Ep. 43 - Creating an Online Store

Want to start an online store for your business, podcast, streaming channel, etc.? 

In this episode of the Digital Wrap-Up, Riley walks you through the steps of easily setting up your online store using Printful and Shopify!

Harden Digital & Design recently launched their own online store selling merch, and Riley talks about the process he used to launch it. Using Printful (https://www.printful.com/) and Shopify (https://www.shopify.com/) make it easier than ever to get your online store up and running in just a few steps.

While it is relatively easy to do, that doesn't mean it isn't time-consuming. BUT once you set your store up once, this print-on-demand style of online store allows you to be hands off after that (aside from promoting your store like crazy!). 

Have any questions? Shoot Riley an email: riley@hardendigital.com.

Check out the Harden Digital & Design store: https://hardendigital.shop/.

Support the Digital Wrap-Up: http://bit.ly/DigitalWrapUp

Transcript

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Hi. Welcome back to another episode of digital wrap up. My name is Riley and I'm the host and I'm the CEO and Digital Director here at Harden Digital and Design. Today we're going to be talking about online stores and how to set one up for your business, for your podcast for your stream, whatever it is that you want to create merch for, and sell it online. I'm going to walk you through the process of how to set that up and automate the process so that you're just driving traffic to your store but then you don't have to handle any of the fulfillment or any things like that. But before I get into the process and how how to go about that. I want to mention that we here at harden digital and design recently launched our own online store too. So we're selling some hardened digital merch, you know, stickers, mouse pads, T shirts, hoodies all these different types of merchandise for our business specifically, but then we also launched a limited love Tipton series as well. So we're based out of downtown Tipton, Indiana, and we found that there's not a whole lot of tipped in swag and merch available. That's kind of just pre made already. Where you just have to select your size and whatever colors that you want without presenting you know, a print shop with your own custom design or anything like that. So when we launched the store that was kind of our big series launch was the love Tipton series and hoodies, T shirts, stickers, all that is available now at hardened digital dash shop so you can check out if you want to support the business. Here at Harding, digital and design, we love your support there. We have some nice pint glasses, some coffee mugs, all of that, that you might use on a daily basis. Check it out again, that's hardened digital dot shop. And yeah, be happy for your support. And if you live in Tipton, definitely check out all the Tipton gear as well. We're going to be doing some more releases. frequently. We have some things planned and lined up as well. You know, they're the possibilities are endless on what we want to do. It's a simple process once you get the store the online store set up and running. But that's kind of what we're going to talk about today on the podcast as well. So I know creating an online store selling merchandise, it's kind of in thing right now. I think with so many people, starting businesses or starting side gigs, they want to be able to make some reoccurring revenue, not necessarily reoccurring, but additional revenue by selling merchandise, but they don't want to personally print or mail out every single piece of merchandise that sold which is definitely the case with us. So to give you some background into why or the thought process of why we started our online store is again it was kind of how can we generate some more money for the business and set up a process that's not super hands on and service base. So you know a lot of most of the products and services that we provide here at hardened Digital Designer service base so that you know we're actually having to do work to make the money. There's not a lot of automation, you know, we're creating the content for our clients and that takes time. We're building websites and that takes time and it's not any just one off things or there wasn't any just like one off things that people could buy from us where it doesn't take us any time to do everything was service based that we actually had to spend time on doing to generate revenue. So we're we've been floating around ideas and I think the big one that kind of stuck first was creating stickers because I love stickers. If you could see my laptop right now, the top of it is covered in stickers. My previous laptops have all been covered in stickers so I kind of just collect stickers wherever I go if it looks cool for it's a really cool place like up in Grand Marais, Minnesota, which I go to use to go to every year but try to frequent there are a lot I love a bunch of their stickers just was down in Florida earlier this year. And there's a gator shack that we went to and kind of an eco tour and by Some stickers from there. So I kind of use stickers as a way to commemorate things that I've done experiences I've had, or just stickers that look cool. And I see that I run into a lot of times. So stickers was our first idea of what we could sell that I think we could reach a bunch of different markets on. The sticker market is big, everybody, not everybody, but there are a lot of people like me that do collect stickers and put them on their cars, their bumpers, their bumpers, their garage, fridges, their computers, their phones, whatever it may be, I think that was kind of our first niche that we wanted to get into a stickers. And then, you know, being in Tipton, like I kind of already referenced, we didn't find a, you know, there's a couple other businesses and print shops in town that do print, merchandise, T shirts, these types of things, but you kind of have to take your own design to them. So if you don't have somebody to design that for you, then you kind of don't have an option. I guess there's not a lot of pre made stuff. So what we did is Kaley created this whole love Tipton series. And you know, my think there's five different designs in that design. And then we placed it on coffee mugs, stickers, like I've been raving about T shirts, sweatshirts, mouse pads, and phone, phone cases. So there's a lot of different