Success? I’m not retired on the beach in Bermuda yet, but I did make some sales rather quickly. My first sale was 4 days after I first opened. I’ve had sales regularly since then (not daily—after all, I don’t have that many products). I sold about 30% of the products on my site, then I added some more a couple of weeks ago.

I’m very confident with the Shopify experience. I wish I knew how to do more things with it (ie, show related items on a product’s detail page; and a handful of other things).

I have another store (a Yahoo store… boooo), that I think I would like to convert to shopify. I’m just not sure if there is some way to upload products en masse (or if you have to enter them one by one)—and that store has over 1,000 products, so I would not be able to do it one-by-one in a timely manner.

I am launching another shopify store tomorrow (hopefully). I may post the URL once I launch it. I still have to take product pics and write descriptions, so tomorrow may be too optimistic.

You can see my current shopify store linked in my signature.

Nice site! Who was your designer?

Thank you Starlooks for the compliment. I designed it myself.

Wow!

Adam, where do you get your traffic from? Do you send customers from your yahoo store over to your shopify one? I’m doing a google adwords thing but don’t want to lay it on thick because we’re not actually ready for a big load of traffic anyway…

Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and seo-efforts.

7 orders so far and some email enquiries in a little over 6 weeks so we are happy. Spending a little on Google Adwords (£2.50/$5 per day) and have set ourselves a total investment budget of £500/$1000 to see how this goes.

We have run another store before and know that it can easily take 4-6 months before a steady stream of traffic is established.

Spending about an hour a day on SEO and most weekends on functionality and design tweaks.

Would be happy to share experiences with others.

Jonathan
www.marketquarter.com

Hey Jonathon. What do you mean by SEO like what do you do? I know it stands for search engine optimization but ???

Anyone try Daily Candy? How about James Girone? And also Babble.com? (this would be for parenting-kids-related stuff)

SEO for me means both optimising the site (content, content, content) and attempting to build reputation (links).

For the former, I am using articles linked off the home page and a separate blogspot blog Selling French Food at The Market Quarter . The aim is to have lots of relevant keywords in the articles and in the blog and link them together for search engine goodness.

Reputation link-building is a slower process and I try and build two of three links a day in directories and my getting other people to link to me from their blogs. I am identifying some of the key food bloggers and they will get some free stuff from us to try. I am steering well away from black hat stuff like buying links as I know these can cause serious problems.

I would definitely try sites like Daily Candy and James Girone but what are you going to do to get them to feature you? I need to find more similar sites in the food arena.

I am puzzled that these forums are not being used more to discuss these issues and hope that the conversations here go up in the next few months.

Regards

Jonathan

I know. I need someone to take notice of the store and I got to sit down and brainstorm some ideas—think outside of the box. ... me too…

I helped Rick at Wall Glamour leap from fewer than 100 visits a day to over 1000 a day. We have plans for the next step up.

Our second step was about improving conversion rates. He is more than happy with sales going from 1 or 2 a week to four or five (larger ones) a day (in less than 3 months!).

I hope he doesn’t mind sharing the fact that he started spamming other Shopify owners telling them they could do with a little help from me. I had to ask him to stop because nobody wants to be told they are crap do they?

BUT, and here’s the gotcha, Rick was prepared to work hard and creatively to promote his site. He has done some great “outside the box” work on and off the site and although I’d dearly love to take all the credit for Rick’s success, if I’m honest it’s all down to him (with a little help from me).

Go take a look …and buy a wall sticker :-)

http://www.wallglamour.co.uk

@Tom Smith:

I think that site is great, and the concept is great. However to be honest, I really think he should be able to display the price as US$. I don’t know what his target customer base is (probably UK) but for me (located in the US), I look at it… and don’t bother doing the conversion rate to find out my actual cost. Right there, you have lost me as a potential customer and I would probably search out an alternative site maybe within the US.

That’s just my perspective though. Being able to toggle the price form GBP to US would have been helpful…

Hey rob. , adding conversion rates to websites is one of the more problematic issues for e-commerce; exchange rates can fluctuate drastically, and each credit card, merchant gateway, and bank calculates them differently. Having separate sites for each currency is an option, but a cumbersome one; generally it requires a separate inventory entirely. (Even big sites such as Apple have separate e-commerce for different countries and currencies.)

I wish it was easier than that, but it’s not; I’d love to offer US$ realtime conversion to our US customers, but I am afraid that’s not in the cards.

@Chelsea: It is really trivial with Shopify to show approximate and up to date currency info for a variety of countries. This can really help customers as a lot of sales are lost if people are unsure about the exchange rate.

I usually wouldn’t mind paying in the currency you only accept since paypal makes this possible. It would just be nice to see what it would actually cost me in terms of USD when converted. It might turn some off since the dollar is low, and the cost may be higher… but at least we were able to see the cost in USD.

I’ve been asking around quite a bit and researching ways of making websites searchable and get more traffic. One way that repeatedely pops up is starting a blog and keeping it up. So that’s what my next step is. I have one on Wordpress with no entries, so that won’t help. I’ll probably start one this week-end. Keep your eyes peeled!

www.Starboo.Wordpress.com I’m planning on making at least 4 entries per week. What do you guys think?

Hi, I’ve been running www.love-eco.co.uk now for 18 months and it’s been a great start. The first sale came quickly, second day of opening! The key to success to date has been PR, for me that means constantly promoting products to journalists, stylists and feature writers. Half my visitors come direct to the site. Half via search engine. However, I have another job and so only get two days a week to run Love Eco and sales and visitors are a bit static of late. I’d love to hear more about business development, getting more sales out of existing customers, increasing average spends and converting newsletter subscribers to customers. Shopify has been great for me. I too just wish I could do a bit more like cross promotions, gift vouchers and duplicating the site but keeping one back office.
Any help/ideas welcome.
Becky.