Kelly 0:00
2020 was one of the biggest years in the history of e commerce. In fact, the pandemic spurred such a growth in e commerce that the industry as a whole move forward about 10 years in three months time. Whether you're interested in starting your own store or learning how to develop for e commerce this week on the podcast, we're breaking it all down for you. Let's get started.
Welcome to the ladybug podcast. I'm Kelly.
Ali 0:25
I'm Sydney. I'm Allie.
Emma 0:26
And I'm Emma. And we're debugging the tech industry.
Kelly 0:31
Something we often discuss on the podcast is productivity. One tool that helps 1000s of web developers and designers do more every day is GoDaddy Pro, combining site client and project management. GoDaddy Pro is an all in one solution and made by and for web professionals. Whether you're new to web design, or looking to grow your business, you'll find free tools, products, guidance and support to help you deliver results for clients. At the heart of GoDaddy Pro is the hub. For one intuitive dashboard, the hub seamlessly brings your site's clients and projects together, manage and monitor all your clients WordPress sites from a single place no matter where they're hosted. with a single click perform bulk updates, backups, security checks, and more to save time and free up your day. On top of all that, you'll find a thriving community of web designers and developers who share advice, insights and learning opportunities. GoDaddy Pro is free to join, head over to go.me forward slash Ladybug to get started. Again, that's go.me forward slash Ladybug. What do cats drinking wine and a woman making wigs have in common? A lot? Actually. They're both the result of someone starting their own business doing things their own way, and pursuing their independence. Just like a million others who started this journey, these entrepreneurs found the support they needed from Shopify. Are you interested in supporting entrepreneurs? Do you want to solve highly technical problems that support treasured local shops? Are you interested in really powerful tooling to change the retail experience with your favorite big brands? Join Shopify. Now digital by default, you'll have the freedom to work from anywhere, and the opportunity to build solutions to help Shopify merchants and partners innovate through chaos and emerge stronger and more adaptable than ever before. Help Shopify make commerce better for everyone. Visit shopify.com slash careers to learn more. All right, so let's kick things off with talking about the different types of platforms that you can build and sell on. Instead of me just going through the list. I want you to just start naming them. What ones are you aware of not looking at the outline that we already
Unknown Speaker 2:40
know alphabetically?
Ali 2:42
Well, there's this one girl Kelly that I know talks about
Kelly 2:44
a lot called Shopify, you mean Spotify?
Ali 2:47
Spotify, Shopify, we
Kelly 2:55
all right, yes. superieure is the platform I build on.
Emma 3:03
Okay. For real Z's. Shopify is an e commerce platform that you're gonna hear a lot about likely because I'm Kelly. Kelly, tell us more about your really quickly.
Kelly 3:16
You are a partner, though I am a Shopify plus partner. I have been building on the Shopify platform since 2014. And I run a Shopify development agency called the taproom. And we build cool things for Shopify merchants.
Emma 3:33
They don't sell beer, which I thought they did. And I was excited about it when I first heard you
Kelly 3:36
know, we I think I've mentioned this multiple times at this point, but we've gotten applications that have come in saying, like, I've been to your Seattle location, and I'm like, Oh, I have a Seattle location. That's cool.
Emma 3:47
I want to go five out of five stars on TripAdvisor. Um, but for reals I have a few ecommerce platforms that I absolutely love. I use Squarespace for my personal site. We also use it for our Ladybug website. I don't do e commerce with them however they do integrate with e commerce plugins I don't know specifically which ones might be sweet as usually stripe also, they have like a whole ecommerce like version that you can you can choose to pay for. Okay, yeah, cuz so stripe is widely used. They use it for medium and the blogging site. However, it does have implications for international creators. Just be aware of that if you are not from the United States or not. If you're not from United States, if you're from outside like I am in Sweden, stripe does have different locations that they partner with. It might not be geographically available. What I love to use are two different sites. One is podia and one is payhip. And I always get them confused. I use pay hub to sell my blogging book. So I use it to sell digital content specifically like PDFs, Kindle downloads, things of that nature, and I absolutely love it. You get an analytics dashboard, you get all the features of like a really robust e commerce site and it's decently affordable as a creator. podia is fantastic. Both of these apps have great UI is, which is a qualification that I have as an engineer. podia is a little bit more expensive, but they allow you to sell online courses as well. So I really think that's really robust if you are a digital content, Sith Lord.
Ali 5:25
What's the Sith Lord?
Emma 5:26
Like? I'm not even kidding. Oh, my goodness, you're gonna trigger all this.
Ali 5:31
seeing any of them? Oh,
Emma 5:32
we need to hop on that. Should we live stream alley watch the Star Wars for the first time?
Kelly 5:36
Maybe Shall we start her at like, three instead of like, yeah, beginning or and just like completely ruin the experience for her?
Ali 5:44
Absolutely. Like we normally asked to define technical terms from like, what is the Sith Lord?
Emma 5:50
Yeah, yeah. But those are my favorites. I actually I have tried Wix in the past. I still really like them. I think Wix is a great site for beginners. That is my extensive knowledge of e commerce, which you know what? To be fair, it's quite a few platforms.
