Publish & Prosper

Your 7-Step Guide to Building an Online Bookstore

• Matt Briel & Lauren Vassallo • Episode 31

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In this episode Lauren & Matt talk through the 7 essential steps to building your own online bookstore. From choosing the right platform to launching your site, we’ll cover everything you need to know to sell your self-published books directly to your readers.

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Lauren: Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Publish & Prosper. Today, Matt and I are going to attempt to take a topic of conversation that would best be described in visual form with step-by-step instructions and explain it to you explicitly through audio.

Matt: I don't even know what that means. Like, what were you… what were you shooting for there? 

Lauren: I was very surprised when you initially shared this episode topic idea with me, because I was like, how are we going to do this without screenshots. 

Matt: Oh.

Lauren: Without like, physical like graphics, or videos or some kind of visual aid to go along with it? 

Matt: You got to have a little bit of faith. 

Lauren: I have more faith now than I did when you first suggested this idea. But my first thought when I heard the episode topic - and possibly at least one person's thought when they saw the title of the episode - was… on audio? 

Matt: I don't know. For the mathematically challenged like yourself, maybe.

Lauren: Mmhmm.

Matt: I'm just kidding. I mean, I think originally we had this one spec to probably happen when we were doing video, when we start doing video. Yes, you guys just heard it here first. We're gonna start doing video soon. 

Lauren: And you think we're gonna edit video elements into it? What is this - 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: A Lulu U episode?

Matt: I don't know what you're gonna do with it, but you'd make it cool, right?

Lauren: Uh-huh

Matt: As the editor of this show. 

Lauren: Uh-huh. It's a shame you guys can't see my face right now. 

Matt: Yeah, it's totally a shame, let me tell you. Well. 

Lauren: Great. 

Matt: Regardless, today we are going to be focusing on the prosper part of publish and prosper So we talk a lot about publishing, and we do talk a lot about ways to prosper, how to facilitate that, but yes, I suggested this topic because it is something we see come up often. And so in a lot of groups that we're a part of online, when we're at shows, we get questions from people. And I think internally, we oftentimes just sort of… we assume that people have a website or they understand how to put together a Shopify store or something like that. And that's not always the case. And it's not always as easy for other people as it might be for us or somebody who has done it several times, or just quite frankly understands the ecommerce space and how to navigate a lot of these platforms and tools. I think this episode probably should have been done months ago, to be honest with you. 

Lauren: You're probably right. 

Matt: But somehow it just kept getting pushed down my list of priorities and I think I got asked the question enough to where I think it's time to go ahead and do it. Does that make sense?

Lauren: Yes, it does. And I do think that it is actually a really good topic. It's definitely just initial hesitation on it, but I do think this is actually a really good topic. If there's anybody out there that is a person like me who doesn't even really look at what the episode topic is before you hit play on, on a podcast episode, we’re talking about how to build your online bookstore. 

So to Matt's point just now about when we're talking about selling direct, and we're talking to authors and creators and content entrepreneurs and everything, we're always kind of talking to them on the like basic assumption that they already have a website set up and that it's very easy for them to plug their bookstore into this existing website. But you know, we realized that's not always the case. So if you are one of the people that has been listening to this and has listened to us talk at least once in every single episode about the value of selling direct and you're like, yeah, okay, I'm, I'm sold, I'm - you've successfully sold me on this idea of how to do that. How do I do that? This episode is for you.

Matt: Yeah, and it does also take you back to the origins or genesis of some of the other conversations we've had around you know, not building on rented land and things. And a big part of that is making sure you have a home base where you can drive people back to that is yours, that no algorithm controls and nobody else can really dictate what you do there and how you do it. And this is a part of that as well. 

If you don't have a website or a home base, this is a good one to start with as well, because it's not just related to setting up an online bookstore on your site. This will also really walk you through the steps of actually just putting together a pretty quick site in general.

Lauren: Yeah, for sure. If this is something that you're like, I'm not actually yet sold on the idea of selling direct, but you are an author, a self-published author, a content creator that is thinking about publishing and you're just not sure what your distribution options are gonna be yet, I would still definitely encourage you to listen to this because it is, other than just like, you know, skipping the step that we talk about when we talk about actually plugging in your ecommerce tools and your Lulu Direct bookstore plugin tools. Everything else is just about how to build out your website. 

Matt: Yeah, I think this could be equally as informative, if not at least a bit entertaining for those who already have a website set up, but nonetheless, yeah. So the goal here is to give you essentially seven steps to get your website slash bookstore up and running so that you can sell your books direct. 

Lauren: Sounds good.


[5:26]

Lauren: Let's start with step one? 

Matt: Well, the first one that you need to do, first and foremost, is you need to figure out who your platform is going to be. Like, who's your website host going to be? Are you going to go with one of the easier sort of plug and play platforms like Shopify? You know, one of the most popular ones right now, you can build a site and incorporate your ecommerce all in one, and it's really easy. 

Or are you going to take kind of… not the opposite route, but the route that a lot of others choose instead of the Shopify route, which is they get a WordPress site. Essentially it's hosted by WordPress, and you kind of build it yourself, and you use a plugin like WooCommerce on your WordPress site. WordPress, obviously, is a massive, massive ecosystem with tons of different plugins and templates. And I mean, there are whole businesses spun up around helping people build their WordPress sites. Well, I guess the same is true for Shopify now, but - 

Lauren: Yeah, but still when I was Googling extra resources for this episode and stuff like that, which also - there are a ton of things linked in the show notes. If you're listening to this and you're like, I want to dive deeper into any one of these steps, there's literally at least one resource for every step in this outline. So go check out the show notes.

But as I was, like, Googling questions and looking for things like that, I was never being specific with my Google queries about any one platform. Like, I wasn't using words like WooCommerce or Shopify or anything. And nine times out of ten, the first few search results that I would get would be WordPress or WooCommerce content. 

Matt: Yeah, I mean, there's a statistic out there that I think is still fairly true, and it's something crazy like almost 50% of the websites in the entire world are built on WordPress. 

Lauren: Wow. 

