Starting from scratch, Shopify sellers’ entrepreneurial stories series ③: Opening a store on Shopify and earning the first pot of gold

In the fourth week, Tim's progress slowed down due to delayed packages, and he began to get anxious. What's worse, the German army ordered him to go back for four weeks of training. Since Tim was still an active soldier, he could not disobey the military order. Therefore, he could only continue to plan for the opening of the store on weekends. From Monday to Friday, he was not at home and could not even access the Internet, which was a big problem for him.

But on Thursday of the fifth week, good news came: the products finally arrived! But after receiving the package, Tim found that 100 packages were much heavier than he thought. It was really difficult for his girlfriend to help carry them home. (For reference: Tim is 1.9 meters tall)

But in short, after receiving the goods, Tim found that the 100 packages were completely flawless and perfect, and he was very happy. Next, he will start to create a store on Shopify.

Although he was ready to sell the product and to deliver it in logistics, he hadn’t figured out the unique selling point (USP) for the product. Moreover, he didn’t have any pictures of the finished hand-sprayed backpack, only the basic sample pictures he had taken at the time.

Unfortunately, this was not something he could change in a short period of time. He trained at the military base from Monday to Friday and had no time or place to spray the products by hand.

So he decided to build his Shopify store using placeholder images. Once he had some finalized airbrushed product images, he would replace all the placeholder images.

Two hours before leaving for the military base, he decided to set up some key parts of the website:

• Shipping Zone

• Add Shopify plugin;

• Product information;

• Store theme/design (Theme/Design);

• Set up a custom domain name (Custom Domain).

  
  

Since Tim opened his store in Germany and had no plans to expand overseas, he set the shipping fee to free shipping. As shown in the figure below:

The reason why it is set as free shipping is that the shipping cost is already included in the calculation of the backpack's selling price. "Free shipping" can also be used as a selling point in marketing to promote conversion.

Since the store is just starting, Tim only wants to add some necessary plugins.

Here are some of the plugins he added:

1) Easy GDPR + Cookie Bar

Price: Free

Tim’s target audience is in Europe, so he has to make sure his store is GDPR compliant. Using the app, Tim’s website can allow buyers to send a request to delete their personal data.

*Note: Installing only one plugin will not make your store GDPR compliant. Please consult a professional for details.

2) Order Printer

Price: Free

Used to automatically print packaging labels and invoices when orders are received.

3) Product Options

Price: 14-day free trial, then $9.99/month

Since the products Tim sells are customizable (color and text), there is a plugin that allows customers to customize the products. At only $9.99 per month, it is worth it for Tim's business.

4) Product Reviews

Price: Free

A plug-in used to obtain customer reviews and let other users see product reviews.

5) Sumo

Price: Free

As mentioned earlier, Tim uses Sumo to collect emails for content marketing. And the tool is free until you reach $500 in email marketing revenue.

He may add more plugins in the future, but for now, these 5 plugins are enough. Since he has not sold any products yet, it would be a waste of time to add plugins that he may never use.

Since he only has one product at the moment, creating a product page doesn’t take much time. He creates a new product in Shopify and uploads four product images. Because he’s in a hurry, he only comes up with a simple product description. He’ll modify it later.

Here is Tim's backpack product description (for reference):

Are you looking for freedom?

Do you want to live a life on your own rules?

Well, go pack your things together and just do it!

Whether you're living a digital nomad lifestyle, going on a business trip, or want to take a break from the hustle - you need a bag which simply works.

If you need more individuality the custom HYKE backpack is the right one for you!

With time I will change the product description and images.

Also, because of my limited time that evening, I didn't set up the “Product Options” app.

After the training, he would modify the product descriptions and images. But since he had limited time that night, he didn't even set up the Product Options plugin.

Shopify has a built-in theme store with various paid or free templates. Tim paid for a theme template and spent an hour setting up the theme section, and finally completed the following settings:

In the last hour before leaving for the army, he designed the website homepage, which looks like this:

Although it’s not yet a finished product, his main goal in designing the homepage is to let customers know what he sells at a glance.

So the first line of his shop reads:

"One backpack is enough - a practical and customized backpack with your own name"

It's obvious that it sells backpacks.

Unfortunately, the domain name hyke.com had already been registered, so he had to come up with a new domain name. In the end, he chose to bind the store domain name to www.hyke-life.com, which he thought was the most suitable for his business. Because his initial motivation was to start this business around finding a free lifestyle.

After purchasing a custom domain, he completed everything he needed to accomplish before leaving for the military that day.

Although he was slow, had little time left, and the process was not smooth, Tim was very happy that he could finally start selling and delivering products.

So how will Tim sell his first backpack in week 6?

By the sixth week, the plan was getting out of control, leaving Tim with only two options: either suspend the plan and wait until the military training was over, or ask for help. In the end, he chose to ask for help.

Tim was called back to the army unexpectedly, which delayed the progress. In order to keep the plan going, Tim found a good friend to be his business partner. He told his friend about the whole plan of opening a shop, and finally his friend agreed to join the partnership. They shared the cost, so their shares were equal.

At this point, with only three weeks left to achieve their eight-week profit goal, they began to focus on the easiest to execute and most impactful options in the short term.

