One of the most important things we'll do this week is get to know the Shopify platform better.
We have plenty of tutorials and walkthroughs that can help you learn Shopify, but we thought it would be a lot more fun if we experienced it together. As such, we're going to split into groups, and spend the week building a fake (or real) online business.
Every day you'll spend a few hours in your groups working on your business. On Friday, one of the last activities for the week will be to share your businesses with the group.
This is an amazing opportunity to put yourself in the shoes of a merchant. We support our merchants from conception to execution and understand their experience is extremely important. We hope you feel the growing pains and the wow moments and enjoy the ride.
This activity also gives us the opportunity to provide valuable feedback to our UX team. As you're building your business, create a shared Google Doc and track your feedback in the moment. We will share this feedback at the end of the week.
Max Power has always loved being in the Kitchen and has worked in restaurants for years. He’s had a passion for creating tasty meals for his family and restaurant patrons for years. One of his specialties has been his sauces. From hot sauce too sweet sauces to sauces made from chopped fresh ingredients. Everyone’s always told Max that he should be selling his creations. When Max googled “Sell Online” the first search result that came up was Shopify! He clicked on getting started and began his adventure of being a Sauce Slingin’ Boss.
It’s time for you and your BaB team, to follow along with Max as he goes through the process of setting up his store on Shopify. In your groups, you’ll come up with an idea like Max and get to go through the list of tasks.
Take your time completing the following activities - slow and steady wins the race here. We’ll be discussing the activity as a group on Friday this week. Once you’re all finished, your group will present your completed shop to your fellow noobs. If you have any issues/questions, reach out to members of your training group first - work as a team! If they can’t help, reach out to the trainers - but be resourceful - you can do it!
The main purpose of the exercise is to get familiar with the Shopify Admin, and experience the product in the same way that our merchants do!
DO THIS ACTIVITY AT YOUR OWN/GROUPS PACE - WITH A GOAL OF DISCUSSING/PRESENTING THE COMPLETED SETUP IN THE WORKSHOP AT THE END OF THE WEEK.
Objectives:
Build a store (real or fake) with a group of new Shopifolk
Present your completed store on Thursday (Day 4, of week 1)
What is your business and walk us through your online shop?
What did you learn?
What did you like/have the most fun with? What did you struggle with?
You’ll have a few hours every day to break into your groups and work on the shop.
Building a real store:
Follow the steps outlined below.
Use your resources and your teammates to come up with a great idea.
The goal is to launch your shop to the world by the end of the week. (Remember starting a real business is challenging, so if you aren’t ready to fully launch by the end of the week, be prepared to share with the team when you plan to launch).
Building a fake store:
Follow the steps outlined below.
Get creative and have fun creating your product and shop.
You can get crazy and out of this world. You can come up with a fake product that doesn’t exist or use an already existing product to sell. (If you’re using an existing product, and will be using their product images, please be sure to keep your shop password protected).
Take Notes:
You can create a shared doc with your team, where you can collaborate on feedback about the different steps.
We can share your notes and feedback about the experience with the UX researchers as well if you have questions about why things are a certain way, or if you have suggestions for changes or improvements.
Complete the steps outlined below to get your store up and running, and don’t feel like this is all you can do, feel free to think outside of these parameters.
HAVE FUN!
PRESENTATION GUIDELINES:
Max 4 minutes presentation.
Walk us through of the shop.
Things your team struggled with, things your team found "easy" or surprising.
How did your group break up the work/tasks?
What did you learn?
As we will be tight on time, we’ll ask that each team share new feedback that they observed, not highlighted by earlier teams presentations.
Create a new store with your group, by signing up for Shopify at http://shopify.com
Max signed up for Shopify and wasn’t sure about a store name just yet. He decided to sign up with the name maxpowersauce.myshopify.com - after reading through some of our Support Docs, he found that although he can’t change the .myshopify.com URL, he will be able to use a custom domain later on. More on that later!
Go through the onboarding process & answer the questions to the best of your ability.
Store names can be changed later on, but the .myshopify.com domain cannot ever be
changed, unless you start a new store completely.
When you’re prompted to fill out where you’ll be selling, ensure that you’ll select that
you’re selling both in-person and online, so choose accordingly!
Choose your location.
Tell Shopify about your business! If this is just a test store, select ‘just playing around’.