Kelly 6:07
It is. Ollie, what do you what else?
Ali 6:11
Oh, um, Etsy, and Amazon. Those are two that exist. They do. Maybe work for one of them. Kind of.
Kelly 6:22
So the other big names and e commerce that you might come across at some point are Magento, bigcommerce and WooCommerce. There's also a Volusion. Evolution filed for bankruptcy. Chapter 11. Last year, I believe, but they're still around. And there are a bunch of global ones as well that are more popular in other countries like PrestaShop zyro, I believe it's called miva. PrestaShop. I've definitely come across the other the other two I have not. And then there are also like subscription based e commerce platforms. Oh, there's also big cartel. I don't too many ecommerce platforms. Like there's no reason to know this many. But usually, if I'm Oh, I mean, you can also talk Salesforce commerce cloud, or works base.
Emma 7:12
Well, all I learned from this is that if we're ever at trivia night, and one of the categories is e commerce platforms, I want Kelly to be on my team. Okay. Yeah.
Kelly 7:19
Good. I'll finally be useful a trivia for something.
Emma 7:22
Yeah, for sure. But in any case, Kelly, my question to you that I totally just thought of out of the blue is why would we choose ecommerce over brick and mortar stores.
Kelly 7:31
So that's the thing, you don't necessarily have to choose one over the other you can do both. Obviously, when you have a brick and mortar location, you're more focused on a local audience, you get a little bit more face to face if it's a little bit more experiential in whatever you're selling. brick and mortar definitely lends to that. But ecommerce kind of expands who your customer base can be, you're reaching a huge audience whether you're even just selling nationally selling in a few states selling internationally, there's really no limit to who you can be reaching with your business. So I like to think of them as two unique like storefronts and they both have their place and you know I can kind of go into like you can you can sell it you can sell on Shopify, but you can also cross your your postings Oh, we didn't even talk about eBay. eBay actually counts as an e commerce platform as well because I think like 80% now of the listings that are made on on eBay are buy it now as opposed to auctions. Fascinating, right? I
Emma 8:35
just learned that us this week never used eBay. But um,
Ali 8:38
my parents used to sell stuff on there. Like way back in the day,
Kelly 8:42
I used to sell digital currency through eBay, which are not what Yeah, so this is a website called Habbo Hotel. It's an online five star hotel for teens where else I'm from, like 20. Or I'm like 2005 until like 2010. I guess I was like doing things on that site. But you know, you can buy virtual items with virtual currency which you can actually pay real money for the virtual currency, of course. And they had these things called gold bars, which are basically 50 coins that you can use to buy things. And you can't sell digital currencies through eBay. So I sold Pokemon cards. And I just happened to also give you a gold bar on Habbo Hotel as well. This was like my freshman year of college and I think I ended up making like $4,000
Emma 9:34
Dude, you're like the Walter White of the digital world. Like, I feel like you were the one hustling people in Neopets.
Unknown Speaker 9:41
Maybe,
Unknown Speaker 9:42
yes,
Kelly 9:43
I had. Oh my god, I don't want to get myself legally in trouble. But I have all kinds of stories we can share offline. I
Emma 9:49
wish I wish I knew teenaged Kelly. But in any case, I do believe in today's day and age. Wow. While I was gonna say when but I just combined them into two words. While we are in this weird state having repercussions of a global pandemic, it's nearly impossible to have solely a brick and mortar business nowadays, like you have to have an online presence. I, I curious if this shift would have come one day or another? Had we not gone through this when we did? Um,
Kelly 10:24
however, absolutely, there's been a, there's been an ongoing shift, the pandemic just like, really pushed things along.
Emma 10:32
So it's a double edged sword because I feel like on one end, the benefits that you mentioned, having an international global consumer base is really a wonderful thing. But for many brick and mortar stores that have been around for decades and generations, maybe they're not as technically savvy as the tick tock age, you know what I mean? And so that was probably a really steep learning curve for them, like, where do you start? How do you make a website? How do you sell things? Like how do you deal with tax implications of now broadening your consumer base? These are all great things, or difficult things depending upon who your person that you're working with us?
Kelly 11:08
Without a doubt. Yeah, and I mean, that's, that's why I love Shopify so much. And I swear, this is not just going to be an advertisement for Shopify, but I love the platform. And they make it very accessible for people to who are not generally technically savvy to actually get up and running on Shopify with minimal assistance. And of course, Shopify support will also help you and all of their guides that they have, and all those amazing partners that are on the world during the Shopify partner program. So there are two pieces that I wanted to cover in this. The first part is starting your own store. And then the second part is actually building for e commerce, since this is obviously a developer focused podcast. So let's start with starting your own store. I have, I ran a merge store for a while. And so I know I got a lot of questions on how to actually start your store. And I said, I'd write a blog post. But it turns out, I hate writing blog posts, so I didn't do it. So let's kind of like walk through the steps of starting your own store. And I'm going to be talking a lot about a lot of steps related to Shopify here, just because that's what I build on is generally going to be the same from platform to platform, it's just how you go about doing it, it's going to be slightly different. So I think the first step here is figure out what you want to sell. I see a lot of merchants start selling something because they experienced some kind of problem in their working to solve that problem. A lot of business started like that way, like bite toothpaste, for example, breathing tubes of toothpaste is kind of a pain when you're traveling, for example. And so having like, little bits of toothpaste, where you literally just like bite down, and that's going to be the toothpaste that you need. makes it really easy to travel.
