had set the manual settings there for capturing payment. And when I refunded it, stripe is telling me that the payment got canceled. It may take a few days for the money to reach customers bank account. 19. 10 Shopify App 1 Reconvert: Okay, so now we have the Shopify store up and running. Let's see what else we can do to make it better. So the first thing I will do is go ahead and add one more product. And then we will go through some of the plug-ins are add-ons that can add great value to your Shopify store. So I will go ahead and login. Okay, so I will come here to products. And here I will add a product. And the product I want to add is another pen. So let me import the image here. This is the default image without the background removed. If you want, you can remove the background from that image using this service removed out BEG, or there might be some other services that can remove background as well. So I will go ahead and do this quickly. So I will just download the free preview image. But if you are running a business, I would recommend you use high-quality images so you can use the Download HD option. And it will cost you some money, which we had discussed earlier in the course. For now I will just use this normal download. Okay, so now this image is downloaded on my computer. The background is gone and it looks okay. Even though this is low resolution. So if I zoom in, I will see that it starts to pixelate in here. Anyway for the demo, it should be fine. So let me go back to Shopify and I will add one more image. This is the background removed image. I can write blue Canvas Ben, description I will write, this is a great quality pen that can ride on Canvas. Then I will put a price to this, let's say this cost 999. And compared price I will put 40, 99. And the cost, let's say is 299 for me. And SKU, I will write Ben Canvas 001. And I have 100 of these available. This is a physical product. It weighs 35 g, let's say region of origin. I will bake Luxembourg. And harmonized code. I will do a quick Google search again. And the Harmonize code for pens is 960-83-0960, 830-96-0830. It gives you the option ballpoint, pens, etc, etc. And then I will add it some search listing. So here in Google Search, it should appear as this royal blue pants at the best quality canvas. Alright, so I will go ahead and save this product. Now I have two products here. The reason why I added one more product here is because I wanted to show some of the apps that are useful. So here if I come to the panel on the left, there is this section for apps. I click on it and then I will click on Recommended Apps. Then I can actually go here at the bottom, Find More Apps in the Shopify App Store. I will click on that. Here. I can look for an app which will help me up sell the products. Now, when a customer comes to the store and they buy a very basic product, let's say a cheap pen, like the cheapest product we have available. And then since we already have the attention of the customer, I want the customer to look at some of my other products and maybe make a purchase of a higher cost product or a higher priced product. So this process of selling something more or a higher price to the customer is called upselling. So here there are plenty of apps and Shopify, which will help us with this upselling process. And let's take a look at reconvert, up-sell and cross-sell. Let's see how this app is. This reconvert, up-sell and cross-sell app has plenty of good reviews, 3,206 to one at this point. And they have five-star rating. They have a free plan available, 30 day free trial. And what that means is this is a paid app, so let's scroll down and see what their pricing looks like. Okay, there's plenty of details here, and here is the pricing. So they have a free tier. And in the free tier, if your store is making less than 49 sales or store orders than the tear remains free for you. And it gives you the option of one-click upsells, vanilla data or thank-you page editor and other features. But the first plan is pro thank-you page. And it costs 799 per month and it is good for up to 99 monthly store orders. Then there is another plan, 14, 99 per month. It is good up to 199 monthly store orders. And then there's a more expensive plan, 29, 99 per month. It covers orders up to 499 per month. If I take a look at all pricing options. So here we have a slider. We can move this. And let's say I'm expecting to make 1,000 sales per month or 999. So that will cost me 49, 99 per month plus 0.75 per cent of upsell revenue. So this is not the total revenue. This is the additional sales that this particular plugin will help bring to me. I have to pay 0.75 per cent of that additional revenue. Okay, So I will go ahead and try this in my Shopify store. So I will click on this Add Add button. And here I'm already logged into my Shopify admin. And I will just click on install app. Here I get a message. Welcome to reconvert. Congratulations, you are five-minutes away from boosting your revenue. In the next page, you will approve charges for the highest possible plan, which is 79999 per month. We will not charge you 79999. This app is 100% free if you have less than 49 orders per month and you get a 30 days free trial either way. So here if we go to this particular tab where they have given a slider, if I slide it to the rightmost side, and in the maximum case, if I'm