Matt: Like it's such a massive ecosystem, it really is. So it's highly likely that people out there listening right now already have a site on WordPress or their blog is hosted on WordPress. And so they're used to working within that WordPress ecosystem. And that's fine. But WordPress is definitely probably one of the most popular. But if you're strictly looking for something easy and you don't have anything yet, Shopify is a great alternative. So is Wix, Squarespace, there are several others. 

And just for anybody out there who's extremely tech savvy and you have some developer experience or you know a developer, Lulu actually has a direct network print API where you could literally just code in our print API and that will connect you right to our entire print network. You wouldn't even need to use something like Shopify or a plugin. 

Lauren: Yeah, so that's the first thing you're gonna wanna think about when you're thinking about choosing the hosting platform for your website is what, like if you're setting your website up with intent, whether it's intent to sell books, intent to sell t-shirts, you wanna start a blog, whatever it is, you wanna make sure that the platform that you choose has the appropriate plugins you need for those things. 

Like if you're starting a blog from scratch, I'm guessing you're probably gonna go with WordPress because that's very common for a lot of bloggers. If you are setting up your website right now because you're like, yep, Matt and Lauren talked me into using Lulu Direct to sell my books, I'm gonna do it - 

Matt: Then you got bigger problems. 

Lauren: You do, I'm really, I'm so sorry again. But if that's your choice here, if that's why you're doing that you can't set up your website on Squarespace because we don't have a Squarespace plugin right now. 

Matt: Well, you could set up a website on Squarespace. You just wouldn't have the ease and quality of using Lulu right now. 

Lauren: Right, that's what I'm saying. Like you can't - if your goal is to use a Lulu Direct plugin to sell your books from your website, then you have to choose one of the platforms that we have plugins for currently. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: So. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: You know, that's something that you're going to want to keep in mind as you're choosing. And then of course, like Matt said, if you are very tech savvy and the kind of person who can work with code, I don't even know how to say - I'm so not tech savvy that I don't even know how to phrase this appropriately. But if you're somebody who has the skill set to access an open source API and plug it into your own website, you can use Lulu's API to do that.

Matt: That was close. You did pretty good. 

Lauren: Hey. 

Matt: There's also Zapier. So for anybody who's familiar with using Zapier and creating Zaps, there's definitely been several people who were able to successfully create a Zap using Lulu Direct and whatever other type of third party cart and ecommerce system. We know one or two people have used it to connect to Thrive Cart as well as Cartra and a few others, but Lulu also will be coming out with more and more plugins as the months come by. 

So yeah, that's definitely one of the things you need to think about when choosing your platform. You want to think about cost. Most of these are not free, so you'll want to look at the different costs involved and find out where your comfort zone is. You'll want to look at - as Lauren and I alluded to - you'll need to know how comfortable you are with the skill set needed to set up a site on that particular platform. I would say one of the easiest is Shopify and then at the other end of that spectrum is probably going to be WordPress, and then somewhere between you're going to have Wix and Squarespace and a few others. 

You also want to think about which platforms offer the type of templates and customization that you'd like to see. Even though we're going to talk to you about keeping it simple, you're definitely going to want to consider that as well. So I'd say the top three things are going to be, like Lauren said, think about what your intent is. So if you know you want to sell more than just books, you want to make sure that you choose a platform that will accommodate plugins to help you also sell whether it's t-shirts or coffee mugs or whatever else, cost to use the platform, and ease of use and ease of setup. Those would be my top three things that you need to really consider when choosing your platform. 


[10:47]

Lauren: I agree. So I think the next thing you're gonna have to consider is step two, which is picking and purchasing a domain name. 

Matt: Yeah, and now that I'm looking at this. I probably have these backwards, but it doesn't matter. Steps one and two basically need to kind of be done at the same time, so it doesn't matter. You'll find that, let's say you choose Shopify, when you're first setting up your store, it's going to ask you if you have your own domain that you want to link to. If you do, it just makes it a little bit easier. So if you did step two first, you'd have that domain name purchased already, and Shopify makes it really easy to just plug right into that domain. It can be a little more complicated when you're using WordPress or some of the others, but definitely not impossible by any means. Steps one and two, the order with which you do those steps, they kind of need to be done at the same time specifically. 

But when it comes to picking a domain, we've got some help for you here. To purchase a domain, you can actually do that in Shopify. I think you can do it in Wix as well. If you go to GoDaddy.com, they make it really easy. I use GoDaddy.com and it's like I said, it's really simple and it still works seamlessly with Shopify and some of the others. So you can do it through Shopify, but I choose GoDaddy and I use it all the time and that's where I just keep all the domains that I own.

Lauren: Yeah, it was - when we were first setting up this podcast we were just having a casual meeting about it and all of a sudden Matt's clicking around on his laptop while we're chatting, like he's not singularly focused on this. And then like five minutes later, he was like, okay, I just bought all five of the domain names that we just considered as potential options. So we have all of them now, whichever one you want to use, go with that one. We have it.

Matt: I'm a domain farmer. I got a bunch of domains. 

Lauren: Just hoard them just in case you need them someday. 

Matt: Well, like anytime I have an idea for something, the first thing I do is go find a domain that would work for it and I buy it. 

Lauren: Well, that's a great idea.

Matt: I usually end up sitting on a lot of domains, but at the end of the day, they're usually not expensive either depending on what you choose. So most of the ones that I do own that are sitting in my GoDaddy account parked, not doing anything, they weren't like super expensive other than a couple of them.

Lauren: I still say it's a good idea. And it's also one of the things somewhere in this outline - maybe in this section, maybe not, who knows? I talked about the idea of… if you are doing all of this at once, if you're setting up your brand or your business kind of from scratch right now, this is also a great time to match your domain name to your social media handles. So as you're coming up with a domain name, if you're also setting up social accounts for your brand - if you already have like, if you already have a brand as a social media content creator and now you're looking to set up your website, you've probably already got a domain name in mind because it's probably going to be something related to your social handle. Or it should be, pro tip. 

