Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Sarah Anderson. I'm Dan Christofferson. I'm Kate Miss. Sarah and I are from Big Cartel. Big Cartel builds simple tools to help artists set up shop online. We brought on Kate Miss to teach the Skillshare a class on how to set up, customize, and promote a beautiful online store. I'm a graphic designer, and a jewelry designer, and I have two Big Cartel shops. In addition to that, I help other artists design their Big Cartel shops. So, in this class, we'll cover the basics of your admin including adding products, setting up shipping, and choosing colors and fonts that complement your brand. Let's get started.
2. Setting Up Your Shop: Hi. I'm Kate Miss. I am a graphic designer and jewelry designer in LA. I'm mainly a graphic designer and I went to school for design. I taught myself HTML and how to use Photoshop when I was 16 years old. So, I've always loved design and the back end of how things work. I opened up my Big Cartel shop for my jewelry store about six years ago, and then a few years after that, I opened my online print shop for my photography prints. I started customizing my shops with a little bit of coding to make them a little bit different from the basic themes, and other artists started contacting me so that I could also help them customize their shops, and it became to be a little bit of a side business for me. I love Big Cartel because, using their basic themes, you can create a really beautiful shop and it's incredibly easy to use. But also with the help of a developer, you can really create a shop that is as big as you can dream of. I approach this class by breaking down a few basic steps to set up your online store. After working with other artists, I've come up with some tips that are great for even non-designers to build a beautiful store. First, we'll go through the admin, adding products, adding pages, setting up your shopping, and how to accept payment. Then, we'll move on to customization. So, how to pick a theme, adding fonts and colors that compliment your brand, and then finally, we'll move on to a few basic assets that you can have to promote your online store. Your assignment is to set up, customize, and promote your very own Big Cartel shop. By the end, you should know your way around the admin, have fonts and colors picked out for your brand, and have assets to promote your shop. All throughout this class, you can share and get feedback from your community, and we'll also have plenty of resources listed should you have any questions along the way. I'm really excited to see what you guys come up with, so let's get to work.
3. Tour of Big Cartel Site: Big Cartel is great for most businesses. Like I said before, it's super easy to use, the backend is really nice, and not a lot of overwhelming features. I think it's really great, especially for new businesses, but you should be aware of just a few limitations. You can have up to 300 products and five images per product. There's also no online marketplace, so just it's great for someone who's a self-starter and is prepared to promote their own shop. We should also make sure that one of the themes fits your needs. Just go through this theme section and make sure that you like one of them. You can always hire a developer to customize this to your needs but just getting started, and in this class we're going to be using one of the themes there. You should choose a plan based on how many products you're going to have. For this class, it's totally fine to have a free plan. You'll be able to do everything in the class with a free plan, and you can also upgrade at any time and you can also downgrade at any time from your plan. When you first sign in, you will have a welcome page letting you know about your store right here. So, let's get started with the dashboard here. So, this is my dashboard. I have paid plan, so if you don't have a paid plan, this will look a little bit different, and some of these will be grayed out but you will, at least, be seeing your orders right here. This will show you where your orders are. You'll have visitors right here, views, products that are sold out, refers from other places online that are linking to your store. This is where your orders will be. This is a really handy in a couple different ways. You can use these to go through and print out your orders to use packing slips. I don't use packing slips, but what I do is when I get an order, I'll print these out and I tape them up on a wall, so that I'm aware of all my orders and what I need to either make or just have, and ship. You can also click this little button right here to mark something as shipped and just to have a personal reference of what you shipped and what you still have to ship out. Here is where your products will be, and we'll go over that in a second on how to add those and delete those. Promote, this is where you can set up discounts and couple little extras right here. We're going to start here in the store section for your settings. So, set up your store name which you probably already have a few set up. Put a little description here, your contact email. This is going to be how Big Cartel gets in touch with you when you have an order, very important. Set your currency, your country, and your time zone right here. So I'm going to set that, and then also set your store type. Save that guy. This is also where you can switch your plan if you'd like. So, let's go through the options section. Maintenance mode is great for if you're going to do a big overhaul in your shop, and you don't want anyone seeing that happening. When you're adding products, you don't necessarily need to turn on the maintenance mode unless you're going to be adding a bunch of things that you don't want people to see. This is great that when you're going to be redesigning or whole shop. Tax will go over that in a second but that's only if you're not using PayPal. Shipping status turn on tracking for shipping. A lot of this is pretty self-explanatory. We will go over inventory tracking and artists categories and a second. Notification, self-explanatory, domains will go over that in the end. Okay, so, under options, you have maintenance mode which is really great for if you're going to be doing a huge store overhaul or redesigning your store. Turn this on, and it'll show this handy little page that lets people know that you're in maintenance mode. This will look different depending on which theme that you have. Tax will go over that when we talk about setting up your payment. Something that we should talk about right now is inventory tracking. So, what inventory tracking is, is it'll track a certain amount of inventory that you have in your store. One example of why you may not use this is if all of your products are made to order and you don't have a specific set of inventory number. You can also, if you have inventory tracking turned on, you can also allow product overselling, which means that anyone buying products in your store will never see anything sold out. So, if you use that, just be aware. Remember that you have it on. Remember not to be overselling something that you don't actually have. Also right here is Google Analytics, where you can set up right here, put your code in. You click on that, it'll walk you through it.