making more than 50,000 sales from my Shopify store, then this plan will cost almost 800 bucks plus 0.75 per cent of upsell revenue. But as long as I'm here on the left-hand side, up to 49 orders per month on my Shopify store, then my plan stays free forever. In any case, they have a 30 day free trial. So if I do not like this, I will just go ahead and uninstall this. So for now I will do. Let's go one more step to approve the subscription. Okay, so now we are here in the post purchase funnel setup. Step one out of two is let's define reconvert as you're post-purchase upsell app on Shopify. For that we need to go to settings, checkout and post-purchase page, and select reconvert, up-sell and cross-sell as the, as the app of my choice, and then save that option. So I will go to the settings, checkout and post-purchase. So settings is here. Then I go to checkout. Here. If I scroll down there is this option of post-purchase page. And I can select the app, reconvert, up-sell and cross-sell. And on top right, I can see if this option, okay, now my settings have been saved, so I will close this. Now I see that the post-purchase app has been set to reconvert. And then I can click on Start. Now. Now this app, they'll give some recommendations like this one, L is optimized to maximize conversions on the first upsell customers can claim 15 per cent of and then if the customer is declining that offer, then you can give them a better offer of 30% off and things like that. So you can customize these numbers based on your strategy. What I will do is I will just use the default settings and continue to the next step. Okay, so now reconvert is active on the store and the customers will see the post-purchase funnels and optimize thank-you page. So I will go to dashboard. And what I will do is I will see the difference the customer sees when they come to the sharp now. Okay, so now I am on a private window and I'm not logged in as an admin. So this is the view a customer will get when they come to the shop. So let me go to catalog. Now I have two pens. One is costing to 99 and the expensive option is 999. So let me click on this and I will add this to cart. And then let me go to view my cart and checkout. Okay, so if I'm using this particular app, the point of me making the payment, there has been no effort from the app to upsell something to me. I would have expected at this point that they would say, Okay, if you can add this product, that would be nice. So after I've made the purchase, the app gives me the offer that I can make a purchase and I will be getting some discount here. So instead of doing 99, I'm getting to 54, which is 15% off discount. And if I decline this offer, a higher percentage discount should kick in. So now the price went down by 30%. And I have to pay just to Euros and $0.09 for this. And then there are more and more offers that keeps showing up. For the next 20 min, you get 30% off everything. And if I want, I can go ahead and sharp more. Okay, So this is one way of making more sales. If you already have the customer's attention and they are on the website, you can try and inside them with more discount so that they can buy more products. So let's see if we can configure the funnels. And here there is a conversion monster funnel. Let me click on this. Okay, so here we have a decision tree that you can take advantage of and you can make edits if you want. So once the Arthur completes, then we can click on this trigger and set it as either all orders or if the customer is entering information or details, etc. Let us keep this as all orders. And when we are talking off the upsell item, then what we can do is we can choose which item to upsell. So I can edit this and click on product options. And here in the products instead of going for the most expensive product purchased, if I want them to buy a specific product, I can come down here and choose specific product. And here I can select a product. So I had created a new product listing, which was for blue Canvas pen. I can click on this. And the customer will see that they can buy this product which is more expensive. So I'm upsetting this product to them. And then they can buy it at 08:49 at 15% off. And if they choose to decline that offer, the 15% offer, then what I can do is I can, and in this one, and choose the same product and give them a 30% discount. You can edit this and make it, let's say 20 per cent. If you don't want to go as high as 30% on discounts, you can choose a different number, and then I will save this option. So here's what is happening. The customer is making the order, they are completing the purchase. Then on all orders I will trigger an upsell. And the first option the customer gets to see is the blue Canvas pen, which costs 999. But I will offer the customer if 15 per cent discount with a timer of five-minutes. If they're already accept this offer, then I will try and make a second upsell. For the second upsell also, if you want, you can set a specific product. If you have plenty of options, then you can decide the order of upselling. If not, you can leave it at a product recommendation like this. For now, I will leave it the way it is at this point. If the user is declining the 15% discount on the blue Canvas pen, then I'm giving them another offer, which is 20 per cent off on this same product. If they are declining even