Amber:
Welcome to Episode 10 of the Gem Finders Podcast. I'm Amber.

Shaun:
I am Shaun.

Amber:
And today, we are going to talk about what we love and don't love about Shopify. It was something that we added to the business about a year and a half ago because it gave us the ability to simplify our checkout process for customers. We now have our own website, and it's been a wonderful thing for the business, but has also given us quite a few headaches. And I think that as resellers, we have very different needs than a lot of other businesses. In some ways Shopify has really met those, and in other ways it hasn't. When I was considering using Shopify, I didn't really see a lot of other resources out there that were geared towards using it for a reselling business, so I kind of wanted to have a discussion today about things that we love and don't love, and things that you should take into consideration if you're thinking about using Shopify for a reselling business.

Shaun:
Yeah. I think it's a great website for selling new items and bulk items, things like that, but it definitely has some challenges with reselling. So we're gonna touch on those.

Amber:
And to be fair, I do think that we would run into the same issues with any other platform. I don't think there's anything that does what Shopify does and also caters to a reselling business. So reselling just creates its own unique set of challenges, and we will kind of discuss that a little bit more today. Although that could probably be a whole episode, if we're looking for ideas in the future—the unique business problems that a reselling business creates.

Shaun:
Not only do people hate resellers, but so do websites and businesses—apparently.

Amber:
Business platforms—because they don't ever take into consideration reselling businesses' needs.

One of the best things about Shopify is the checkout process. We hear it all the time from customers that the checkout process is awesome. They can create their own account if they want to, there are photos at checkout, you can add photos to invoices—which we've got really great feedback on. Before, we were sending PayPal invoices that didn't have photos, so people have really loved being able to see the pictures and knowing that I am putting the right thing on their invoice and in their order. And it's very helpful when we're packing orders to be able to see what items go in which box. 

There are a variety of ways that people can check out.

Shaun:
Yeah, pretty much any payment method is accepted at this point.

Amber:
Yeah—Apple Pay, Venmo, PayPal, just a credit card.

Shaun:
Yeah, and I think the best part is the payment plans. Because as a business that sells primarily on Instagram, I know you used to get asked so often if they could make a payment plan or if you could set up a payment plan for them. So now they don't have to ask. It is right in the checkout process.

Amber:
Yes, and payment plans aren't something that I have to manage. Because it can be really hard to have to follow up with people and be like, "Hey, I need your second or third payment," or to have to wait to ship something until the payment plan is fulfilled. Cause then the item is sitting in your house for a long time. So the payments through—you can either do them through Shop Pay or through PayPal. The payment plans—they have been wonderful because I don't have to do a thing. I don't even know if I can see who used a payment plan and who didn't. If I can see it, it's not something that like—it's not in an obvious place. So I don't even really catch when somebody is using one and when they're not. I just send it as a regular order and Shopify does the rest.

So I think there are a lot of things that have made the checkout process easier for us and for customers, and that has been wonderful. And it's really nice that you can also send invoices, because that is something I feel like a lot of other platforms lack. You can create your website, but you can't really invoice through the same inventory that the website is showing. So one really fantastic feature—even though there are some things I would change about the invoicing feature—the fact that Shopify has an invoicing... they call it draft orders, but the fact that you can create an invoice-style order and then email or copy and paste the link to send to the customer has been very convenient.

Shaun:
I know that you had to have somebody code some stuff into the invoices to make it more along the lines of what you wanted. There's a lot of cool features with Shopify, but there's a lot of things that might seem obvious that you kind of have to either pay for an app or pay somebody to code for you.

Amber:
And I think from a business perspective, that was very smart of Shopify—to create something that literally any level of business can utilize. You can be a very small business, and Shopify will work for you. And then I also know that there are businesses that bring in millions of dollars that use Shopify. So it is a platform that can really cater to you depending on the level that you're at with your business. However, the features with the basic Shopify plan are extremely, extremely limited.