4. Adding Products: So now, we're going to add some products. You may not have products ready to add, but I think it's really helpful if you have at least one to five products just as a placeholder, so that when we move on to the customization section, you'll know what those areas are going to look like for your theme. You can use placeholder images, no images, it'll create a little box for you that's a placeholder. You can also use just placeholder text. So, you'll go right here to products and add a product, I've already created a little placeholder here. First, you're going to name your product, try to keep it simple and brief. I say that as someone who has a little bit of trouble with that but that is the ideal situation is keeping it brief. Right here where the description is, is this little Editor here is called a WYSIWYG editor which stands for What You See Is What You Get. With the exception of line breaks, paragraph breaks, you're going to have to use HTML, just very basic HTML for things like bold, italic, and links. Don't be afraid of that, I'm going to share with you a little cheat sheet for how to do those, super simple you may not even use those at all. So, things to keep in mind that you may want to include in your description materials, size, color, use maybe the inspiration behind the product is really nice to connect with your audience. So, the next thing that you're going to move on to here is the status. So, active means that your product is active and for sale ready to go. Hidden, that's really great to use when you have a bunch of products to load but they're not ready for the public to see. Sold out is what will automatically happen when you sell that product but also it's good to use let's say, you sell product in person to a friend and you don't have any more of that left, so you want to manually turn sold out on. Coming soon, pretty self-explanatory just lets people know that that product is coming. Really good for if you want to give a little preview of that product that's coming out, but you don't want people to be able to add it to their cart yet. Next is categories. It will come with these set up categories that you can edit and delete yourself, not everyone is going to use categories, a good example is let's say you have a clothing line and you have shirts and pants and maybe accessories, and you want to be able to help people navigate through those, really good if you have a lot of products. Perhaps you don't need them if you have a pretty small line, totally up to you. It's a good way of helping people navigate your store. So, you can let's say, "I'm going to delete these because I don't have these guys right here." For my store, I'm going to add a category of a necklace. Add the category and then just check the box next to the category that you're going to use. Next, we have pricing, pretty self-explanatory. Set a price for it if anything is ever, you're having a sale and it's on sale, you can click this guy right here. In stock, if you are using inventory tracking, this will show up and you'll add how many of those products that you have in stock. You can also add options. This is perfect if you have different colors or sizes of a product. So, let's say that this product had different colors of a leather strand or on the necklace that you can use I could say, this one is like a red cord and I have three of those in stock. Then I also have a tan cord. So, tan cord and I have two of those in stock. So, that's when you would be using the options. Moving down, this is where you'll set your shipping. So, shipping will be set up by where it's going to. This is different for everyone and it depends on how you're shipping products, just an example, I use US domestic shipping Canada because it's a little bit more than US. Then I set one for everywhere else because those are all pretty much roughly the same, yours might be a little bit different. You can set those up and then hit the Save button and that will be your default shipping. For some people, you may want to say everything in your shop has the same shipping price. For me, I like to keep my shipping costs as low as possible for customers. So, I have two different shipping based on whether I'm selling a product that's really light or a product that's really heavy. So, for me, I have a little cheat sheet that I