But if it's not, if you're setting all this up, if you're like a new author that's getting started and this is you setting up all of your marketing and ecommerce and website and all of that stuff, if you have the opportunity to create a domain name and social media channels that all match each other, it's going to help you with your marketing efforts so much all the way down the line.

Matt: Yeah, I think there's going to be some slight differences between nonfiction content creators and fiction authors. 

Lauren: Sure. 

Matt: As a fiction author, like we've talked about in the social media episodes that we've done. You're probably going to want a domain that has your name in it, your author name in it, if possible. And it's probably possible unless you have a name like Ronald Reagan, like good luck getting a domain. But also, you know, sorry about your bad luck if that's your name. But you know, most authors will probably be able to find a domain with their name in it or a variation of like LaurenVassalloWrites.com if you can't just get Lauren Vassallo, which I would recommend you go try to get - 

Lauren: Okay. 

Matt: And I'll tell you why in a minute. Then get something like that, if you're a fiction author - or Lauren Vassallo Romance because I know that's your thing. But nonfiction content creators, however though like we've talked about in the social media ones, oftentimes you don't necessarily want to be known for your name particularly if you're going to be trying to exit whatever business you're building. And I won't get into that but the nonfiction content creators, they know what I'm talking about you might want to find a domain name that really is more closely aligned with your product or your content brand or what you're doing. 

Again there's a big difference between somebody who's writing fiction and who wants to be known as an author, and so everything they do supports that, versus a nonfiction content creator who may be looking to build a business, sell it, build another business, sell it, or even build a business, sit on it for a while and maybe potentially get some offers later on down the road so they can exit. You want to be careful about the URLs and the domains that you choose. It doesn't mean you can't buy a bunch of them and then just use one, but still own the others so that nobody else can own them. And that's what I was referring to when I told Lauren she should go buy her name. 

Lauren: It is taken by the way. 

Matt: Oof. Right now one of the big issues people are facing is with, you know, with AI and a lot of the things that are happening out there, people are purchasing domain names that might belong to other people. Somebody might've purchased laurenvasallo.com and built an entire website around Lauren's namesake and might be doing nefarious things with it, like slandering Taylor Swift. So - 

Lauren: No one who knows me would believe that was true under any capacity. 

Matt: However. 

Lauren: Go on. 

Matt: That person comes back to you and says, hey, we have this domain for sale, uh, you might be interested in buying it and you say, oh yeah, what domain is it? And they say it's laurenvasallo.com. So now to buy your own domain, which is also by the way, out there potentially slandering Taylor Swift. It's going to cost you ten times what it would have cost you had you bought it ahead of time. 

I would encourage everybody out there to go out there and try to buy your own name as a domain. You don't have to do anything with it, but you can just park it, which means nothing's happening, but you own it so nobody else can own it and do anything nefarious with it. Also, if you're making a name for yourself as a writer or an author or something like that, and you don't wanna necessarily just use laurenvasallo.com, you still may wanna go ahead and buy it and park it. 

Again, if another Lauren Vassallo is out there and let's say this person is a… I don't know, an ambulance-chasing attorney, and they take it and do something with it, all your fans and your readers that go out there and research Lauren Vassallo, they're gonna come across this other website and they're gonna think, wait, is she an attorney masquerading as a romance writer? Like what's going on here? So -

Lauren: I have met at least one of those.

Matt: No comment. I got nothing to say there. 

Lauren: Fair enough. So the TLDR basically is that if you are a fiction writer, try to get a domain name that is your name or associated to your name or your author pen name if you're writing under a pen name.

Matt: Right.

Lauren: If you are a nonfiction author, you're probably going to lean more into your brand, your business model and less your specific name. 

Matt: Yes. 

Lauren: Great. 

Matt: That's right. 

Lauren: Okay. If you’re - 

Matt: Unlike that section, keep it short and sweet. The shorter the domain name and URL, the easier it is for people to remember. 

Lauren: Yes. You want it to be something memorable and not something memorable because somebody was like supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.com  

Matt: That's a good one. 

Lauren: That is a good one. But I -

Matt: But good luck spelling it. 

Lauren: Yeah. Like I know the song by heart and I still don't think I could type that into an address bar right now. But you know, you're going to want something that if somebody meets you at a conference and you didn't have any collateral or business cards to give them and they walk away and they say, oh, I remember that I met Matt Briel and I want to go - what, what was that face?

Matt: Sucks to be them. 

Lauren: I was like - oh boy. 

Matt: Sorry about your bad luck. 

Lauren: And I want to go look up his website later. Like, you want the website to be something that they can probably remember on their own. And even if you do have, like, if you're lucky enough to have collateral on hand in that situation, you want your domain name to be something that you can easily fit onto that collateral. It's one of the great things about Lulu.com as a brand name is that it fits on everything we put it on. 

Matt: By the way, somebody owns supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.com.

Lauren: Do you think it's Disney? 

Matt: But I could get it dot live. 

Lauren: Is the dot go available? Because if dot go is available, then it's definitely not Disney that owns it.

Matt: Dot app is available, dot blog is available, dot sucks is available. 

Lauren: X or ck?

Matt: Ck. Anyways. 

Lauren: Well okay. 

Matt: Can't buy that one. 

Lauren: Can't buy that one, but that's okay because it would be too long to fit on a business card anyway. 

Matt: I’ll have you know I did spell it properly though.

Lauren: I don't doubt that for a second. 

Matt: Okay what were we talking about?

Lauren: I love how convenient Lulu.com is to put on all of our swag and collateral that we make. It's nice, short and sweet, it fits on everything from a business card to a hat. It works. 

Matt: Yeah. Yeah.

Lauren: If you can find something like that. But counterpoint, as you're considering what your brand name is, what your domain name is, stuff like that, there is also a Lulus.com.

Matt: That's right. 

Lauren: That is a completely different company. Great company. I have a couple of dresses from them. They do great wedding dress. Like if you're a bridesmaid or wedding guest, great company, totally unrelated to us. So if somebody is attempting to remember our name and types it in one letter incorrectly, they're going to go to a very different website. 