Get your store ‘staffed’. This will allow you to have every feature of Shopify’s plans, plus the
‘Getting Started’ module, and ping a trainer in Slack @liz, @matty, @tayles, @pat, @kay, @emily.thoma, @shaq, @hirsch, @queen, or @karmena. We can hook you up.
Max has a product idea already, he’s going to make some bomb sauces. He’s decided to start with 3, Hot Sauce, a Chimichurri Sauce, and a Plum Sauce. He plans on having variations of his Hot Sauce, so he’ll need to create some options within that product.
Products
Add a few products - if you’re not selling something real (yet!) then just use images
from your computer or the Internet, and make up some product names. Read through
the directions below, and then get started adding products!
Create 5 variants (for example 1 product with 3 variants and 1 product with 2, and then
a third with none - whatever you like).
Add at least 1 product image for each product; if you have more, add them.
Add 1 digital product - yes, this may require the use of an app…
Have at least 1 product tracking inventory, and 1 not tracking inventory.
Add weights to your products.
Max has been thinking about how to organize his products a little. Since he only has 3, he’s unsure he will need to organize them into categories. If he were to, he is thinking of arranging his sauces by type, so at this point, he’ll have a collection called Hot Sauces, one called Sweet Sauces and one called Fresh Sauces. This will help his customers sort through the types of sauces they prefer.
Collections
Create a few collections to organize your products
Create at least 1 Collection that will automatically select products based on
conditions.
Max wants to edit one of the manual collections to be an automatic collection, is this possible? Give it a try.
A big thing for Max is sharing his passion for his sauces and cooking with the world. Thankfully within his online store, Max can add pages to talk about his story, health/ingredient info, and a contact page so his customers can reach out to him with questions. Max was never much of a blogger but has decided that he’d like to start a blog for his shop. He’s going to write about where he gets his ingredients from, recipes for people to use his sauces with and whatever else he can think of!
Pages
Create an About Us/About Me - why not use some of the quirks or Myers-Briggs info
If you don’t already have one, head over to http://wordpress.com and create an
account there. Create a few ‘test’ blog posts using the lorem ipsum generator; find the
Wordpress Importer app in the Shopify App Store, and import those posts into your
Shopify store.
Add a Contact Us page using the contact template, and send yourself an email using it
in order to test it out.
Add a staff member to your shop. Change the author on the blog post with this new
staff member’s name.
Create a few more posts, and use the Rich Text Editor to style your post with the
following things: (note - these do not all have to be in one page)
insert images
insert videos
Max has been thinking about the people who helped push him to start this business, so has decided to create a discount code for 15% off for his close friends and family.
Discounts
Create a free shipping discount
Create a discount for an item in a collection
Create a discount for a member of your training group
Max isn’t overly confident in his abilities to edit a theme or work within the code. So he’s opted to try using one of the available free themes in the Theme Store. And as his business grows, he’ll think about upgrading to a paid theme or even hire a Shopify Expert to help him customize a theme.
Themes
Time permitting, you’ll be taking a deeper dive into Themes later on; for now, add the following themes:
New Standard
Minimal
iii. one of your choice (paid or free)
Now customize your theme a bit - stick to the ‘Customize Theme’ options, we’ll be
diving into HTML/CSS changes later on. Do the following:
change some colours, like on buttons, backgrounds, and text
Max also wants to organize things on his homepage so people can easily navigate the shop. He’s not 100% sure what will work best for his products. For now, he’s going to start with links to the pages he’s created, the blog, and one to his collection of products. How will you organize your shop's Navigation?
Navigation
Organize your homepage by customizing the navigation bar with links to your
collections and pages you’ve created
Now create a dropdown menu underneath one of your navigation header items
Domains are something that a lot of people struggle with. There are so many domain providers, and options for a good domain to represent your business. He’s thinking about whether he’ll want an email account along with his domain. Have a look through this Slideshow to learn a little more about domains before following the next steps: Domains
He’s decided that the domain he’ll be using is combativeonion.com, as he already purchased it from GoDaddy. If he decides to rebrand later, he will purchase the domain directly from Shopify.