keep taped next to my computer that just lets me know like, my two-ounce brass necklaces, those costs $3 to ship, my more heavy ones those are four ounces and that's $5. So, that's just a little helpful hint. So, for shipping you may use PayPal, you could use that for shipping if you're accepting orders through PayPal. You can also use Endicia or stamps.com, all really great shipping tools. I really recommend getting yourself a scale which some of those companies will send you a free one and just sit down and figure out what all of your shipping is for your products. Create yourself a little cheat sheet, it will make your life a lot easier. So, then lastly, you're just going to add your images. So, right here you'll just pick where images, it'll upload right here. If you add more than one you will be able to drag them around in order by grabbing them, so add your images. You may not have images right now, you may have one, two, whatever, add those up and then you're good to go. Hit Save and you have a product ready. So now, we're going to set up payment. There are two different ways that you can accept payment and you can also use them both. You can accept Stripe which will allow your customers to pay with a credit card and you can also accept PayPal which you will need to set up a PayPal business account. You can set up both of them so that you can accept PayPal and credit cards. One reason why you may only want to use PayPal is if you need to be able to accept multiple tax rates, which you can only do in PayPal. Otherwise, great to have both of these turned on. If you do use Stripe and you need to charge the tax, you will need to do that in your options and turn on charging tax. So, to prep ourselves for the customization section, we're going to want to add a couple of pages that'll help you understand what your navigation is going to look like. So, we're going to go up here and hit the Customize Design button, and then hit this little tab right here to go to your pages and add a few pages. It is okay if you have no idea what these pages are going to be right now and you don't have text, just add some placeholders in right now. Some examples of pages that you might use are the an About page, FAQ page, maybe a Shipping Policy page, stuff like that. So, for this, I'm going to add an About page. I'm just going to put some placeholder tricks here. This is a little bit more of an advanced editor section then your products. So, here you actually can highlight things and make them bold and italic and create links which is really helpful. One quick little thing here is that I would recommend typing directly into here. Do not copy and paste from Word because Word adds a bunch of extra coding that's going to mess you up. Another thing you could use if you're on a Mac is text editor and use it in plain text mode. So, just be aware if you're copying and pasting from other places and things are looking really wonky, that is one reason why that might be happening. Also, we will have a little link below to a big cartel overview of adding pages, because a little thing that you might need to know a little bit more about is how to add images to the page. Because you're going to need to host your images elsewhere, super simple but just watch the video if you need to add an image to these pages and that'll help you out a lot. So, when you're done, just hit done and your pages will be right here. If you are to add another page, so let's add one just for fun here. Grabbing these little bars right here, you can organize them and you'll see over here it's showing up which order they're in. So, when you're done, just hit Save and your pages are ready to go. So, everything that we just went over, you can also do in the mobile app. If you're an iPhone user, you can download that in the iTunes Store. You can go over your orders and also edit and add products and also really cool is that you can sell your products in person. So, that's a really cool feature for those of you out there who have an iPhone. So, before we move on, I want to make sure that all of you pick a plan and settings that you need, set up how you'll be accepting payment, calculate your shipping and if you need to, create a little cheat sheet for yourself. Add a few products to begin with and then also add a few pages to begin with before you move on.
