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I just released my Shopify Made Simple eBook for Free

March 25, 2013 By 5 Comments

Shopify-2010-black

For those of you running a Shopify Store, considering Shopify for their business or interested in learning more about Shopify I’ve written an eBook that I decided to offer for free.  While Shopify is a pretty intuitive ecommerce platform to use for your business I wrote the book from the perspective of the beginner to intermediate user.  I hope that you find it useful in starting your business using Shopify but if you have any questions, suggestions or things you want to see in future versions please let me know.

To Get A Free Copy of This eBook:  If you want to get a free copy of this eBook than please subscribe to my email list and I will personally send you a copy, free of charge.

Newsletter-sign-up

 

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How to Use County Tax in Shopify

March 13, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Someone recently contacted me after having troubles finding a way to charge taxes in the provinces that they do businesses in.  Naturally, I found the question intriguing enough that I wanted to research it and what I found was interesting  first of all was that there was no app to do this which means that you need to rely on native functionality in Shopify.

Next, I logged into my test site to have a look and what I found was interesting is that Shopify currently has a feature called “County Tax Beta” which you can opt-in or opt-out of depending on if you want to use it.  If you didn’t than you might decide to use regions and set it up that way but what county tax beta gives you is…

County Tax (currently in beta) is a new feature that automatically calculates the state and county sales taxes for a purchase based on the customer’s zip code. If the shop has County Tax enabled (new shops have it enabled by default, and as of April 2012, nearly half of all active shops do), the tax rates defined for the state will be ignored in favor of the tax calculated by County Tax, which is more accurate.

Source: http://wiki.shopify.com/Province_%28API%29#Special_note_for_U.S._Shops_using_the_County_Tax_feature

So you might be asking yourself, “that’s great Luc, but what does it look like when this feature is used?”  Let me show you here…

Shopify - County Tax Beta feature

For those of you who want to opt out of using this feature please feel free to look for the following link and simply click it to opt out.

Shopify - county tax beta opt out option

Whatever you might decide to do and even though this is still in beta it is a very useful feature that allows you to quickly setup taxes in Shopify and organize it in a way that makes sense from a country by country perspective.  If you haven’t checked out Shopify as an ecommerce platform feel free to click here and check it out.

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Launching my first eBook called Shopify Made Simple

January 18, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Shopify-2010-blackOver the past few months I’ve been working on a few side projects outside of writing, Website-Experts.ca.  One of these projects is an eBook called , Shopify Made Simple that I am self-publishing.  I wanted to write an eBook that walked users and store owners through the ropes of setting up a Shopify store from start to finish.  The finished product is almost done and I’ve even sent out a few copies to some designers and store owners.

So what does my eBook cover?

  • Basic setup
  • creating and managing products in Shopify
  • managing and tracking inventory in Shopify
  • Setting up taxes in Shopify
  • Setting up shipping options in Shopify
  • How to add content to your Shopify store
  • How to setup a domain in Shopify

One of the ways that I am trying to help business owners looking to open a store using Shopify is presenting it in a fashion that appeals to the non-coder audience.  The non-coder audience are people that aren’t familiar with coding and still want to setup a Shopify store.  While the clicks not code mentality is nothing new its a way that I chose to gear the book.  I hope that people find it useful and informative.

Find out how to get a free copy

If you are interested in getting a free copy what you need to do to qualify is to sign up after clicking on my affiliate link with Shopify and opening a paying store.  If you open a free trial using my affiliate link and later decide to pay for it I will be reaching out to you to send you a copy of this eBook free of charge!  Click here to sign up for a Shopify store today through my affiliate link here and if you decide to sign up for a paid Shopify store I will reach out to you to send you your own personal copy of Shopify Made Simple.

For those of you wondering when the book will be available to buy, for those of you already with a Shopify store please email me or post your interest in the comments section of this article and I will send out a quick update when it goes live.

Filed Under: Announcements, Lifestyle Design Tagged With: ,

How To Import and Manage Products in Shopify

January 10, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Today let’s have a look at how you can import products to your Shopify store using a CSV file.  For those of you already running a Shopify store this will allow you to update multiple products at one time from one file which will save you time.

Exporting products from Shopify

Exporting Products from Shopify

Now if you’ve never created products in your Shopify store before you may want to skip to the next section where we look at grabbing the default CSV template to create products from scratch in your Shopify store.  For those of you interested in exporting products from Shopify to make changes and re-import this will quickly show you just how you can do that.

Step 1: Log into your Shopify store and click on the “Products” tab.

Step 2: Click on the “Export products” link.

Step 3: You can either choose to select “all products” or “currently shown products”.

Step 4: Lastly, you can add, delete and edit products in your CSV file and get ready to import them back into Shopify (We will cover this next).

Importing products into Shopify

Importing Products into Shopify

Now that we’ve looked at exporting and managing products in a CSV file we will now cover just how you can go about importing them for the first time or re-importing to overwrite your existing products in a few easy steps.

Step 1: Log into your Shopify store and click on the “Products” tab.

Step 2: Click on the “Import products” link (as seen above).

