Transcripts
1. Lesson 1: Shopify Introduction: Hi everyone, My name is Margaret and I'm so excited to dive in with you to this Shopify course and see the sites you can build, grow, and thrive. My background is as a web developer and I made a ton of custom Shopify site. So please don't hesitate to reach out if you need any help. So let's dive in. So what exactly is Shopify will add its core. It's software that facilitates the sale of goods online. Well, what does that mean? It means that you are allowed to have this small piece of the Internet dot just belongs to you that you can set up your marketplace on. Now at Shopify is the company behind the software that has built out the ability to have all of these marketplaces controlled by the individual vendors. So what makes up if I different from any other platforms? I mean, we've seen WooCommerce, we've got Squarespace, WIX, and a whole bunch of other ones as well to, well, it's an ease of use. It's also very specialized for e-commerce. Specifically, the checkout experience is amazing and not something that they constantly put research into it. It's also an all-in-one solution. So you don't have to go out and piece together a bunch of different softwares to make it work seamlessly. So what products does it actually work best for? Shopify works best for physical goods if you're selling digital products, e-books, online courses, membership programs, shuffling might not be the best platform for you. So we're talking about products that need to be physically delivered to you, think something like Amazon. So why use Shopify? That's very Christian and there are tons of other platforms out there. If you're just getting started in Shopify is a great solution because it has a ton of integrations with a bunch of other platforms. The user experience is pretty seamless. Also the speed of setup. You can get a shop up with an a day. I mean, within this lesson alone, it's less than a couple hours. You can have a shop up and running and optimized, ready to go. Okay, let's dive in and build your shop.
2. Lesson 2: What you need to get started: So now that you've learned a bit more about Shopify as a platform, let's dive into what you'll actually need to build a site. So what do you really need to build a Shopify platform? Well, you don't need a ton. There's three main things. You'll need a computer, desktop or laptop. You can't really build a mobile Shopify site like from your phone. So I would stick to a desktop or laptop, PC or Mac. Both work fine. Doesn't matter who you're going to be building it actually own their software. You'll also need a printer to be able to print out shipping labels. You don't need a specialized label printer. You can use any regular printer, but we're gonna get into those supplies a little bit later. And you need a stable Internet connection, you're going to be building in the Cloud. So you're not going to be building just on your machine. You will need access to the Internet. Shopify is a self-contained software so you can use it from anywhere as long as you have Internet connection, you can access your store. No software installations required, no extra software that you have to install on your computer. You just log in and you're ready to go. Now we're gonna talk about plans a little bit later in the course. But operating a store there is a monthly fee that comes along with it. Because you're using the Shopify platform and the Shopify software, those plans range between $29 a month to 2000 dollars a month. Most of my clients start in the 2009 dollar range, and then those scale up from there as they get busier if they need more features from the platform. And that's all you need to get started.
3. Lesson 3: Setup with the 14 Day Trial: So now we're gonna go through how to set up your story using the standard 14 day trial. So when you first sign up to Shopify to create your site, there's two ways of doing it. You can do it through their 14 day free trial. If you have everything on your site pretty much together and ready to go, or you can sign up as a partner. Signing up as a partner will allow you to take an extended amount of time to create your say without having to choose and pay for a plan, you become a partner. So you do get access to some other features and the backend portal looks a little bit different. So we're gonna go into that in the next video. But in this video, I'm gonna show you the first choice which is signing up with a 14 day free trial. So when you go to shopify.com or Shopify dot ca, you'll want to either enter your email address in here, or you can click on the top right-hand corner, start your trial. Enter in your information, password, and for store name. You store name, whatever you want to choose. Great maker, it doesn't already exist, it'll check for you. Now when you enter the store name, this isn't set in stone. It's the store name that you see in the URL when you're updating the site from the backend. But when you add a lot to it, you're going to change it over to your final domain. So it doesn't matter a huge amount what you added as here, you can always change it on the other side of things. But just know that your URL, your Shopify URL will become the store name, but that's what's going to change to your specific domain. Afterwards. Go ahead and create your store. Go ahead and create your sore. It's gonna go through a few different steps of creating your store for you. It's also going to send you a confirmation email to make sure that you've entered the correct email address. So it makes sure that you fill that out. You'll be brought through a number of steps here as well, answered them to the best of your abilities. All of this information will be able to be changed on the backend once you're inside the store. So it's going to bring you through two different steps. Just choose the best ones that fit. You. Say we're just playing around. Depending on where you check off, it does give you some resources to help you. So answer these just to the best of your abilities. And crafts. Great. And click Next. I won't fill in this information right now. But as soon as you feel all this in, you hit Enter and it's going to bring you to the dashboard of your site. When you get that email, you can confirm and log out and log back into your site to make sure you have full access. Again, keep in mind if your address changes or if you open up a warehouse, all of this information can be changed as well too. So that's how you set it up with a 14 day trial. It's very straightforward. So the next video we're going to dive into how to set it up inside the Partner Center, which gives you a little bit more time to work on your store. The setup is a little bit longer. The dashboard looks a little bit different, but we're going to navigate through that in the next video.
4. Lesson 4: Setup with the Partner Center (optional): So this lesson is optional. We're gonna go through how to build your store inside the Partner Center and sign up for the Partner Center. And that way, you'll have an unlimited amount of time to work on your story before you launch alive. Okay, so in this video we're gonna talk about Shopify partners and how you can become a Shopify partner. So it can buy you a little bit more time when you're building of the store, instead of being restricted to the 14 day period, shall play partners are a really important part of the Shopify ecosystem. There mainly responsible for creating sites for clients, creating apps, creating custom themes, and being able to dig into new features as well as manipulate the code of the theme as well. So being a partner does open you up to these possibilities. If you're a designer or developer, I highly recommend you starting off as a Shopify partner because it will be a necessary part of your journey Anyways. So let's dive into being a Shopify partner. So I am already a partner, but I'm going to bring you through the sign-up process and then I'll bring you into my partner portal so that you can see what it looks like when you have a few stores setup. So you'll want to go to shopify.com slash partners. And you can go ahead and join here. So I'll try to sign up with an e-mail address that I'm not using already. Great. And it'll have a bunch of information. So this is really straightforward. As soon as you fill in all of this information here, create your first last name, password. It's going to bring you to the Shopify portal. So let's trip over to the Shopify portal. I'll show you what mine looks like and I'll show you how you can access a variety of websites inside of it and how the portal looks a little bit different than just getting access to the backend of your own website. So this is what the Shopify partner Center looks like as soon as you made an account. Now you'll see there's a lot of stores happening in mind. A lot that I've set up already. And I'll just bring you through what's going on on the left-hand side. That, and the fact that this is a different portals from what we're going to see when we just sign up for the 14 day plan. And we're gonna see how we can access the shop and build a new one inside the Partner Center. So on the left-hand side, you'll see that we've got a variety of menu items. We've got referrals, affiliate tools, apps, so it defaults to store. So these are all the stores. I've got referrals. If you're referring Shopify out to anyone, an affiliate tool, if you're promoting Shopify as a platform, it gives you some links so you can see if people clicked on your affiliate links, like what kind of traffic those are getting. The apps, if you're creating or testing out any apps, you can go here or if you're building any app. So this was probably quite advanced. But if you're going to be building any apps, you would do that in the Partner Center as well. If you are an affiliate and you do devote referrals, you can see your payouts. You can also click on education, which is a great resource to be able to go through some more in-depth marketing courses for Shopify bees are all free. The Shopify support, if you're ever stuck, you can hop on live chat with Shopify. You can add more team members to your partner portal. And then you can also change some settings as well here too. So you'll see I've got my my Skillshare shop here and I'll show you what the backend about looks like. So this is where we're gonna get into how to build your store in the Partner Center. So once you've signed up for it, this is the Partner Center that you've got. You won't have all of these sources, but you will have this button in the top right-hand corner saying add store. See you go ahead and click Add store. A managed store is if it's a store that already exists, but you're requesting access to that store within this portal. So we're not doing that. We're building our own store. So you want to click development store. You can go ahead and add this information here and that's going to create your store automatically. After you did that, that soil will become part of this list and you can access it at anytime. So even if you're not sure about certain themes and you, maybe you want to test out different themes or you wanna do different setups for your store. You can do four or five versions of the same store it until you figure out which one's best. And then you can finally deploy from that store that you select. Now the Partner Center is free to be a part of, but you do have to start paying for your Shopify plan once you deploy your store. So to access the backend of the stores that you've created, you can go ahead and click on the store. And you can either click on this here, which is going to bring you sort of outside the store and then go ahead and log in, or you just click the login button. And that will bring you directly to the dashboard of the store. So this is what the dashboard of the store looks like if you set up your clan on the 14 day trial, this is the only view that you're going to get. This is the only view of the store that you'll have. You won't have access to a full Uncle Buck here. You want to have access to a full partner center and you won't have this flexibility. But if you already have your store completely planned out, you just want to get it up as fast as possible. The 14 day trials, the way to go. But if you need more time and you want to make a few different versions of your store. It's free to use the Partner Center or you can set that up, set up a few different versions, add some team members if you want, if they need to come in and make edits as well too. And then you can test out which store you'd like to deploy. But when he set it up for the 14 day trial, this is what you're going to get and this is sort of the heart of your individual store. And this is where we're going to live for the rest of the lessons. So that's how you can set up inside the Partner Center.
5. Lesson 5: Theme Selection and Installation: So what does the Shopify theme? And we've got free ones, we've got premium wines. Well, basically a theme is the skin of your site. So it's going to have a lot to do with how the site is visually setup, as well as its physical appearance. So let's dive into some examples and see what the differences between free and premium themes. So let's jump into Shopify theme selection. What actually is a Shopify theme? And what do you use it for? So basically, a theme is a skin for your site. The themes going to be able to dictate what your site looks like, where things are, a certain amount of features and basically the entire layout of the site, the core functionality stays the same, so the checkout stays the same. And the ability to make collections, the product pages generally are the same, but there is a few more features that are added and a bit of layout changes and available configurations within the Shopify themes. So basically it controls what the customer seats. It's going to control everything that the user, the end user or the customer is interacting with. The good thing about these themes as if they're all Shopify your proved. So to be able to hide your theme in the Shopify store, it needs to go through an approval process. This is different for some other programs like WordPress where it's a bit of a free for all and anyone can make a custom theme. But to be in the Shopify marketplace, it has to go through approval process. So you know, and you can trust that the themes, no matter if they're paid or if they're free, they're all held up to the same standard. So there's free themes and there's paid themes. So what's the difference between them? I would say if you're starting off, definitely start with a free theme. Organist go through a free theme in this course as well. But free themes are basically styled the greatest start off with. They have all of the core functionality and the Goethe's theory allow you to master the core functionality of Shopify without dealing with a lot of the bells and whistles that come with the premium themes. The premium themes can be beautiful. I would say they're more for the experienced Shopify user and maybe something that you would graduate into. Now, they do take a lot longer to set up as well too. So for something that you can get off the ground really quickly, there are some amazing free themes out there. So premium themes, as I mentioned, they have more features, more customization options, and you also have better support. So when you pay for a theme, the developer who created that theme, a lot of the times it's more likely to jump in and answer questions, make adjustments, and they're always on top of security updates as well to free themes are also, they don't have as many features to support. So you can usually just reach out to Shopify directly and they'll be able to guide you on the free themes as well. Again, I highly recommend starting off with a free theme because it allows you to master the platform without getting bogged down with all of the details. So how much do these premium themes run while the free themes obviously are free, and you can find them in the Shopify marketplace. Whereas premium themes, I've seen them anywhere from a $150 up to 500. They can get quite expensive the more complex they get. But if you're looking for a premium theme, you can get a really nice one between about a hundred and fifty and two hundred dollars as well. So let's dive in and check out the marketplace on themes. So to view the themes, you're going to want to go to Theme Store shopify.com. And it's going to bring you through all of the collections. You can sort by all of the industries and then you can go to all themes as well too. So you can go and down and see which ones are free, which ones are featured and, and how they've set up the themes to highlight all the features of both the paid and the free ones. You can also click on all themes. I actually like this view a lot better because then you can go into and sort by free paid number of products and really hone in on which one's going to be best for you. So this is the theme marketplace, and now I'm going to show you how to install the theme that you've chosen, whether it's free or whether it's paid to install the field. We want to head back over to our store dashboard. And I know we haven't gone through the full store dashboard yet, but we have seen it on the initial install. So the first thing we're gonna do is install or theme. We're going to go with a free theme today TO, to install a free theme. Go ahead and click online store. The first one at the top. It's going to bring you straight to themes anyways. And then we want to scroll down to theme library. So if you have purchased a theme from a third party, it will give you a downloadable zip file and you can upload a theme here. Or if you've had a custom thumbnail, you can upload that. But if it's coming from the Shopify marketplace, which I highly recommend, you can browse their free and Shopify themes from here. Now, when you explore it from the back-end of your site, you can have that automatically installed. So let's check out the free themes. And I reviewed these earlier. We're going to go with one named Brooklyn. Here we go. Great. And we're gonna do the playful one for, for cupcakes. So we'll add that to the theme library. So after it's been successfully added to the theme library, we want to click on Actions and click Publish. That'll make it the active field now. Great. So then we went me scroll up to the top, we see current theme and Brooklyn. So that's how easy it is just to install it straight from the Shopify marketplace, which, which Subway I highly recommend doing it this way. It's very straightforward and we know that all of these teams have been vetted and reviewed by shopify itself.
