I Forgot About Shopify — A Brief Update on my Screen Sales

byKLThayer

614 followers

2 years ago

Hey WA friends and community! I hope all are well and progressing.

I wanted to give a brief update on my screen making/selling for those who have been following my previous posts on this adventure, and I PROMISE I'll make it brief this time!

After the fiasco of my frame suppliers doubling my order and having to take a loan from my employer to cover the cost of them, my screen sales have drastically declined from what they were when I first started and could hardly keep up with the orders coming in.

This is both good and bad. It is good in the sense that it's given me time to do some other tasks on my MASSIVE to do list, but bad in the sense that I'm now struggling financially and need to generate some quick cash flow.

You may recall that I listed my screens on two sites: eBay and Etsy, and had most of my orders from eBay, but Etsy was where I got the one customer that bought 10 of my screens at once. He's also the one who had a problem with the exact alignment of my screens; my most recent post discusses this issue.

I don't remember if I mentioned in that post that this customer was able to find a small washer of some sort at his local hardware store that fit perfectly and eliminated the problem he was experiencing with my product. Nevertheless, I will take measures to correct this issue with my frame suppliers before making any future orders from them.

Another problem occurred recently when a customer cut their finger on a sharp edge I obviously missed in my production process. I DO sand down the edges for this very reason, and to remove excess glue from attaching the mesh to the frame. Clearly I missed a spot and when the customer notified me, (gratefully she just messaged me instead of leaving a bad review) I apologized sincerely and offered to replace her screen with a new one and I would cover all shipping charges. In her message, she'd stated that her husband had sanded down the sharp spot, and she didn't reply to my offer, so I assume all is well enough. Still, not a good thing and I'll be making improvements to my process and QC checks.

The situation being what it is, I was preparing to "dive in" and list my product on Amazon, (which I've been very hesitant to do) and I saw something, (can't recall what) that reminded me of Shopify.

So, I decided to give them a try, and spend most of the day yesterday setting up my account and such. It turns out they've got a plugin I was able to use which transferred over all my product listings from Etsy, and that made things very quick and easy, not to mention convenient. I had to try a few different plugins before I found the one that worked for me, but luckily it worked great once I found it!

That is a benefit to using Shopify that I was previously unaware of, and I believe they have a plugin to do the same thing from eBay, although I'm not going to do that. I only have my screens on eBay, but I'll soon be getting my t-shirt patterns listed on Etsy, (and now on Shopify in a few clicks of my mouse) and getting more experienced and familiarized with both Shopify and Etsy and how to better use them in my business.

I've already jumped into all the related training and blogs, etc., related to this subject on WA, and will be going through more of those in the near future, and there are plenty, to be sure.

I also didn't know that you can set up Shopify like your own website, including the ability to have a blog and use your own domain, (although I learned that there is an issue with domains hosted on WA, but that may have since been resolved). I don't know how much of that feature I'll end up using on my Shopify shop; I'm still very much getting my feet wet there.

On that note, I found Shopify to be quite user-friendly. I'm learning more and becoming better every day, but still don't consider myself any kind of expert when it comes to this whole online [affiliate] marketing arena. So, even though there is a lot to do and learn on Shopify, it was nice to see that they have a step-by-step process you can check off as you complete the tasks associated with setting up your account and payment information, etc.

I also learned, (on WA) that you can sign up to be an affiliate for Shopify, but I don't know if that's something I'll implement in the future or not. I'm still trying to focus on my primary niche and adding regular, quality content, and admittedly I've severely slacked on my regular posts to my website. I've even slacked off on my WA training, which is regrettable, but has kind of been necessary, and I will get back to it soon!

What I haven't done is neglect to keep learning, growing and progressing. I'll get back to my training and regular content creation/posting soon. Part of the problem is that I've known for a long time that I'm going to need to implement vlogging and YouTube into my business and especially my particular niche. I've got a lot of helpful training videos I could create in my niche, but I can't do that until I learn more about, and gain some experience in making and editing my own videos.

With the help of WA, (in particular Eric Cantu's expert training on this subject), I'm diving in and will be doing that in the near future, so be watching for me to post my first one, (when I have it ready) here on WA to try my hand at this new arena and get the community's feedback and advice. Realistically, that won't be for a while yet, as I've got other priority issues/projects to deal with as well.

Anyway, this was already longer than I intended, so I'll leave that with you for now.

As always, I'm interested and grateful for any comments, suggestions, etc. Thank you for reading! 😊

Kevin