Importing products into Shopify

Step 3: Next, I want to focus on one area of the import page and as you can see below this gives you the ability to use a generic CSV file if you don’t have any products currently in your Shopify store, or if you are importing or re-importing products into Shopify you can choose from 2 options when importing your CSV file including…

  1. Ignore products that already exist
  2. Overwrite existing products

Once you’ve found your existing CSV file you can then upload it into Shopify.  Using CSV files to manage your existing products or import new ones will save you time instead of using the standard interface to create products so this is definitely worth spending the time to learn so that you can quickly update your products and move on to the next task.

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How to Use Shopify Catalog Manager

January 6, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Shopify Catalog Manager

Shopify is a great ecommerce platform for selling your products online and with more and more apps being made available to Shopify store owners I wanted to take a moment and highlight one in particular called “Shopify Catalog Manager”.

Yesterday I wrote about Shopify’s Catalog app that allows people to purchase from all Shopify stores that are currently live.  But this raises a concern for Shopify store owners “What if I don’t want certain products or collections from my Shopify store to show up to users on the Shopify Catalog app?”  This is the reason why Shopify built its Catalog Manager app to help you manage your Shopify store.

In order to do this you’ll need to know how to install apps into Shopify which I will quickly show you now.

Step 1: Once you are logged into your Shopify store go to Apps | Manage Apps and then select the “Add a New Application” link.  Doing this will take you to Shopify’s App Store.

Installing Shopify Catalog Manager

Step 2: Now that you are on Shopify’s App Store type in the name of the app you want to install into your Shopify store.  In this case we’ll type in “Shopify Catalog Manager”.

Finding the app on Shopify's App Store

Step 3: You’ll now be brought to the App’s listing page and in this case you’ll see the listing for Shopify Catalog Manager.  From here simply click “Install App” which will bring up a pop-up where it will ask for the URL of your Shopify store and once you enter it you’ll have access to the Shopify Catalog Manager App.

Installing Shopify Catalog Manager

Now that you have the Catalog Manager installed you’ll notice that you are brought to a screen that allows you to drill down further on collections on your Shopify store or by product.

Shopify Catalog Manager - Viewing Collections and Products on your Shopify Store and their visibility

For instance, drilling into collections on your Shopify store you can control if the entire collection is or isn’t visible to the Shopify Catalog and you can click on specific collections on your Shopify store to control and restrict the visibility of specific products as you can see below by simply clicking on the product or collection that you want to restrict visibility on.

Shopify Catalog Manager - Control visibility of collections and products to the Shopify Catalog app

I hope you’ve found this useful in managing what appears and doesn’t appear in Shopify’s Catalog app.

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Using Shopify’s Catalog to Reach More Customers

January 5, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Shopify Catalog App

Shopify is a great ecommerce platform based out of Ottawa, Canada so naturally I am partial to it being Canadian myself. But, in all seriousness, the bright and forward-thinking brains at Shopify recently launched an app simply called “Catalog”. Shopify Catalog is anything but a catalog in the traditional sense. What it allows Shopify store owners to do is to sell through the app and with more than 5 million products on Shopify stores today that represents a lot of additional sales for Shopify store owners. This is a great feature and it’s important to note the following for any Shopify store owners…

  1. Shopify store owners don’t have to do anything to ensure their products are available in the Catalog app other than making them available on their Shopify store
  2. Customers who love your products can click the love button on your products to act as a bookmark
  3. This app opens up a new way of selling using mobile commerce (These are transactions that take place on a mobile device like an iPad for example)

Check out some exclusive screenshots of what catalog looks like and how it functions.  What you’ll notice is that once your customers have downloaded the app they can see suggested shops, products and a search engine for searching across all of Shopify’s 35,000 stores currently.

Catalog by Shopify

Shopify Catalog - Products I Love

This is a great sales tool that ecommerce store owners who use can take full advantage of and should.  Recently Shopify updated the app and already since it was rolled out 2 months ago over 20,000 people have installed it on their iPads which is pretty impressive.  If you haven’t already signed up for a Shopify account and you are running or looking to run an ecommerce business then why not sign up for a free account and check out Shopify today.

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5 Shopify Themes That Will Blow Your Mind

December 2, 2012 By Leave a Comment

The New Standard Theme

Style: Slate

Price: Free

Pros of Getting This Theme

  • Its free
  • Clean and minimalist design
  • Easy to customize with twitter integrations, signup forms and filterable collections

Cons of Getting This Theme

  • Its not created for a mobile devices with response theme design
  • No support on this theme

Check it out in action!

 

The Mobilia Theme

Style: Napa

Price: $140

Pros of Getting This Theme

  • Its a responsive theme built for use with mobile devices
  • Highly customizable font (typography) and color settings
  • Includes access to four styles (Napa, Sydney, Tokyo and Milan)
  • Great customer support
  • Awesome full width slideshow
  • Perfect for photographers, designers and other design based businesses looking to showcase their products

Cons of Getting This Theme

  • Its expensive at $140 but it does include four styles for that price

Check it out in action!