6. Lesson 6: Essential Shop Assets: So before we dive any deeper into setting up our stores, we want to make sure we have all of the elements we need to be able to properly supply people with the product once our store is up and running. So let's go through everything that's needed for launched besides the website. So we've signed up for a say in installed or theme, but what else do we need to start? Well, first of all, you're going to need a product, at least one. You can launch with just one product, which is totally fine. We're going to launch with about three, and we're gonna have some variations of those products as well. So at the very least you'll need a product. So we're also going to need shipping and packaging for that product. You're going to need the actual packaging that the product itself comes in. And then you're also going to need shipping boxes to be able to ship it in. Now we're also printing off shipping labels as well too, which which you're going to attach to the outside of the box. But you can get these packages from tackling where you can make your own product packaging. And from places like Amazon or you lie, you can get the shipping packages that you needed to ship your products. You'll also need things like inserts. If you're inserting a card, maybe they get a coupon off their next purchase. Free stickers and also packing tape as well too. You're also going to need designs for the site. Now you don't need a full website design because these seems that we're using take care of lot of the design aspects and a lot of the layout. But what you will need as a store name, possibly a logo, or you can just use sort of a named Mark. You'll need a color palette and you'll also need photography, or at the very least, stock images and smell. Now I know design can be tricky for some people and hiring a designer can be quite an expensive endeavor if you don't do design yourself. So there are a few options to outsource this design. Places like Upwork, Fiverr, 99 designs. But for you in the resources below, you'll see a full download of a list of not only designed resources, but you'll see stock photography resources. You'll also see places that you can do designs yourself as well too. So there are options when it comes to design, don't think that you have to be a professional designer to pull this off. You'll also need a printer or label printer. You can use a regular printer for the time being. That's totally compatible with the Shopify printing labels. Eventually it's going to be a lot easier and faster when you start shipping tons of orders to get a label printer, that means it's going to print on paper that sticky on the back. So you just peel it off and stick it on the box. You're also going to need a logo or name for your product. We talks about the Design Resources little bit before, but you'll also see the download in the resources. If you need some more ideas for that, you will also need the domains. So for a domain you can have one that's already registered from an external domain source you can have in that you're already seeing on. Or if you think of a domain later on in the process, you can actually purchase, got through Shopify and implement it right when you launch. You'll also need a bank account and a credit card or PayPal. So these are going to serve two different functions then BankAccounts going to be hooked up to the payment gateways to allow you to receive money, the credit card or PayPal. It will allow you to pay, Shopify the monthly fee. So you're going to need a bank account for receiving funds, but you're also going to need credit card or PayPal to pay your monthly Shopify fees. And if there's anything else you think you might be missing. I've included a full list in the resources below.
7. Lesson 7: Products: Products. Let's dive into all the editing we need to do in the products, how to add a new one from scratch, all the components that you need to outline and editing existing products. So let's set up our first product. So every product you create from here on out is going to be set up exactly the same way once you get into the dashboard of your site. So you'll log in and you'll see this here. Along the left-hand side. You want to go ahead and click on products. And you'll see all of these other items which we're going to cover as well. But first off, let's add some products and see all the information that you're going to need to add in. So you're presented with these two options here. So we're going to use our product, but just to just say, you know what fine products are. If you're drop shipping or if you have a print on demand service that you're using, there's a few other things as well too that you might use this find products for. We're not going to cover this in this lesson because drops shrinking and print-on-demand are their own full courses all on their own. So just see, you know, this is going to bring you to a Shopify page that lets you explore a lot of different ways that you can automatically import items into your store. So feel free to explore that just out of curiosity, but we're going to cover that in a whole other course. So my start by clicking Add product, and that brings you to a blank product screen. So we're gonna go through all the items that are required on, on a product page. And then we're going to look at variance in its separate video because I want to cover that separately. So you're presented with a bunch of stuff that you have to fill in on this page. So we're gonna go through section by section and I'll tell you what you have to fill in for each one. Now we're building a cupcake stores. It's going to be mostly cupcake related just as a heads up. So here for the title, this is what your product is going to be called. So this is going to be the name of your title, isn't do cupcakes. Greats. The description here, I'm just going to go ahead and put plain text in the description. You can format that text just like a regular text editor at a table if you had. So say if you're selling clothing and needed a clothing size charts, adding a table in there. You can add images in here, but I would recommend adding the images in media. It gives a bit of a cleaner setup. I'll show you what that means when we check it out. You can add like to say a how-to video in there too. And you can clear all the formatting if you copy and paste from somewhere else. I highly recommend clearing the formatting because if you copy and paste from a Google Doc or a Word document, it's going to pick up some of that formatting as well. So I've already written a description and I'm just gonna go ahead and paste it in there. So these are for a set of birthday cupcakes, sprinkles and white frosting. They're going to come in packs of four or six or 12. This will become important when we go down to variance at the, towards the bottom in the next video. So then we're scrolling down. This is all pretty straightforward. Media is all the pictures of the product. So I have some that are pre-selected and you can just drag and drop straight in here. Or you can click Add Files to have to prompt your desktop or some sort of file organizer to come up from your computer. So I'm gonna go ahead and drag a few of these in. I'm going to drag them in right now in no particular order. But they're different sizes and I'll tell you why. The reason they're different sizes is the first one and the biggest one is always going to be your main image. So I think I'm actually going to keep this as my main image. And then when, depending on how the theme is setup, when you sort of flip through the carousel or click on the images below. That's when you're going to see all the extra images. So you can have some control over the orders that these show up. If you want to rearrange them, you can just drag and drop those images as well too. You can also add media from a euro. I rarely do this, mostly because I download the images and upload them straight here because they're going to be your product images. But if you are a drop shipping or taking your products from an external source, you might need to add media from that external sources as well. So let's get into the pricing box. So the price, this is really straightforward. We're gonna do the base price as $12. The cost per item. So the cost per item has been added within the Shopify platform, probably within the last year or so. It's a really good thing to have because that allows us to calculate margins. So say costs $4 to make each item. The price that they're selling for the retail price is $12. That means we're making a margin of 67% to 67 percent profit, which works out to an $8 profit. Now we also have this compare at price up here. This is if you want to put anything on sale. So the way Shopify does this, it's a little bit counterintuitive, but let me explain the price. What you need to remember is the price here will always be the price that the product is selling for in the cart. So if it's on sale, this needs also to be the sale price. Whatever the person is purchasing the product as needs to be in the price category. So if the product is on sale, say These go on sale for $10, we would change this to $10 and then the Compare at price would then become 12. The reason they do this is so that the comparable prices, the one that has a strikethrough. So that they know it's on sale for 10. If you ever get confused about this, just always because I know it can be confusing, just always remember that via this on here, Christ, no matter what is going to be the price that they are paying on checkout for the product. So if the products on sale and they're gonna get it on sale, and that's the price they're going to pay. The sale price goes here. If it's regular, praised, the regular price goes here. But remember if it is a sale price that you have the original price at the compare it. I hope that makes sense. I know sometimes it can be a little finicky to wrap your head around. Please let me know, reach out if you have any questions. This is totally optional whether you want to charge tax or not. It's pretty typical to charge tax, so this'll come pre checked. But you definitely want to check with your local laws and your accountant to see if you're going to be charging tax on your product suite. So let's go down to inventory. A lot of the times when you start off creating your own products from home with a small level of inventory and maybe just one product. A lot of people skip this and they say, Well, I'm managing my own products and I don't need it like an inventory system. I know what's going on, but I would highly, highly recommend. I've built a ton of sites in a ton, a ton of e-commerce sites. If there's any advice I can give you, stay organized from the very, very beginning. So please get a stock keeping unit. Askew. Barcode is optional. I would say you really only need a barcode if you're selling books for sure. But you also want to move to a warehouse where the items are going to be scanned you apply, need a barcode as well, but please please keep a stock keeping unit. This is a unique sort of alphanumeric code that gets assigned to specifically to that product and to the variation of that product as well. This is something that you can go buy your own by a bunch of skews, but it's also something that you can make up yourself. So I highly recommend creating them yourself and keeping a proper naming conventions. So work and go CC for cupcakes, dash, beat a ban. So this is now rescue. So when designing a skew, if you are making your own skews for organizational purposes, you want to start big, start with the largest category, which is cupcakes. And then you want to go down, well, it's a birthday style cupcake. And then finally it misses the vanilla flavor. If you, if we're going even further down from there, we can even go down to like like pink frosting and things like that as well too. For this example, I'm going to keep it how it is here. So if you're making your own skews, make sure you establish a naming convention early on. It's going to save your butt when you start to grow. We generally want to track quantity. There's certain situations where we don't, but for this case, we do on a truck quantity. We're not going to continue selling when we're out of stock because because it's a bakery and we can only make so many, there are situations again, when this would be the case, but we're going to leave that unchecked for now available. So I have about a 100 of these ones available, which is the current inventory level of this skew at this price. So this is not all sorts to come together. You also want the quantity to be precise because once that hits 0, that's when it's automatically going to change to sold out. So make sure this is up to date because as people purchase the product, it's going to decrement this number. So it's going to bring this number down accordingly. And once it hits 0, it's automatically going to change to sold out. So let's talk shipping for this case, it is a physical product or not gonna go into digital products in this quiz because they're a little bit of a different, they're a little bit of a different animal may do that in a separate course. So we are going to keep this checked. So for weight before you choose the right kind of weight here too, and you want to make sure your weights are accurate because that's how you're shipping is gonna get calculated. It's going to take the weight of the product, the weight of the packaging, the distance that it's going, and calculate your shipping from there. So let's go to pounds. And let's say for a pack of these, it's going to be 1.2 pounds. Great. With the decimals, you can be as specific if you like. I would say you can round up to two decimals so you can get 1.25 pounds. I found that beyond that, it doesn't make much of a difference with shipping, but make sure you can get as accurate as possible. Now for customs, this is something that is often skipped over by a lot of people because it doesn't make it a mandatory field inside of Shopify. You definitely want to take the time as you grow to fill this in for every single product. Because if you fall behind and don't fill in these categories, when you're, when you're shop gets very busy and at scale is really difficult to go back in, find all of these, and fill them in. So you wanna make sure you're covering customs information from the start for every product you enter. So we're gonna get our country of origin. Your hair, it's Canada. Province of origin, grapes. We're also going to get the HS code, so forth, HS code, bunch of different ways you can look this up, but it's a universally sort of globally recognized code that's used to track what products are at when shipping internationally. Make sure you enter this code even though it's optional, because if your product goes across borders and doesn't have an HS code associated with it. That's when it's going to get held up at customs. The package is gonna get torn open and things like that because what this says, it tells them what's on the inside without having to have a full description. So falls into a very specific category. If you're trying to find out what your HS code is, the best website I've seen is fructose. Fructose. And here's the URL. Here too, you should be able to access it straight from the, from the Fritos homepage or just googling it Fritos hs lookup. So you can put a brief description in here and it can try to match them. Or you can browse the HS codes and then start to narrow down sort of what your product is. So after you've browsed, make sure you grab your code. So once you've got your code, you want to come back and pop it in this spot here. This is going to show up on a year international shipping labels so they can easily identify what your shipping in what category it falls into. So for variance, we're going to cover this in another video because Marion's can be a little bit more involved. So let's say that there are no variance right now, even though we know that there are, because we know it comes in packs of four or six or 12. So I scroll back up to the top and let's go to this column here. So for products status, if you don't want your product to appear on your store front, yeah, and you're still working on it. You can keep it as a draft and by default it will be kept as a draft. But as soon as you're ready to go live, make sure you click active because it won't automatically make it active for you. This is fairly new. So if you're if you have used Shopify a very long time ago, this may have changed since the last time you've used it and it keep it as draft for now. We're not ready to go live. We definitely wanted to show up on the online store. If you don't want it to show up on the online store, you can keep that unchecked. There's some scenarios you may not want it to show up on the online store. Say it's a like it's an exclusive offer, maybe just available through your newsletter if you don't want it to build on the store, but will still generate a link for it on the website. You can schedule the availability so it automatically becomes available. So if you're doing a big launcher a bit clothing drop, you can schedule exactly when those products become live on the site and you don't have to be there to do it manually. So for organization, we've got product type. So for product type here and do add cupcakes. Great. So we're gonna start to add more product types to me who adds like cake pops are some regular, regular cakes. But this is basically to identify the group, the groupings of your products for the vendors. Even if you're the only vendor, I would recommend filling your own name in here because sometimes you might want to expand and take on different product lines as well too. So for example, I'm just going to say acne, Bang Theory co, great. So even though it's all X-ray now we might expand to bring in other base turns into the shop suited with all our items. We want to make sure that we identify ourselves as the vendor as well too. We're not gonna do any collections because we have a whole video dedicated to collection. So we'll come back to that. But for tags, tags are a way to easily group projects outside of product and vendor. Also, tags are really good to make relational and suggested products that people can cross-reference for up-selling, cross-selling and so on. So for example, we're going to use tags like vanilla. So we add these as tags. So say someone's looking at this product and they scroll down to the bottom and we have like we have something installed that says other recommended products. If we know that there is a bunch of them that are tagged vanilla or that are tagged sprinkles, we know to start recommending ones that how similar tags as well too. So tags is really good not only for organizational but for relational purposes as well. Great. So I think we've got everything covered. Let's check out the product and go update that. We can go ahead and preview. It's still in draft. Amazing. Awesome. So how this theme is setup as we've got all the pictures on the left-hand side. And we have the we have the items on the right-hand side which constantly live there. But we can scroll through these pictures while this stays stable as well too. All right, so this is going to change as we add variants which we're going to dive into in the next video.