that, then I am showing them the thank you page and I'm exiting the funnel. If they're accepting it, we are making a purchase. And similarly, if they are accepting the second up-sell, we are making a purchase. If they are declining, then we are going to the thank you page. So it is pretty simple. So let's see this in action now. I will go ahead and start a private window again. And here, after making the changes, let's see how it looks like. I go to catalog. I buy my cheapest Ben. Add to cart. View my cart checkout. Then I will fill in the details. I go ahead and continue to payment. And once I have made the payment, I get the first upsell option which says, so here I have chosen a specific product for up-selling. I get this royal blue Canvas pen and I'm getting a discount on the 999 price of 15% and it is available to me for 849. So at this point, if I accept it, I will get the price of 849. But if I decline this, I should get it 20 per cent discount. Here, even though the text says Get it now for 30% off, if you notice out of ten bucks, I'm getting only two bucks a discount. So it is a 20% discount. I forgot to change the texture, so I will keep that in mind. But for now, I will decline this offer as well. Okay. So now the order is complete. So you can configure the final the way you want it to. I will click on edit and make sure my title reads 20 per cent now because I have changed the number to 20%. Alright, so this is a very helpful app that you can add to your Shopify store. 20. 11 Shopify App 2 Frequently Bought Together: Okay, so let's go ahead and take a look at some of the other apps that are compatible with Shopify. So the first thing we will do is we will go ahead and remove the app installed in the previous lecture. So let me find the apps. So here I have the reconvert up-sell and cross-sell app open. I want to remove this for that, I can go to Settings. I can go to general settings. Here in the application status. The app is now enabled. I will go ahead and disable this. And then if I go to Settings checkout. And then I scroll down to the post-purchase page. I select App as none. And save this. Okay, So we have deactivated the app and removed it as the preferred app for post-purchase page. So next thing what I can do is I can even delete this app. So I go to settings and I go to Apps and sales channels. Here I see all of my apps. I can simply remove this reconvert up-sell and cross-sell app by clicking on Remove button. Alright. Now let's take a look at some of the other apps that can be helpful. One more strategy that a business can use is to show products that are frequently bought together. So even if you are shopping on Amazon, sometimes you will see that Amazon recommends that people who byproduct day also byproduct B and C. So that is one way they can increase the order value for that customer. So let's take a look at this app frequently bought together. And this has good reviews. And if I go down, this app has to pricing tiers. The first one is the free tier, which is free forever. No limits for stores created in the last two months. So they are supporting new independent businesses through this free tier plan. And they also have a professional plan which costs 1999 per month and the subordinate limited number of products, orders and traffic. And even the professional plan has a 30 day free trial. So let's go ahead and install this app. I will install this app using this button. Let me go ahead and refresh the page. Okay, so now I have this installation wizard. Let me click Next. And here the app is giving the option, how many recommendations would you like to add? So you can do plus one product plus two products, or even plus three products. So I will keep plus two products here. And then the position of the widget. So you can put it below the Add to Cart button, which would look something like this. You can put below the description of the product. You could put below the product taking the full width or at the bottom of the page. I think this could be a good location below the Add to Cart button, but you can always do testing with different positions and see which one gives you better results. So I will go ahead and pick this for now and click Next. The initial setup is finished. So let's start with the app enabled. Okay, so let's test this out. Again. I will open a new private window and see what a customer will see you on my store. Alright, so here I am in a private window as a customer, I go to catalog. I pick, let's say this product, blue pen, classic. And now when I'm looking at this product, I get this option of frequently bought together. And it is telling me that I can buy this product plus I can buy this second product. So it will show the details as well. So this item is the blue pen classic, the product that I selected. But it is telling me that I can also take a look at Blue Canvas spend, which is 999. So I like this one a little better because it is not waiting for me to complete the purchase of one product before the second product recommendation comes in. But here, while I'm making the purchase, it is giving me the option to add one product and pay for both the products in the same transaction. So this is my personal preference. I prefer upselling this way, but the other strategy is very successful and very popular as well. So you can take a call there. Alright, so it looks like this app is working as intended. And here you would notice that there is only one product that is being shown, even though in this setting. So we had chosen to show two additional products. And that is because we have just one additional products. We have a total of two products. If we had three products, it would have shown two additional products here. So let me close this and I will go ahead and disable this app because this is a demo store. And I don't want to be billed for it. So I disabled it. Next I will go to settings and remove the app. So I go to settings, apps and sales channels. Here. I can just remove the app frequently bought together. 