Getting my Shopify fundamentals right

The first step of DTC consumer brands is a Shopify store. I am building our second Shopify store. It is a painful process😖 . It seems easy on the surface, but the devil is in the details.

👋 Hola! Welcome to Out of Singapore. I am Shantanu and I write about building businesses from scratch. I share stories about my initiatives, failures and learnings so that you can do better than me.

It took effort to start writing this weekend. I was battling hangover yesterday and I couldn’t keep my eyes off the sale numbers (9.9 sale). The week was bad in terms of numbers and when finally the orders started pouring in, it was pure joy!

My professional journey has been like a camera zooming into a picture. I started working at an ecommerce platform (high revenue, hundreds of brands), moved to a medium sized brand (med revenues, few brands) and now I am building brands from scratch (read - zero revenues, 1 brand). Starting from scratch takes confidence. Over the years, I have gained the skillsets required to start and scale a new brand to $100 mn annual revenues (goal is billion plus). Can I achieve this goal? Guess, we will know after a few years. 🫠

It has been two weeks. How have you been? I know some of you were travelling. Would you share a secret with me?

For readers not familiar with Chinese social media landscape, Xiong Hong Shu, 小红书, or Little Red App is the Instagram equivalent in China. Apart from China, it is widely popular among Chinese expats living abroad and international travellers from China. We are starting to advertise on this platform (now you know why I am interested). If you are curious about the platform, read this interesting article from a content creator who went viral - How I cracked Xiaohongshu – China’s hottest social media platform.

Here is a snippet from my Little Red App.

Now, let’s jump to today’s topic. When you start a DTC brand, you need a product, people and a storefront. In most cases, the storefront is either Shopify or a marketplace store like Amazon or Shopee. A marketplace store is straightforward (not easy). However, a Shopify store is a complicated ballgame. You need to think like a brand manager, product manager, fulfilment manager, creative director and customer service manager - all at once.

I have been struggling to get the Shopify store live for our new skincare brand, Cerm. Let me give you an overview of a Shopify store and then we will get down to making all of this work for you.

Simplistically, a Shopify store is

1. Information about the products and the brand.

2. Design to emphasize the information.

3. Technical setup to ensure the user can move through the store and receive their orders.

Let’s look at these one by one.

#1 Upload information on Shopify store

We are launching skincare products specifically made for the youth, for the skin problems they face everyday. The Shopify store is meant to communicate this to build trust with users. The information can segmented into following categories

1. Key store pages - Home page, product pages, brand story, FAQ, blogs

2. Policies - Shipping, return, refund, privacy, payments, complaints

3. SEO - Keywords, meta title, meta description (on all pages, collections, tags that we create)

4. Custom fields (meta fields) - As the name suggests, every brand has their unique custom fields. For us, some are skin type, product claims, INCI list.

Here is the backend view of a product page. The challenge is not filling up the information - it is writing that engaging product copy that speaks to engage our prospective customers. I initially tried using ChatGPT and Bard. Unfortunately, they are mechanical. We decided to hire an experienced copywriter to write all the pages. She is quite literally the voice of the brand now.

The backend of a product page. I cannot show the meta fields (12 additional fields).

Each of these headings are a separate page.

SEO, i.e. being Google friendly, forms the building block of all copy on the website. The keywords must get plugged in from the start else God save you (He/she won’t save you).

#2 Make the store look pretty

This has two parts - one is creative assets (read photoshoot and product shoot) and second is UI. We will talk about UI in next section. The creatives needed for the store are:

1. Product images (and videos)- Most basic building block of the store are the products. This is the simplest, highest quality picture of your product and it’s look and feel. For skincare, it means images and videos showing texture and application on the skin. Each product needs a minimum of 3 images.

2. Main banners - Nowadays, a new form of immersive banners are coming up. For practical purposes, imagine a desktop wallpaper. Stock images won’t work. Please shoot original pictures as they go a long way in differentiating the brand. We needed 5 different banner images. This itself is of two types - product banners and lifestyle banners.

3. Icons - This is often overlooked. However, icons are your secret weapon. It tells brand story in small graphics, like climate neutral or gentle on skin. Of course, you can be creative and replace these with GIF. However, you would like a balance of static and video assets on the webpage.

4. Videos - While they are important, you can have them later on. We decided to add a splash video on homepage to introduce our product and brand values. In fact, video as a hero banner makes a lot of sense.

The secret is not getting these photos clicked but finding the images that make sense and give the right message to the users. Editing these raw files is a massive job and you must have a good designer at hand to handle it. It took us more than 30 days to get the pictures ready🥲

Spend extra time on getting the first few images and creatives right, it sets the brand language and standards moving forward.

#3 Setup tech for smooth user experience

This is extensive and my favourite part. Let’s go into details

1. UI - Where a specific information, including text, image and video, appears on the page. This can be learnt and improved by looking at competitor websites.

2. UX - Simplistically the website speed, checkout experience, information availability. Competitor website design helps, but best is watch your customer with Microsoft Clarity.

3. Integrations with fulfilment service, payment providers (credit card, BNPL, regional payment methods) and custom services.

4. Marketing setup - Connecting to Google, Meta and Tiktok ecosystem. You can also add other channels later on. Tools like Triple Whale to track the marketing ROAS is extremely helpful. Here is the ecosystem I was talking about
   Google - Google Ads, GA4, Google Merchant Centre, Google Search Console, Tag Manager
   Meta - Facebook Ads, Facebook and Instagram shop, Facebook and Instagram pages
   Tiktok - Tiktok Ads, Tiktok shop, Tiktok page

5. App installations and setup - This can be long list, but most common are customer reviews, product bundles and loyalty apps.

Quite often the default store and theme setup is not enough and custom coding is required. We plugged in a custom “product superpower” tag since it is an easy way to highlight the product.

#4 Superheroes who made the Shopify store possible

These superheroes made most things possible for me.

1. Smartass developer

2. Experience skincare copywriter

3. Fast experienced designer

4. Photographer who knows his shit.

In short, getting a store up and ready is a lot of work. If you don’t put all the required information, then Google and Facebook won’t recommend your store which means users won’t come to you. I am hopefully at the tail end of the getting the store ready.

The launch date is 15th September 2023🤞

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Thank you for reading till the end. You are absolute star 🌟

If you like my writing and initiative, please like this post and share with your friends.

I skipped my run this week. I am also travelling again next week for work, and will be in India for a week - New Delhi, Kolkata and Dhanbad. I am worried my workout schedule will get screwed. So, I need to start following my routine from tomorrow. Again, fingers crossed 🤞

I have missed Jisoo.

She is the cutest. 🤭 Credits: Giphy

Thank you again, hope to see you again next week. Have a great week ahead 💪