8. Lesson 8: Variants: So with the variance, we're going to do a deeper dive into products. And basically variants are an aspect of products that allow you to have more than one variation inside that product. So if you have blue t-shirts that come in different sizes, we're going to go through how to handle all the variants situations. So we have our product just about ready to go. But as I mentioned, we've got this here that it comes into 46 or 12 pack. So this is where the variants come in handy. So we need to not only make our base price, but we also need to make prices for the 4-pack, the six pack or 12 pack. So we're going to scroll on down to variance. So if this product has multiple options, we're going to click Yes, that's what brings these options open here. So by default it says size and it gives you a few other options to choose from. Taking a lot of the most popular one sort of in the e-commerce space. Because if people are selling things like T-shirts, those will come in different sizes and colors and so on. But since we're selling cupcakes, It's definitely size because it's sort of the size of the container. But let's say we want to make this a little bit more clear. We can also put our custom option here to. We don't have to choose one of these. So we could say, let's say side that box. Perfect. And then we want a comma separate the different options. Let's scroll back up at the top. Now it comes in a pack of 46 or 12. So we want to do for six and 12. As soon as you hit the comma or the Enter key, That's what's going to create a new option for you. These can also be words as well, or as high as small, medium, large, and so on. So we're going to stick with for six and 12. Actually, you know what I'm gonna do because this might not be a 100 percent clear, it's true, but it might not be a 100 percent clear. So let's have a 4-pack six pack. I think that's a little bit more clear than just the numbers. 12 packs. Great. So as we create this and you scroll down, it's automatically going to fill some stuff in for me. So there's a few things happening. It's going to create ultimately a whole new product called a 4-pack. That's like a sub-product of this one. So we've got the 4-pack, then it's going to create the six pack as well as the 12 packets. Going to keep doing this for however many options that you have. Obviously because there's different volumes in these, these are going to be different prices as well. So let's say the 4-pack is 10 bucks, the six pack, but it's 10. Remember, burned up here too. If we put it for 10, it's 10, but it's normally 12. So we're gonna do 10 or do a six pack as let's do 16 and the 12 for 20. Because of these are all actually individual items within sort of one larger umbrella item. They're going to have their individual quantity and skew as well to by default, it took the skew above and then added 1, 2, 3 to it. Which by default makes lot of sense because that's what it's just going to generate automatically. But we're going to make this a little bit more specific as well, because we're going to go for six and 12 so we know which ones those are, so you change the skew. We're also going to take some more inventory levels. So maybe you only have like 50 packs or sorry, 40 packs here. And 50, or maybe we've got 30. Great. So, so these are the very basics that you need to create variations within one product. So we're going to go ahead and save, and then I'll show you what else you can do to dive a little bit deeper within each one of these variations as well through and scroll back down here. So we've saved those, but we're going to go in and edit them as well too. So let's start with the 4-pack because you'll now see that there's some extra fields that weren't there before. So go ahead and click Edit, and this is going to pull up a whole new screen. So some people will just go in, save their variance and not know that there's actually a whole new screen that it will pull up. So this screen allows you to do a few more things. You can make them variants on sale. So we now we have the 4-pack on sale, normally $12, it's on for 10. We adjusted the cost per item as well too. We have the skew, all this other, all these are items that we added on the mean product page. But we also want to add images just for that variant. So, so what's going to happen is as soon as somebody clicks on that variant, it's going to switch to the main image of that variant. So right now it's taken on the image of the overall product, but let's switch it up. So we're going to do just have different images. Now, we've got one image for the 4-pack. There's three there, but we'll just use that. And then we're going to click down to the books. Certainly make sure we save it. And click down to the six pack and link. Let's choose another. Here's the six pack. Again, this information is going to be carried over from all of the information that we created for the main product. So we also see as things become more expensive, but sometimes this doesn't make sense. So it's $16, but we have a comparable price for 12. We're going to take way to compare price because we don't want this one on sale. We wanted to sell for a 16. Quickly check down here. Well, this looks great, great. Group, the 12 pack. And let's have this one. Again. I'm going to take away the compare it price because this one's not on sale. Make sure we're all good for the rest. Okay, It looks great. We'll also see from here, I'll save that. We'll see from here that the main image for the birthing cupcakes is different from all three of them. So let's see what happens when we see this from the outside. When looking at the page, and what happens when we interact with these three variants as well too. So let's go back to the main product page. Because we add these images and associated with them, then with variance, they're also going to become images of the main product as well too. So just keep that in mind. Great. So we're gonna go ahead and preview. Perfect, so now you'll see up in the right-hand corner, this didn't exist before this size of box. So now we have four pack six back and talk about. But you'll see, so I'll go a little bit slower as you can see what's happening. It's defaulting to the 4-pack. Again, we have the 4-pack on sale for $10, which is normally 12. Remember for the 612 pack, we took that sail off. So when we click here, it's the regular price, it's not on sale for 16 and then this one's for 20. Also, we've associated certain product images with that. So when we click on a variant, it goes directly to that associated image. And it's going to vary whichever theme you have. Sometimes it's sort of like a, a slide to that image. Sometimes it's a carousel where it just snaps to that image. But whatever image you associate with that variant, it's going to switch that image. Great. So that's variance.
9. Lesson 9: Collections: So this video is all about collections. We're gonna go through how to make collections, how to edit existing collections, and what the differences between a manual versus an automatic collection and how you may use both in different scenarios. Okay, so I've gone ahead and created six different products using the guidelines that we went through in the past few videos. So as you can see just as a quick glance, for these products, we have a couple of different vendors. We have ourselves as a vendor, and then we have some red velvet Bakery as a vendor as well. We also have some cake pops versus some cupcakes as well too. So this was intentional. We're going to build two different kinds of collections. We're going to build a few different collections, but we're going to build two main kinds of collections based on some pre-existing criteria. We're also going to go ahead and create like a manually curated collection as well too. So now we've created our products. Let's go ahead over on the left-hand side and you'll see collections just down here. So anytime you set up a store, they'll be one collection by default that's already created called homepage. We're going to leave that as is for now because we're going to revisit it when we go to sections. So leave the homepage there and we're going to go ahead and create new collection. So for this new collection, we're going to create a collection for cupcakes, and we're going to create a collection for Cake Pops. There are two totally different kinds of products. So we want to make sure that they match the criteria so that they can get automatically puts in that kind of collection. You'll see in a collection type here we have manual or automated. We're going to make a couple automated and then I'll show you how to make a manual one as well, so forth. First collection. We're just going to name this one cupcakes. You can drag and drop a cupcake image in here. Two, very similar to the product page. We've got the description that we can put in there as well too. You're going to put cupcakes it for now. Then when we get to the collection type section here we have manual or automated. So this one we're going to make automated because we want everything that we act in the store, all of these new cupcakes that we add as new product, we want them to automatically be categorized into the cupcake collection without going in and having to manually add them every single time. So we're going to add some criteria for the conditions below. So we want to do is open this up in checkbook conditions. We've got, so we have title. You can group ones together that have the same title. You can group items together that have the same weight, that have the same compare that price. So if everything is on sale for the same price, you can make a category automatically from that too. For this one we're going to use type. So you want to use the type is equal two cupcakes. So it's going to pull up the two types that we've created. Product is equal to Cupcakes, really straight-forward type of automatic collection. We're going to save this. So that means every product that we add here that equals cupcakes is going to be automatically added to this collection. Sometimes it takes a minute to, to update their certainly go ahead and view. Great. So as soon as we view it, you'll see all of the cupcakes, which is the three of them are in here to any ones that are on sale are also listed. Save $2, save $2 because again, as we mentioned before, the regular price was 12, but they are on sale for 10 right now. You'll notice there's no cake pops in here because it's eliminated that from this conditional that we've set up here. Great. We have the products that are in there. Okay, Great. So just do a quick refresh sometimes it takes a second to pull that was him. So even though it's an automatic collection, you still have some control over the order that they show up in. So automatically it'll be by best-selling, which is good to keep it by best-selling. It's really effective way to rank collections. You can also do alphabetical, reverse alphabetical, priced lowest to highest. So if you have sail ones that you sort of want to offload, you can click the lowest price from there. These are all the same price, so manually. So soon as you click on manually, you're also going to see these sort of six dots on the left-hand side with this like grabbing hand. And you can manually drag and drop to rearrange how the order is on the collection page. So you do have a lot of sort of manipulation available to you here, even though they're automatically being pulled in a lot of control over how the products appear on the collection page. Great. So there's one collection. Go back here. You know, went through that one more time by making a cake pops collection. So again, oops, kind of image. We're going to make this as an automated collection again as well too. So instead of Product Tag, same deal of product type is equal to Cake Pops. Done, save every item that we enter from now on that has kicked pop as its product type is automatically going to be posed this collection. So great, Let's look at automatic collections, but let's use a different sort of criteria. So let's do the red development code. Because maybe you have a vendor that wants their own page, but we still want to make that automated as well too. So let's use a different criteria. We can use vendor this time. So we've created one that's called red velvet CO. And we want product vendor to read development bakery. Great, so this is a great one to use if you're sort of curating a bigger site that has a lot of different brands of products involved, then each one of those brands would in turn sort of have their own page and have their own collection on the site. And it would all happen automatically as you, as you add more products. Great, so those are a few automatic ones. Feel free to play around with those ones. Sue, let's check out manual collections. So an example of what you would, when you might want to use a manual collection is we're gonna do one called bakers choice. So the biggest choice basically means the beaker is going to choose what products belong in that collection. So this isn't something that we can do automatically. It's something that we can go in and manually select the products and also select the order of those products. The time series can really come in handy are around the holiday times. You can curate very specific products to go on sale for a holiday period or to cater to very specific audiences. So I'm going to add a cupcake image here and renew because choice. So instead of automated, we're going to switch to manual. And once we switch to manual, we want to hit Save. So all the other options come up. So it's going to refresh. And then we're going to see a bit of a different screen here, but we can click here to search the products. So if we want to start to search all the products, we start typing something in, and then these will automatically come up. So maybe we want that birthday cupcakes, chocolate and vanilla cake pops. So we can add B is. So that's where we go in. We can browse all of the products here. Again, we have the same sorting abilities as well too, so we can go ahead and start manually. And let's bring chocolate. Vanilla, and Brick Bay. Awesome. So you can browse any of the products Up until a list and sort them as you like as well too. So this is an example of how you'd make a manual collection. And those are the two types of collections you can use and a few different scenarios for when they will be helpful.