5. Picking a Theme: All right. So, now we're going to move on to the fun stuff and first off we're going to pick a theme. So, under Customize Design, you're going to go right here to the first tab to your themes, and you're going to see all these beautiful themes that you can pick from. You want to pick a theme that best suits your brand. So, maybe you have big beautiful images that you want to show off. So, something like a template like Neat right here, or maybe Picklejuice are really great for having big full-screen images that you want to use. So, here's an example of a how Neat uses big full-screen images. Then Picklejuice is another one for when you do have a slide show loaded, it will show full-screen images. Maybe you have a more minimal, clean ascetic, and you want to use something like Nova, very clean and simple. Also Luna, another clean and simple theme. Totally depends on your brand. What you're going to want to do is just click through here and see how your products are looking? See what you're liking about each one? Don't pay too much attention to fonts and color right now because we're going to be moving on to customizing those but just see what you like about the structure of each one. Just clicking through on each theme and see how you like it. Another really helpful thing to do is to take a screenshot of your screen, save them onto your desktop and then you can compare them side-by-side. Maybe, right away you see one you like and you won't need to do that but it is a little helpful hint. Next, we're gonna move on to the Customize Section. So, over here, you are going to see different things depending on which theme that you've chosen. So back over here in the Themes, I've decided for my brand that I want to go with Picklejuice. So, what we're seeing right here in the customize section is going to be a little bit different based on what theme you're using and when you click through, you'll start to get which ones are different? So, for Picklejuice, the colors are going to be only two different options whereas a theme like a Luna will have maybe like five or 10 options for the colors. So, when you go through this, we may not be able to be doing the exact same thing together but you'll get a sense of what your options are? So the first thing that you could potentially do here is add a logo. As a designer, I'm very biased in this section but I will say that it is an invaluable investment to hire a designer and have a logo designed. It elevates your brand and makes you more professional looking. It also lets people know what your feel is and it helps you set the tone for picking fonts and colors as well. So if you have a logo, which I hope that you will, you are going to be able to add your logo right here. So click this little button right here. Find your file. I recommend a transparent image such as PMG, so that the background of your logo doesn't show like a white box around. So add your logo there. In your preview, it'll show up right here. Next, you can add a slideshow. So each theme will have a different kind of setting and guide to how big your slideshow will be, and it should stay underneath it. Some of them don't exactly and will resize to what you need. So, I have gone through and picked a few images for my slideshow from my Lookbook, which we will be going over a little bit later. So I'm going to click the button here and find my images that I want to add. Keep in mind that these should be cohesive images that look really good together, and we will be going that over a little bit more in the Lookbook area. But another idea for some things that you can have in your slideshow or maybe you want to overlay some text on top of the slideshow to let people know maybe you're having a sale, you have a promo code, you have a new collection out. There are going to be some examples of how you can do that on the Pinterest page that we're going to let you guys use, that's under the Resource Section. So, there's a lot of different ways to use the slideshow but the most basic idea is just adding some great images to let people know how your products are being used. So these are all loading up right here. Some of the themes have a little section where you can add a background image on Picklejuice that isn't an option but some of them will have that. I would say use a background image wisely, use something that's a little more subtle, maybe a texture, or a pattern that goes well with your brand but just be weary of adding anything too loud and crazy and just remember to err on the side of subtlety. So we're going to skip over colors for just a second because I think it is a little more helpful to start with fonts first. So again, this is going to look different depending on what theme you've chosen. Some of them will have a little bit more options but for this particular theme, I have a primary font and a secondary font. A lot of times what that means is your primary font will be your shop name and maybe some of the headers on your pages. The secondary font or body font will be a font for your pages like body copy or your product descriptions. Totally depends on the theme you're using but for the most part you're going to have about two different fonts that will guide the rest of your pages. So, you might be a little bit overwhelmed by the options here, there are a bunch of really wonderful Google Font options. So, I made a little guide for me to help me pick what fonts I want to use. You can create a guide like this in really any program. I used Photoshop, you can use Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, any of the Adobe products. But if you're not a designer, you can also use something very simple such as Word or PowerPoint for this. What I think is really helpful is to place your logo right here or place the text spelling out your shop name using the font, and then putting underneath here navigation and body font. So what's really cool about Google Fonts is that you can go to Google Fonts and download the font that you want to use and then install it on your computer. I'm not going to go over exactly how to do that, that will list a resource for looking up how to do that. Super simple, download the font onto your computer. So what I did here was I put a couple of navigation items here and then I put just some placeholder text just to show me what a body font would look like here. Then I tried it a couple different things that are available over here in the Font Section. So after looking over this, what