It is enough to kind of get a website out there and to get a shop up and running, but the features are very limited. And like Shaun said, when you want to customize something or add something or add a certain feature, you either need to pay somebody to code it or you have to add a plugin. Which can be very, very overwhelming, because a lot of times there are so many different plugins that do the same thing. So trying to decide which plugin you're gonna use—and a lot of them are paid for. There are very few free plugins, especially for more advanced features. But trying to narrow down which plugin is going to be the best option for you... I haven't really found Shopify support to be super helpful in that regard. Narrowing down which plugin is a process, so they definitely don't make it easy.

It's nice to know that as the business grows, I can continue to add things. But as a very small business right now, sometimes it is very frustrating to need what seems like a small tweak and have to either pay somebody to code it or pay a plugin to add that feature. So it's something to take into consideration, but there's nothing that you absolutely need—especially if you're just starting out as a small reseller. We started out on the marketplace platforms—eBay, Poshmark, and Mercari—and then we were selling on Instagram for a few years before I added in Shopify and our website. The basic functions of Shopify will absolutely help you start out at that level.

Shaun:
So you've dealt with the design of the website a lot more than I have. I've hardly done anything with it, but I have heard you mention some things along the lines of, you know, certain features only work with certain themes. And it seems like it's harder to code things in certain themes. And I know that the theme that we are currently using—you said does not integrate well with, like, Google and SEO.

Amber:
I've run into a couple different issues where it kind of seems like nobody can tell me where the problem is. For example, I keep getting emails from Google that our products aren't set up correctly. And so when I talk to Shopify support, they are telling me that it is the theme. And then when I talk to the theme developer, they're saying it's an issue with Shopify. And then you can't get a hold of anybody at Google. So there are just a lot of complications.

And in some ways Shopify support has been very, very helpful. It's very easy to get to a person, and you can actually talk to a person. It does give you like an AI thing in the beginning that attempts to help you, but as long as you just tell it, “No, talk to a person,” a few times, you can get to a person. And I've never had to wait more than like five to ten minutes to be able to chat with an actual human being. And some of the people have been way more helpful than others, but overall I've had really great experiences with Shopify support.

But there do seem to be some things where they kind of say that it is the theme’s fault, and then you go and try to get answers and they can't give you them either. So that has been frustrating. But I've only had experience with one theme, and I really do like the theme itself, and I feel like the theme developer has tried to be helpful. You know, there's just kind of like a lot of gray areas. And I think that that's one of the biggest issues—like, I am just starting to become familiar with Shopify. I was a WordPress user with the businesses and the blog in the past, and it is different. Shopify is very different than WordPress. So it's kind of like new territory that I'm not used to, and finding answers to what seemed to be simple questions has definitely given me a lot of headaches—and probably some gray hairs.

Shaun:
I think that all businesses could be a little more transparent about how they deliver information and just be a little more clear about things. You can say that about any website or business, that there's a lot of gray area and, you know, things that seem confusing. I think that all businesses could take a little bit of a lesson from that.

Amber:
And I think it's really frustrating that I can't get help from Google, especially because I pay for the Google Business suite—or they keep changing the name—but like I am paying Google for our email addresses and other things, but I can't find anything to be able to be like, “Hey, can you help me figure out exactly what this email means?”

So that's been hard because I'm not sure that our products are showing up on Google in the correct way, which is one of the reasons that I wanted to start a website to begin with. It could be on me—like maybe it's just something that I'm not understanding—but it's been hard that I can't figure it out and that the answer has been to pay a developer. And then so—I did contact the developer that—I had two pieces of code inserted into the website, and I'll tell you what those were in a second. But I contacted the developer that did those, and they were like, “This isn't a problem we can help you with.”

So there's been a couple different situations where it's been hard to navigate and hard to know which avenue I need to explore to get help. I had a Shopify developer code a condition section so that it shows at the top of the listing, because the condition of the item is very important to me. I always want to make sure that we are advertising and marketing our products with accurate flaws and an accurate condition description. Because I never want somebody to, you know, be unaware of a chip or some cloudiness or some kind of flaw—and then it show up and them be like, “I didn't know it had this.” Especially when we try to be so detailed with documenting that information.

My first priority was to get that on the invoices, because you can add a custom product to an invoice, but you can't add a field that shows any other details. So my priority was to get that condition info, because when you're in the backend and you're putting in all of the information for the item, I really wanted there to be a condition field that would then translate over to the invoices when we were sending them. And in order to do that, you had to have it as a field on the item page. I tried to do it and I couldn't figure it out, so I had somebody code that field. So now it goes onto the email invoices, and then it also shows on the regular website listing page.

