I’ve got my domain name, I know what I’ll be selling from Doba, and so now it’s time to start setting up Doba and Shopify accounts. I’m going to start with Shopify, and as I start this post, I have not yet signed up. I’m going to post notes here if I run into issues as I go along.
https://app.shopify.com/services/signup – Which package to choose? I’m not sure if I need carrier shipping, but real-time stats sounds like a good thing, so I think I’ll go for the $99/month package, especially since I can downgrade anytime I want to without any extra fees.
The “create account” page was intuitive enough, no problems there.
On the confirmation page there is a link to enter the contest, so I guess I’ll do that.
Ok, now I’m on my “dashboard” where I can do everything to run my store. First things first, I need to figure out how to get my domain whitegoldweddingbandswomen.com pointing to my store…I just clicked on preferences, and see there’s a spot to put in my Google Analytics account info, I better set that up right now while I’m thinking about it. And as one thing leads to another, I might as well set up a full Google account profile while I’m at it…
That’s all done, so back to Shopify’s preference. Hmmm, sales taxes, I hate this stuff. It looks like it automatically put in settings to charge Utah sales taxes, but not for the other states, so let’s leave it at that. If it’s a problem I’ll deal with it later.
On Checkouts and Payment, set up paypal, I already have an account and following the directions was easy enough…Google Checkout set up was slightly more complicated, but I got through it. I’m not going to go into excruciating detail on these steps, as it would triple the time of actually doing them and I’m sure you can find step by step instructions in many other places.
Now, do I want to set up my own credit card gateway or depend on Google Checkout and Paypal for everything? I think I’d like to set up a gateway, but this may take some time, let’s see how it goes…ok, took about 10-15 minutes to work my way through the application, and it is just that, an application with no guarantee of being approved. It’s the same as applying for a credit card. I chose to apply through Authorize.net because I’ve signed up with them in the past and I know they’re reputable, whereas I wasn’t familiar with the other names out there (other than Braintree, which was started by a friend of mine, but which only deals with large accounts).
Shipping…hmm, I’m not sure what to do here since Doba’s drop shippers will be handling this, so I’ll come back to that later.
Alrighty, so fixing the domain, that’s the second to the last option, and it’s fairly easy. I use GoDaddy for all my domain registration/management, and Shopify has specific instructions on how to set it all up correctly, so that was a snap.
Well, that pretty much concludes the “shopify sign up process.” There are a lot of things to be set up on the site, and that will be quite a bit more work, but I’m all signed up and ready to go and it was about as simple as someone can make it. Not to say it’s simple, but there aren’t any ways I can see to simplify things any more.