21. 12 Shopify App 3 Free Shipping Bar: In this lecture, we will take a look at one more Shopify App, which is for free shipping. So I will look for shipping bar. Here. There is this app, free shipping bar. Let's check this out. Here. What this app does is on top, it will keep reminding the customers how far they are from getting free shipping offer. In my store. I have enabled free shipping on orders above 49 bucks. So let's see how this app can help us make more sales. So they have a free plan and they have a paid plan as well. We will go ahead and use the free plan. I will install this app now. So I have to follow these steps to set up free shipping with a minimum order value for Shopify store. So go to Shopify admin settings and shipping, open the relevant shipping profile, added shipping zone, shipping method condition, and or Eminem model price. Once you complete it, click done, you can create a bar by clicking the Create New bar button below. So I will click on create new bar. And here I will choose the colors, let's say blue. You can change the name of the bar so I can write, lets say blue bar and shipping goal is 49. Then the message will show up something like this, free shipping for orders over €49. And if there is some item in the cart of the user, of the customer, then it will tell the customer how much more they need to shop in order to get this free shipping offer. Okay? So all of this is cool. I will go ahead and enable this. I save this here. Okay, So let's see how that works on the shop. So I will go ahead and open a new private window. Alright, so I have now opened a private window. So this is what a customer gets to see. The banner says free shipping for orders over 49 bucks. So let's see if this actually changes dynamically as the customer is adding orders. So let me pick this product. And here let's say I pick one of these add to cart. And now that I have added one pen, this number changed 49-46, 0.01. And let's say I keep adding more of these. Now in my cart, the value is 17.94. So I'm just 31.06 away from free shipping. So a message like this can also tell the customer that if they make a little more purchase, they would be unlocking the free shipping. So there is a high chance that they will increase their order value to get that free shipping. So this very simple but effective tool can also increase your sales. 22. 13 Shopify App 4 Replay Site Recorder: We will take a look at a couple of more Shopify apps. And every time I'm showing you a demo of the app, I'm making sure I come here and remove this so that I don't get unnecessarily charged for something that I wouldn't be using. So I have removed all the apps that I have done a demo off for now. So let's go ahead and take a look at the next step. Here, I want to show you a very cool Shopify App. I'm talking about this app, Replace side recorder and surveys. So let's click on this. This app also has very good ratings. And they have a free tier. And the Free Tier supports 100 unique visitors per month. And they have a paid tier, which is 29 bucks per month. And they support up to 10,000 unique visitors per month. And for every 5,000 additional unique visitors, they charge $10. Okay, so let's go ahead and see what this app does for us. I add the app and install it. So here it tells me that I have a seven day free trial ending on September 13th, and the app spending limit is 999. But as we saw for up to 100 visitors per month, this is free. Up to 10,000 visitors per month. It is 29 bucks. So I will go ahead and approve this. Okay. So let's go ahead and start the onboarding here. First thing I need to do is enable recordings on my site. So what this app does is it records the customers session so you can see where the mouse is clicking, where the user is navigating, at which point the user decides to make a purchase, or at which point the user decides to quit the website. So this can give very valuable insights into how the user is actually interacting with the website. And what you can also do is you can enable post-purchase survey. So I will go ahead and open this. There are some articles that you can read to see what should the survey look like? What questions you should ask. But here I would ask a very simple question which goes by, how likely are you to recommend shopping with us? I will say one list, then, most likely. So let me make this more clear. On a scale of one to ten, how likely are you to recommend shopping with us? One least slightly ten is most likely. And once they are done with their response, you can put a thank you message. Like thank you for your valuable opinion. Save this. Now what I will do is I will see how this works. I will go ahead and launch your session