10. Lesson 10: Pages: In this lesson, we're digging into pages. Of course, your whole site, It's going to be made up of a collection of cages. So we're going to have over a call talked about home and a default pages you can use for pretty much any other kind of content. So now that we have all of our products setup, it's time to make a few pages for this site. So over in the left-hand sidebar, when you're in the backend of your site, you want to click on online store. And then we're going to click on pages here. So for the pages, you can make an unlimited amount of pages on your site, but we're going to focus just on two today. We're going to make an about page and a contact page that has a contact form on it. Of course, we also want to think about the homepage because that's probably the most important page of the site. But the whole pages set up a little bit differently than the rest of the pages. So we're going to do the boats and contact page. And then in the next video, we're going to go into the homepage specifically because that involves a lot of difference, what are called sections. And we can actually make the homepage a lot more modular. So let's dive in to the regular site pages. When you're on the page here, go ahead and click Add Page. Great. First of all, we're gonna do the about page. And we do have this editor that's probably starting to look a bit familiar now from the other videos. And I've created just some filler, filler text to put in here. So we're also going to add some images to you're welcome to add a video as well. If you have a little about video you'd like to create, but we're gonna go ahead and insert a couple of images. So let's go ahead and drop in some files here. Also, I just wanted to take a quick note. I found all of the stock images through Unsplash. So Unsplash and Pexels are some good stock imagery sites that I use quite often, Unsplash asks that you credit the Credit the creator if you're going to use it on your live site as well too. It's also important that you enter alt texts as well to what alt texts is, is not only is it searchable from browsers, but it also allows people who use screen readers to be able to get a description of the image if they're unable to clearly see the image. So all text. Great. Insert that image. And then the other thing that you want to make sure about these pages in check over on the right-hand side here. This is what's going to separate certain pages from others. And what makes a difference between what theme you choose as well. The theme template for this page that you're using right now are using the basic page, which is pretty normal. We also have a page dedicated to contacts. Reuse that one for the contact page 2, and I'll show you what the differences. So go ahead and click Save. And if we view that great, you've got a great About page with an image. You can add more imagery if you like as well too. So going back here, I'm going to go back to the pages. We have our about page and go ahead and add the contact page. Now. I came to this to contact us. Great. So when you create a contact page, you wanna make sure on the right-hand side that you open up the page templates and switch it to contact. The reason why you want to switch to contact is because the contact page template is what actually has the contact form on it. So if you go either to the regular page or to the full-width page, which just means that the margins are a little bit wider. It's like the regular page but just a bit wider. Those ones don't have a contact form. So the only one that you're going to be able to get with a contact form on it is the Contact page. So make sure that has the right template, like save. Go ahead and read the page. And we have our nice contact form as well to this message when it's filled out will get sent to the administrator of the website. You can also change this in the settings as well too, if you want to teach it to someone else. So that's how you make pages. You can make an unlimited amount of pages on the site. And we're also going to go into, in another video on how to create a navigation.
11. Lesson 11: Sections and Homepage: In this lesson, we're digging into sections. Each page on your site is going to have sections as different components that make this a bit more module to work with. We're also going to look for sections that we can use in the navigation. So up in the top and in the footer and the best sections to have and which ones that you can avoid or are bit more optional. So the most important page on the site hasn't been made yet. You'll see that we've made the about and contact page, but now we have to make the homepage. And we can make a homepage without talking about what's called sections. So the whole page isn't made of just a regular page template. It's actually made up of a variety of modular sections so that you can control exactly how your homepage looks. When you're in the dashboard on the left-hand side, go ahead and click themes. And then we're going to click on Customize button here. You're going to open up a page that's brand new to us, but I'll give you sort of a navigation around here so you're able to go in and manipulate things however you would like. So you'll see that this is a, this is what it looks like our homepage. As soon as you install a new theme, your homepage will sort of fill in some placeholder material. So we have sort of a place holder banner back there. We have some sort of placeholder images for this image and text section and so on. We do have a collection and it's put in there already, which is birthday cupcakes. We'll just leave that in there for now. We're going to look through the rest of the sections that we have available to us, some of the limitations of those, as well as where else on the site can these sections be used? So if you look along the left-hand side, you'll see that each of these sections corresponds with a block on the home page. So you'll see up top we have the header here. And I'll go ahead and click on that. You can change the logo. You can address some components of the navigation and so on. We're gonna do this one. We do one specifically just some navigation. But the rest of the page you'll see there's a little bit of a separation between header and footer because these are sitewide elements. So if you go ahead and, and manipulate anything inside the header or anything inside the footer, those are going to affect everything sitewide, whereas everything in here just affects the page that we're on, and in this case, the homepage. So first of all, we're going to look at this, which is the slideshow, this sort of hero banner. It just looks like there's one, but you can go ahead add more and more slides and then this will turn into a slideshow itself. We also have the full screen or adopter first image, which makes it a little bit shorter here. The full screen when stretches it to the full size, I like it a little bit more narrow because you can start to see this collection here. Okay, Great. And then after that, got some custom HTML. There's just some example text in there as well too. We can also see there's a, there's sort of an eyeball beside each one. So I'm going to scroll down to the Featured Collection. And when we click this eyeball, that's section becomes invisible. This is a really good idea. Say if you have holiday collections that you're getting ready, putting on the site and previewing how those will look. But you don't want to make them live on the site yet, or say a sales over. And you want to hide it, but you don't want to delete this section completely. You can just click on the eyeball and it will delete it for you or rather it will hide it for you. So as we scroll down now we have a subscribe to, we have some more custom HTML, which is basically just some texts in this situation. We also have two that are imaged with text and image with texts. You'll see that these appear on opposite sides, which isn't the settings of this. So when you click on it, it will give you some options to select the image, the image alignment. So you'll see the image alignment for this one who was on the right, the one below it, image alignment was on the left, which gives us sort of staggered look here. And then after that, That's the last section. But you can go ahead and add more sections so we're going to see what's available to us. We have some collection lists and see what that looks. So it gives you a bit of a preview of these before you, before you commit to it, you want to use that section. Click select 2D feature one, which is kinda nice as well too. Let's do a collection list. And we'll select that. So let's add that section there. And then it brings you into the settings of that section. So we're gonna go ahead and select the collections here. So let's do bakers choice as one of them. Great. The images that show up right behind it. This is why we selected image when we create our collection. Because anywhere on a site where we're highlighting these collections that we've created. It's going to use this image that we were associated with that collection as well too. So let's pick a few collections here. Cupcakes, grit, and then we'll do one more for keep pumps. Awesome. So this is a section on our home page that we've created that brings us directly to bes collections. If so, the heading we can make this a little more interesting saying like view, our case. So let's go back here. So now we can see if we scroll up, has it sort of in real time. On the right-hand side, we have these image and text sections above here, and it automatically adds any new section you've added to the bottom. Now, on the right-hand side you have these six dots with these little, with this little like gripping hand. And you can move this up. So if we drag and drop it up, take a look at the right-hand side. It's going to be virtually show you where on the page this is going to be placed. Let's bring up a little bit higher because we want people to really to focus on the collections. So we'll bring it up even to here. Great, So it's right underneath the banner. Perfect. So you can go ahead and add a bunch more sections, rearrange them and make sure you save the page. Now, you're limited to 25 sections, so don't go crazy. Also, probably don't do more than 12. The homepage repeat hung increasingly long. It'll become way too much that people won't read it. So make sure that you have the stuff that's most important at the top, some of your features, if you can give it less than ten, that would be great as well. But try not to max out the 25. It's really difficult for people to read pages that are that long. Also, you'll see that this is the homepage. I'm gonna go ahead and save this. You'll see that this is a homepage, but sections aren't exclusive to the homepage. So we'll see up in this drop-down here, we're editing the homepage, but you can drop down and click on any of these other pages and go ahead and edit them, how you want them to look. Now, the homepage is definitely the most robust and the most complex, which is why we chose to do this one for the lesson. But feel free to go into, say, product pages and maybe you want to hide some of these aspects. Maybe you want to turn on recommended products and things like that as well. So feel free to go inside some of these other ones and manipulate those as well to the checkout and the cart we're gonna do in a later video because there's some aspects you can optimize within those rooms as well. But at least as long as you know how to do the homepage, you'll be able to do all of the rest of them as well.
12. Lesson 12: Blog Posts: In this lesson, we're going to dive into posts. Posts are a little bit different than pages. So we're going to go into the differences between the two. We're also gonna talk about what posts are best used for and custom post types, which is a pretty new feature that I'm super excited about from Shopify. So since reviewing all of the sections, I've gone ahead and completed the full homepage. So we'll see that in here using the sections we went through in the previous video as well. But we want to add a few more aspects to this site. We want to add a blog and then we want to make sure everything shows up in the top menu here. So let's go back into our dashboard and we'll start off at the homepage here. Now go over to online store and then we'll see blog posts. So we're going to make a few different blog post and I'm going to show you some new features that shop fires recently implemented. So if you click on blog posts, you'll see that nothing exists right now. So let's go ahead and create a sample blog post. Just have sample 1. And then our excerpt here. For our content. I'm just going to put in some filler text to there to make it a little bit longer. Grapes. And he myself here as the author. And on the right-hand side we'll make sure that's visible. We won't add an image for now. But on the lower right-hand side we've got tags, which is how the blog posts are going to be categorized. And we also have the blog. So what this means is which feed does it belong to? So by default, when you create a Shopify store, you've got a single feed and it labels that as the news feed. But there are some circumstances where you might want to add additional fields. A perfect example of this is if you run a podcast. So let's create a brand new podcast feed because we want that to be separate from the news feed, which is basically separate from the blog. We want a full podcast feed all on its own. So this article here, it's going to belong to the News Feed. So we'll click on that here. Great. And when we go back to blog posts will see that here. We also see it now that one's created Manage blogs up and up in the right-hand corner. So we're going to click on that. And what this means for managed blogs is managed blog feeds. So as you can see by default, we have one blog feed, which is the News Feed. So we're gonna go ahead and add Blog. And for this one, we want to add podcast. So we want a totally separate feed for podcasts because we don't want them all blended together. We wanted on a completely separate page and completely separate sequence of articles. So now we've gotten a full feed created named podcast and grace, we see news and we see podcasts here. Let's go back to blog posts and we're going to add another blog post here. And this will be Podcast 1. Now we can just add some text here as well too. We'll click that to visible again. And then down on the right-hand side, you'll see author myself. You can add some other users here to get other users, you can select them as offices or two, or you can just type in an author. But as soon as we open blog, you'll see now there's the news, but now there's also the podcast. So now every time you write a post, you can determine which feed it goes into. So we're going to put that directly into the podcast feed and go back here and show you this. Great. So we have two, it's still calls them blog posts, but we've got podcasts 1 and Sample one symbol one is the, is the blog posts that we've created here. Great, So I'm going to go ahead and duplicate these. And now we're going to come back and put everything together in the menu.