 

The Masonry Theme

Style: Flamingo

Price: $150

Pros of Getting This Theme

  • Its a responsive theme built for use with mobile devices
  • great product and collection layout options
  • excellent typography options (choose from over 500 Google fonts)
  • The option for customers to personalize products
  • Perfect for eCommerce store owners looking for an intuitively styled theme

Cons of Getting This Theme

  • May not work for service based businesses using Shopify as this is more designed for products then services.

Check it out in action!

 

The Responsive Theme

Style: Paris

Price: $140

Pros of Getting This Theme

  • Its a responsive theme built for use with mobile devices
  • Customizable typography, color palettes and product layout options
  • Customizable homepage slideshows with optional captions
  • Associate product variants with product images
  • Zoom option on product page galleries
  • Perfect for store owners looking for a minimalistic theme to showcase luxury goods

Cons of Getting This Theme

  • This theme has a lot of ability to customize however if you have beginner level web design then you may find a lot of the functionality offered is overkill.
  • The style of this theme suggests high end or luxury goods so keep this in mind if you are selling everyday common items as it may not be the best fit for your audience

Check it out in action!

 

The Carleton Theme

Style: Modern

Price: $180

Pros of Getting This Theme

  • Its a responsive theme built for use with mobile devices
  • packaged with two styles (Classic and Modern)
  • Customizable promo boxes
  • great customer support
  • Unique product viewer

Cons of Getting This Theme

  • This theme has a lot to offer but with a price tag of $180 is hard to say that the money you are spending on the theme is truly worth it unless you use the customer support and the theme and styles to their fullest

Check it out in action!

 

Note to Interested Shopify Users

I will be releasing an eBook in the next few weeks that I’ve written to take some of the guess work out of developing and building Shopify stores so please stay tuned for more details.  If you’ve never heard of Shopify before please feel free to check out more about this ecommerce platform here and sign up for a free 30 day trial.

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How to Install Apps on a Shopify Site

March 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment

If you’ve never used Shopify to run your ecommerce business I wanted to take a few moments to show you how you can quickly and easily add apps to your Shopify website.  The great thing about this is that you don’t need to code anything to add a Shopify App to your Shopify website and you can have it up and running in a few minutes.  So with that let me guide you through some easy to follow steps to add apps to your Shopify website.

Step 1: Once you are logged into your Shopify site click on “Apps” on the menu and then select “Get More Apps” from the drop down list as you can see below…

Step 2: You will be directed to the Shopify App Store where you can download any number of apps.  For this tutorial I will download a free app called “Plug in SEO” and once you click on the app you want you will then be directed to a page similar to this…

Step 3: Once you’ve clicked the “Install App” button that you can see above you will be directed to a page like this to enter the URL of your Shopify website.

Step 4: Next you will see a screen that says something to the affect of “You are about to install this app” where you can click the “Install” button to install it to your Shopify website

Step 5: Lastly, go to “Apps” on the menu in your Shopify store and you should see the app installed there and ready to use!

Using apps on your Shopify website is a very useful way to ensure that you can extend the standard functionality that Shopify already offers with a customized flavor of usage whether you are looking for a social media app, accounting app, or something else you should definitely checkout Shopify’s App Store for all the apps currently available to you.

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How to Design Your Shopify Website

February 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Today I am going to discuss two different approaches to designing a website using Shopify.  The first approach is using the “clicks not code” approach for people that are more comfortable working in Shopify’s user interface.  The second and more programmatic approach is using the “code not clicks” method of developing a site using Shopify.

Once you’ve finished signing up for the free trial of Shopify and you are logged into your Shopify website you are going to want to see how you can design your Shopify website.  The first approach to develop a Shopify website is to take the “clicks not code” method of website development.  This approach should help those of you looking to for an easy way to setup a Shopify website by clicking and selecting options in the Shopify back-end.  No additional coding required.  The first thing that you need to do after logging into your Shopify website is go to Themes | Theme Settings which will give you open access to make changes to your Shopify website.

There are a number of settings that you can setup for your Shopify Theme by default including General site options, colours, fonts, buttons, and styling for a number of areas including…

  • Page Background
  • Header
  • Homepage and Homepage Carousel
  • Right Column
  • Product Grids
  • Product Page
  • Cart Page
  • Blog
  • Footer
  • Additional Layouts
Depending on what you want to modify on your Shopify website you are going to find that the user interface highly useable as shown in the following screenshot.
As you can see there are a lot of ways in which you can customize your site without any coding at all.  The next option for getting your Shopify site customized is to use the “Code Not Clicks” option to really dig into the code behind Shopify to begin to understand how you can extend Shopify for your own needs.  This is not for the “faint of heart” because it requires coding knowledge but if you are comfortable you can definitely being to customize your Shopify site in virtually no time at all.  In order to get to the Shopify templates that run your website go to Themes | Template Editor.

The Template Editor in Shopify allows you to do a number of things including editing and developing Layouts and Templates to run your Shopify site, access the variable reference guide that allows you to understand how to code your Shopify site.  Shopify uses a language called “liquid” which is a mark-up language that the Shopify team developed to customize and code Shopify pages and templates quickly and easily.

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