as a customer. So my favorite thing, new private window. Over here, I have a new session in a private window, I am doing random movements of the cursor. I'm taking a look at this slide show. I'm looking at the product. And let's say I want to check the images. And at this point, Let's say I decide to add this to cart. So I simulated a customer session in a private window and I want to see how this session is captured by the better replay app in my admin console. So I go to recordings. And here I see that there is already a session recording available. And here it is coming from Luxembourg and the devices, a desktop Mac OS using Safari. This session lasted 37 s. So let's go ahead and see what this recording looks like. So I click here on View recording. At this point they are playing a video. So they are recording this session. They are tracking the cursor the way I moved it during my session in the private window. So you can see the customer is looking at that. The customer is looking at a product. The customer wants to zoom in and look at the photograph. So all of this is getting captured beautifully by this particular app. You can also see how much time was spent on which page on the website. 23. 14 Shopify App 5 Lucky Orange Heatmap: Let's take a look at one more app for Shopify. So we come here, we go to app and sales channel settings. And here we go to customize your store. Now there's one more app for recording the user sessions, the way we saw in the previous lecture. And that app is lucky orange heatmaps and replay. I will go ahead and add this app. And as long as I have 500 page views per month or lower, this app stays free for me. Let me add this evidence style, this app. I have to fill in some basic information to connect this app but Shopify. So there are some more questions that you can answer here. What are you most interested in doing? I have picked observe and monitor conversions and present data for visualization. So I will go ahead and set a password here. Okay, so now I'm here in the lucky orange dashboard. So let's see how this one looks when a visitor actually visits the website. So I will again simulate a customer visit here in a new private window. Okay, so now I have opened a private window and I have gone to this website, royal blue pants.com. And I'm scrolling on my lucky orange dashboard. I see that in real time. It is showing me I have one visitor online. And it is showing me as a new visitor because this is the first time they are recording me as a customer. And let's say I do some activities on this website. Like I scroll, I check out a product. Scroll down, let's say add the product to cart. And then if I check my cart or shopping bag, I have two items, I'll make it one. And then I will go ahead and try and check out. Okay, so let's say I come to this point and then I decide not to go ahead with the purchase because of some reason. So I will go ahead and close my session. Now let's see what I get to see in the lucky orange dashboard. I click on Dashboard, I click on one visitor online. Here it gives a fake name to the customer like teal QE. And it tells me that the visitor was from Luxembourg. Luxembourg and the customer visited three pages and spent 1 min and 3 s overall on the website. They added two items to the cart, which is true at one point I had two items in the cart. And here, if I want, I can take a look at this watch. So it is showing that I open this website in a smaller window. And it is showing the entire movement of the mouse. On the right-hand side, you can also see the actions or activities. So curves are shaken, element clicked, product viewed, element clicked. So all of these activities are actually trapped on the sidebar as well. It also shows me when I added the product to the cart, when I'm clicking and things like that. So once I'm going to check out, the session recording stops. And that is common across both the apps that we saw in the previous lecture. Also, the session recording did not include anything from the check-out session. Even this app like you arrange does not include or record D check-out session. That is because it contains sensitive information about the customers like their name, address, and things like those are sensitive information. So the apps that do not record them, and that is prohibited by shopify itself, I believe. So. These are two cool apps that you can use to see what your customer is, seeing, what your customer is doing. If there is a pain point, if the customer is spending too much time somewhere. And if a customer is getting frustrated because the layout is not easy to read and they are exiting. So you can take a look at all of this customer behavior and try and improve the design of your store or the checkout experience of your store. And that way you can improve the customer experience, as well as increase the conversions and increase your revenue that way. Lucky orange app has one more cool feature of heatmaps. So let's take a look at that. I open this lucky orange dashboard. And here if I come down to analytics, here I get the information on the most active pages. Since I did only one customer simulation, I don't have much data here, but still, I want to show you this feature. So I go to the homepage and here there is an option of launching the heatmap and give it a couple of seconds. Here I can scroll down, see where the user has made clicks. So here we see that there is one orange spot. So the customer clicked here once. And that is the only hotspot where the customer has clicked. So if you want a quick analysis of where exactly your customer is clicking and if the products are well placed so that the customer can easily navigate to the next page or not. Heatmaps like this can be very helpful. 