These options are:

• Prepare giveaways (for building email lists);

• Contact influencers (to gain attention on social media);

• Leave a comment on Instagram (to get followers on Instagram).

Based on their previous experience in e-commerce operations, they decided to use free marketing strategies. In their opinion, paid marketing strategies are only suitable for business development. Since their business is just starting, free marketing strategies are the most suitable for them.

The most difficult thing they encountered during the marketing process was that they had no way to truly display the product. Their business advocated selling customized backpacks, but they only had the original product pictures and no customized product pictures at all.

Therefore, Tim decided not to sell customized backpacks anymore and changed the products sold in the store to simple backpacks. As for customized backpacks, we will talk about it later.

When Tim first built the website, the words "custom" and "individuality" were everywhere in the product copy. Since Tim changed his product USP (selling point) to sell simple backpacks, these words had to be deleted or replaced. So they decided to eliminate the fancy styles in the store and change to a simple style.

As you can see in the image above, Tim not only changed the wording of the copy, but also added a new product: the snapback (baseball cap).

There are two reasons to add new products:

• Lower the barrier to purchase (attract people’s interest in the brand at a lower price);

• Cross-sell products (increase average order value).

Since baseball caps are not a critical product, they do not buy them in bulk. They use an on-demand printing and delivery service called Printful, which automatically fetches the print files, prints the caps, and ships them to the customer once someone orders a baseball cap from their online store.

In this way, the business becomes relatively simple. If customer demand increases in the future, they will purchase in large quantities to provide fast delivery services and better customer experience.

They just need to upload the HYKE logo pattern on Printful, and the app will automatically generate the layout design.

Since Tim had used the app before and tested the quality of its hats, he knew that Printful’s hats were top-notch. But he didn’t know the quality of its other products, so he held off on buying them. After tweaking the website, they next decided to change their Instagram account.

As mentioned in the previous article, the content Tim uploaded to Instagram for the first time included: funny emoticons, emotional quotes, reposts of wonderful pictures, and product advertisements.

Since the website and overall branding were going minimalistic, it seemed like the Instagram account should match that style. So he deleted almost all of the images and uploaded the backpack he currently had, as shown below:

Currently, Instagram is their second sales platform.

Once Tim finishes his military training, they’ll have to think about real social media marketing (i.e. engaging with users or using Instagram stories strategically, etc.).

Even though social media is a good way to market, Tim still prefers email marketing on e-commerce platforms. With email marketing, you can reach potential customers with just a few simple clicks. With an email list, you don’t need to spend money on advertising or worry about your marketing account being shut down.

The most effective way to collect an email list would be to run a promotion with a prize contest, so they decided to go with that approach.

Since the clients they wanted to reach were entrepreneurs, they decided to put 10 of the best business books in a backpack and give it to their clients as a giveaway. The books were:

• Rich Dad, Poor Dad

• How to Win Friends&Influence People

• Creativity, Inc.

• The Why Are You Here Cafe

• Crushing It

• Steve Jobs

• Eat That Frog

• Think and Grow Rich

• The Big Five For Life

• The Four Hour Workweek

The total cost of the 10 books plus the product backpack was over $150. He picked these books based on his own preferences, and since he is his best audience, this is definitely a giveaway that his audience wants.

As for the promotional channel, they use the KingSumo platform. Through this platform, their prize promotion can reach a large area of ​​platform users. Then, in order to get the free gift, the contestants must take certain actions (such as referring a friend, etc.).

Here’s how they set up their contest with KingSumo:

• Duration: 1 week

• Winners: 1;

• Sharing options: Facebook, Email;

• Prize conditions: daily return to homepage (2 times), Instagram followers (2), website visits (2 times);

• Email integration tool: Sendfox.

To run a giveaway promotion and collect an email list, they did three things:

1) Embed the badge on your website

This is easy to do with KingSumo because the platform provides a code. As a seller, all you have to do is copy and paste the code provided by the platform into your website page.

Setup process : Go to Shopify's Themes>Actions>Edit Code and copy and paste the code before the closing tag <body>.

Finally it looks like this on the web page:

2) Put a link to your giveaway promotion on your Instagram profile

3) Share to your personal Facebook page

They also promoted it on Instagram.

As mentioned before, in order to attract the attention of the target audience, they will leave comments on the target audience’s Instagram posts. As shown in the following figure:

When leaving comments on your target audience’s posts, first comment on the content of the original post, then remind and encourage the user to participate in the promotion they are holding. This will lead the user to click through to the Instagram profile and then click on the promotion link in the profile.

They spent an entire afternoon leaving 75 comments on Instagram, and then something amazing happened!

A customer bought their backpack on the first day of their promotion! After a customer places an order through the Shopify online store, the seller will receive an order reminder. In the past, they heard the Shopify order reminder sound from other places, and finally they heard this sound from their own store! As shown in the picture, a small blue mark appeared in the order of the Shopify background, which means there is an unfinished order!

At present, Tim and his partners have received the first order. The next thing to do is to fulfill the order and send the product to the customer. But the question is, can Tim, who only placed orders in the sixth week, really make a profit of $1,000 by the eighth week at the latest? To know what will happen next, please wait for the next analysis.