However, I have needed a theme update for a long time. And apparently, when you update a theme, it doesn't necessarily maintain your custom code changes. So Shopify told me that if I update the theme, I will need to have that code reentered.

Shaun:
And I'm sure that won't be free.

Amber:
No, I doubt it. And when I had it coded the first time, the company told me that they were going to send me the snippet of code and tell me where to put it—and they never did. So I need to either try to reach back out to them, but that was over a year ago now. So I need to either reach back out to them and say, “Hey, you promised me that you would give me this—tell me where to put this code,” or I need to pay to have it recoded again, or try to figure it out on my own. So just, you know, it's been challenging to navigate things like that.

But there are a lot of other areas where something seems really simple and it's not there. For example, you cannot change the order that the products are displayed in on your website. It automatically sorts it by the date that the item was added into inventory. So there's no way for me to decide exactly which order the products should go in. 

And for us, we aren't always making the items live in the order that we found them in or the order that they were inventoried in, because we have a lot of different collections that we're curating. And sometimes we're holding things for a specific collection. So sometimes we might find an item in, you know, January, and it might not be listed until March or April. But other times we find an item in January and it's listed two weeks later.

So sometimes we're making an item live for the first time and it's technically a new item, but because other items were added in between, it doesn't show until much later on the page—which is very frustrating when I'm trying to show people the newest items. That's why I added that New Item section, so that at least on that page, it was more readily viewable. But if somebody just clicks on the “Available” tab, everything is sorted by the date in which it was added to inventory. And that’s not ideally the order I would like the products to show up in. So it’s very frustrating because that seems like a very simple feature. Like, can’t I just sort them by the date that they went active, rather than the date they went into inventory?

Shaun:
Well, another newer issue that we experienced related to inventory and how products are displayed is—on our end, we have a listing that’s called “Example” that we duplicate every time we add a new item to the website. Because there are a lot of fields that we fill out on each listing, and a lot of them are already pre-filled out, and just the general setup and the structure of how we list our items is in that Example. So we just duplicate that and then we create the new listing from that.

And over the last month or two, something happened in the way that Shopify decided they were going to display the items on our end when we're trying to add products. And now it does the same thing—it only shows the newest one first. And you can change the way it sorts, but you can't change the way that it is default sorted. So every single time you add a new product, it goes back to showing it from what was added most recently. And the Example one is not, because obviously we duplicate that, so that keeps getting further and further down the list. So now every time we want to find that, we have to change the sort.

And that takes, you know—it takes a few seconds. I know that sounds silly, but it is—it disrupts the workflow, and it just makes that whole process longer. So again, it seems like something that is so simple that should be there, that you can just change how the default sort is. But you can't.

Amber:
No. And so it has an asterisk and then “Example,” so that it would show up as the very first item. And then they changed it, and now you do have to click, like, five or six things to get it to show up. And it is frustrating.

So there are a lot of things like that where I'm like—why? So we just kind of—the more we use Shopify, the more we run into these seemingly very small things that if I was making Shopify, would be like an automatic thing that I would make happen. And as a user I'm like, why? Why is this not there? It’s not anything that you would think you’d need a plugin for.

Shaun:
There’s also—like we touched on in the beginning—there’s a lot of reseller-specific things that we have had to kind of alter to use in a way that Shopify didn’t necessarily intend. So we make it work for us.

Amber:
For example—and I don’t even think this is reseller-specific—but there is a vendor field. And originally we wanted to use that for where we got the items from, just for our own personal knowledge so that we could easily see where we got each item at. But then I realized that that field was automatically showing up on Google, which I had no idea. So then we decided to use it for the brand of the item instead of the place we got it from.

I mean, not that it matters—I’m not trying to hide where we bought the items, we share a lot of that information anyway—but it wasn’t necessarily something I wanted publicly attached to the listing. That information isn’t useful for the customer. So it was very, very strange that we had to make an adjustment like that, or that there was no way to just hide that from Google.