24. 15 Shopify Apps Wrap Up: There are thousands of such apps that you can use on Shopify. So if you are facing a business problem and if you think you can make your business a little better by adding a feature, be sure to check out the Shopify App Store, maybe there is a ready-made solution for that already. E.g. let's say you want to print out the shipping labels. So I will just go ahead and search for shipping. And let's say I do shipping label. And here I have so many options. If I take a look at the first one, which is pH, multi-carrier shipping label. Now, this app can display real-time shipping rates from multiple carriers, like FedEx, UPS, USPS, DHL, etc. So if you do not have a free global shipping policy, then you can use this app to show real-time delivery options to your customers so that they know exactly the amount they would be paying for purchasing your product from you, including the shipping price. And then they also have this option of one-click label generation. So you'll click one button and all these shipping labels with the information of the customer gets printed so that you can pack your stuff, use this label, and ship the product to your customer. Likewise, there are other solutions in the App Store. Next thing I can think of is SEO, which is search engine optimization. There are plenty of plug-ins for that as well. So if I just take a look at the first one, which is SEO image Optimizer page speed. Let's see what is included in this app. Seo is the practice of optimizing your content and images so that Google indexes your website. That is, Google includes your website and images in its database. When a customer looks for something e.g. say, the best blue pens in the universe. If the customer types for that, then Google searches through its database and shows the results, right? So ideally you would want to be the first result that Google shows many customers search for a product that you are selling. So you can take advantage of these SEO tools. And here this app is for image optimization. Likewise, there are other SEO tools also available. E.g. if I take a look at this one, smart SEO. This app also offers some of the features like optimized store images, generate SEO tags, fix broken links, managed sitemap, and speed up your store, improve SEO and drive more organic traffic. So whatever your use case B, make sure you check out the app store. Maybe there is a solution that can do the heavy lifting for you already. And almost all of them have a free trial. So this one has a seven-day free trial. If you think something is not really giving you the value, you can go ahead and uninstall it so that you don't have to pay for it. Alright, so with that, I will wrap up this section of the Shopify apps. 25. 16 Shopify Started Plan When To Switch Plans: Okay, so now we have already taken a look at how we can create a complete Shopify store, how we can enhance the features with the help of the Shopify apps. Now what if you don't really want to commit to spanning 20 to 30 bucks every month for the Shopify plan. Let's say you have just a few products that you want to try and see if they can sell in the market or not. So you can actually opt for even a cheaper plan on Shopify. And that plan is here. So we go to Settings and we open this plan tab. And we go down here and the bottom and change plan. If I scroll down here, we have these starter plan. It costs about €5 per month and they transaction fees are a little higher here, so it's five per cent instead of the two per cent we were paying here. Okay, so let's go ahead and see how this startup plan works. Once I choose the starter plan, I will get to keep some of the features, but some of the features will get dropped. So I get to keep the product information I have added. I have added two products on the store and I will always have the option to upgrade anytime. What I will lose this, any customization made to the team and I might lose access to more themes and some other apps. And of course, I will not have a full fledged website with pages, blog post, navigation and product collections. But they started plans still might be a good fit for some of you. Let's go ahead and see how it looks like. I'm still in the free trial period, and I will choose the billing cycle of €5 per month. Then I will go ahead and start my plan. So let's take a look at this setup guide. Now. Here I have the option of setting up the Shopify payments. I will click on this. I already have my Stripe account and degraded. So I will skip this step and go to View All Tasks. And the final step here is to share your products. I get to see two of my products. I can go ahead and close this particular thing here. And now I want to take a look at my online store. So here I have a simpler looking website with just the logo, the menu, the navigation menu is gone. The other pages that I had earlier like blog and things like that as gone. I also had a slideshow of products, which is also gone. But I do have