Domains (THIS STEP IS OPTIONAL)
If you already own a domain, and want to give configuring it a try, go for it. Don’t forget you can use the help centre. (docs.shopify.com)
If you’d like to try this step, go ahead and buy a domain. (This can be expensed under your Startify budget)
Add that domain to your Shopify store
Set it to be your ‘Primary Domain’
Log in to manage the domain on the registrar’s site
Follow Shopify’s instructions to redirect a third party domain
Take some screenshots - one of the properly configured DNS panel on the registrar's site, and one of the properly added domain in your Shopify store
Max isn’t ready to launch yet, so he’ll be keeping his store password protected until he’s ready to share his store with the world. He’s been told about Google Analytics and how helpful it can be to learn about how people are interacting with his shop. He’s going to have to sign up for an account and do some reading!
Online Store Settings
Find and edit your store details
Find the Google Analytics section - sign up for a Google Analytics account and set it
up in your shop
Change your storefront password
It’s time for Max to start thinking about how he will be accepting money. It’s a pretty important part of his business and he wants to make sure he’s doing things right. Have a look through this short Slideshow to learn a little more about: Payment Gateways. Max is located in Canada and is eligible for Shopify Payments. It’s really important to know if his products are eligible to be sold using Shopify Payments. While Max is looking for this info, check to see if the product your shop is selling would be eligible to use Shopify Payments.
Payments
Find and enable the ‘Bogus Gateway’ option in your shop
If you don’t already have a PayPal account, set up a free PayPal account now. (No need to keep Paypal as an active Gateway for the rest of the exercises.)
Not only does Max need to think about how he will be accepting money, but he now wants to make sure the checkout experience for his customers is seamless and works the way he wants.
Checkout
Customer Account
make customer accounts optional in your store
note: Multipass is only available to Plus Merchants
Order Processing
have your orders automatically fulfill only the gift cards in an order
Check out Language
edit the Checkout page title from ‘Checkout’ to ‘[your shop’s name]’s Checkout’
Policies
find the Shopify Policy Generator Tool again, and click ‘I’ll skip the Shopify trial
for now, just create my policy’ and create your policies
Shipping is an important part of an online business. Max, for now, will be shipping his products himself. Part of his business plan is to research fulfillment services available in his area, to help with shipping his products when his business takes off!
Shipping
Offer free shipping to all orders within Canada only.
Set up weight based shipping to 2 other countries - make sure ones the US; turn off shipping for Hawaii, Guam, Alaska, Puerto Rico and increase the shipping cost to California by $10.
Set up price based shipping to one other country.
Create a custom fulfillment service - use your @shopify.com address.
Have one or two of the products in your store set to fulfill via the new service.
Create 4 different weight based rates that increase in price as they become heavier.
Create 2 separate orders using 2 of the above rates you’ve just created.
Being in Ontario, Max needs to make sure he’s aware of the taxes he will need to pay to run his business.
Taxes
Set local tax rates
Create a tax exemption
It’s really important that Max gets notified of the orders that get placed. He wants to make sure the notifications for his orders are set up to send him an email. He also wants to make sure the emails that are sent to his customers are representing his business’ culture and style.
Notifications
Customize the order confirmation email which gets sent to customers by editing your
‘thank you’ message
If you have an iPhone or Android phone, download the Shopify App, and connect your shop to it.
Max is ready to launch! He’s thinking of placing a few test orders to make sure everything is ready to go for his Merchants. Now it’s your turn.
Process some orders!!
Have at least 2 different people visit your shop and make some purchases
Create the following orders yourself (as a fake visitor to your shop); have each order
go to a different address, and make at least one order from your @shopify.com email
address
place an order with at least 2 items
place an order using a discount code
iii. place an order with one product; now, imagine that the customer chose the wrong variant/ color/size and would like to get this corrected - they’ve contacted you before the order has shipped out; manage this situation
place an order for 2 items; now, imagine that the customer would like to return one item and get a partial refund
place an order in which the customer creates an account
fulfill all the orders you’ve created
Max has decided that he should take advantage of the Shopify App Store, to help run his business. There are a lot of options, so he’s decided to start with Order Printer since it’s a free app made by Shopify.
Apps - add the following to your shop if you haven’t already.
Digital Downloads - this one you’ve probably already installed and used
Order Printer - feel free to explore this app and tweak some templates
Things your team struggled with, things your team found "easy" or surprising
How did your group break up the work/tasks?
What did you learn?
Answer any questions the group may have!
Add fresh feedback that the earlier groups haven’t mentioned to keep us on time- after all, we’ve got precious social time to enjoy before your first TownHall!