This is also not Shopify-specific, but something that I think is important to take into consideration—and I'm not sure if this is an issue across the board for many resellers, or if it’s just us and our customer base—but it has been so much more challenging to get people to purchase off of the website than we initially thought. Because when I was doing most of our selling on Instagram, people were asking me daily like, “Do you have a website where I can view all of your available listings?” Because I had them in just like a story highlight—like those little bubbles that come up that permanently stay on your Instagram profile.

So I had like “available 1,” “available 2,” “available 3.” Everything we had available was just in one of those highlight bubbles. And people had to click through to see what was available, and then to see the most recent items, they had to click all the way to the end. I couldn’t really find a better solution at the time, so people had been asking me for a website where they could view everything. And so I really thought it was going to be much more of a success—or much easier to get sales on the website—when we first created it because so many people had been asking for it. But that has not been the case, and I don't really know what the reason for that is. I think a lot of our customer base got very used to purchasing from the Instagram live sales, or maybe just Instagram in general is what they were used to.

But I am really surprised that we don't get more spontaneous website orders. I mean, we have made it work. Once we kind of realized that it wasn't going to bring in as many orders as we thought, we adjusted our strategy. So we've made it work and it's been okay—but definitely something I was caught off guard by.

Shaun:
And that also makes me wonder if the SEO and the Google optimization—if that's an issue with that too. Because you would think that—I mean, people are pretty frequently searching for vintage items, and you would think if our items are showing up there, that we would get more spontaneous sales. So again, I don't have any information that I can link that to directly, but it's always made me suspicious if that has something to do with it.

Amber:
Even that one day when we were looking at all the analytics on the back end, like—we had less clicks from Google than I would have expected.

Shaun:
Yeah.

Amber:
So I definitely think something is wrong with the way that our items are showing up on Google. But I can't figure out how to fix it, so that's definitely been a challenge.

I think one of the best things about having a website is that you own it. We could wake up tomorrow and Instagram or TikTok could be gone. I mean, TikTok was almost taken away, and we still don’t know what’s going to happen with it. So it’s very dangerous—as we have learned if you go back a few episodes—but it is very dangerous in business to rely just on one platform for all of your sales.

And we have relied, up until this point, very heavily on Instagram. I think one of the great things about having your own website is that you own it. You are, for the most part, completely in control of what goes on there and what customers can see and what customers have access to and how the items are displayed. And there are very few places where you can have that kind of control over your listings, because most of the other platforms are—you know, they are a platform where it's managed by some other third party.

So I'm still so glad that we ended up creating the website. I do think that it gives a certain level of credibility to a business, because you know that the business is serious if they're taking the time to not only create a website but to keep it updated and regularly add new items. I think that from a marketing perspective, that strengthens the online presence of a business. So I'm still really glad that we have it.

Shaun:
Going back to the uncertainty of selling on the social media platforms—not only could the platform itself go away, but they could suspend or delete your account at any time for no reason, if they feel like it. So that’s also really scary to think about. Like, if someone were to report your account just as a joke or, you know, just to be spiteful, and if Instagram takes their side and your account's gone—you’re starting from square one all over again.

Amber:
Or if your account gets hacked.

Shaun:
Yeah,

Amber:
Or if you can’t log in. I had that happen a couple months ago on my personal account, so it wasn’t as big of a deal. But I can’t imagine—I would have lost, you know, two weeks in sales if that had happened to the business Instagram account. So I do think that there are a lot of benefits to having your own website.

And if something were to happen to any of the online platforms—if your customers are aware that you have a website—they could go there for updates. And you could post an update saying like, “Here’s what happened. Here’s where to find me. Here’s where my business is going to continue to show up.” So I think that it's a really great safety net. It's very smart to have your own website.

Even if you don’t keep it updated, I would really recommend getting one up there—doing a little bit of, you know, an About Me, about the business, here’s where you can find me—because you never know who is seeing you on Instagram or TikTok or, you know, wherever or just word of mouth, who’s trying to search your business. And if they search your business on Google, if you only have an Instagram, it may or may not come up.

Because I know that in certain capacities, Instagram is searchable, but I don’t think that it is the same as if you have a website.

Shaun:
And I mean, the good thing about Shopify is I know that you can try it for like three months for like $3—something like that.

Amber:
Something like that.