13. Lesson 13: Navigation: Navigation. In this lesson, we're going to go through how to make menus for the top navigation as well as the footer. So I've gone ahead and created a couple more sample blog posts and two simple podcasts. So now we're going to put things into the navigation just to show you what the navigation looks like ahead of time, the default nav. Up here we've got carefree cupcakes, which is our name. We also have the home catalog search and the cart button as well. So to modify what's in the navigation, we're going to go over just underneath online store here, click on Navigation. And by default, the main navigation is what Shopify pulls into the top. You can make more navigations and you can insert them in different parts of the site using some sections depending on the theme, but by default, all Shopify themes. For the mean menu. Though, that's the one that's going to show up in the top bar. Great, So editing this menu is fairly straight forward. We're going to go ahead and add a menu item here. So we're going to add a few pages. The first one is a boat. And as soon as we click on here, it's going to start to pull up some options for us. So we're gonna go to Pages. Click on the About what we've already created. Great. I'm going to go ahead and click contacts. Isn't here before. Awesome. Pages contact, add, perfect. And we also want to add our two blog feeds as well. So let's go for a blog for the first one. And we can add individual posts to the menu items or we can add feeds. So where it says blogs, That's where it's going to add the feeds. So we're going to add news for our blog. For blogs, we're going to podcasts for this podcast 1. Great. Now we're going to look at some of the other items to home. We want to keep that as is. That looks good. Catalog. Let's see what they're pulling in for catalog. So they're pulling in all the products. So let's keep catalog there. But maybe we want to feature the red velvet collection inside the navigation as well. But if we don't want to put it as a main item, we want to put it underneath catalog. And I think catalog sometime isn't the best name for it looks so let's change this to all products. Great. It's going to change that to all products. And let's add red to Velvet as one as well. So for that, you're going to be able to click on collections. And it's going to bring up all the collections that are that are options for you. So click on red velvet. You can also pick certain items that have a specific tag within that collection. So you can get really granular with what you put into these and how it's sorted. Right now we want to pull up the whole red velvet company collection and we'll add that as well. We don't necessarily want that as a top menu items, so we're going to move it underneath all products. The tricky thing is as soon as now this sort of depends on the theme as well. So we're going to grab these six dots on the left-hand side and drag and drop him. But see how the blue line goes all the way across. That means this one's going to be on the same level as all of the ones, as all the ones around it. Which means it's going to be sort of like a top-level navigation. But if we pull it over a little bit right, you'll see that it automatically indents. And then the one above it creates an arrow. So that means it becomes a child underneath this one. So that's when we can start to add more underneath here. Like we can add maybe some holiday collections and things like that underneath all products. Now this kind of depends on the theme as well, because sometimes what will happen is when you go to click on it, you can click on all products and that'll bring you to all products. But some themes are set up so that when you click all products, it's just going to toggle the drop-down menu. And you don't actually have access to all the products. So depending on what theme you choose, make sure you keep that in mind. If you want this top-level item that has children underneath it to be clickable. Make sure you check the theme. Another way around that too, is we have all products here. I can add another menu item saying like see all products and put it underneath just to make sure they have the ability to access that bowl products catalog. So let's click save menu and let's check it out. Anytime you want to preview stuff and you're back here, make sure you click the little eyeball to see things. Okay, great. So this is super interesting with this theme, you'll notice that there's three bars in the top left-hand side. And when we open that up, we can go ahead and see, oh, I just clicked on all products. And when we open that up, we can go ahead and see all of the items that we've added to the navigation. The reason they're not filling in along the top here is because there's definitely some breakpoint set in the theme. Now, all things are going to be a little bit different. So this one, this is happening because there's too many menu items. So it's defaulting to a sidebar instead of cramming them in along the top. But say I go and remove. So let's delete podcast and walk. And go ahead and save menu. So after I've taken a few items out of the menu, you'll see that it's not sort of the slide open sidebar. They all fit in the top. So depending on the theme, different size menus are going to be managed a little bit differently. I'm going to keep this menu small because I like how it's set up like this. So let's keep it as is. Great. So we've got the top menu. Same thing works for the footer menu as well too. These are setup exactly the same way except the items that you select in here will appear in the footer instead of up in the header. And that's how to create menus.
14. Lesson 14: Discounts Codes & Coupons: Coupons and discounts. We're going to go through how to run promotions with these and all the different kinds that you can use. And some examples of some best-case scenarios for you to optimize your sales on your site. So there may be certain scenarios where you're going to want to discount your products. You might either want to discount them to give certain people exclusive access to a discounted product. Or you might want to run a promotion. So to do that, There's a few different kinds of discounts you can set up. If you go ahead from your dashboard and click on discounts. In the left-hand side, you'll see over here there's two kinds that you can click on. So discount codes allow you to create a coat and tie that to a certain discount so you can distribute it to whoever you like. So that's something that gets given ODE and when the code is inputted in the checkout and then they get that discount. However, the automatic discounts are tied to certain conditionals. So we would tie it to a certain collection during a certain timeframe. Say if you're doing like a holiday special during the three weeks in December or something like that. We can set the time, we can set the discount amount and we can set the exact products that, that gets applied to. In our case, the descent doesn't have to be distributed manually. It's an automatic discount that comes off of the checkout as soon as they meet all of that criteria. So let's set up one of each. So for the regular discount codes, we're going to go ahead and click on Create discount code. And we're going to use the example code here, spring sale. Now I'm put them in all caps, but casing doesn't matter. So you can put it all lowercase, but if somebody puts it in all caps in the checkout, doesn't matter. And it's kind of a tip to like when you're on sites, you don't necessarily have to have the discount code in the right casing. So just as a heads up there, We're gonna do a type as a percentage, and we're gonna do 20%. So let's see, they get 20 percent off specific collection and a browse collections. So say we're running a sale that has for spring and it has 20 percent off Cake Pops. Minimum requirements. Let's say they have to have a minimum purchase of $10. I don't think there's any under $10, but let's put a minimum of $10. Customer eligibility. Everyone. This can come in handy because since you can access your previous customers up in the top left, you can specify if customers have purchased a certain product in the past, that's when they qualify for this discount. In this scenario, we're just going to say everyone limit usage. I usually put limit one per customer. And you can limit the amount of times the discounts used in total. I usually use that open and limit one per customer. And then we can set the date here. Say it's like me to the end of June. Great. And we want to make sure we copy that discount code. Go ahead and click Save. And that gives us summary up in the right-hand side, it also tells us how many transactions it was used on as well. And we can also do a discount report to get the exact sales summary of how much was saved and how much money was spent as well. So we've got available on all online channel is 20 percent off Cake Pops, minimum purchase of $10 for everyone, one used per customer. Now until June 30th. Perfect. You can also automatically generated code, usually create my own code. So but if you want something totally random, you can automatically generated as well. If you want to disable it early, you can always disable that early. And for promote. The shareable link can come in really handy if you're sending out emails to let people know about a certain special that's coming up that actually put the discount code right in the link. So as soon as they follow through and purchase anything from the shop, it will automatically put that in at the end so they don't have to manually put that in. I've used that a few client situations where some people get exclusive access to items. Great, See how I got one. Let's make an automatic discount as well too. Let's do the let's do a fall fall sale percentage. We'll get to 20% as well to well to specific collections. So let's browse this one again. We will do this off the red velvet collection. Minimum purchase of $10. So this one is, even though we've put something that looks like a code in here, doesn't actually need a coat. So that means whether they use a code or not, they can enter this as a code to get the same thing. But as soon as they go and check out any of these items, they'll automatically get 20 percent. Whereas in the other one, they had to use the code to get it. But this automatically comes out as long as they fit the criteria of being this collection and having the minimal, minimum purchase and being within the set dates as well. Let's do 30th. Perfect. And we see on the right-hand side it saves to have available for all online sales 20 percent off the red velvet company collection, minimum purchase of $10, active until June 30th. As I said again, these automatic sales, they'll come off automatically at the checkout where as the discount codes need the actual code to work. And that's all about discounts.
15. Lesson 15: Accepting Online Payment: Let's talk about payment options. There's a ton of different options when it comes to people paying for products on your site. So we're going to go through the most popular too, and take a quick look in the Shopify dashboard to see what other options there are when you start to expand. So to set up payment options from your dashboard, you want to navigate down here to settings. So when you're not in settings, you'll see a bunch of these aspects that we haven't really dove into yet. I will do sort of a summary at the end because a lot of them have been filled in in the initial registration period, as well as some of them need a little bit more information to completely fill them in with things like billing right now. So everything will automatically be entered into general when you set that up. But we're going to go into payments. So for these payments, it's going to be how you can accept payments in your store for people to purchase off of you. So go ahead and click on payments and you do have a few options right off the bat here. The first one I would highly recommend is using Shopify payments. Shopify payments is a secure payment gateway that uses Stripe. So it uses Stripe at sort of the engine behind the gateway. But it allows people to put their information and their credit card information directly into your checkout without taking them off site. So it's a pretty seamless experience for people. The security is really high and you hook it up directly to your bank account so that you can control when deposits automatically get put into your bank and then you set it and forget it and you don't have to worry about it at all. It's the easiest one to set up and it's also the easiest one for your customers to use when they're checking out as well. So I highly recommend using that one, PayPal Express. I would recommend using PayPal Express. If you are international. Sometimes there can be places that have barriers to where they can use your credit cards. And some people just have a PayPal balance that they really like using. There's a little bit of extra protection for the purchaser with PayPal because if there's any dispute, you usually takes the side of the customer. So always keep that in mind as well too. As a vendor, it's a good second one so that you can increase the amount of people that you can cater to. There's also a few third-party providers and alternate payment methods as well here. So let's check some of those out. It's a list that's also worth checking out because sometimes it can integrate directly with your accounting system. So say you're using like P or Sage payments solutions. You can integrate directly with sage so that you can have a seamless accounting experience as well too. There's a ton of others. I'm not going to go through all these individually, of course, but you can see that there are so many. There's also alternate payment methods. The difference between third-party providers and alternate payment methods are third party providers are another credit card acceptance source. But alternate payment methods are basically anything other than that. So that can be if someone wants to pay with something like sessile or pay with something that has a quad pay is another one as well too. Let's check out some of the options. So these have some integrations like affirm and sessile and bit pay if you want to accept bitcoin payments. So these are ones that may not be directly associated to credit card companies. So you'll see like Afterpay, a firm which are these sort of divided into four payments kind of deals. The same thing, That's what it says ALL is as well to of course, the Bitcoin you compare with bit PE. Think there's coinbase that just got integrated as well. So not only bitcoin, but you can, you can take like Bitcoin and Ethereum, things like that as well too. So alternate payment methods definitely check these out. But things like quad pay, sessile, affirm, Afterpay. These are really good options, not something that we're going to go into right now. Maybe I'll make a complete series just on that. But there's some nice options that can be a low-risk to you as a vendor and give some extra payment options to your audiences. Both two. But all in all, I would a 100 percent setup using Shopify payments if you have people expressed, That's another consideration as well. These two are the top for a reason, they're definitely the most popular and they give the widest coverage for your potential customers as well. Now when it comes to setting them up, it's pretty easy. As soon as you click on it, it's going to ask for a bunch of account information and automatically sync that together. It'll bring you right back to this page and it'll tell you that it's all set up and ready to go. These are really straightforward once you start the process. And that's that a setup payments.
16. Lesson 16: Cart and Checkout Setup: The checkout process, let's dive into how we can make it as easy as possible for people to byproducts off of your site. We're going to see what we can edit in the checkout process, how to do it, and what plan you need to be on to edit what aspects of it. Let's dive in. So to set up your cart and checkout pages are basically see how they're set up and then do some customizations from there, we're going to go back to where we set up sections for the homepage. So if you're not sure, I was going to online store and customize this button right here. And this brings you to the homepage sections back here again. And then up at the top, you'll see we defaulted to homepage, but there's two other pages that we want to check out in this video. Feel free to go through the rest and play around with these. But we're going to set the cart and checkout pages as well. So if we go ahead and add cards, I think everything looks great here in the cart. We've got the header as we see it here. We've got the footer, and when we add a few items to the cart, I'm going to show you what they look like, but I'm pretty happy with the cart. We're going to keep that as is. So let's go to the checkout. So for the checkout, the great thing about Shopify is it's very intuitive by default. So this is the checkout page it gives us. And a lot of you out there, this is actually going to look really familiar because it's the same check out that every Shopify store uses. Because it's so familiar to customers, we don't want to change it too much. But you'll see on the left-hand side you can open up checkout settings. And you can do things like selecting a background image, selecting a custom image instead of the, instead of just sort of the name stamp here, you can change positions of God and you can do a full background image, which I have never done. So we're not gonna do that. The full background image. But you can also change the background of this color, some topography to make it a little bit more branded as well too. So we're going to change some of the accent colors, the errors. We're going to keep those in red, and we're also going to change the background color here and add a banner. So for the accents, Let's go ahead and change them to sort of this pink that we've, that we've used in the banner before, the buttons. I'm going to do that as well, too. Great. Also, to scroll back up here and select an image. Let's go with this one. So that's the background banner image. We're going to leave out a logo. But let's see how it looks with the wording centred. Yeah, so it's a hidden here is hidden behind the frosting. I think our best bet is to leave it on the left as well. We could keep it over the frosting and also change the color of it, but I'd like it. I like it now that it's left aligned. So we'll give that a minute to update. And then I'm also going to change the background here. I'm going to make a little bit later. I think this pink is a bit too, a bit too dark. So let's go with the order summary background color. And I'm just going to use this little bit later. Great. It's more a peachy color. Grading and click Save up here. So I'm liking this a lot better already. As you can see it there wasn't a huge amount of stuff I could change. Now when you get up in the more advanced Shopify plans, especially sort of more of the high volume and top tier plans. You can customize this quite a bit. So you've probably seen on some stores that there's some other aspects going on here. Maybe there's like an upsell, maybe there's like related products and things like that as well too. Those are going to come in for apps that are going to be additional paid functionality and functionality that can be added on, on the higher-level plans. But to start, this is all you need. It's a really tried, tested and true checkout process. It's pretty simple and it's very intuitive for the customer, So I don't need to upgrade anything quite yet, but know that there is a possibility for further customizations and add on the further you go up the plans and, and the higher volume traffic, Hugo. Great, so that saved. So let's go back. I'm actually going to pull up the site, put a few things in the cart to see how the cart looks. Let's go to our products. That's Atmos to the Kurtz. Great. So this theme, again, this is very famous, specific that it has the cart that pops out from the right. So totally depends on the theme. That's why you want to make sure to go through all the demos to make sure that this is something that you'd like. We can change the color back here and everything. But for now, I'm just going to, let's see, I'm going to do three packs of that. However, if you don't like this, you can usually change it within the theme by typing cart up in, oops, sorry, my capstone card up here in the URL. And it'll bring you to the actual cart page. So by default, a lot of themes have sort of that Slido drawer from the right-hand side. If you're looking at the cart, It's really nice so that you can stay on the page but also check up on your card. So I do really like that one. However, if you want to go to the full cart page, know that that's an option as well. And you can always check out what it looks like by typing in cart after the URL as well. And that'll bring you straight to the page. Great, so I'm liking how this looks. We go and continue to check out. Make sure we've got that checkout page that we've set up graves. So we have checkout setup, we've got our Express Checkout if we have Shop Pay going to talk about a little bit later and has all the customizations here so we can go ahead and check out. So that's how we make some small adjustments to the carts and to the checkout page.
