project
Buttonbird.comBuilding an online store using Shopify
beyond bricks and mortar
Five years of running a wildly successful fabric shop in Santa Fe and Nancy Arnold was exhausted. Sure, it was wonderful helping customers with their projects, walking up and down the aisles after hours, arranging merchandise and displays, and watching the bookkeeping numbers go from red to black! But 8+ hours a day on her feet, then going home to spend another several hours researching new products, filling special orders, balancing books, handling payroll and taxes, managing employee schedules, etc. was more than she had envisioned when she started.
In 2017, Nancy decided to take her act online. She had closed the store 2 years before, but she missed the fun of finding new products and sharing them with her beloved customers. She no longer had a retail space, only a spare bedroom and her trusty MacBook Pro. Her favorite place in her store had been the button aisle. So what better to sell online! And, her customers really missed the buttons, finding it much harder to find online buttons than fabrics.
I considered several ecommerce options for her store, including WooCommerce, Magento, Squarespace, Volusion, BigCommerce and Shopify.
I decided that for an online shop to have the features Nancy wanted, plus the ability to scale in size, Shopify was the answer. And the price was right: $29/mo to get started, vs $4200/mo for a 2200 square foot bricks & mortar store! Shopify has great tech support, and super connectivity to shipping, tax calculation, social media marketing and email campaign management. We started photographing and posting products, set up the shipping and tax accounts, integrated her 3000+ email list seamlessly, and put out the word on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest!
SERVICES
- Consult on ecommerce options
- Set up the Shopify account
- Evaluate, test, install and customize a Shopify free template
- Design MailChimp mailing templates, connect to signup forms
- Set up the Facebook store
- Set up and connect to Instagram & Pinterest
- Create workflow for product photography and listing
- Provide on-going tech support