Matt: The bigger problem there is, I mean, they'll figure out they’re at the wrong website. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: The bigger problem is, is that Lulus with the S, who was a company that came around after us, we already had lulu.com - they probably have to spend extra money in Google search and things like that to get their traffic to the right place instead of over to us. There are ramifications to potentially not choosing a really well-strategized and well-thought out name. 

Lauren: Yeah, you will be competing with, if you have a very similar name to another company that already exists, you will be competing with them. 

Matt: Yeah, yeah.

Lauren: A lot, that's, we just reached the end of my knowledge on SEO.

Matt: Well, I mean, that's changing too, because of AI. But at the end of the day, yeah, you want to put as much distance between you and any potential confusion for your reader or buyer anyways. So yes, if I was the person starting Lulu's clothing company, I would have thought twice about that, knowing that there was already a Lulu.com as well as a Lululemon.com - 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: Lulu's BBQ Sauce, there's a Lulu opera singer, and all of these things were already in existence before Lulu's the clothing company started so. I would have thought differently about that. But again, whatever, it's their money. not ours. 

Lauren: Free advice from us. 

Matt: Yeah for you just choose wisely. You don't you don't want to create any extra competition or confusion. 

Lauren: If you need some help coming up with ideas If you're really scraping the bottom of the barrel and you can't figure it out try ChatGPT or Gemini. You can also - Shopify has a free domain name generator and so does Squarespace and GoDaddy.

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: Worst-case scenario go mess around in there for a little while. 

Matt: Yeah, but the point is spend some time with it. So many people rush into something and they just choose a name because they think it'll be cute or it's funny or whatever. And then later on down the road, they hate it or it causes them problems. Take the extra time to think about what you're going to do in terms of a name. Especially if your name isn't available and you are a fiction author like ‘writes’ is always a good sort of selection there So Katie Cross Writes or Lauren Vassallo writes try to get your name if you can 

Lauren: And, you know, try to just spend a little bit of time thinking about - and this is more business name than domain name anything else - but spend a little bit of time thinking about what details you're gonna have to explain to people over and over and over again.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: I think about this a lot, the bookstore that I used to work at was called Book Revue, but it was review spelled R E V U E.

Matt: The attempt to be clever, I think - 

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: - probably caused you guys more heartache than anything.

Lauren: Yes, it did. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: And that was - one of the owners would say that to me all the time. He would always say like, we thought we were being clever and fun with this name. And it has caused so much confusion in the 40 years that we've been in business that I would rather just go back and change it. 

Matt: But you can't. 

Lauren: But you can't. You can't. 

Matt: Well, you can. But that's a whole new headache. 

Lauren: We could do a whole episode on this. You realize that, right? 

Matt: We won't.


[22:26]

Lauren: Okay, good. So let's talk about step number three. 

Matt: Yeah, step number three. Okay, you've got your name, you've chosen a platform. Now it's time to decide on what your site's going to look like. So you're going to want to choose a layout or a template. You don't have to be married to this first choice, by the way. So, we’ll use Shopify again because it's the easiest one to talk about, but with Shopify, you can choose one of their free starter layouts or templates. They all actually look pretty good by the way. And you can go ahead and start designing, building your site. And later, if you want to change the design, it's actually pretty easy to just install a different template or layout in Shopify and it pretty much automates everything for you. It’ll carry over your content, everything like that. So you may have to tweak a few things, but…

So pick one that you, that you like. It doesn't have to be like one you're gonna be married to for the next 20 years. Pick one that you like that's gonna look good and just get moving, get started.

Lauren: Yeah, it doesn't, I think with a lot of the websites that exist now or the lot of the website hosting platforms that exist now, they make it difficult for you to screw it up. Which is not to say you can't. 

Matt: Mmhmm. 

Lauren: People definitely still have the ability to make some really atrocious color combination selections and things like that. Even in the year of our Lord 2024, it still happens, but. It is pretty hard to go that wrong on most of these websites. So really what you want to keep in mind is less making sure that it looks good in the template because it's going to, but making sure that it looks good with your brand.

You know, we talked about, we did the whole episode on author branding. Definitely go back to listen to that one if you haven't already, but that includes having an actual physical brand look. We talked about that a little bit in that episode, things like a color palette that you're using for your social or for your website or for any collateral that you make, if you have a logo, if you have a specific font that you're dedicated to. And you know, like you want it to make sense for you, for your brand. If you are a business consultant who is using their website and their book to generate new clients, you're not gonna have your website designed in the Lisa Frank aesthetic. 

Matt: Can you explain to everybody what that is? There's gotta be some people that listen to this podcast that don't know who Lisa Frank is. And I only know because I have younger sisters. So I really wanna hear what your explanation of this is. 

Lauren: Okay, so if you think back to the 90s. And you think of those notebooks that are in like bright, not neon colors, but really, really bright, poppy colors. And all of the notebooks are like cartoons of dolphins jumping over the ocean, but there's also a rainbow in the background or a kittens or unicorns or anything. 

Matt: They were all very metallic and sparkly - 

Lauren: Sparkly. 

Matt: Holographic. Like if you could basically think of all the most gaudy ways that you could design a Trapper Keeper or something like that. That was Lisa Frank. 

Lauren: They were perfect. 

Matt: There were Lisa Frank stickers like this it was everywhere. 

Lauren: They were incredible. And you know what as I'm saying this I'm realizing that I would totally, totally hire a business consultant whose website was designed - but most people wouldn't, you know? Like most like you don't want - or, if you're a fiction writer, if you are a horror writer, if I'm setting up Matt's website for the new book that he's going to be writing, the new horror novel that he's going to be writing. And I, and I -

Matt: It’s a biography, by the way. Or an autobiography. 

Lauren: Great. Perfect. If I, you know, designed him a website that was all in bright pinks and purples and had little hearts all over it, that would be weird. Not just because it's Matt that we're talking about, but because his potential readers would come to that website and be like this must be the wrong place, because this is certainly not the website of a horror novelist.

Matt: But what if all the dolphins that were jumping over the waves their noses were like machetes, and then like the unicorns that were running around like their horns shot lasers and sliced people in half?