17. Lesson 17: Shipping and Delivery: Shipping and packaging. This is a really fun part where you get full control over the unboxing experience of the person that's going to receive your product. So let's go through how we can optimize that experience and what some shipping options are and things to keep in mind depending on where you're shipping to and what country you're shipping from. So at this point in our setup, we've added our products, we've configured our collections, we've created our pages, we've edited the homepage, we've created our navigation, so everything outwardly facing on the site should look great, as well as being functional 2, we've checked out the cart. Everything looks good there. So what happens when people reach the carts and they want to order their product? Well, we have to take care of shipping as our next step. So from the dashboard here, down on the left-hand side, you'll see setting. So click on Settings. We're going into an overview of all of these items once we wrapped up and then there'll be a few sort of loose ends to tie up. But we're going to cover all of the major aspects in here in their own separate videos. And now we're diving into shipping and delivery. So once you click on shipping and delivery, you'll see that there's a bunch of boxes down the right-hand sides. You'll see these are all separate and sort of as I scroll down on the right. And they're separated by lines, so they're all sort of different sections. So one by one we're going to go through all of them. Some of them are going to leave as is, and then some of them are going to go in and make some adjustments to the configuration. So the top one here is shipping. So this is overall shipping to any shipping zones we've created. That means this is where we set the pricing for everywhere that we deliver it to. Underneath here we have these two options for local delivery. So you can set a certain radius out from your delivery zone, charge a certain amount to do sort of hand-deliver yourself. You can do local pickup. This one's been recently added within the last year or so. And then down here we have some details about shipping itself. So we do have packages for this. It gives you sort of a standard box size. We're going to keep this box size for now. But if you have different size packages that you'll be shipping in. So if you have multiple products or multiple kits of products that are in varying sizes, you want to measure the dimensions of those boxes and add them all here just by clicking Add package. And it'll give you the dimensions and the weight for each custom box that you add. This will go into the shipping calculation. So it's important to have this information. It gives you options for envelope and soft packaging as well too. So it should have you covered underneath that we have shipping labels. So by default, because we're in Canada and we've registered a Canadian address, we're going to use Canada Post as our default labeling. If you're in the US, it'll probably default to USPS and wherever you are in the world, it'll default to your domestic mailing service. So it will have to label formats here. We've got our regular half by 11, which is a regular sheet of paper. So if you're using a regular printer, you'll want to do a test with this one here. We also have thermals. A thermal are the ones that are going to be printed from a label printer. So it actually uses not ink, but it uses like a thermal impression to put all of the information on one side and then sticky on the other side so you can go ahead and slap it directly on the box. Most people end up using 8.5 by 11 until they get the printer. Not totally necessary to have the official label printer. It just speeds up your production and packaging process a little bit faster. Packing slips. I usually don't edit these. It has all the information from the order of so unless you want to add something really specific, you can leave that as is because it should have all the info on it. Carrier accounts. I'm going to leave this blank for now because it's only really valid if you have certain business accounts with companies like FedEx or UPS, DHL, things like that. So you can connect directly to your business account of those. But we're gonna leave that blank for now. We also have custom order fulfillment. So customer order fulfillment means if you're connecting to an external where hosts, they're going to need to connect into your store and you'll probably need to access their software through this section here. For our purposes, we're leaving the label as is relieving the saved packages as the default package. And we're just going to be concerned with editing these three boxes up top here. So we're actually going to leave the shipping one until last, but let's do local delivery and local pickup first. So we have the local delivery from our central shipping location in Toronto. I can go ahead and click on Manage. And I click that it does offer local delivery. And then we have a few options to decide from. We can choose delivery zones via postal code or ZIP code, or if you're in the OS. Or we can set a delivery radius. So by default we set it delivery radius and we're going to set five kilometers. You can also change this to miles if you want to. It depends what you've set up in the settings. And we're going to name it local delivery. So we're going to sap one zone. It's going to be a radius of five kilometers out from our core location. Minimum order price is going to be $20, and then the delivery price, let's say is $5. Great. Additional information. So please show receipt on arrival when we go to deliberate. That makes sense. So we're just going to add one delivery zone, but notice down here you can create more. So this one's five kilometers out from a central location. If you want to add another one that's 10 kilometers out from the central location, maybe for $10, then you can continue to add zones going out further and further from where you're delivering. I'm just going to keep the one zone for now and click Save. Excellent, So now we offer local delivery. We're also going to activate local pickup as well. So click Manage here. We want to activate local pickup and we want to select the amount of time that you need to get it ready for. I'm going to keep it at about 20 hours because we wanted to go at that day again, they're baked goods and we're only going to put in the inventory what's already been baked. So we at least we know we have them on hand to be able to send out. We're sending out from this core location here. They can come pick it up for free so there's no charge there. And then for our pickup instructions, confirm your email when you come pick up your order. Perfect. You can add more details here if you'd like, but I think that should do. So go ahead and click Save. So now he's activated local delivery as well as local pickup. Now, worldwide shipping. Let's dive into that. So up in this top block here you're going to click Manage rates. And we're going to scroll down a bit because there's going to be a bunch of rates that are already set. So our shop is set up in Canada. So it's gonna consider domestic comedian shipping. It's going to consider cross-border us. And then they've also grouped in international to like overseas and everywhere else. Over on the right-hand side, you'll see that there's three services for and then 13. So if we pop this down, it'll have the delimit the different delivery services. Yours might look a little bit different. Each of these might have its own line. Or there might be a little drop-down here, depending on your version of Shopify you're working with. So these are presets and you can see shipping speed. These are all calculated by Canada Post because it's making some assumptions that we're using Canada Post as our default. So that is true that we want Canada Post as our default, but we don't want the rates calculated by them. What we wanna do is use flat rate shipping. So while flat rate shipping is, is exactly what it sounds like. It's a flat rate, which means a set amount of money that they're going to pay at checkout. And they're going to know this ahead of time as well too. So we're going to mention it throughout the site. And they're going to pay that no matter how much they spend. Now there might be some extra incentives if they spent a little bit extra more money. But we know that the shipping rates are not going to be calculated on checkout. So that's our goal here. Now. By default, they are all calculated shipping rates that are set up. So what we need to do, we need to eliminate all of these calculated rates here. And we need to go in and set flat rate shipping and some conditions for that flat rate shipping. Let me know for comments if you need any other help on flat rate shipping, but basically it's a single rate they pay for shipping. So they're not surprised by any calculations at the end. Now statistically speaking, and also anecdotally, a lot of the reasons people will abandon their checkout is because the shipping rates end up being way higher than they anticipate. The good thing in flat rate shipping is they know exactly what they're getting as soon as they begin the checkout process. And sometimes even sooner, they can get incentives from spending more money as opposed to carrier calculated rates, which actually increases the more money that they spend. You can also run promotions more easily with flat rate shipping and give some extra incentives that way as well too. Now, you can use regular carrier calculated shipping, the ones that come by default. But just know it usually leads to high cart abandonment rate. So I'd highly recommend this method of removing all of these and entering flat rate shipping instead. Okay, So here's what I'm gonna do. On the right-hand side for all of these, you'll see three little dots. There's a couple different ways you can do this. Up here, this top manage, you can click that and it'll remove all rates. So you can do that way. Or if you just want to remove them one by one, we can click on the three dots on the right-hand side. And we can go ahead and click Delete. I'm going to go ahead and actually do them individually. So if you do all of them together, just know that it's also going to delete all your zones to I want to keep the zones as art because I do want to set three different flat rate shootings, but I wanna keep the zones the same. So on the right-hand side, Let's go ahead and click Delete on all three of these. Great. So we have the same zones. We have our domestic zones for Canada, across border for the US and the rest of the world. So under Canada, I'll start with domestic. Go ahead and click Add rate. So we're not going to use carrier calculated rates. That's what was already there as a preset. Instead, we're going to set up our own flat rates. So we're going to keep this clicked. Set up your own rates. Domestic three to nine days unreasonable. Let's say $10. Great. 39 days, $10. We're also going to set an additional rate. So setting up our own rate, we're going to set an extra flat rates. We're going to keep it as $0 though. And we're going to say 39 because a stays great setup for loan rates. 39 business days. We're getting if the price of free, because this is where we're going to get free shipping. But we're also going to add conditionals to this because we don't want every order to have free shipping. We only want people that spend a certain amount of money to have free shipping. So let's say add conditions. And we're going to base it on the order praise because we want to say that there's a minimum price of $50. We're not going to set a maximum, but they're gonna get free shipping as long as they match this criteria. So how this reads is we're setting up our own rate, is 39 business days. Again in the domestic zone, free because we've got 0 here. And based on a price, so they have a minimum order of $50 and they have a minimum order of $50. They get free shipping anywhere in Canada. Greats me, click Done. Perfect. So we have, so we have a shipping rate of $10 for everyone and free shipping for everyone who spends $50 and up I not the same criteria to the other two. And let's come back when those are does okay, great. So I set those two different criterias for all three of these zones. So at the checkout Shopify is going to review all of these criteria and then apply the criteria that matches got person's information. So it'll take your location information and it'll take the amount that they've spent in their cart. And it'll calculate based on all this criteria, what their shipping will be. So if it's a higher-priced sort of cart bundle, will get it for free. Or it will apply $10 for domestic, 12 for cross-border and 15 for international. So again, we're doing flat rates here. You can always sue carrier calculated shipping as well, and that's the default. But I highly recommend going with flat rate shipping. So let's go back. So we've entered all our shipping rates. We've set up local delivery, we've set up local pickup. We have our packages that we've decided to print off regular sized letters using our printer and we've tested that already. Packing slips are good to go. Carriers already hooked into our local mail carriers. That's great and we're not using any fulfillment centers. So this looks like shipping and delivery are ready to go.