Emma 12:57
That's so cool. Do you also see they now have toothbrushes with like a toothpaste compartment underneath it that you can like squeeze up into the toothbrush or something I saw on Tick Tock because I'm a tick tock Queen now. And that's what the kids are using nowadays.
Kelly 13:11
How do you refill that?
Emma 13:13
I don't know. Well, I think like I think it's like a travel container. So like you just like I don't know the right word like, like, squeeze it in there. You don't mean like, you know what travel size? Like acrylic containers or stuff? I think it was just how do you clean it? That's all there question. I think you just throw it out. But
Kelly 13:34
they're just buy a new one or something.
Emma 13:37
That's a good point, though, is like, like your company has to this is my opinion. I feel like all successful companies solve a new problem, or they solve it in a unique way. Because to be honest, how many new problems are there coming out every single day? I'm not sure. I feel like a lot of problems have already been discovered. It's just about potentially creating a solution that differentiates itself. Or better. In Yeah, I
Kelly 14:03
mean, that's one of the most important things here is that it's not about being first to market. There are always there's always going to be competition. It's it's about differentiating yourself from your competitors to get people to actually buy from you. So yeah, and other other ways you might figure out what do you want to sell? I mean, my merge store, I just decided to start it because it was fun. You know, why not? Um, maybe you're a maker, you make something like candles or your art or something like that, and you want to sell it. Maybe it's like a little side hobby. It doesn't have to be like this grand business idea necessarily. It might not necessarily be aiming to build this multimillion dollar omni channel business by any means. But figuring out what to sell is kind of the first step.
Emma 14:51
I think what you just said was a really fascinating point that you kind of rushed over a little bit which was You don't have to be first to market and I remember reading In a book, and I believe it was the originals, the originals by Adam Grant, I think it was that book, where he discusses how some of these businesses came to be so successful. And it was the fact that they weren't first to market. They let other people rush into the market, make all these mistakes. And meanwhile, they're sitting there watching and we're finding their own process. Now, that being said, also, like, to some extent, like not every business has that same privilege, because it's expensive to start a business. And a lot of people rely on their business as their primary income. So like, if you are able to, like take a step back and not rushing to the market, I think that's a great point. Sorry, I just needed to make that.
Kelly 15:41
Oh, for sure. Which is a great segue into the next step, which is determine who your target market is, who was going to actually buy your products. And it's important to not just use your friends and family here as an example. Because you might get opinions on your products and whether or not they would buy it, and your friends and family tend to not be very honest with you. They'll usually say, Oh, this is such a great idea. Yeah, I'd love to buy this and they have zero intention of ever buying it. So you need to do some, like proper market research on who who is who is your target audience, not only where they're located, how they live their lives, what else are they buying, that might be, you know, kind of a complimentary product. What do they do for a living, like create these user stories around who your customer base is, before jumping into selling, or else you might be kind of marketing to the absolute wrong people.
Emma 16:33
It's also really freaking difficult to change human behavior, I remember in the Power of Habit, it's an awesome book. And he discusses the creation of toothpaste as a product, and how and also for breeze, both of those products change human behavior. Because back in the day, people didn't have any motivation to brush their teeth. Like there was I don't know, if there was a lack of medical research as to why they should or what they actually it was the adding of the mint flavoring that they marked, they were able to change human behavior by marketing is like, oh, have fresh breath. So if you are going to create a product that is aimed Its goal is to change human behavior in one way or the other. You have to make it as simple as possible for people to change their their behavior, and also give them motivation as to why they would.
Kelly 17:21
Yeah. So that's a really great point. Um, that book was called what the Power of Habit, okay, so what I want to talk about next is the different kinds of businesses that you can have, you might have come across the the phrases dropshipping, before or print on demand. Or, of course, there's creating your own products to sell, I'm pretty straightforward, you create your own products, you're you're sourcing the materials, you're having a warehouse source the materials to create the product, and then either you ship it out yourself, or you work with the like some kind of third party logistics warehouse to actually ship it out for you when the orders come in. That's going to be just a standard model that you see most businesses running. Drop Shipping is where you never actually maintain any stock, you're sourcing the products from third parties, wherever it could be from, you know, you hear like Alibaba a lot, or like AliExpress, or just other makers, like I've seen people drop ship from people on Etsy. And just to bring awareness to those products, you also have things like goop, I think is another one that does it, there are a bunch of them. Um, basically, the the benefit here is never having to maintain stock, you never have to be the one to actually ship the products yourself. Whether you have to deal with the returns depends on what the what the policy is. And you also have lower margins on these items, because you're buying the items from somebody else to resell. So there's really important to remember when it comes to drop shipping, lower margins is definitely part of this, this means you're going to be making less money per order. The other thing to remember is where these items are originally coming from. A lot of these drop shipping businesses that you're buying items from it you're sourcing from are based on China. And so it could be up to six weeks to receive a product. And you know, people are generally impatient, they don't want to wait that long to receive an item. So if you are going this route, just be hyper specific and clear on your website about how long things will take to ship. Otherwise, you're going to get a lot of customer support requests being like Hey, where's my package?