Lauren: Now you're on to something. 

Matt: And all the kittens. I don't know. They'd probably be like really scary. 

Lauren: Kittens are already really scary. They got those claws. 

Matt: But still all like metallic-y and bright and you got me thinking now. 

Lauren: So what you're saying basically you want to merge our aesthetics into one website design. 

Matt: Possibly.

Lauren: I can get behind this.

Matt: Okay. 

Lauren: All right. We'll keep brainstorming offline.

Matt: I still think you're probably right. Most people should not design their websites in Lisa Frank style. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: Keep it simple.

Lauren: But if you do, if you have a really good example of your website designing a Lisa Frank website, please email it to me. I'd love to see it. 

Matt: Yeah, for sure. Please send it to podcast@lulu.com. 

Lauren: Thank you. Some other things that you want to keep in mind though, while you're laying out your website, you want to make sure that you look at your website, both on desktop and mobile. We're going to talk more about… the final step of this, spoiler alert, is reviewing everything and testing everything. So we'll talk more about that. But just as you're going through layouts and deciding which ones you want to use for your website, take a look at them both in desktop version and mobile version. 

Matt: Yeah. Most of those platforms make it really easy to design in a mobile-first sort of setup. Usually they'll have like, as you're building your pages, you'll see little icons in the top right hand or something like that. One will be of like a mobile phone, one will be of a laptop. And you can kind of toggle back and forth and make sure that whatever you're doing looks good in both. But I will say that based on our own traffic here at Lulu, and I'm also pulling up some stats right now that mobile traffic definitely outweighs desktop traffic these days to the tune of probably more than 50% so. You definitely want to make sure that, that your site is well optimized for mobile - not just the informational pages, but the ability to actually purchase something. 

Again, make sure that is all optimized for mobile. Most places design mobile-first. And typically that means it will show up fine. It'll render fine on a desktop or a laptop, but I just found something from SEMrush - for 2023 mobile traffic basically, in visits, 40 billion roughly to mobile devices and, you know, around 10 billion to desktops and laptops. So I was still pretty far off. I mean, mobile traffic is 75% at this point. Anybody listening, I mean, think about yourself as a user too. We do most everything throughout the day on our phone. So make sure your website looks really good on a phone. 

Lauren: Yeah, absolutely. If you're a little suspicious of that, I was looking for stats yesterday when I was putting this outline together and I kept rejecting things because they were outdated and I was looking for more recent stats.But one of the things that I kept noticing it as I was like pulling these outdated stats was that they just kept getting progressively like higher and progressively further apart where the mobile was really just taking off. So this is not a new trend. And this is something that's just going to continue to trend upwards like that. 

Matt: Yeah, oh, definitely. 

Lauren: For sure. 

Matt: Yeah, mobile is not not going away anytime soon. 

Lauren: No, it's not. So the last thing that you'll want to consider is going to lead us right into step four, which is going to be what pages do you want to have on your website?


[29:28]

Lauren: So step four, building out your website, figure out what pages you want in addition to your homepage. 

Matt: Yeah, or more importantly, what other information do you want people to know about you and to have access to? And we're gonna talk about a few of them. Obviously the most popular ones would be kind of an about me page. Like you really want people to know who you are, especially if you're building a persona or a brand as an author of a particular genre. So this is your chance to tell people who you are, put a few pictures there, tell them how you got started, whatever you wanna put there. 

You know, you're gonna have your products pages. So for each book you've written or that you write, you'll have a page that's dedicated solely to that book. Product pages, it's a little misleading. There's not much you actually have to do there. Like typically, like if you're using Lulu or something like that, um, when you connect your products, your books, there's not a whole lot to do on those product pages, they're pretty easy to build out. You can get through them pretty quickly. 

You want to have some sort of a page where you can address any common questions that people might ask you. So if you're fulfilling, let's say print books from your site, people are going to have questions about how long does it take, you know, what types of shipping are offered, for audiobooks or ebooks, you know, they may have questions that come up pretty often around downloading. So having some of those there ahead of time will really help lessen the amount of emails you might get post-transaction. That's something people don't think about a lot is when you're selling direct. You're also customer service.

Lauren: Yes. 

Matt: So any of the common questions that you can address up front on your site, on the FAQs page will save you some emails into your inbox of questions that you just repeatedly have to keep typing the answer to. 

Lauren: Yeah. And on that page with those FAQs have contact information available for you. Maybe if you don't wanna flood your inbox with people asking questions, and instead you wanna use a plugin tool to have a contact form on your page directly so that people can fill out that form on that page, you can figure out how you wanna address it then. There are tools for you to do that. There's definitely ways for you to do that. 

If you want a little bit deeper dive into customer service for your Lulu Direct or your ecommerce store, whatever. One of our ecommerce specialists wrote a really great blog post a while back about this. I have it linked in the show notes. So it's the one in step four called customer service and your ecommerce business. So definitely go check that out if you want to read more about that. 

Matt: Yeah. And again, having somewhere where people can join your mailing list or something like that is so important because you may get a lot of first timers or people who are just kind of looking or maybe they came across you at a conference or an event or in a social media ad or something like that. And they might not be ready to purchase yet, depending on what you're selling, but they may be interested enough to join your mailing list. 

And so we won't get too heavily into that part of your site, but there are plugins for email lists. And so you can build a separate sort of segment of people who subscribe to your email list, but haven't purchased anything yet and you can market to them slightly differently than you would to people who have purchased, you know, one of your books or a trilogy or different products. So making sure you have somewhere for people to sign up for your, your email list is really important. 

Lauren: Check your email service provider, they will most likely have plugin tools available for you. 

Matt: And if you don't have an ESP going into this, again, it's very easy to just start using some of the ones that are native inside of Shopify or Wix or some of these other tools. They all have like MailChimp plugins and things like that. So again, a lot of this can be done during your setup process. A lot of it doesn't have to be done outside of the setup process. It's a little easier than you might think. 