18. Lesson 18: Order Fulfillment: Order fulfillment. So what happens after a person places an order? Well, there's a few different things that can happen. Let's dive in. So we set up our shipping and our payment gateways and we finally received our first order. So after you get the e-mail that your first orders come in, first of all, congratulations, but I'm also gonna show you how to fulfill that as well. So when you're logged in under orders, you'll see the number one besides which can go ahead and click on orders. And then you'll see the one that's just come up. You can see payments. If it was rejected. If the payment was rejected, it'll say that there as well, too unfulfilled how many items there are and the delivery method that they chose as well. So we're going to go ahead and click on the payment. This is a test payment gateway. It's not hooked up to my actual account. Just as a heads up. You won't have this notice there though. So there's a couple of things that we're gonna do. First, we want to check it out and make sure everything is working well, like we have the right skew. Looks like the right number that's in there on the right-hand side, we want to make sure that we've got some contact information, some shipping information, the shipping address, a billing address if that's different, and some general information here as well too. This was a test transactions, so these aren't really valid, but you should have sort of a green dot here to make sure everything is good to go. Everything looks great on this order, we have it marked as paid. That's most important part before you ship things, you want to make sure that they're fully paid. We also have the subtotal, the shipping and the standard shebang and the grand total there as well too. So the next thing that we wanna do is create shipping label. So when we go to create shipping label, give us a few options here. We want to make sure that it's the right order number, that it's unfulfilled because what we're doing is fulfilling it right now. The, the right products we all, we also want to make sure it's the right package. If this is not the package we're sending it in, we can add package to add a new set of dimensions to this new package and the new billing amount will be automatically updated. So how this works is that it's assuming that we're using Canada Post because we're in Canada. It's also going to assume that you're using the USPS if you're in the United States, unless you've hooked up any other shipping account to that. Now, we're going by the default, which is Canada Post. So we'll see the options down here. Now, we know that we have a $10 flat rate that we turns to for shipping. So there's a few options for Canada Post because it's kinda post That's going to give it to us in Canadian dollars, but our storage surging USD. So we did charged $10 USD flat rate shipping. So let's go with the closest one, which is today business days, which is perfect for exactly the flat rate that we chose. 1193. And you'll see that conversion up here, 989 is very close to our flat rate shipping. So you want to go through and make sure all of these aspects are accurate. Are you planning on shipping out today? You can check out the next day if you want to do that as well to just make sure that's accurate because that's going to be in the records that the customer is going to get as well. Do you want to email the shipment out? So sending them an email saying that the package has gone out, shipping from their credit shipping address. So it shows you how much you're saving down here. We're using the right box, the total weight. We've selected the correct option for the shipping label. And the next step is to say by shipping label, I'm not going to click this right now because it's going to charge me. But as soon as I click by shipping label, it's going to authorize the transaction and then it's going to show me the shipping label that I can either saved to my desktop as an image or a PDF or I can go ahead and print at that time. Now, keep in mind that you can print shipping labels on regular eight by 11 paper. Then you would just sort of fold it up and tape it to the outside of the box. You can also purchase a shipping label maker as well to demo is probably the most popular brand. You can get them on Amazon or you can order them straight through Shopify as well. Basically, it prints everything on a label and the other side of it's sticky so you peel it off, slap it on the box. It saves you a little bit of time. So if you're a high volume store or your volume starts to get up there out. Highly recommend using an actual shipping label printer. But just know you can use a regular printer for the time being printed on an eight by 11 and tape it to the front of the box. And that's it. As soon as you print the shipping able, it's going to ask you if you want to mark this as fulfilled and the correct answer is yes. So we're gonna go right here in Mark is built. If you have tracking information, you can put this here as well to that totally depends on the carrier that you're using, but I will use Canada postal select that. And I'm going to send the shipping details to the customer right now. Then we're going to mark it as fulfills. You'll see this has changed from unfulfilled to fulfilled. And then we're gonna go back. These are grayed out, it's paid, it's fulfilled. And now you're sitting here with the actual shipment box ready to go. So in that case, you would either go to your local Canada Post or USPS and just drop it off so you wouldn't have any money exchanged there because you've already done that on this side when you purchase the shipping label. Or if you have a bunch of orders that are going on, usually you can call Ken and oppose USPS, FedEx, UPS, any one of these logistic companies, and get them to come and pick up a batch of orders. There's gonna be some nuances and things that you've figured out along the way here. But this is a very basic shipping process. So more you grow, the more you'll be able to iron out how this process works best for you.
19. Lesson 19: App Selection & Installation: So Shopify refers to any third party out on as an app, is technically it's an application, but it's not like the ones that you're used to on your phone. So we have to use a bit of a different language when we're talking in the Shopify ecosystem because they refer to any sort of snippets of functionality as ops. So let's go through, uh, what ops are, how to trust them, and how to choose the best app for your site. So when we can go apps, we usually think of the applications that live on our phone, but the word opsin Shopify mean something a little bit different. So what apps too, is that they extend the functionality of the Shopify store. So if you're used to sort of the WordPress ecosystem, you might be used to like plug-ins and widgets, but applications are just that, so they're add-ons to the already existing software. So why would you want to add on to the already existing software? So Shopify is very robust as it is, but there's a few reasons you might want to add some extra functionality. Shelf height doesn't have product reviews right out of the box. So that's something you might want to add on. Shopify isn't the best, was selling downloadable products right out of the box. So using an app for that can be super helpful as well to what usually happens in the Shopify ecosystem is independent developers create these apps to extend the functionality and then Shopify is able to test through popularity to see if it's something that they want to pull in to the main software eventually. So some examples of really highly used apps are open or low, or Barolo integrates with AliExpress. So you're able to drop ship. Easy digital downloads allows you to make a better experience when you're selling digital products. Print full integrates with print on-demand. Jaco is a review system and there's so many more. I do want to warn you though, you want to see Lean and only use the obscene need. So anytime you add functionality onto your site, you're adding a chunk of code that somebody else made. So there is a potential for it to slow down pages on your site and to avoid apps bugging down your site, I'll show you how you can spot better quality apps over others. So outdo, come in free and paid. Usually fear ones are an introduction level to a paid app. So I would say most apps on the store are paid or there's a paid version and then a free version of the same app. So if you're lower in volume, not using it for as much sales, you might be able to get away with just with free outs. But in the long-term, you want to try to budget for paid apps because they can hugely extend the functionality of the site. Also with paid apps, they're not made by shop files. You're actually supporting the independent developer who's making the app by paying for it. And in doing this, you usually get a good support system. So if you're paying for an app, there is, this is the income that these developers have and they're usually all over supporting the app. Whereas if it's free, the support might not be as robust. So if you need help with an app, make sure that it's a paid one and make sure you get a high-quality app. Again, it doesn't have to be paid like there's free versions of really good apps out there. But a lot of the times, if there's a few different, opposite, do exactly the same thing that paid one tends to be better quality. So let's check out the app marketplace and how you can install apps on your store. So you can download apps straight from the dashboard of your Shopify store. So when you're in the backend of your story, going to go ahead and click on Apps. And then we're going to open up shop for apps in a new tab. It'll open up the app marketplace. So here you can go through different categories and collections, but let's just search for one for Instagram. So I can show you how to install it, sets the Instagram feed. Great. And then we have this sort of marketplace where we can look through all of these different categories. We can filter by free and paid. Keep in mind, the F31 usually has a paid upgrade. Now, I usually use Insta feed. It's free for the basic plant. The basic plan will fit the bill for almost every site. But there's this interesting one here that has Instagram feed plus stories. So it says it's free to install. Let's check it out. You want to go ahead and click on it. And if you're on the page, so we have a one-click setup for incipient gallery and stories. Okay, Mrs looks super interesting, which I have not seen before. I mean, they're always coming out with new apps. Has the contact support for development. A few screenshots. Okay, Looking great. It is paid after the first ten hundred ten hundred page visits per month. And I think that should be more than enough for our purposes. So let's go ahead and add app. So you'll see I didn't click and in the else it automatically redirected me back to the dashboard and asked me if I was sure if I wanted to install this. Now you can review the terms and conditions. Just going to click install app for now. So after the install, it asks me to verify some credit card information, which I did. And then as soon as you verify any information, it'll bring you right back to the app screen and you'll see which app is installed. So I'm not going to go through the configuration process of the app because every app's going to be different depending on the functionality that you're using for that app. Most apps have video tutorials that you're free to go through. And most APP developers, I've reached o to directly and they've been very generous with the information that they shared with me and sometimes walks through the app set-up with me. So that's how you install apps.
20. Lesson 20: Shopify Plan Selection: So at the time of your launch, you're going to need to choose a Shopify plan. Let's go through all the plans available and pick the right one for you. So there's a variety of Shopify plans to choose from, but it's all about finding out what the options are and which ones best for you. So altogether there's five different plans. So let's go through what the differences for each one. So the very lowest plan is called Shopify light. Now this doesn't give you the full store all the cubes here is the cart. This has been useful in some situations where maybe a client has a WordPress site or a Squarespace site. And we want to embed a physical product on their shop and be able to fulfill it. So they want a place to log into and be able to ship the product. And they want them to be able to check out on the site, but they don't want the whole site. So they wouldn't got pages, they wouldn't get collections, they wouldn't get navigations and homepages and sections and everything that we've reviewed already. They would just get the ability to embed their product somewhere and to pay for that product. And then you would ultimately be able to go in and see a similar but pared-down dashboard and fulfill that product. The next one up is the one that usually everyone starts with with it. $29 a month. That gives you all the basic functionality that we've been looking at so far. So everything we've reviewed in this course falls under the $29 a month basic functionality plan. The reason you might want to go up to a $7,979 a month plan is because you get better shipping rates with that and you also get better reports. So once your volume starts to go up, you definitely want to do a little bit of a calculation to see how much you're saving and shipping rates by going up to the next plan, which is another $50 more. And that actual $50 a month more that you're spending a lot of the times. If you get a higher volume of store, this plan pays for itself in the better shipping rates anyways. And then along with that, you get better and more RAM, more robust reporting. Shopify advanced for 299 a month is even better shipping them as $79 per month one, you also get better reports as well too. So again, if you're looking to upgrade from 79 to 299 a month, I know it's a big jump, but there is a significant savings in shipping rates. So that's some math that you'll have to do for your store to see if you're saving more than $220 a month in those reduced shipping rates, you also get more robust reports and you get the rollout of new features as well too. So there's also Shopify Plus this is the highest plan you can get. There's very little stores that are on this planet, 2000 dollars a month. You get dedicated support, you get high level customizations. And of course he got much more reduced shipping rates as well too. So if you're really high volume store, sometimes it's a no brainer, just what you're saving on shipping rates. You also can highly customize the checkout, which as we saw before, we can choose some colors and add a banner. But when you go and see highly customized checkout pages, more often than not, they're on Shopify Plus and a developer has been able to go in there and really highly customized and get access to the code of the checkout page. We're not covering that in this course because it quite, it is quite a bit more advanced, but definitely let me know if that's something that you want to dig into. So let's see how to select the plants. So to select your plan from your dashboard, you want to head down to Settings. Now Shopify is always updating these settings here, so, so I am going to do a full overview. But throughout the videos we've updated most of this content. Now because they're rolling out new changes to this. You'll see in the upper right-hand corner I have plan, which is super easy to uptake the plan. I also have billing. So your dashboard might look a little bit different. I don't know if plan has been rolled out to everyone yet. So if you have plan, go ahead and click on that, select your Shopify plan, enter your credit card information and then it's good to go. Or if you don't see Plan, go into billing and do the same, not going to click on those because it has my credit card information in there. But as soon as you click on it, asks for the plan of your selection. Now we reviewed those all in the previous video. You can also see them again here. If you go to shopify.com or dot slash pricing, you can go ahead and review all the plans, has the three main ones and then don't forget down here it's got Shopify Plus and Shopify Lite. But it will give you those options once you get back here and to your credit card information, and you're good to go.