I'm looking here for is maybe you want to use the same font for both, maybe you want this to be cohesive and use the same font here. Another thing that's nice to use are two different fonts that compliment each other. You also want to make sure that the font looks really nice with your logo and doesn't clashed too much. I made this example right here, and I just thought how bold this font is right here, I feel like it really pulls away from my logo. You want to make sure that you're making a nice hierarchy here that isn't drawing your eye to one thing too boldly. So, after making both of these, I'm actually really into just using this one font here, and I like the way it looks for both of these. I like that it looks similar to my logo font but isn't exactly the same. So, for some of your brands, trying to match your font is not going to work as well. But sometimes using a font that is similar and compliments is going to be really great. So I've decided this one is what I'm going to use right here. So, I'm gonna go over here and choose that font for my primary font, and I'm going to choose it for my secondary font. So now, over here in my preview, I'll be able to see what that looks like. Here's all that nice font change right there. Looks great. So now, we're going to move on to colors. So this Color Section is again, going to look different depending on your theme. Some themes will have a ton of different colors that you can use such as your headers, your body font, some of them will have a rollover color. It's totally going to depend on your theme. You may want to choose your accent color to match a color that's in your logo. So if you're a designer has this file for you, one option that you could do if you have Photoshop is take your logo into Photoshop and use the Eyedropper tool to get that color and get the hex code, which is the little code that's next to the hashtag, hash symbol. Then go over here and paste that directly right here, and it'll give you that exact same color. This is a really great way to go back to that little guide that we made over here and start adding in color. So, this is the one that I chose, these two fonts right here. What I did was make a little guide using the colors right here. So this is my main color, this dark gray I've decided because it's the color of my logo. Then I'm trying to pick an accent color here. So, I made some different options of colors that I think look good with this so I have like green, a poppy red, a yellow, and a gray. So I'm looking at these, and the yellow is nice but it's a little bit difficult to read right here so I'm not going to go for that. Then I'm feeling like maybe this green is a little bit too close to the gray, it doesn't quite provide enough contrast. Looking through this, I'm really liking the gray and maybe I want a monochromatic look. So, I'm going to use this code and go over here to my secondary color. In this particular theme, your primary color is this background color here, and I'm feeling that that really is going to clash with my products. So, I'm just going to make that white so I've totally monochromatic store here. In this previous section, you can click around and see how things are looking. So, I like the way the fonts looking. I'm liking all these colors here. Go through my products. Yeah, I like this. I like how monochromatic this is. Another thing in this section which will be a little bit different per theme is how many products you have per page? So how many people are going to have to scroll through. Some of them will have a featured image, product amount that you'll set and that is when you go to your homepage, that is where your featured products live. There's some other different settings. You can add in here your social handles. So when you're done with all that, hit save.
6. Design Examples: Now, I'm going to go over some examples of some different Big Cartel shops that have some really great design, just to give you some inspiration and some ideas for examples of how to do a few of the things we just talked about. So, the first one here is a really nice shop that uses one of the Luna theme. I really like this font that she chose that compliments her script logo, this really pretty soft rollover color. You definitely get a sense, when you look at the shop, it's a very nice feminine feel to it. I like the way she uses these pink background colors for the cards, so that it isn't an entirely monochromatic shop, but still has that soft feel. The next one here, this is a custom theme, but a really great example of using a nice big bold font here complemented by a nice light classic Serif font. Also, great use of a monochromatic looking sharp, but these rollovers here have a little pop of color. Over here, this is a good example of using black as a background, which isn't very common and isn't great for every brand, but works really nice over here. I think one of the reasons is they chose a cream-colored font here. The text is cream color and has this little rollover here. I think that this would feel a little more starky for a white and kind of softens it up and makes it a little more modern looking. They also chose a very basic Helvetica font. Nothing fancy, but looks really nice with their logo. This last example is using the Snakebite theme which is a pretty loud and bold theme, but looks perfect for how exciting their brand is and their products, so not great for everyone but perfect for this shop. This very bold green and these yellow rollovers, you get a definite feel for this brand and how fun they are. Really basic font too here, nice bold, modern San Serif. Okay. Before we move on, you want to make sure that you pick a theme that best suits your brand. Then, you're going to want to create font pairings or maybe just one font. Pick those for your brand and set it up for your shop. Maybe share those font pairings that you created with the group for feedback, great resource to get help from your other students. Choose colors for your font and apply those, and then if you don't already have social media accounts set up, it's great for the next section to have those set up, and we'll kind of talk about more what might be right for your brand, but pick a name for your handle and make sure that you're consistent, and that'll be great to use for the next section to have ready. Using your shop's color scheme, update your social media accounts to match those two. It'll look really nice and give you a cohesive feel throughout your brand.