Lauren: Yeah. A lot of stuff is built in for you. There are things that you are going to have to bring to the table. So try to figure out as much as you can, what those things are going to be. You know, are you going to need graphics? Are you going to need product images? Are you going to need header graphics, like a hero image on the page? Are you going to need copy? The answer is yes, by the way, all of these things are things you’re going to need. Are you going to need any additional tools or plugins that can help you achieve the functionality that you want these specific pages to have? Like whatever it is, no kind of going in as you're building out these pages what additional content you're going to need in order to build them out. 

And don't just guess either. Don't assume that the 1080 by 1080 Instagram graphic that you already have of your book is going to work as the graphics that you need for your hero image on your homepage of your website. 

Matt: Yeah, but if you think back to one of the earlier episodes we did around publicity, Lauren had a great idea about having a folder on your desktop where you keep all of your really well done headshots, photos of your book covers, all of that material and those assets that you would be using anyways for social media marketing and publicity and things like that. This is just another good reason to have all that in a folder on your desktop, because as you're building your site, you'll have quick access to those things and you won't have to go hunting them down or creating them. 

Lauren: Pro tip from a former social media manager. If you are requesting graphics, if you are paying a freelancer to create graphics for you, always ask for them in all possible formats that you would need them in, do not ever just ask for like, Hey, I just plan on using this graphic on Instagram, can you just make me an Instagram graphic, ask for it in Instagram square, Instagram stories, Facebook size, X size, like whatever, whatever social platforms you're on, get this graphic anytime you're requesting graphic assets of any kind, get them in as many different sizes as possible, because the different orientations of square, portrait, and landscape will also help you when you're doing things like building out your website. 

Matt: Yeah, definitely true. 


[34:52]

Matt: I think the next step that we're going to talk about, arguably, some people will need it, some people won't, but I wanted to put it in there. A lot of these platforms that you're going to choose from, they have built in merchant processing tools, which means you don't have to go out and find a plugin to run your credit cards and things like that. It's already built into the system. So Shopify, for example, you can just enable their merchant processing, which makes it really easy for you to be able to sell things from your website. They all charge roughly the same fees. You might save one penny per transaction by going with somebody else. In the end, that's probably not worth the hassle and the trouble. So I recommend probably just using whatever the default is for that platform. 

But nonetheless, you may be building in WordPress or something like that, where there's not a native or default built in merchant processor, and you have more flexibility to pick which one you do want to use. So you're going to want to do a little bit of research around those. There's obviously a lot of the key players out there. You can go with something like Square or PayPal or, you know, some of the others, Avalara. 

There's a bunch of them, but ultimately, if this is your first go at it and you want to keep things as simple as possible, I would suggest just using whatever's native inside of Shopify, Shopify Pay, those things. Same for Wix, WordPress has some payment processor abilities, that just makes it super easy for you. 

That being said, inside these platforms, there's a few things you're going to need to fill out and toggle on. So in order for you to get paid, you need to link your bank account. So you'll want to go into the payments and billing section of your Shopify, Wix, whatever that is. They'll ask you for your bank account information of where you want your money deposited. And basically that makes it so that every time you sell a product, a book, whatever that might be at your sort of predetermined payout stage - so whether that you get paid out once a day or once a week - they'll deposit that money into your account. 

You'll need to make sure that that's connected. And in there, you can also typically choose a few other things that may be hyper relevant to the way that you're gonna click payment. Make sure that whatever you're using, you're comfortable with their merchant processing. If you're using something like WordPress where you have a lot more flexibility, just make sure you do your homework on the tools that you're going to choose from. 

Lauren: I have nothing to add. 

Matt: Oh, good. Okay. 

Lauren: Mostly because I don't know anything about that topic.

Matt: Mostly because you're on the other end of that transaction. 

Lauren: Correct. 

Matt: Usually the one buying something. 

Lauren: Correct. 

Matt: That's okay - 

Lauren: I would be lying - 

Matt: We love that 

Lauren: If I said there wasn't at least one ecommerce website open on my laptop right now.

Matt: We love that. Yeah. So again step five may or may not be necessary for you. It is a lot easier just to go with whatever the default is in that platform. I have a couple of Shopify stores, that's what I do. It's very easy. You might go in and play around a little bit with which bank account you want to get paid to, that kind of stuff. Anyways. 

Lauren: I do also want to add any of the things that we've talked about so far, especially if they're things that we've said platform-specific, you have to go in and do this, that, and the other thing. All of these platforms have incredibly robust knowledge base content available to you. They all have their own blogs, they all have their own like guided tutorial videos and stuff like that. They make it as easy as possible. So if you're asking questions about any of these things that you're like, I'm not sure how to do this. We can't get super specific on things without knowing which specific platform you're going to be using. Like, you know, there's only so much we can talk about at a high level. But if you're like, okay, I'm definitely using Shopify. How do I do this, that and the other thing? I guarantee you Shopify has the answers on their website. 

Matt: They do. That's a great point, as well as WooCommerce and Wix. And we know this because when we were building out our plugins to work with them, we went to make sure that their resources were going to be ample enough for our users. And if they weren't, we created our own to match that. They do have tons and tons of great resources. And so as you get deeper into building your site and you want to go three more clicks past what we've been talking about, that's the first place I would start. Our blog also has a lot of articles and our YouTube channel. There's a lot of videos on how to set certain things up, but Lauren is absolutely right. You're going to have questions around sales tax, for example, and shipping and… resources are there, just go find them. They're usually pretty easy to work through and we'll put some in the bottom of the show notes there too. 


[38:59]

Matt: So step number six is I would consider this the fun part. I don't know if everybody would. I think more people would consider the designing of the site the fun part, but I like picking out all the plugins and the tools that are going to help me do my job and sell things better. 

Lauren: That's because you're a nerd. 

Matt: Can we edit that post? No.

Lauren: No.

Matt: I'm just kidding. This is where you're going to choose, you know, again, what are you going to sell? Who's going to help you sell it? Uh, for us, obviously Lulu Direct, we hope that's who you're picking to fulfill all of your print book needs. Uh, so we have plugins for all the major sites. You may decide you want to do t-shirts and other stuff too. And there are other print on demand plugins like Printful and Printify. And there's a bunch of them that also work with Shopify. 