options there that you can kind of play with. And you know, once you have that one design done, you can kind of place it on a bunch of different actual products. So kind of the base of what we wanted to do was to obviously create more revenue for the business. So we started looking into what different services are there that kind of can create merchandise for you. And then the other big aspect for us was that we didn't want to have to fulfill all the product orders. We didn't want to have to one mass produce anything like order 100 T shirts and hope that we sell them because there's a lot of upfront costs there. And we have no idea how well the products would sell. So if we bought 100 T shirts and only sold 20 of them, then we're stuck with that cost of the ad T shirts that we just bought. So we wanted kind of a print on demand system, which is what we use now, where nothing is produced until it's purchased on our store. And then they fill the entire fulfillment or fill the fulfillment, that's great. They fulfill the entire order for us, they don't make it until it's ordered. And then they handle all the shipping for us. So it's really an automated process once you get the designs and the products set up and that's kind of what we were looking for. So what exactly do we use to or what system or software do we use for that print on demand? There's a bunch of them out there. There's pros and cons to each one. So you know, I'm gonna tell you what we did here at Hardin digital and design but they're by no means this is Is this the best one I think it's has a ton of great reviews and it's very simple. But you know, research what works best for you. This one was highly researched and highly recommended across the board. So you might find out that this is the one that you want to use as well but we use Printful so it's print fool.com And if you're watching on the YouTube, I will pull up what Printful looks like here. So basically just has this is the back end system of our store. And you can click View store here sorry not great podcasting but definitely go check out the the YouTube video youtube.com/at heart and digital if you haven't subscribed there you can watch this and especially if you're really wanting to learn how to set up an online store for yourself. Go check it out there but basically the Printful store allows you to take those designs that you have like Kaley designed all these love Tipton designs here let me pull one up. And this is the courthouse picture. So as you can see it's on a mousepad here but a picture of the historic downtown Tipton courthouse. This is just one item there. But basically what I wanted to show you is that you can create an online store We're here. So this is our hardened digital store. And we'll talk about store front here in a little bit because this isn't the full process this is just to create the products and have that fulfillment of the products on the back end. But again, this is another one of the designs. It is their outline or fulfilled in state with the word Tipton going across it, this is probably one of my favorite designs. But Printful that allows you to basically take that one design or however many designs and pick what you place that design on. So there's men's clothing, T shirts, polos, tank tops, jackets, hoodies, swimwear, even, same thing for all the women's skirts, shorts, pants, all this type of stuff, so tops and bottom and clothing, even for kids hats, like there's so many different options here. And you know, I've never actually gotten into the hats, but yeah, there's just, I don't, I haven't even scrolled through all of them, honestly. But, you know, accessories, phone cases, like I was saying, the mouse pad that I showed you home and living stickers is where, you know, that's the big one for us. So there's so many different options here on Printful, that it's just easy. And you go in flags, holiday decor, blankets, like, you just have that person design, whatever it is, or take a logo that you already have designed. And you come in here and upload it, you select the different sizes, or the different colors, and you preview what it looks like with the print on there. It's just a really intuitive and quick process to get the product actually, quote unquote, created online. So then what you do from here is you have all of your products selected in a store. So then if I go to my stores, you can click View store and you sync it. And so I've been talking about Printful, which is the product placement and fulfillment, but the actual online store so if you're to go to hardened digital that shop here this is again on YouTube, what our shop looks like. This online storefront is not through Printful itself. It is through Shopify. So Shopify by far is, you know, the the easiest to set up easiest Thrawn easiest to maintain e commerce Store, in my opinion, there's so much you can do with it in terms of E commerce, and that just makes it just simplifies the process tremendously. So you have the Printful side of things, which creates it and then you go into create a Shopify store or Shopify website, which will then be your public facing storefront. And the great thing about Printful is that once you create all these products and Printful you can have them push to your Shopify store, which then you can have actual website and sell things online that way. So it's kind of a two pronged approach there. Printful integrates into Shopify in that whole process of setting up the integration between Printful and Shopify is super easy. I don't want to get into the step by step process. There's blogs that have that that it's I'll put it in the blog post that I do with each episode but it's a very simple and intuitive process to set up Printful set up Shopify and then link the two together. So talking about Shopify specifically. Let me go in here. Online Store so we haven't sold a whole lot yet. But we just launched it and trying to pull up the store so if you're watching you can see the products this is all the love tips and stuff right now. So all these designs, you can put them on a bunch of different things. I really liked that phone case. Really like this courthouse, the Kaley designed there as well but so this is the public facing side of it but on the back end, if the website would load very easy to sync and set everything up as well. You know, I said Printful is super easy Shopify is just as easy as well. And you can come in here and customize the website, the only downside