21. Lesson 21: Pre-launch Check: Okay, this is what I like to call our pre-launch checks. So we're going to review everything mixture we're ready to go. So starting on the left-hand side, we wanna go down all of these items, checkout our settings, and then finally launch. So we had our tests order, we've successfully fulfilled that excellent products we wanna, we wanna go through and make sure all of our products have the right pricing. We also want to make sure that they're all entered correctly and they're all set to active. We also want to check over these collections here. Make sure we've got all of our collections. They're all work email have the right parameters and the right products in them as well. Customers, we don't have any customers yet, so we can skip over that. Analytics will start to get a bit more of once we get some action on our shop for marketing and a bonus video, I'm going to go through the most popular automation, which is the abandoned cart automation. So we're going to skip that for now. Discounts, any discounts that you've set up, make sure you go through, check, check all the parameters for the mixture. They're set to active so we know that your customers can use them. Make sure that your apps are set up and configured in the App Store, online store here you want to pop this open, make sure you've got your blog posts. We've got our correct theme selected here. We've got all the pages we need contact about. You might want to add a shipping page in here to tell it about the flat rate shipping. And if they purchase over a certain amount, they'll get free shipping. So I would that I would add that page in there and get that into the navigation. Also check on the navigation as well too. We have all of our items and I've set up exactly how we wanted it to. Now for preferences, this is on the launch checklist that I've attached in the resources. But you want to be sure that the homepage has a title and a small description. This is what's going to show up in search engines. We also have our social sharing image. So you can kinda an image made up in something like Canva where you have a nice background image and the name of your shop inside that image as well. So that when people look you up or people share your thoughts, share your story on social media. Not only do they get the summary up here, but they also get an image indicating what your businesses as well too. Make sure when you accept your Google Analytics, you paste your tracking code in here as well, as well as your setup, as well as you set up your Facebook pixel. And usually these off for now because it's a development site, but definitely check with your local laws if these are required as well too. Now because the stores under development, I can't disable the password protect, but you should be able to in your source will take off the password protection. We want to enable capture. That'll, that'll limit the spam and domain redirection we want to enable that this is a fairly new, fairly new integration. So you might not have domain redirection yet, but just know that it's coming so I won't get into x. I think there's still rolling it out. And I'll go ahead and click Save. Got our preferences. Now we pop down here to settings. We're gonna go through each one of these individual settings and just whip through them and be sure that the correct information is inputted. So we're gonna go ahead and click on General. Now, General was initially set up when we registered our store. So should have all of this information here too, I will say about the store currency at the bottom, that you can change this currency up until you make your first sale. Make sure to check your currency and know that it's the right one before you launch live, it will disable your ability to change this after you've launched. However, if you reached out to shopify supports, like if you've made an error, you can change it through support. So Don't panic if it's, if it's locked to out of this just contact support. So for payments are made sure we got a payment gateway. I have sort of a dummy payment gateway from a development sorts of tests payment provider. So that once activated, you should have Shopify payments activated. That checkout mic go through. I'm not gonna go through each one of these because they're all personal preference depending on the store. So make sure you go through the whole checkout system and have all of your timing, setup, shipping, and delivery. We've set this up. We can see that we've got our local delivery in our local pickup setups. You can go ahead and click on Manage rates and it should show all of your rates that we just set up. Great. Taxes are going to depend on your region and your product. So this is something you want to check with a professional and check with your accountant to see if you have to set up taxes and how they should be setup. Typically, we do charge tax unless we know otherwise. So definitely check with your financial advisor or accountant locations if you have inventory at multiple locations where you can read about this, if you only have them out one, we're assuming you're just starting off. We're assuming you're just starting off. So if you only have met one, you can keep that as is notifications. Who gets notified about what and when. You can go through these individually and turn them on or off, gift cards, are you enabling gift cards for your story? You can set up gift cards, can hear files. Every image you upload to the site will be held here in files. Sales channels. If you want to start selling on different sales channels, using Instagram for people to purchase your products or Pinterest. You can do that in here as well too. Right now we're just setting up an online store so we know we've got our sales channel set to online store. Again, you might not have plan up here, but plan and billing will be very similar. So plan and billing users and permissions. Is there anyone else besides yourself that you want to add to the store? So is there anyone else like an assistant door fulfillment warehouse, you can go ahead and add stuff that'll send them an invite to be able to set up their own account store languages. If you're looking to set up a multilingual store, that will be done in here as well. You can also adjust not only in the language of the store, but the wording on what customers experience on this site too. So maybe you don't want to say Add to cart. Maybe you want to say proceed to checkout, something like that. You can see you can change that and store languages as well. Again, billing, just going to have your credit card information in there. And legal. So legal, super interesting because you can automatically create all of your legal pages providing that you've entered the correct company name in the general settings. So we can click Create from Template and then you can go in and adjust, say you have like a 15 day return policy and so on. It's going to put your e-mail in various places and it's also going to insert the company name that you've put as your main store name in here. Make sure you go through, if you're going to read these, to go through and read all of them because you are agreeing like you're taking on these as the contract of your store. So I would highly recommend going through and making adjustments to these. We're going to pop in all these templates just for now. Grapes and you can create your own ship and policy. There is no universal shipping policies. So this is sort of up to you to create your own. Go ahead and click Save. Excellent. So you've gone through all of our settings. Like I said, most of this been configured in the first place. So now we are ready to launch.
22. Lesson 22: Launch!: Let's get your site live its launch day. To make this process a lot easier, I've created a checklist, so check down below, download the checklist, but we're going to go through everything together. So the great thing about launching is with Shopify. It's the easiest part if you're used to WordPress or Squarespace or some of the other sites of their loved one can be a pain, but softly makes it super easy. So when you're in the dashboard, you can go ahead and click on online store and then you'll see domains down here. So you want to go ahead and click on domains. You'll see that there's the name of the store, dot-dot-dot my shop, phi.com. Now, this is totally usable, so you can still use this. So as of right now, as long as we have everything else set up, the stores actually launched like it's live, it's ready to go. You can take transactions. But the problem is, is that the domain doesn't look great, so nobody really wants to send people to that domain. So there's a couple options. When you go to launch your store, you can keep it as is, and you can send people to this domain or you can add your own custom domain. Now, a few things might happen if you have your own custom domain. Either you've purchased one already because you know that you want to use it for your store. In that case, it would be either connect existing domain for transfer domain. So connect existing domain means it's going to pull you off the site to wherever your purchase, your domain like GoDaddy and things like that. And it's going to change some settings inside that platform to redirect people when they go to that domain, to your website. Transfer domain means that they're going to take that domain and bring it into the Shopify site. So the biggest difference between the two is if you connect an existing domain, you're still going to pay that other company, whether it's GoDaddy named Chief, any of those, you're selling a paid out communists or renew your domain. Whereas transfer domain or these in a live under the Shopify umbrella. A lot of people like it for simplicity. However, I like keeping my domains on the external platform just because they have so many and I know where they are. So it's totally personal preference. If you're using a domain that you've already purchased, whether you just want to connect from existing platform mean that domain stays there, but you're using it on Shopify or transfer it, pull everything over to Shopify, totally up to you. You can also buy a new domain. So if you haven't created a domain yet or if you haven't purchased a domain yet, just click on by binding domain. And since you've already entered your credit card information, It's so easy to just two or three clicks, get it set up and it's literally in a setup. Everything behind the scenes for you. Binding domain is definitely the easiest one if you don't yet have a domain. But if you already have one, click on Connect, existing, or transfer. Now I'm not gonna go through this process because every domain registrar is going to be different, whether you have GoDaddy or hover or named cheap, you enter your domain name that you've purchased elsewhere in here. Click Next. And then it's gonna give you steps that are specific to that domain registrar. So a lot of the times that a login for you and I'll make those changes for you. But some domain registrars that are a little bit more obscure, it might ask you to go through some of those steps manually. So just know whether you're connecting existing domain or transferring domain. You'll have to go through a few steps to make sure that those two platforms are talking to each other. After you've completed those, you'll be redirected to this page here. And the status will change, it will change to pending, and then it'll change to complete, are connected and you'll see your new URL right here. So it might take a couple of steps to make that connection. If it's on a different platform. Soon as you've made that connection, Shopify does the rest for you. If you buy the domain on the Shopify platform, it does everything for you. And then that's it. You don't have to redirect everything. You don't have to deploy files, you don't have to change over a database, any of that kinda stuff. You just have to sync your domain registrar with your Shopify domains and it does the rest for you. Launching on Shopify is a dream. It's so good. Also, I've included in the resources below you have full checklists when it comes to launching. So going through the launch review preflight checklist that we did on the last video as well as this video to keep that checklist handy so you don't have to keep going through the videos. You'll have that handy C. You can deploy any site just in a few clicks. Thanks so much guys, I'm so excited to see your sites. Please link them down below. I'd love to check them out, even if you haven't done the full deployment yet, if they still live on, uh, my shop phi.com URL, I'd love to check them out as well, too happy to give feedback and I'm so excited that you made it till the end of the course. I've got a few bonuses in store for you.
23. Bonus 1: Abandoned Cart Email Automation: Welcome to your first bonus. Today we're going to dive in and talk all about abandoned carts. So when it comes to marketing, there's one funnel that's created by default in the Shopify platform. So I wanted to bring your awareness to this because it is already so you just want to make sure that you know what kind of correspondence your customers are getting. So when you're logged into the dashboard, go ahead and click on marketing. And you'll see that there's a campaign already set up called abandoned checkout emails by Shopify. So go ahead and click on that. So brings you to this probably looks familiar the checkout area of our settings. So has all the basic checkouts stuff from that area. Again, a lot of these are personal preference. But if you want to scroll all the way down to abandoned checkouts, so we have so by default, this is checked automatically send abandoned checkout emails. So gametes when people get to the point of purchase where they've already inputted all of their information right before they go to confirm payment, they have second thoughts, then they leave. You've probably got news is about two. So basically, you get an email saying, Oh, there's something within your cart or you finish shopping yet, and it gives a linked back to that cart full of those products. What you can do with this is use it as a marketing opportunity to maybe included discount code. So if they've abandoned their checkout, it's usually because of price. Or you can offer free shipping at a lower thresholds, or maybe a 10 percent coupon codes, something like that if they use it, maybe within the next, say, 24 hours. So these are the default settings of the abandoned checkout email. So it's automatically turned on email subscribers who had been in checkout or email? Anyone who had been in checkout, I would go email anyone who had been checkout. We always want to go with their recommendation. E has to be six hours, but they've changed that. So just know that Shopify puts a ton of research into everything that they're doing. So definitely go with the recommended ten hours here. Great. So these are sub, and then we're going to go click on Customize e-mail. You're gonna see a lot of really sort of scary code in here. But don't worry, you're basically going to look for like full sentences of texts. High, you added an item to your carton, haven't completed your purchase, you can complete it down well, it's available. And then maybe you want to check, you want to add another sentence there with a link to a coupon code. So this would be a perfect example of places that you could put links in to coupon codes to hopefully increase conversions on your store as well to make sure you don't remove any of the code here, just look for complete sentences. Go in and fuse a bit more of your personality. Can tell some jokes. You can put some gifts in there as well too. You can also put a coupon code in, but make sure you keep the full structure of this e-mail as is. So I'm gonna go ahead and save that. And we'll go back here to settings. And that's how we've updated our abandoned cart and the content within that. Again, don't mess around too much with it. Change up the language so it's a little bit more personal and feel free to add in a coupon code to increase conversions.
24. Bonus 2: Launch Checklist and More: Welcome to your second bonus, the Launch Checklists. The launch checklist is super valuable and something you can keep in your back pocket. You can download that below. And I'm also going to include a few other resources for optimizing your site, for search engines, for imagery, and a few other aspects and gotchas that some people don't think about when they're launching your Shopify site. So in total, we've got four bonus download starting off with our Shopify checklists, we cover all of your tracking codes, double-check your inventory and make sure you've got your domain and email setup. Then I've got a really simplified sock Shopify SEO checklist. This isn't by any means a full comprehensive SEO breakdown, but it definitely gets you started in the right direction and make sure that you can set things up from the get-go to be able to improve on them over time. So you want to focus on product descriptions, easy to read, slugs, shop titles and descriptions. Make sure you're labeling those images with alt texts when you've uploaded them. Internal linking, especially between products and blogs. And make sure that the language that you use is natural language. Avoid keyword stuffing for sure. Next, we've got our design resource list. This is complete with links as well too. We have some design resources. A lot of my favorites Canvas, both free and paid. 99 designs where you can hire designers and run contests. Five, or you can hire designers as well. Seeing with Upwork, you can also generate Shopify logos and Shopify store names of these two generators a 100 percent for free from Shopify. We also have packaging resources as well too. You're having trouble how to package your product itself in its brand and packaging, as well as its shipping packaging. These are some great resources and they can really help you up level your unboxing experience to make everything completely branded. So you've got you line for shipping packages, Kathleen for those customize branded packages. No issues. A great packing tissue company that I've used before. And then of course, if you want to include any extras like coupon codes are greeting cards or postcards. We've got new cards and a vista print as well. You can also start to make some swag with these companies, don't bags, journals, things like that as well too. This is a great set of resources to get you started and I'll probably add more as time goes on. Thanks so much.
25. Final Thoughts: Thank You: Hi everyone. I wanted to make an additional video to say how grateful I am for you to go through the course. I'm so excited to be able to bring all of these years of experience and truly be helpful to people out there. Please let me know. Please reach out in any medium and let me know what else you'd like to learn. Also, I do want to add on that. This is not easy, like this Shopify endeavor of creating your own store. So please cut yourself some slack. Really understands that what you're doing and building a small business is not an easy feat. So I want you to know that I'm here for you. I got your back and I want to support you. Please reach out and any medium as I'd love to keep making these for you guys.
Margaret Reffell, Web Developer | Online Business