The plugin process itself is pretty easy. It's not that hard. I know like with Printful, for example, you just download the plugin and you build out whatever shirt you want in Printful. They have a really cool t-shirt designer. You just go in there, design your t-shirt. You connect it. You connect your Shopify store, which is also very easy. And then every time you design something, Printful will automatically export it over to your Shopify store and add it right to your products page. It's very easy to do. So this is why I think this is the fun part, is being able to connect all the different things, the drop shipping platforms and stuff like that. 

And it just automates everything. So you don't have to keep a bunch of inventory in your garage or warehouse it. Every time you sell something, whether it's a book or anything else, that order gets transmitted to the appropriate POD provider or whoever that is, that order gets fulfilled and shipped out and you get charged whatever the wholesale cost is to manufacture it. That's it. You're selling your book for 20 bucks on your site and Lulu's charging you $5 to print it and it's $5 to ship it. You sell it to a user for 20 plus $5 shipping. You pay Lulu $5 manufacturing costs, $5 shipping. You're still making $15 straight profit. It's pretty easy math.

Lauren: If you say so. No, that one I actually did follow along on. Don't worry. One of the other things with these tools that is so great is that they do for the most part integrate really well with each other. They're designed to work with each other. So if you are selling copies of your book and then right next to it on your product page, you're selling t-shirts with your slogan from your book on it, your customers can purchase both of those things, check out, go ahead and have their products.

Matt: Yeah, it's called a mixed cart. And so most platforms support a mixed cart. So yes, they could have one of your books in the cart, also a t-shirt and maybe something else too. And the backend would know that the book order goes to Lulu, the t-shirt order goes to Printful or whatever you're using. Again, there's not much you have to do. 

Lauren: Cool. 

Matt: So these tools are pretty quick and savvy. 

Lauren: And there are a bunch of other tools that aren't exclusively ecommerce solutions that you might want to plug into your website as well. Things like if you're worried about how you're going to collect and calculate sales tax, you might want the TaxJar plugin. I don't know anything about taxes. I just pay them. But I hear that's something that you would want if you were going to be starting your own small business. 

We've talked before about having a way on your website to collect product reviews and testimonials, even if we don't necessarily agree that they're necessary. So there are plugins like TrustPulse that you could use for something like that. So you can get your reviews that way.

I mentioned earlier the idea of having a contact form built into your website. There are plugins for that. There's all kinds of things that you can do that you can use these apps that have been designed specifically to help you build out your website. 

Matt: Yeah. I mean, again, we also talked about plugins for email providers. SMS, texting, things like that. I mean, if there's anything you basically want to do with your website, I'm certain there's a plugin for it. That's for sure. So you don't have to know all of this stuff. You don't have to have the ability to program or do these things. There are apps for them. And some of them are free and some of them will cost something. So again, like we said at the top of the show, keep in mind the cost associated with all of these things. 

Some of these apps, you may not need to add your first month in business. You might want to do one or two things and get going. And then from there, you'll figure out ‘oh yes, I do want to add in a tax app because I'm hitting nexus in Nevada. And so I'm going to need to start collecting sales tax,’ or things like that. But keep in mind, again, there is a small cost associated, but that's the trade off to not having to be an expert in web design and email and taxes and all these other things. For me, I would much rather just pay somebody a couple bucks per month and they handle all that through their app or plugin and I don't have to worry about it.

Lauren: It's worth it. 

Matt: I would agree. 


[43:19] 

Matt: So at this point hopefully we've got our site built out to a degree. We're pretty comfortable with it. We've installed a few plugins. We've tested them, right? We've sent a few test orders through to Printful and Lulu Direct and these other places. And that all seems to be working fine. Money's getting charged and collected. And at this point, we want to start doing a little more testing, previewing and getting ready to publish our website. 

Lauren: Yeah. And this is what I consider the fun part. This is when you get to go in and really fine tooth comb everything. So, you're going to review your entire website. You're going to preview it on desktop. You're going to preview it on mobile. If you have the opportunity, if it's possible for you, to check it on different types of mobile devices. You know, sometimes it looks different on an iPhone and an Android. Sometimes it looks different on an iPhone and an iPad. We preview our emails when we send out emails from Lulu. There's a group of us that are all responsible for reviewing every email before it gets sent out. My Gmail is in dark mode and one of my other coworkers is in light mode. And we get like we have different feedback on these emails because -

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: We’re viewing them - like, little things like that. So you're definitely gonna wanna go over your website in every possible format that you can think of. 

Matt: Yeah. Definitely. You won't be able to catch everything - 

Lauren: No, of course not. 

Matt: And that's okay. But you're right. You should definitely look at what it looks like on a laptop, what it looks like on a, on a mobile phone, multiple different types of phones if possible. Now again, some of these platforms will give you that ability within the platform. Like you could even specify, show me what this looks like on a, you know, an iPhone 12 versus Google Pixel 3 versus, you know, whatever, whatever. So some of that, you don't even have to go out and physically find somebody with those phones. Some of them even let you see what it looks like on a Blackberry.

Lauren: Wow. 

Matt: Which is ridiculous. I don't think anybody has a Blackberry anymore, but. 

Lauren: Do they still make them? 

Matt: I have no idea. So, you know, a lot of that you can actually do in the platform, which again is why I'm a big advocate for Shopify because they really do just kind of take a lot of the legwork out of it for you. Think about that. Go through every page that you've created. Get yourself a little checklist if you need to, but every page you've created, like your About Me page, your FAQs page, your product pages, you want to go through each of those. 

You're going to want to make sure that each page there's some continuity that exists at the top, what we call top level nav, right? It's the headers of the pages, make sure everything looks, you know, the same from page to page. And then your footers at the bottom of the page, those should all look the same, have the same links, have your email signup box down there, whatever you do.

Lauren: Click on all those links in all of those things. 

Matt: Absolutely. 

Lauren: Make sure you’re doing that. There's nothing more frustrating than when you're trying to find somebody's Instagram account and you find their website and they have a button at the bottom of their page to their Instagram and you go to click on it and it's a dead link. 