Emma 19:27
Yeah, I'm doing that right now. Like, I'm not gonna sit here and wait for a two second page web page slow. Do you think I'm gonna wait six weeks for a product I buy? Like unless it's an exceptional product and like if it's supporting a small business and like, like small craters, I'm happy to do it. But not if it's coming from AliExpress
Kelly 19:44
I've been waiting eight weeks now for my peloton to arrive. Oh,
Emma 19:48
my God. That's a lot.
Kelly 19:50
I Yep, I've got a 15 days to go.
Emma 19:53
So we're almost there. That must be heavy to ship though for what it's worth.
Kelly 19:58
It's just it's the number of people who are buying them, it's just the demand that caused it to take so long, because it's actually it's local. It's delivered locally. So they have a driver come like a peloton. Driver come and drop it off and
Emma 20:10
you ride a bike over actually.
Kelly 20:13
Yeah, he rides the bike takes the wheels off, and then that's it on the stand. Here you go. Yeah, totally. Okay, so that's some important information about drop shipping. Drop Shipping is one of the easiest ways to get into e commerce, though again, because you don't have to be doing the heavy lifting on the actual product building side. The other type that I ran was print on demand, which is, again, you're not sourcing the products, you're coming up with the designs for the products, though. And then you're having his third party actually print and ship those designs for you. Again, you do have lower margins with this, but you have more creative freedom over what it is that you're selling, because you're the ones who are actually you're the one who's actually designing those products. So that was the whole inspiration behind my mind merge stores that I didn't want to do with actually printing and shipping things. I just wanted to design and then carry on with my day.
Ali 21:09
No, yeah, that's what we did for the dev store and the ladybug star when we had that as well. Exactly,
Kelly 21:15
yeah. Okay, any questions about either any of these three, before we move on,
Ali 21:20
I didn't name a couple of the print on demand services.
Kelly 21:23
Yes. printful is the one that I would use as the primary one, printer fi is another really great one. They all have different types of products at different price points where they're being where they're shipping from. So definitely do your research. A lot of these allow you to request samples, potentially for like a nominal cost. So you can actually see the product before you start selling it, which is kind of an important thing to measure quality. And you also get the added benefit of being able to take your own product photos, which is a whole nother topic that we'll be getting into.
Ali 21:55
I've used both of those as well and have had good experiences.
Kelly 21:59
Yeah. The third one that I use is t launch, which is this Shopify specific one, I believe. But that's where like, I got my coasters from in the in the baskets. Oh, awesome. Yeah. Okay. So this next step here, and this is one that I really, really, really want to stress a little bit more detailed here is selecting a theme. And I say select a theme, because I know we're all developers, we don't need to custom build our store in order to be successful. And this is something I see from merchants all the time, they're like, Well, I have really complex needs. So I you know, I want to install these four apps. So I think a custom build is going to be the best to go. Also, I want to differentiate myself from from everyone else. I'm telling you, a vast, vast, vast majority of merchants do not need to have a custom design, custom built website. Shopify themes are really great, because they provide a really great starting point of kind of like a launching point from you, or from where you're what you can build. From there, you have full access to all the theme files to customize it however you want. But why completely build something from scratch when you don't need to, it's going to save you money, and it's going to save you time. And these themes are already supported. So
Emma 23:18
let's also talk about the power of design. Because if you change the color palette, and the typography, guess what it's gonna look and feel a lot different than that, quote, unquote, non custom template that you thought that right? So very quickly, color makes a huge difference in the ethos or the pathos of your website, meaning the trust that you build with your consumers. If you are creating an eco friendly clothing store, you're probably going to want to go with more of a green palette because a green instills like you know, like nature and or organic content and things of that nature. You wouldn't want to choose red, if that is your target market. Likewise, if you're building something to do with like social media, you might want to go with a blue because blue instills trust, learn about color, different kinds of like emotions that are elicited from color palettes. It's I swear it can make a huge difference to like how people engage with your content. Also typography like if you are building something that's very esteemed and like eloquent, maybe go for like a like a, like a Times New Roman, what are those it's Sarah fonts. That like the lettering looks a lot more put together more eloquent, more formal. If you are doing something more modern and you want to appeal to a younger audience go something sans serif, so it doesn't have the little like ligatures on the ends of your letters. We did an entire design episode with Steve sugar. So I highly recommend you listen to that if you want to learn the basics of design and how it can impact your product. But you know, it doesn't have to be times new roman or Arial. You can go to Etsy or creative marketplace or other online stores and buy digital files for custom fonts that you can use on your your website's highly recommend, like Kelly said, you don't need fully custom, you can do little things to improve the originality of your site.
