Hi there.
Glad that you could drop by B&P today. Today, I’d like to talk about my short lived Shopify adventure.
As you may be aware in my previous posts, I am a shopkeeper of an online aBay Store called ADRL EBAY - http://stores.ebay.com.au/ADRL-Store .
This is where I sell both brand new and pre-used gift items that I have acquired through the years, as well as regularly pick up in local markets in Australia (where I am based).
Very recently, about a month ago, I looked into setting up a store to sell Custom Printed products like Tees, Totes, Mugs, Socks and Wall Art Posters. I signed up with a custom printer that drop-ships, which happens to have a ready App linked to Shopify. So, I decided to sign up with a Basic Shopify Store (under A$ 30.00 monthly), and for the next three weeks, came up with some original designs…. also borrowing from some classic copyright free art and modifying it…. and posted products in the store.
It was an exciting kind of work, focusing on designs, and having the ease of adding it into a mock-up of the product, with Shopify taking care of the store site, and most especially the Shopping Cart. It also gave me the opportunity to sell to the very large American market since the drop-shipper was based in the USA.
Using the Shopify store guide, I created a few Collections that had different kinds of custom printed items in them - The Alphabet Collection, The Art Gallery Collection, The Homer the Bully Collection, and a few more. (I will feature these collections in more detail in the coming blog posts).
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| One of socks from The Art Gallery Collection |
Unfortunately, once I had a good number of products on the Store site, I then looked at the ordering and pricing procedure to see how I can make it more competitive for my customers. It was then I noticed that the shipping costs with the Shopify store was a bit complicated to set up with the drop-shipper. Shopify computes the shipping cost from Australia, instead of the USA. Shopify will only allow you to link up with the drop-shippers address automatically (so that shipping costs will be automatically computed from the drop-shippers address), if your Store Plan was a Premium one (under A$ 300.00 monthly).
The monthly fee was too much for me. So, to continue using Shopify, I would have to estimate the shipping costs on a per item basis and set it up per item in my store. This could mean that I may make errors in the shipping costs and end up losing money on a sale (as I would need to pay the drop-shipper the shipping costs, aside from the product cost).
After a day of mulling it over, I decided to just close down my Shopify store. Later in the afternoon, while exchanging emails with the drop-shipper’s customer service support, they informed me that it seems Shopify has a “secret” way of allowing the link up to a drop-shippers address for an extra US$20 monthly. Although Shopify is giving me about a month or so to re-open my Store if I change my mind, I decided that their keeping the tool a secret didn’t bode well, and decided to just keep it closed.
I was feeling bad about the designs and collections I had made, when it occurred to me the next day, that I have a website project in progress - a site hosting I am already paying for , provided by PageCloud. I intended this site to be like a community of all my different projects, but realised that it would be put to better use with the designs I want to market.
I set up a new store with the drop-shipper, called it ADRL Designs, and will be hosting the store site at this address - https://adrl.pagecloud.com/
The site is still very much under construction. If you visit it, it will still show the site templates I am using. I hope to have the site up and running by the middle of December this year. By then, I also plan to get a custom web address for the store.
In the meantime, I will be blogging about ADRL DESIGNS here in B&P for those of you who would want to see its progress.
Below are some of the products in the now shuttered ADRL Shopify but will soon be available in the ADRL DESIGNS Store.
Thanks for dropping by and see you soon.
Alan