Shaun:
And I know some of the podcasts that I watch—they have promo codes for $1 for the first three months. So, you know, it is relatively low risk to try it out. And like I said, I do think that it is really great if you are selling products. I think that it is a great website to use. I don't know that there's one that would be better than Shopify. Like, even though there are some things that we wish were better and some relatively simple things that are kind of surprising that they're not there, it is still a great website to use if you're selling products of any kind really.

Amber:
Another benefit of Shopify is being able to see your available inventory in real time—being able to see exactly how many of an item you have left. Because even though we don't have items where we have like 10 available, we do have items where there are two or three available. So it's nice to be able to see what sold. It's nice that when something sells, the customer can no longer see that it's available if somebody is looking at our website to see what our available inventory is. And it's nice that there is less room for human error.

We do use Shopify and Airtable to manage our inventory because Shopify doesn't have all of the features to record all of the data that we would like. And we do have a whole podcast episode a few episodes back on that. But because I'm the one who's updating Airtable, there is room for me to make mistakes. And sometimes I will select the wrong status or I will forget to update an item, and I'll go back in and find it later where it said it was still available—but it had actually sold. And I try really hard to stay on top of it, but you know, every once in a while I do realize that I made a mistake.

And it's nice, one, to be able to cross-check that with Shopify—to kind of have like a checks and balance system in place. But two, it's nice to be able to—if I look in Shopify and something says zero, then like, I know it sold, because we only had one to begin with. So it's really nice to be able to have that real-time view of our inventory that I know is accurate at any point in time.

Shaun:
It's really nice to have all of that automated. Like you said, we do use Airtable as not necessarily a backup, but an alternative. We're able to customize the data that we put in there more than we can in Shopify. But it's nice that, you know, Airtable's just for us. That's not public—that's not for the customers. The customers just see what's on Shopify. So you know, it is nice that all of that is automated. And you know, if we only have one of something—if someone buys it, it's gone. And you know, there's not that room for disappointment with the customers.

It would be really hard to keep up with the stories sometimes—to remove items when something sold from the stories, for example. So you know, a lot of the time something would be sold, and you'd get messages about it, and someone would be interested in it—but it would be gone. So now this avoids a lot of that disappointment.

Amber:
We have realized that we do need to keep that in mind when we're invoicing for something like a live sale, because the inventory is obviously not automatically updated when somebody makes a claim through Instagram. So we realized very early on that if we're going to show items that are on the website, we need to be updating them and taking them out of inventory the moment that they're claimed. Otherwise, they stay on the website, and that leaves the opportunity for somebody else to swoop in and claim it—and then either way, I'd have to let somebody down. That would put me in a very difficult position, like, who got it—the person who claimed during the live or the person who purchased it through the website?

So once we realized that that was going to be an issue, I started—when we did our live sales—creating the draft order and then reserving the items immediately after the item was claimed. And on one hand, it was a little bit tricky because it does take a few seconds during the live sale, so it disrupts the flow of the live a little bit. But I think that's better than the alternative of potentially having two people purchase and claim the same item.

So that was like a little bit of a hiccup and something that we realized we had to do. And I think it's very important that if you are using Shopify and selling on other platforms—whether it's eBay or Instagram or whatever it may be—make sure that you are actively updating your inventory on Shopify if you have your items listed elsewhere, so that you don't run into the issue where multiple people try to claim the same thing.

Shaun:
And that's also another benefit of the invoices or the draft orders on Shopify, is that it does give you that option to reserve the items. And as soon as you save that draft, it takes the items off of the website. And you can set for how long you want them to be reserved. So if you want to give a customer, you know, 24 hours to pay it, you can set that—and then after 24 hours, it automatically goes live back on the website. So it's nice that, again, that's all automated. You can set it, it takes it off, and if they don't pay it, it goes back on, and you don't have to do anything with it.

Amber:
Yeah, even though there are some frustrations—and we've spent a lot of time talking about the frustrations of Shopify—there really are so many other things that it automates, that it makes seamless, that really do add a lot of convenience compared to how we were doing things before, where literally everything was manually.