Kelly 25:07
And one of the most powerful things you can do to differentiate yourself from others is the quality of your imagery of your photography. Investing in high quality it photos of your products and lifestyle shots is really going to make you stand out from the crowd. As long as your own photos and unbelted. Actually, let's go ahead and start talking about this. Now, at this point, you start creating your products. If you're using drop shipping, or print on demand kind of services, they sink into Shopify, for example. So you just need to write like after you design if you're doing print on demand, you need to do the title and the description. They provide images for you. Don't use them take your own. Because you can, if you do like a reverse Google image search for any of the images that are provided, you can see just how many stores are using the same images and the same default description that they provide for you. This is not going to help you at all with SEO. For one thing in two, there's no character to your site, your brand voice should be uniquely you on your site, you can use some of the content in like the bullet points in terms of like how to care for a product or the dimensions of it or whatever. But write your own product descriptions, take your own product photos, I think this is something that's really really important to stress. If you don't have the actual products themselves, like you haven't actually ordered all of them. There's a website called place that dotnet that lets you upload your photo your design that you created for like prints on demand, for example. And they have all different kinds of stock imagery that you can use that kind of places your design on top of these stock photos, this is better than using the default photos that are provided from from these drop shipping and print on demand tools.
Emma 26:54
As a quick note, you don't need a really nice camera to take awesome photos. I have an iPhone 10. And the camera on this is awesome. It like portrait mode. Every time I post a photo taken from my iPhone, people want to know what camera I'm using. I'm like it's just my iPhone. Now I know it is a newer model. But if you have a phone with a good camera, use that just make sure that your lighting is good. And your framing is good. And I'm sure that there are videos on YouTube you can use to to figure out those settings.
Ali 27:21
Yeah, lighting is everything.
Kelly 27:23
Yeah, I also want to shout out Shopify compass. If you create a Shopify store, you get access to Shopify compass for free, which is this huge library of tutorials and courses that various Shopify partners or previous merchants or active merchants have made for you to access to learn how to do all these things like how to run your Facebook ads, how to write your product descriptions, how to shoot good photos, like everything is there available for you, and it's a completely free resource if you're paying for a Shopify plan or if you're on a trial. So the next piece I would look at are apps. So on Shopify, what are considered like plugins on WordPress, or apps on Shopify, they're just like extensions, essentially, to add on to your store, whether they're back office so they're they're helping you run the run the business in some form, like managing your inventory, or things like that, or their actual storefront based apps, which are like product reviews, or connecting with the live chat service, for example. So there are three categories. I usually like recommending to start things off. The first is product reviews, go ahead and install this app. Now. I'm on Shopify, I like judge.me. I like Juniper, I like kendo. There's also free apps like Shopify product reviews to get you started. Product Reviews are really, really helpful for a number of reasons. One, they build trust, because people are reviewing the product to you're getting feedback on the product. And three, they're great for SEO because it actually brings your reading over to Google when somebody finds that product on Google. So highly recommend installing a product reviews app. Next is email marketing. If you're not going to immediately start sending emails, that's fine. At least start collecting the email addresses or give people the option to opt in. I'm a really, really big fan of clay vo spelled k l AVIYO. You can also use Shopify emails, they have like a whole email marketing thing, you can install that app there's omnisend all different kinds of email marketing, you can also use something like MailChimp, MailChimp does not have a direct integration with Shopify, though. So just heads up there. And then the third piece I would look at is support. So offering some kind of ability to chat live with your team or with you is really helpful and can make that make or break the purchasing decision. If they have like a really quick question for you, like, Hey, does this product contain this certain food because I'm allergic to it or something like that. Um, there are a bunch of free live chat apps in the app store that you can use or you can use a more full Customer Service kind of platform like gorgeous, it's g o rG IAS to act as your customer support network, which actually pulls in like comments from Facebook and DMS, from Instagram and all kinds of fun stuff so you can actually maintain all of your customer support inquiries on one place. Next creager recommended informational pages. So there are three primary pages that I recommend about us FAQs in contact us. Your About Us page should answer three questions. Who are you? What do you sell? And why should I the customer buy from you? Be creative in your copy. People like to get to know you, the owner and also you the brand what makes you special, what makes you different be like it have some fun with this. I see so many people have the most boring about us pages. That is zero inspiration to actually get me to buy from you. An important note about your About Us page makes you have some kind of button or call to action on there to lead people to shop again, don't let this page be a dead end. second page FAQ. This is a hill I will absolutely die on. I talked about it a lot on the commerce t podcast. You need an FAQ page. Everyone has questions. Everyone needs answers. The basic questions you're always going to need, what is your shipping and returns policy? What happens if my item arrives damaged? If you're selling any kind of food or anything that's anything that's ingestible or put on your skin? You need to include allergies, you need to include that like care guide, anything that people are going to have questions about, include those answers.