to Shopify, a Shopify website in comparison to like WordPress or Wix, even, there's not as much customization to the overall design of the website. You know, it's such a powerful e commerce site, but it's not as powerful and creative or there's just not as much, you know, if you take a look at this, and then go take a look at our, our actual hardened digital.com website, there's just not as much as custom customization that you can do on the Shopify side of things. But you're not really using it for that you're using it strictly to sell products, you do want to add some info, we're going to add an about page, I think that links back to, you know, the hardened digital, actual website. But so that's just one thing to keep in mind. There. But I do want to talk about Printful again, and I guess I guess, to wrap up with Shopify, there's once you integrate the two you have both set up and you combine them your Printful shop is now pushing products to Shopify, and you place those products on your website on Shopify, you can either create a custom domain, buy another domain, and connect it to your Shopify stores, like that's what we did with harden digital dot shop, is we that's a custom domain. And then you just link it to Shopify, which is again, very simple to do. Or you can use the free and it's like my Shopify hardened digital.com. And just like like Wix or something, if you're creating a free website, there, it has the Shopify branding, but for you know, for 10 $20 a month, or 10 to $20 a year, if you're going to go through the process of creating an online store, I think just buy a new domain, if it makes sense harden digital dot shop made sense to us because it's just a difference of.com to that shop, and boom, you're right there. So easy branding for us. If it makes sense to you spend the extra 10 to $20. But back to Printful. There's the Shopify Printful also links to a bunch of different e commerce stores. You know, it connects with WooCommerce, as well, I will caution that I had some issues with that integration between Printful and the WooCommerce plug in. So that's why I ended up going with Shopify instead. But definitely explore it if you know, like my big thing was, hey, I wanted to really keep the shop on our Native website Hearne digital.com, because it has that has that option to put WooCommerce into our WordPress website. And then we just drive all traffic to Hardin digital.com/shop. And then while they're on our shop, they also see all of our other branding and all of our services and all that type of stuff. But it just didn't work out for us. Like I said, I had some issues and with that integration between Printful and WooCommerce, and I didn't want to really mess with it beyond that. I'm one I'm impatient. And I like to just do things now on the fly. And I was trying to launch it and it's just given me too much trouble. So I said, Screw it, we're going to Shopify, and that's what we ran with. But again, I'll take you back to the screenshare here. And while it's not hosted on our actual hard digital.com website, I did add a tab at the top that goes to the shop. So then boom right here we are at our Shopify store again. So not the perfect setup, not exactly what I wanted, but it works for me I'm happy with it. Especially because we got that specific card and digital dash shop branding. So if this is something you're considering, it's a great way to great easy way to set up an online store using Printful and Shopify. Very easy process but the one thing that's like harder to if you're wanting to just kind of sell probably depends on like what you're wanting to sell. So like us, we're selling stickers and we have this specific love Tipton thing and we're gonna have some other very specific niches that we're going to be creating products for and selling them Um, for us, it makes sense to kind of do on a Shopify store, you can also do Printful to Amazon as well. And that's, you know, a little more complicated of a process. But what you get with Amazon is you have that full search engine behind you have people searching for products, you know, so if we were going to put some of our digital marketing stickers or podcast stickers that we might develop, or something like that, you know, anybody who's looking for stickers and podcasting, or podcast stickers on Amazon, it has that search engine capabilities there, which can be very powerful for driving organic growth. You know, with the Shopify store, like what we have, it's not really backed by a powerful search engine like Amazon. So we basically have to drive all of our traffic to it organically ourselves are run ads, we ran some Facebook ads and different things like that trying it out. So with Shopify, you have to be driving that traffic yourself, which can be difficult for people. It's definitely hard getting website clicks, in general, and trying to get people to buy stuff on your store is complicated, without just running and spending money on ads, but that's the big difference there. A lot, a lot more steps to becoming a seller on Amazon, they have their own merch program as well. But you're pretty limited on what you can sell, like we, we couldn't make stickers and through Amazon merch is process. So that would be you know, I found out about that afterwards. Because I was. So you can do Printful to Amazon and run your own shop and do that connection to Amazon. But then there's also that separate Amazon merch program, but you're limited on what products you can actually sell there. So pros and cons to it, a lot more involvement and work upfront to become an Amazon seller. But you know, if you're willing to go through that, then the benefits work out in the long run, because you have that more powerful search engine behind you. But to kind of combat the lack of search engine capability behind the Shopify store, it makes it Shopify makes it very, very easy to integrate to your Facebook and Instagram stores as well. So you know, you have Printful, then you have Shopify, and now you can sell directly on Instagram and Facebook as well, which I think is a huge key to driving more traffic and getting more sales is people are buying directly on Facebook and Instagram. You know, since they since meta introduced shops, I don't even know how many years ago, it's obviously been working out and people are buying there. So Shopify allows you to easily just integrate, every time you add a new product, just make sure you click to add it to your your Facebook