Quite a Learning Experience- Part I
Well, it's been quite the learning experience! In the past, I have created dozen of blogs and found them simple and enjoyable to make, but this was my first attempt at an e-commerce website. Talk about a horse of a different color!
From the very beginning, I decided to go with Shopify as my e-commerce platform. I think it was a good move. I have had nothing but a position experience when calling their toll free number for help! They were like life support on the other end of the phone. I'd go into a phone conversation extremely frustrated that I couldn't figure things out myself....
You know the feeling, right?
But then I'd emerge from the call feeling like a champ because I had experienced "aha!" moments and now I could conquer the world!
With each new discovery, I inched forward towards the completion of my brand new website.
It was actually fun to design the website. I knew how to give my website the look I wanted because of my experience in creating blogs. Add images, edit colors, fonts, etc. Fun stuff. Effortless.
Then came the transfer of info from Etsy to my Shopify website. Also effortless. It was as easy as exporting my listing files from Etsy to importing them into my website. BUT THEN--- I had to edit each individual listing (all 400 of them)!
Because when the info was imported from Etsy, it ended up in one big clumped paragraph. So one by one I edited the text in each listing. The photos had all been transferred in the export/import process. Thank goodness! So all that was left was to add tags to each listing, edit SEO titles and descriptions, and set up "collections". I used tags to automatically compile collections. That was easy enough once I figured it out.
Once I had my Collections organized, I started putting my main menu together. That was something new to me. It took a while to figure that out and yes, Shopify did get a call from me. They walked me through it. Before long, I had a main menu with sub menus under them. Things were coming together! Pat myself on the back!
Next I set up the footer menu. Shopify tutorials were so helpful here! I learned to create pages. And how to add pages to menus. About Us, Refund Policy, Shipping Policy, Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, FAQs, etc.
Then I finished up my home page. I added a welcome at the top, Some testimonials at the bottom. And some photos in the middle - linking them to their respective Collections. By now I was feeling pretty proud of myself. My website looked clean, simple, represented my "brand" well, and was easy to navigate. All this took about 2 weeks. The 2 weeks included viewing of a lot of tutorials since this was all so new to me. Oh what would I have done without YouTube?!?
But little did I know that the hardest part was still to come.....
Stay tuned for Part II.