Use your customer service, like the questions that you receive from customers to kind of help guide these questions. But there are all kinds of guides on like, what are the absolute necessary FAQ. So you should be answering. When you write your your FAQ page, make sure the questions are coming from the perspective of the customer like what is your returns policy? I am I the customer? I'm asking you, the merchant that question. Don't do what is our returns policy because that's not what the customer is asking. Make sure your answers are concise and don't write paragraphs to respond. People do not have time or patience to read a long page of FAQs, make it readable so people can easily browse to see which question they're going to have answers to. I see a lot of people build their FAQ page into like an accordion. So you can easily toggle the question to see the answer. And the last thing I will touch on for FAQ is your last question should be what if my question was not answered here and direct them either to live chat or direct them to your form on the Contact Us page, which is the third page we're going to talk about your About Us page or your contact us page. Another great opportunity to highlight your most frequently asked questions people don't read, people do not read. Put the information in front of their faces many times as you can to cut back on customer support that you want to you want to cut back on the number of questions you're receiving where the answers very clearly written on your website, have a form that makes it easy for people to reach out to you. If you have some kind of direct email support or phone support. include this information here as well. If you have a brick and mortar location, make sure you include your address on there to all kinds of opportunities to to get to your customers and make it make it as easy as possible for them to reach you. But also make it easy for them to get answers before actually emailing you.
Ali 33:21
That's great advice. I'd also shout out Jenna Kutcher who she's not my favorite. She's kind of like a girl boss influencers. figure, definitely not my favorite. But she has really really great advice for creating it about our bio page. I think she has a podcast episode that I listened to you that was really excellent. It talks just about sharing your story because stories get people really hooked in. That's what I use for my about page on my blog, just telling my story and sharing a little bit about me behind the scenes. And I think that that really works in order to get people to believe in you and to build trust, which a lot of this is about.
Emma 34:04
I was just gonna say building trust is the fastest way to build trust. What I meant to say because it's 542 here in Stockholm, what I meant to say was that Sally's point, like sharing and opening up about yourself builds trust with people in you know, your consumer base, but also like in your network. Personally, that is how I think I on is one of the reasons I think I built a following on social media was because I share the shit I go through as a human. And I think if you can do that, as a business owner, it makes people want to it. What's the right term for that? Like, you have loyalty, your consumer loyalty is much higher.
Ali 34:48
Oh, for sure. I think that's one of our biggest piece of advice for social media and we've shared that in past episodes is sharing the real you and the things going on behind the scenes because that will make people relate to you I think the same is true for your about page,
Kelly 35:03
or Sure. So this next topic is a really fun one, you need to update your legal policies. Yay consulted attorney about this. This includes your terms and conditions, your privacy policy, your shipping and returns policies, make sure these are crystal clear. Make sure you have them accessible, make sure this information is available whenever somebody needs it. Shopify does provide you with templates that you can use to base these policies off of make sure you actually update the template because I had a lot of placeholder information in there. And I cannot explain how many websites I've visited that has still had that placeholder like bracket bracket business name in there instead of actually your company name.
Emma 35:46
A quick question how do you feel about people that don't have massively large budgets to hire lawyers and going through doc like legal document websites.
Unknown Speaker 35:55
Um,
Kelly 35:57
I'm really if you're running a business, I feel like it's really important to consult with an attorney, or even even like on a quick Hey, review this document for me as opposed to like draft this entire policy for me, there are a lot of people you who offer this kind of like a one off service, as opposed to like going through the entire hiring a business attorney process. But it is still something like just to protect yourself as in, especially when we're dealing with things like GDPR and ccpa. And in terms of like, keeping customer information, either confidential or having the ability to remove it, which by the way, Shopify already supports that out of the box. So they do have a customer deletion tool if you need it. But you want to make sure these policies are crystal clear.
Emma 36:41
Okay, that's good advice. Because I always went through like the Legal Zoom side of things I'm like, I mean,
Kelly 36:46
yeah, that's totally fine. As long as somebody like somebody is who is an attorney, reviews it? Yeah, you just want to make sure you're protected. Cool. Because you don't want to do something wrong here and then end up being sued.
Emma 37:02
Yeah, I would, I would call a lot more.
