Hey guys, today I want to share some advice for setting up an online store.
In case you didn't know I have a little apparel company called Liner Note Kids that I started
when I was in university, and I have actually made a whole video on the story of how I started
that little business.
and on that video actually I've had quite a few questions about how to set up an online
store, which storefront to choose, things like that.
So i thought I would dedicate todays video to telling you all about how I set up my store
online and giving you some tips and recommendations.
the hardest part of setting up an online store, for me anyway, was choosing what site to go
with.
And what I found the best way to do this was, was to write a checklist of all the things
that I needed from an online storefront, and then just keep searching, keep googling until
I found the one that suited me.
I'm sure you've all heard of Etsy, and that's definitely one of the most popular online
storefronts, but I wanted something that i could fully customise the look of, so that
I could tie it in with my existing website, so that just wasn't for me.
I also didn't wan tto pay anything over and above the normal paypal sellers fees because
I wasn't selling that many tshirts and I wanted to try spend as little on the setup as possible.
I also needed something that was easy to use obviously, and I also wanted to be able to
list as many items as I wanted for sale.
Finding something that was that good, but also free was really difficult but one day
just through random googling I stumbled across a storefront called Storenvy.
Storenvy suits me perfectly, first of all because its totally free to use.
A lot of other site options I looked at did have free plans but it turned out with them
that you could only list five items or so for sale which isn't ideal if you're like
me and wanting to put out collections, maybe with tshirts in a bunch of different colours
and mens and womens versions so that just wasn't gonna work.
But with Storenvy I can list as many items as I want, and I can also organise them into
collections which is perfect for me.
They also let you have full access to the CSS and HTML of your store which was awesome
because I could blend it in with my current website like I wanted to.
I wouldn't really recommend playing around with that though if you're not really into
coding.
There is options to customise the colours and things like that just in the standard
theme so if coding's not your strong point do that instead.
Once you've picked the storefront option that you're gonna go with and had a bit of a play
around with it, obviously the next step is to list items for sale, and a tip for this
is definitely to take clear, good-looking photos of everything.
When I'm shopping, if its for clothes, I really like to see what items look like on a person
so that's what I've done for the photos on my store.
But you obviously have to decide what works best for you.
Make sure you describe your items really well too, and if there's tagging options in the
storefront you've picked make sure you tag them well.
A good percentage of the sales that i get actually come through the storenvy marketplace.
every item that you list for sale on Storenvy goes into their general marketplace so if
someone just searches on Storenvy the site, not your particular store, they could find
items in your store which relate to the terms that they've searched.
Even though they weren't looking for your store in particular which is really cool.
And I wouldn't have gotten those sales if I hadn't tagged my items properly.
Make sure your store has a good FAQ section also just so that customers can read a bit
more about you and see that you're trustworthy.
It's also a really good idea to clearly state how long shipping will take, that's especially
important for me because, as you can probably tell from my accent if you didn't know, I
live in New Zealand so all of the items I ship come from here so they take much longer
than average to get anywhere basically and a lot of my customers are from the US and
they're used to shipping obviously being one or two days, so its important I state that
really clearly so that there's no nasty surprises.
So if you're just up front and honest about everything you shouldn't have any problems.
And that's pretty much it really.
I mean if you've got the merchandise already then getting set up with an online store isn't
really that hard.
Like I mentioned the hardest part is actually just choosing which storefront to use.
And I highly recommend storenvy for that.
They're not paying me to make this video I just think they're absolutely awesome and
I've had such a good experience with them so I'll leave a link to storenvy down below
so you can check it out and see if it might be right for your online store.
And if you're interested in checking out my store then I'll leave a link to that below
as well.
If you found this video interesting or maybe it helped you out somewhat then please give
this video a thumbs up and if you've got any other questions that maybe I didn't answer
during this video, feel free to leave them down below in the comments.
I'll see you guys next time.
bye!