Matt: Or it takes you to their like Twitter page. They're all messed up. 

Lauren: Yep. Yeah. So click on every link on your website and make sure it takes you to where it's supposed to go to.

Matt: Yeah. And it never hurts to have other people help you. So if somebody else in the house with you, or you got a friend or a relative or whatever, like give them access, have them take a look at the pages as well. 

Lauren: Kill two birds with one stone and find a friend that has an opposite mobile device from the one that you have. There you go, easy. 

Matt: Yeah. Not a bad idea at all. And then again, like I alluded to coming into this step, you’re really going to want to do some end to end testing with your products. So log out of the site as the owner, go in as a user. Make a purchase, buy a book or a t-shirt or whatever it is you're selling. Get through the process, make sure everything was okay, the card was charged properly. Log back in as the site owner, take a look at the order information in your dashboard, make sure the order came through properly, the card was charged properly, the money is credited to your account, and then make sure that order was transmitted properly. If it's a book, it's coming to Lulu Direct properly, make sure if it's a t-shirt or something like that, make sure it went to the appropriate manufacturer. And then you're going to wait and make sure that product comes to you and it's printed the way that it's supposed to look. 

I technically would not launch my store until I'd physically touched, laid eyes and hands on those products to make sure they, that everything is set up properly, they're being printed appropriately, you know, and that could take anywhere from three to ten days. So, you know, a little patience there, but I wouldn't recommend launching that portion of your website. If you haven't physically done full end to end testing and know what that product's going to look like when it hits the hands of your buyer.

Lauren: It's worth it. It's worth it because the time that you spend now waiting for everything to get straightened out and make sure that everything looks good and everything looks the way you want it to look and your products look the way you want it to do. You're going to spend that time now but you're going to save it later when the first ten customers all reach out to you and complain that something was wrong - 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren:  in their delivery process and they didn't get the product that they ordered or they didn't, it wasn't the quality they expected or whatever it was. 

Matt: Yeah, like if you're selling ebooks and audiobooks and you're using BookFunnel, for example, we know over BookFunnel they say a lot of the complaints they get is that once somebody gets the email with the file download for the audiobook or the ebook, a lot of times they have issues with it. Usually user error is what I'm trying to say. But nonetheless, you need to understand that as the site owner, you need to understand what that experience is like for your customer. So again, test every product you have and every manufacturer, vendor partnership plugin that you're using, because you want to make sure that you don't launch. And then, you know, within the next two weeks, you've got 27 different complaint emails coming into your inbox because you didn't test some of these things. 

You're going to want to make sure again, as you're going through the cart experience that everything looks right. I would also test your abandoned cart feature. So go through, put something in the cart and just leave the website. Then when you log back in as the owner, a few minutes later, see if you can see that abandoned cart information in there, like what was in the cart, where were they? Are you able to reach back out to them? Is that session being logged in your ESP plug-in so that you can shoot them an email, or an automated email that says hey you left something in your cart come back and get it. If you've set up a discount for that particular purpose, make sure that's firing too. You're going to want to test all those things, all those behaviors, all those events and triggers.

Lauren: Yeah, just anything you can think of. Think about your own, like, how you use online shopping. Whatever you're doing, whenever you're online shopping, think about what you do and just try to test all of those different things. Like I know myself, one of the things that I do is I'll be browsing a website and I'll open like five different tabs of the different products that I wanna look closer at. And then I'll have them all in five different tabs and I'll add them to my cart and I expect them all to add to my cart from the separate tabs. I expect that by the end of that shopping experience, they're all gonna be in my cart together. I'm not gonna have five different carts open from the five different tabs.

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: You know, you want to make sure that that's actually going to be the case like you want to make sure that your website is working the way that a user would expect it to. 

Matt: Yeah ultimately I think what we're trying to say you're gonna spend more time testing your site and all the features and functionality of your site then you will actually putting the site together.

Lauren: Probably. 

Matt: For the most part. I could put together a Shopify's website and store in a matter of hours, but it would take me days to test everything if I did it with some patience and thoroughness, for sure. And that's okay, too. Like with everything that you do as an author or creator, you need to approach this with the same level of patience and understanding that this is not like a two hour thing and you're done. 

Yeah you might put your site together in a couple hours, but again, this testing is going to take a while, you know, and then there's going to be an iterative process where you're building off of it in a couple of months, you might decide you want to change your template or your layout or based on feedback from user behavior, you may want to restructure your product pages or things like that. 

Lauren: Yeah, this is also coming from two very impatient people. So we do totally understand. 

Matt: I have no idea what you're talking about, by the way. You must have a mouse in your pocket because I don't think you're talking about me. I have the patience of a saint.

Lauren: Of course you do. That's so true. Yeah, no, we totally understand the excitement and enthusiasm, you've just built this out. You've been working on this for a really long time. You want to go ahead and hit publish. You want to share it with friends and family and fans, people that have asked me for it and like, see what happens. You got to pump the brakes a little bit. You have to like, it's worth taking the time to make sure everything is right before you hit publish on your site. 

Matt: Yeah. 


[51:25]

Lauren: Yeah. Is that it? Did we get through all seven steps? 

Matt: Those are all seven steps to building your own online bookstore, yes. 

Lauren: Yes, they are. 

Matt: So again, if you want to go any further into those, we suggest you check out the resources on Shopify, Wix, WooCommerce, and those other sites. They're all great. We'll have a bunch of stuff in the bottom of the show notes and outside of that. Thanks for spinning the last 45 minutes listening to us ramble on. 

Lauren: We can hope it's 45 minutes because it's not currently 45 minutes. 

Matt: It will be. 

Lauren: I am good. I'm not sure that I'm that good. We'll see. Fill in the blank on how much time this episode is when I'm editing it. 

Matt: 40 to 50 minutes. How about that? 

Lauren: My money's on 55. 

Matt: All right. 

Lauren: But we'll see how it goes. You'll know probably as soon as we do. So thanks for listening and thanks for sticking it out with us.