Kelly 37:04
Yeah, while I'm on this topic, let's talk about accessibility when it comes to e commerce because there are no guidelines specifically for e commerce businesses when it comes to accessibility. Um, Shopify themes that are available from the theme store are accessible Shopify as a whole is accessible, okay, assumption, some things are, um, but as soon as you start making any changes to your website, as soon as you install any apps, it is entirely on you to make sure your store is accessible. I am not a fan of the apps like excessive B that supposedly protect you from from lawsuits. They don't work. I mean, I've heard from numerous merchants who had that app installed still still get sued. So just I mean, follow actual accessibility guidelines. And we do have a podcast episode covering accessibility that we will link to in the show notes as well. Same thing applies here does not matter if you're running an e commerce business, it still needs to be fully accessible. Like law firms are intentionally targeting online stores because there's such a gray area here so it's easy quick wins for them. So do what you can up front to protect yourself and make your store fully accessible. Okay, now that we're past the legal stuff, let's talk about selecting your payment gateway. And the reason why I wanted to talk about this is because different payment methods are used in trusted globally. We're used to in the states just entering your credit card information in or using Google pay or Apple Pay. Not everybody uses a credit card for example. and debit cards can be be declined for example, or maybe they just don't have that built in trust on actually entering their credit card information for your on your stores, they'd rather use some kind of payment gateway, they like respect they trust which would be like PayPal, for example, or Amazon pay. So I often recommend get a credit card payment method in there. Um, Shopify payments is actually built on its rebranded stripe. So it's literally just using stripe for your store is just called Shopify payments. With that you do get access to Apple Pay shop, pay Google pay, all the like one click Checkout kind of things are in all of the accelerated payment payment gateway options. But I also recommend including a non credit card based payment gateway as well, such as PayPal or Amazon pay. I know people have a lot of opinions when it comes to paypal. I also have a lot of headings when it comes to paypal. But the reality is merchants are not merchants customers trusted. And so it can make or break a transaction if they don't want to enter their credit card information and on site. Amazon pays just another wallet Amazon so people trusted because they already have all their credit cards stored on there for example. And then you have all of the I'm not going to get too deep into this but they're also buy now pay later options. So basically like splitting your payments To You know, for parts, such as a firm or klarna, or afterpay, or sessile, just to name four of them. payment gateways are fun, just to name. Yeah, and as I've stated multiple times, consultant, accountant, consultant attorney, speak to the professionals here in terms of making sure you're capturing taxes appropriately and all the legal stuff.
Emma 40:27
I'm just excited about ecommerce Kelly.
Kelly 40:31
You look at you look like you are here's dead panning me. Okay.
Emma 40:35
But Kelly, how do I develop for e commerce?
Kelly 40:38
Before we move on to that, I have one more thing to point out. But wait, there's more. running an online store is not build it in, they will come. You need to market your products. Whether this is through social media, it's running Google ads, it's I don't know, having a strong email marketing and SMS strategy.
Emma 40:59
There's a book I highly recommend called growth hacker marketing, it's tiny, under 100 pages talks about how to market if you don't have a marketing department highly recommend we'll link it in the show notes. I'd also quickly suggest having social media as a business if you are a business because that's where all the millennials hang out.
Kelly 41:16
Alright, now let's get into developing for e commerce. This I think running a starting your own business takes a lot longer than learning how to build for e commerce when you're already a developer. So there are three primary areas that you can build for ecommerce. The first is setting up stores. So just helping a merchant get up and running on Shopify, installing apps, helping them choose a theme making some you know minor customizations to the theme, setting up their fonts and colors, adding in the content adding in the products. This will means a list a little bit less developer heavy, but it's a really good way to really familiarize yourself with the Shopify back end Shopify admin, understanding how it works, or whatever other e commerce platform we're using. Like I said, I'm only thinking in terms of Shopify. The second is building and selling a theme. So these are the you know, what's actually being sold in the Shopify theme store, for example, or from a third party theme, creator out of the sandbox is one of my absolute favorites from Shopify, they do have a couple things in the Shopify theme store, but my absolute favorites are actually sold off of Shopify. So basically, you design, you build a theme, you add features to it, you let the merchants actually pay for the theme, and install it. And of course, you're going to end up supporting it as well. A lot of Shopify themes range from you know, well, some are free, but you might sell a theme for like $180, a installation per installation, or I've seen themes go as high as $450. My favorite theme on like ever from is from out of the sandbox, it's turbo is I think, like $350 per purchase. So you could make some good money from from selling themes. And the third way, of course, building on top of Shopify, when it comes to themes, whether you're setting up the store selling a theme, it gives you plenty of opportunity to use front end languages, which I'll get into momentarily. The third way is to build and sell an app. So extend the basic functionality of Shopify or whatever e commerce platform you're on. And whether it's back office, or its storefront based, and you can sell that app, a lot of these have a monthly fee, that may be usage based and maybe based on how much you're paying to Shopify, for example, which plan you're on. And you can determine what these pricing strategies are. I've been watching a number of developers who use the pandemic to build their first app and sell it. And they've been really public about how much money they're making. And they've gone from launching an app in September to bringing in $5,000 a month from people just installing and using the app. So I'm a really big fan of looking at the opportunity to build for e commerce because there's just so many opportunities here. Just on Shopify, there are over a million merchants. So you have a huge market of people who are who you could be marketing these services to. In terms of languages required. We're looking for themes, it's going to be your basic front end languages, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, having an understanding of how API's work is really helpful. Shopify does have a number of API's that their storefront API that you might end up using, or any of the rest based API's, like the cart j. s, is used a lot for adding items to the cart via Ajax, Shopify themes often use jQuery. So just a heads up still little looming in the past there would be nice to move beyond was that
Ali 44:37
jQuery is fun, though. I miss jQuery.
