Yesterday we unlocked the doors to the new store. On Shopify, there is a password feature that I enabled when I started, so that I could trial and error to my heart’s desire in private. Tuesday morning we put the last piece of paperwork in place, and by Tuesday evening we were ready to do some test runs. We were really excited. I know there are articles that say, set up a store in 15 minutes!–but our store apparently wasn’t that kind. It took me three weeks. Take a look at our store, though–I think there is a reason Shopify’s stock has seen phenomenal growth.

After doing a final edit of the storefront, which involved a few description tweaks here and there, all I had to do at this point was unlock the website, RagTopsGR.com, and the sales channels.

Unfortunately, at this point I also discovered that the smart-sizing on the main screen was smart-sizing the logo and the fonts together by 1/4 of an inch. It was okay, but neither of us wanted to take a picture of it to start bragging. It didn’t look right.

After about 45 minutes of wrestling with the theme settings and googling info, I learned that the slideshow set up to run on our main screen would be centered and sized according to the viewing screen. I couldn’t move it. But I could change the font. Actually, I moved the wording from the Heading box on the slide to the subheading box, and that made it smaller and slightly lower, avoiding the logo, and allowing Heed (RagTops Top Model) to shine.

Then it was simply done. We just needed to get out on the internet corner and flag down traffic. But because my husband has been working on @rag.tops Instagram account, we had a customer in queue immediately. I emailed him personally and let him know the doors were open and he could checkout whenever he wanted. He did. Couldn’t have asked for a better first day of business.

Today we shipped the first order via USPS. Shipping was one of the big problems for us, because it’s a headache and there’s a reason it’s expensive. With Shopify, the customer can choose how much they want to spend on shipping at checkout using our company discount, then we print the labels from USPS, UPS, FedEx, or DHL here at home.

The shipping is charged to the customer, you collect the fees, and then Shopify bills you for the shipping with your monthly subscription. Our previous options were expensive priority flat rates or a trip to the post office to use the scale.

Shipping was just over $3.00, a much better incentive than the previous $7-$10 we might tack on. I might add that online, locally, and via call center, USPS has provided me with excellent customer service at only moderately slow rates. Honestly, that’s what I would expect from a specialty store, which is what I think they are now.

And even though I really don’t know how to make good use of it yet, the Sales Analysis is cool. Creepy, but cool. My husband put a widget on his phone that tells him how much the cash register is holding and has a ticker of how many people have come in the front door. I’m thinking about what kind of goofy accents on the site might be fun and encourage browsing. On the Shopify dashboard, we can see what countries viewers are in, whether they are on a mobile or desktop. We have graphs, and one tells us our sales are up 1,300% from yesterday. Yay!

Tonight I have to set up the buy buttons for Instagram. Facebook is already moving to add its own IG buy button version to facilitate the growing sales traffic. The mechanical parts of the store require twice the time they might if I were less tech-challenged. I could not imagine how hard it would be if I actually had to do more than point and click for the most part. Actually, it’s easy enough that I am trying to figure out the margins on running an online consignment store–it seems like all of my friends are makers. I don’t make anything like hats or jewelry or tiny clay charms. I am a word person. I can tell people where you are, I guess. I’m glad to share this experience with you!

I have to work on our marketing plan, and figure out where our money is best spent in advertising. I found a great infographic that I call the TOFU map, so next time I will share that with you, because now we have to get out there and drive sales–“like” if you see me.