7. Matching Your Brand: So, once your shop is ready to go and set up, a really invaluable tool for putting your best foot forward is to set up a custom domain. What that means is that instead of having to go to the Big Cartel URL, your customers can visit your own custom domain. So, no matter where you bought it from, they'll be a little bit different the way you set it up, and you can always refer to the Big Cartel guide on their website that we'll link to at the bottom. But for today, I'm going to walk you through how to do that on Hover, which is where I bought my domain from, so it'll give you a little bit of an idea of how that may work for you. So, once I'm logged into Hover, I'll go to my domain area and click DNS. What you want to do is click Add New, and under host name, you'll put in www and you'll be adding a CNAME. Under the value target host, you'll put your bigcartel URL and click Save. The next thing that you're going to want to do is forward the domain. So, on Hover, you'll go under Domain Details and under Forward domain. You'll basically want to put in the www version of your domain. Click Save, and that's all there is to it. For most domains that you're going to buy, it's going to take a little bit of a while to show up, so don't be alarmed that it doesn't show up right away. The last thing you just want to make sure you do is just under your bigcartel back end, under settings and domains, just put in your custom domain right here. So, before we move on to the assignment, I just want to give a little tip about social media. I think that collaborating with other artists and even other students in this class on promotion is really helpful. Promoting other brands and other small businesses is really great for you, even collaborate with them to share each other's shops, it's really a great way to get out in your community and be supporting other people and they'll be supporting you. It's very mutually beneficial but also just a really awesome thing to do for everyone else. Now, we're gonna move on to the assignments. So, after this section, you should have set up a custom URL, and with your lookbook images, create a social media package to promote your store. The reason that we've picked these fonts, and colors, and the steam, is so that everything in your shop is looking cohesive and it feels like it all belongs together, and you're giving your customers a good idea of the personality of your brand. So, create a package for promoting your shop, whether that be a newsletter, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, whatever you're comfortable with, so that you can use this imagery to be promoting your brand. Submit it as blog, submit it to print publications, whatever works best for you to get yourself out there. Collaborate with other people to promote this. You have this beautiful package now to move out there with your shop. Another thing that you can do when your're admin, is set up a discount code to create discounts for your customers during different times, another thing that you can provide on social media. So, a great little feature on Big Cartel that you should be utilizing whenever you can.
8. Final Thoughts: So now I'm going to walk you through what my final story looks like. Over here, I have my theme implemented, all of my font setup and I cropped some of my lookbook images to be horizontal and use the ones that worked best for the slideshow. Then down here I added my products. Another helpful thing is that you can also use your lookbook images as product photography, especially if you're doing something like accessories or clothing where your main image will be your product photography, and then your second image can be of a model wearing it or a different view or a different context of your image of your product, someone wearing it to give them a sense of scale. Let's see, so here I have my fonts implemented, I have my logo, my custom URL is implemented now. I chose pickle juice because it's a really simple theme, but it also is a little bit more interesting and allows me to use these big bold lookbook images at the top. I have my pages implemented, and then also my product photography, I'm using all the same white background images so that they're cohesive when you're looking down here. You understand that up here this is my lookbook, this is my slideshow, and down here these are all my product images that all look like they're part of the same line here. That's it. So, this didn't take long. I put together a really professional looking websites, I have lookbook images and a package ready to promote and I did it pretty much on myself and I'm ready to go. So that's it. That's our Skillshare class on setting up a beautiful online stories using Big Cartel. It's a lot of time and energy to really dedicate yourself to your product and to your community, and we want to remind you to make sure you have a nice balance. Your store and your brand versus your free time, and that you find a nice mix of those two. Yeah. But that being said, running your own store, you're in charge of everything; from quality control, to promoting your business, to being a part of the community, it's a lot of work. Yeah. So make it a little bit easier on yourself by making weekly lists and then reevaluating where you're at with your goals on a monthly and quarterly basis. So we would encourage you to give this whole thing a year. Set up a plan, make a budget, give yourself milestones that you can see what happens after a full year. That'll give you plenty of time to understand your customers a little bit better, understand how they buy from you and we want to encourage you to keep it up. We believe in you and we hope that this class helps along the way.
Kate Miss, Designer