Kelly 44:41
Honestly, that's why I don't totally hate it. It's just I always have to like, hey, heads up. You might be using jQuery. We end up having to use it all the time, because that's just what themes are. A lot of Shopify themes are built on.
Ali 44:54
Yeah, I missed that era of web development.
Kelly 44:58
You don't have to miss it. Come join me. And then liquid is the is a Ruby based language that I think was built by Shopify, which is used for like pulling in actual content, think like any kind of templating language essentially. And then if you're building, let's say Magento, for example, is powered by PHP, if you are into that kind of thing, or WooCommerce is also going to be PHP based or big commerce is is a typical front end languages, with with liquid or their own version of liquid as well. If you go headless, so separating the backend of your store and building a custom storefront for it, this gives you a little bit more freedom to vote for what you use, a lot of JavaScript libraries and frameworks are going to be used here, whether you prefer Vue JS or react. These are usually the two that we see come up most frequently, you also are going to need an understanding of graph QL. And how how that data is actually pulled in. The storefront API from Shopify is graph QL. A graph qL API. So learning graph qL is really helpful here. I personally prefer how to graph ql.com as a as a good resource to learn. And then when it comes to building Shopify apps, code in whatever language you want, this the beauty of it, I mean, you can literally build an app however you want. Of course, just make sure you have the understanding of API's. We personally at the taproom, builder apps with node Express, graph, qL, and react. It's and then our themes are usually HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and then if we're getting into API work, we're usually using Vue JS on Shopify themes as well. So that's our tech stack. I just blew through all kinds of stuff when developing for e commerce. What questions do you have
Emma 46:47
is e commerce on steroids? That's what we should title this episode. I don't have any questions. I feel like that's superduper comprehensive. It was a lot though. And I feel like it's, you know, people listening to this, it's gonna take them maybe a little bit of time to digest. But there's so much valuable information in this episode that I didn't even realize like the different types of dropshipping versus print on demand versus create your own products and like all these different things, I had no idea.
Ali 47:13
Yeah, agreed at all. Go ahead and shout out. I guess a pre shout out shout out that a lot of the front end frameworks are doing really cool. Ecommerce starters like next j. s has one I think it integrates with Shopify or whatever you want to use for e commerce. And then my manager Natur dabit. He has an example of jamstack e commerce that's built with Gatsby. And I think that's really cool as well. So we can link those in the show notes.
Kelly 47:46
Awesome. And just to throw out some more, some more resources really quick here. And then we can wrap up and do shout outs. Shopify dot dev is a really great resource for learning how to build for Shopify Shopify partners is where you can become a Shopify partner, naturally partners@shopify.com. And then we're also going to link in twitch stream in the show notes as well. I do a weekly twitch stream every Wednesday at two. It's called Kelly plus Kelly with my counterpart, Thomas Kelly, who works for Shopify. And we're we're building a store called shopping points calm so you can actually follow along as we build a full Shopify store. That's awesome. The End, let's do shout outs.
Ali 48:27
Okay, mine is kind of cop out, but it's warmer weather. It's finally no longer in like the single digits in Chicago and I feel like my mood is just eat 100 times better. It's so nice. And I can actually go outside and I love it.
Kelly 48:42
It's amazing. The cold is here. Okay, of course I'm in I'm in Georgia. I'm the coldest that is this week is like 60. It's going to be in like the middle of July seven days.
Emma 48:53
It's negative to here and knowing Oh, no,
Unknown Speaker 48:57
no, no,
Emma 48:57
no. Okay, like this. Now, I'm not leaving my house. So yeah, fair enough.
Kelly 49:02
Emma, what's your shout out?
Emma 49:03
I want to shout out the two of you. Because when I was going through a shit time, not only did you send me flowers, but you got me a book club subscription to the English bookstore in Stockholm, which I'm loving. And I went and picked up my book yesterday and I got two that were on like the book club. I bought the other one because I like they both sound interesting. But I got such a fun age by Kylie read, which is what I've been wanting to read. And it just it sounds really, really interesting. So I'm excited. So thank you.
Ali 49:30
Yeah, sure. I read that last year. It's it's a good book.
Emma 49:35
Yeah. Kelly, what's your shadow?
Kelly 49:38
Yeah, my shout out. I know we talked about Adam Grant earlier, but he recently came out with a new book called think again. And I am honestly on chapter two. So I'm not super deepest, yet, but the concept of it I absolutely love it's basically talking about how reframing your mind rethinking being open to other you know did change like using the changing of new information to actually reframe your thoughts is a skill that you can learn. And it helps to kind of keep an open mind and question your own opinions and biases. And also kind of create a an environment to allow others to take on those those same behaviors. So I'm really excited about it. Think again by Adam Grant. All right, so that's it for this week. Thank you for listening to me speak for nearly an hour. If you liked this episode, tweet about it. We'll be selecting one tweeter to win one of the books we mentioned this week since we named 900 books. We post new episodes every Monday so make sure you're subscribed to be notified. Also check us out on youtube@youtube.com slash Ladybug podcast. Please leave us a review review reviews because really happy and we will see you next