and Instagram store as well. And then once you set up that integration, which again is super easy in the backend of Shopify, then it just automatically pushes to your online store or your your meta store as well. So and then it pushes to Facebook and Instagram. And then the great thing about that is you can, you know, say this was I had a hardened digital coffee mug in my hand, which this is not this is there's a coffee mug in it, but it's world's best boss. Shout out to the office. Say I took a picture, which I actually recently did take took a picture with a hardened digital coffee mug. And, you know, created a an interesting caption for it. And you know, it's just a selfie of me holding the coffee mug, but it has the product in it. You can tag specifically that product, just like you're going to tag an account or tag a different user in Instagram or Facebook, you can tag that product, people can click on it, it goes directly to your shop in the app still so it doesn't take you to your web browser or anything like that. And then you can buy directly there on Instagram if you have your account set up to purchase stuff. So it makes it super easy. You can get creative with it, you can just post the the image of you know the stock image that's on your Shopify site, you can post those overlays as well or you can get creative and if you have the product in hand you can take real world pictures of it too and be tagging it and other people can tag it you know, you know your friend or family member buys a coffee mug or a pint glass or something like that. And they take a picture of it and you tag the product and tag you and then people who follow them and see it can directly click on the product link there too, and buy it on their Facebook or Instagram. So, you know, that's just one way that you can kind of start driving more traffic to your online store without having that powerful search engine behind it. Which, again, Printful, the Shopify shop fight of meta Facebook slash Instagram, it's just a very simple process. You know, it takes time, when I say simple, I don't necessarily mean you can do it all within an hour, especially if you're adding a bunch of products. But it's something that you can literally read one blog post or one help article, and walk you through the entire process, or just simply log in, create an account, and it'll walk you through the process from start to finish there as well. And that, you know, that's exactly what I did when we started hard and digital that shop. It's just very easy to do. You know, it's time consuming just like any other project. But it's a kind of, besides the marketing and pushing and trying to get people to your website or to your online store. You simply it's a set it and forget it type of thing where you upload the products, and Printful it automatically pushes the Shopify, it automatically then pushes to Facebook and Instagram. And within a matter of 20 minutes, the new product that you created or the new design that you had sent over to you, you could push it to three different products. And it can be pushed to your online store and your online store on Facebook and Instagram as well just by uploading a new product in Printful. there so that's kind of a very broad overview of how to create an online shop just based on my experiences. And I've used Shopify with another one of our clients here in town to set up their online store. And it's a little different for them. They're not using Printful, because they have an actual physical brick and mortar store, where they can take product photos, and they just upload it directly into Shopify. And then they kind of handle the handle the shipping on their own, but it's the same type of process, it's pushed to their online store, and then it can be pushed to Facebook and Instagram as well. And, you know, it's a little different because it's not print on demand like we're doing but they ship it and they do it all based on the inventory that they have there. So especially if you're looking into the print on demand thing, like what we're doing, and you don't want to spend hundreds or 1000s of dollars bulk ordering stuff that you have no idea if it will actually sell or not. Print On Demand is the way to go through Printful or another service like that Not sponsored by Printful or Shopify, but just wanting to give you honest feedback on how we did it and what worked best for us there. So, again, I think that's kind of high level overview. If you have questions, if you're wanting to set up an online shop, feel free to reach out send me an email Riley at hardened digital.com. And I'd be happy to walk you through the process. If you want to do that. I'd be happy to set it up for you. If that's if that makes more sense for you and you don't have the time or you're not as tech savvy, whatever it may be, be happy to help again, my email is Riley harden digital.com Or you can find me on social media at Riley Harden, send me a DM be happy to chat and go from there. But that's kind of the process and just something on my mind something that we're going to continue to be adding products to, you know, just sitting here now talking about the shop, I've a couple of different product or product designs in mind that I'm going to go Kocaeli here and bug her about, you know, she's the creative genius and that comes with a downfall of trying to create my ideas that I come up with on the fly like this sometimes but thankful for her she does a great job and she's always able to conceptualize what I have in mind and put it down on paper in this case on screen. And so she's awesome there but before I take off again, just check out our online shop hardened digital dot shop for some hardened digital swag. If you live in Tipton, the love Tipton series is there and we'll be looking to add more designs here over the summer and just as we get more creative and see what hits and what doesn't hit so I think that'll do it for today's episode. If you have any questions hit me up and And stay tuned next week. I think I already have a topic idea for next week's podcast which, you know, after a little lapse in a few weeks back on the podcast game, and happy to be here chatting with you and hopefully it will get Hannah or Kaylee on again in an upcoming episode. So it's not just me you don't have to sit here and listen to me or look at me. Only but yeah, I think that'll do it for this week's episode of digital wrap up until next time, stay safe and Happy Creating