my products here. And below the collection, the featured collection of products is also gone. So I end up losing some of the features if I'm downgrading to the starter plan, but if I have a handful of products, this might still be a good option for me. So let's see if I click on this. There is the option of adding the product to cart. And you can go to view my cart and you can go ahead and check out. This is also not a bad option. The only thing here is to take a look at the transaction fees because it is five per cent. And at one point if you start making more sales, it might be cheaper for you to go for the standard Shopify plan rather than sticking to this starter Shopify plan, because you might end up paying more in transaction fees than you would pay for an upgraded membership. Okay, so let's do a quick calculation when it will become beneficial for us to upgrade the plan. This one cost €5 per month, but they transaction fees is five per cent. The next one is €24 per month, but the transaction fees is 2%. So let's say I'm able to sell products worth €1,000 in a month. In this case, if I'm using a starter plan, I would pay five per cent of the transaction as transaction fees. So five per cent of 1,000 is $50 or €50 in this case. If I want the basic Shopify plan and I am making a sale of the same 1,000 bucks. I'm paying just two per cent in transaction fees. So I'm paying 20 bucks in transaction fees. So 20 bucks and transaction fees plus 24. The total monthly cost would be €44. In this case, I would be paying 50 bucks just in transaction fees and five bucks on top of that for the plan. So I would end up paying 55 bucks for the starter plan. Whereas by just paying 44 bucks, I would be getting this basic Shopify plan, which has more options and more features. Once your sales starts picking up, or once you anticipate that your sales will hate a certain number, then you can think of changing the plants according to what would make more sense to you financially. Similarly, we had done the example before that once you start hitting sales of eight to 10,000, then it might be cheaper to switch from basic Shopify to this Shopify plan, which costs extra €9 per month. So you have to take a look at the total cost that you are paying, not just the subscription fee you are paying for a plan. 26. 17 When To Switch Plans WhiteBoard: Okay, so let's do some quick math to see at what point it makes sense to switch from a start or too basic and from basic to the regular Shopify plan. So here I see that this startup plan costs €5 per month. And on top of that, there is a five per cent charge per transaction. The basic Shopify cost €24 per month. And there is a charge of 2% per transaction on the revenues. And the Shopify plan costs €69 per month. Add on top of that, I have to pay 0.5 per cent per transaction. So here, a quick way of determining this switching point is taking a look at the differences. So here, if I have €24 per month minus five, which is €19 per month on monthly fees. This is the difference. And on transaction the difference is 5% -2%, which is 3%. Okay? So a quick way of determining what should be the switching point. I will simply take the monthly cost, which is €19, and divide this by three per cent. So I can also write three per cent as 0.03. And let's see what this switching pointers. I use the calculator for this 90/0, 0.03. So I get the answer as fixed hundred and 33.33. So let's say we have 634 bucks as this switching point between these two plants. Let's do a quick calculation here. When my revenue is 634, then I'm paying five per cent transaction fees in Starter plan. And here in basic Shopify, I am paying a 2% transaction fees. So here I should be getting 31.7 in transaction fees plus the five bucks for the monthly cost. In total, it will cost me €36.7 per month on a revenue of €634. In case of basic Shopify, I'm paying 2% transaction fees on the revenue of 634. I'm paying 12.68 in transaction fees, plus I'm paying 24 bucks for this subscription. So at this point on the revenue of 634, I start paying lower in total fees in basic Shopify plan. So at 06:34, I will switch from starter to basic Shopify. If it is less than 634. I will go for this plan. If it is more than 634. I will go for basic Shopify plan. Alright, so let's also calculate when I should switch from basic Shopify. Shopify. The procedure is the same. I will take a look at the monthly cost. So 69 for Shopify, -20, 44 basic Shopify, which is 45 bucks. Okay. And in terms of percentages, the difference is two -0.5, which is 1.5 per cent. Then to compute the switching point, I will divide this by this. So this is per cent. This is per cent. I will do 45/0, 0.01, 51.5 per cent can be written as 0.015. And that will give me 3,000 bucks. Okay. Let's do a quick sanity check here. If the revenue is 3,000, then the transaction fees, I have to pay 2% of that, which is 60 bucks, and the monthly fees is 24. So my total cost in this case is 84 bucks per month. And here in the Shopify plan, I'm being 69 per month as monthly fees plus 0.5 per cent as transaction. So my revenue in this case is 3,000. I'm paying 0.5 per cent, which is 15 bucks. I will double-check. I'm paying a monthly fee of 69 in total I'm paying for. So the switching point between these two plants is 3,000. Okay? So simply based on the financials, it makes sense to have this plan 0-634. It makes sense to have the basic Shopify plan 634-3 thousand. And once you start getting more revenue than 3,000, it makes sense to convert to this plan. And I'm talking of revenues. There is another plan, Advanced Shopify. So you can use the same technique to figure out when you should switch from Shopify to Advanced Shopify. I really hope this was helpful and it will help you make decisions when to switch from one plan to another. 