I’ve shared a little bit about my jewelry business with you in past posts. It was a bit of a rollercoaster ride in that before I decided to close up shop to pursue other passions, I made some big leaps.
Things like expanding my product line with gemstone and glass pieces (fail) and building a stand-alone website outside of Etsy. When I did that, I explored all of the platforms available and landed on Shopfy for a few key reasons.
First, I want to say that Etsy is great! There is such a sense of community and so many shoppers frequent Etsy daily. It was a great place to start. But, the competition is fierce and your customers are Etsy shoppers, not yours.
You also might be wondering… I’ve been talking a lot about how great Squarespace is, so why did I launch If the Jewel Fits on Shopify? While I do love Squarespace a ton, I was looking for a bit more in an e-commerce platform to really take our shop to the next level. These are the things that swayed me.
1 // Gift Cards
This was a must-have feature, especially for the holiday season. Shopify provides an easy solution for customers to buy and gift electronic vouchers. It was easy to set up and, with a little bit of coding knowledge, easy to brand.
2 // Social Integrations
Shopify has integrations with Pinterest and Facebook! It's easy to set up your products as buyable pins and even easier to add a store tab onto your brand's Facebook page. Those were both really exciting things to set-up.
3 // Customer Service
Equally as awesome as Squarespace, there is a great support team at Shopify. I participated in multiple chats and email exchanges during the set up of the shop. They spent a lot of time with me and searched out the answers if they didn't know them on the spot.
4 // Apps
There is a library of apps that integrate into your Shopify store. I’ll dive more into those in a later post. The key here is that they are all within the Shopify dashboard so they are easy to find and install.
5 // Low Maintenance
This is always a plus in my book. No need to worry about server issues here because Shopify hosts your website. All you have to do is update content on the easy, web-based content management system, sell orders and create relationships with your customers!
Programming Level: 1.5
Sometimes, you will need to go into the code section to edit and change things, like your gift card creative. But, the Shopify support team has a huge library of tutorials and you can jump on a live chat and have them walk you through it.