27. 18 Selling Products Directly Via Stripe: Okay, So we have seen all the Shopify plans. We have done the calculations when to switch from one plan to another. I want to show you one more cool feature of Stripe. If you use this feature of Stripe, you don't even need a Shopify account. This has limited functionality, but it can still work for a lot of people. So let's say I have just two products. I come to Stripe, I come to the products tab. Here, I have the option of adding a product. So here I will have my same product, blue pen, classic. And I will write the best blue pen. And I will give some details such as Ray 25 g, and then there's 6 ". Okay, so go ahead and add more description to it because this is the only place where the customer will get to see the description. We are talking about creating this product directly and Stripe and selling it from here. So we don't even get the customers to visit a website or a Shopify store. So I will add an image here next. Then I will categorize it as general tangible goods. That's fine. Pricing information. I'm selling it for 299. I will charge stacked on top of this and I will make it a onetime payment. Okay? So I will go ahead and save and add one more product. The next product was blue pen Canvas. And I will write this span handwrite on Canvas as well. Then I will write something like wait, 35 gram length 6 ". Then I will also add an image. Next standard pricing, I'm selling it for 999. It is a onetime charge. And I will remove this check mark because I want to charge a tax. On top of this. I will save this product. Now I click here on products. I see two products here. One is blue pen classic, one is blue pen Canvas. So how do I make a sale from here, I will simply click on a product, let's say this one. And if I scroll down, I get to see this, create a payment link. I will click on this. Here. Stripe will generate a checkout page for me. So there are two pages. 1 is a payment page, one is a confirmation page. On the payment page, I can let the customer adjust quantity and I can set limits 0-99 or any number you want. And I will put collect tax automatically and collect customers address because this is a physical product. I would want both billing and shipping address. Here in the list of countries you can choose which countries you can ship two. So I have chosen Europe as well as North America. And if you want, you can add some shipping rates as well. Okay, You can go add a new shipping rate. And let's say I'm doing 399 as my shipping rate and I will charge tax on top of that. And estimated shipping time if you want, you can provide between, let's say, 2.6 business days. And I will save this. So at this point, I see the screen here. The customer gets to see the details of the product and they get to fill in their information, make a payment, and we are done. We can also see the preview of the payment page on a mobile device. So this also looks good. Next we have the confirmation page. The confirmation page is a very standard one. It tells you what product you purchased and there's a thank you message. If you want, you can replace this with something like thanks for supporting our small business. If you want to personalize this, you can do that or you can just leave it the default way. You also have the option of not showing the confirmation page, but I prefer to see the confirmation message. So I think the other people would also appreciate this. Alright, so once you are satisfied with the look and feel of this, you can go ahead and create a link. Here. There is this customized link created by stripe. I can simply copy this and send it to anyone via email, via WhatsApp, via Messenger. So this link will take them to the checkout page we just previewed. Let's go ahead and see what that looks like. Okay, So I opened the link that was created by stripe. Here is the inflammation of the product. Here is the information I need to enter for getting this product shipped, and here I can make the payment. So it is a one-page checkout. I like this. If you want, you can also generate a QR code for accepting payments. So I simply click on this QR code and Stripe will generate a QR code. And I can download it. I can put it outside my sharp if I have a physical location or if I'm doing a pop-up store, then I can put this QR code on the product and people can directly scan it and make a purchase online just by scanning and using this QR code. This is another cool feature of strike. There are of course limitations because if you take a look at the products, we have just one image. We don't have much description. We do not really have a website. There are plenty of limitations and disadvantages if you compare it to a Shopify store. But if you don't want to pay the subscription and you have a very limited amount of products to sell. This could also be a viable option. And I personally like this, that stripe is giving users this particular feature.