Shaun:
I think another pro of Shopify is—another thing that it automates—is it will automatically send an email to customers if they abandon a cart. If they get to the step where they enter their email, or if they're already logged in as a customer, it will—you know—if they add items to their cart and then they leave the website and they abandon it and they're looking at something else, Shopify takes care of all of that. Just automatically sending the email saying, “Hey, you have abandoned items in your cart. Do you want to come buy them?”

That's something that typically, as a business owner, you have to do—those follow-ups manually with customers. If they said they were interested in something and then they don't follow through, it's nice that that's automated. You don't really have to do anything. And I mean, I don't know how often that works with our customers, but it's nice that it's there, and we don't have to personally do anything with that.

Amber:
And it's pretty much automatically been creating an email list for us, which we haven't utilized. But at checkout, there is an option—there's a little checkbox that says like, I don't know what it says—but it's like, “Do you want to subscribe to updates?” or some kind of little marketing thing about being added to our newsletter.

And I can see who is subscribed and who isn't subscribed, and we haven't utilized that or leaned into that—even though we probably should. But it has made building an email list very easy, so that if we wanted to utilize that as a marketing strategy, we could. And it's already there.

Shaun:
At checkout, people can leave you a tip if they want.

Amber:
I have really mixed feelings. Did we turn that off?

Shaun:
I don't know—

Amber:
We might have turned it off.

Shaun:
But I mean, for different types of businesses, I can see how that would be really useful—that you can just have that option there. It doesn’t really apply to us necessarily. I mean, I don’t know. I don't know if we turned it off or not. But if it's on—like, if you want to tip us, by all means, you're welcome to!

Amber:
No! Don't!

Shaun:
But it doesn't necessarily apply to this type of business as much as I could see it being useful for other types of businesses.

Amber:
Yeah, and so there are a lot of smart features like that. I know we talked about this a little bit before, but I think the purchase history is really nice. You can see how many orders a customer placed. You can go back and look at what they bought—even though it's harder to see that than I would like. You have to click on the orders individually. I really wish there was a way to look back through all of the items that they had purchased.

Shaun:
I would also like to say really quickly that it is very possible that a lot of these things are accessible—because you told me that you weren't able to see things before, and I went in and I was able to find them. So it is possible that some of these things we're saying—they actually are accessible. We just haven't done enough digging. Yeah, I don’t remember—it was something about a sales report, and she was like, “You can't see this,” and I went in, and five minutes later I found it.

Amber:
So... I don’t disagree. However, I don’t feel that it is as user-friendly as it could be. I feel like a lot of times I will discover a feature, but it’s not where I would intuitively expect it to be—or it’s almost hidden. Or there’s like a roundabout way to get to it. So I don’t think it’s as straightforward as I would appreciate it being.

Shaun:
Yeah, I agree. I mean, when you go to pull a report, there are a lot of options, and they are worded in a very strange way.

Amber:
Yeah,

Shaun:
I agree.

Amber:
It’s not as straightforward as you would expect it to be. Or to see one thing that you think would be very common, you have to filter out all of these other things. So it’s just—it could be so incredible. The potential for Shopify is amazing.

And I will say that Shopify is constantly making updates—maybe even a little bit too frequently. Because we'll log in and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, something is different,” and there’s no update button. It just automatically is updated. So you’ll go in and there’s a new feature, or they’ve changed something that you’re familiar with, and you have to figure it out again.

Shopify is always making updates, and they're always trying to improve things. And when I’ve had frustrating issues happen in the past, they'd be like, “We're going to submit a request for this to be on our updates list.” I don’t know how many requests they need before they take it seriously, but I do know they’re constantly looking for ways they can improve the experience.

And I know they put out a report that has all of the recent changes and updates. I feel like they’re not one of those companies who's just like, “Well, it is what it is.” I do think they are trying to improve the interface, trying to solve some issues. And I forget what it was, but there was one feature I really wished it had—and then a few months later, I went in and it was there. So, you know, I think that’s always a really good sign when a business is constantly making tweaks and changes, because you know they’re in touch with their customers and keeping an eye out for what people are looking for—and at least trying to improve things, even if they aren't always exactly what might be the most helpful or necessary.

Shaun:
Well, like you said, major companies use Shopify. So, you know, I'm sure if one of them submits a complaint or suggestion, it’s probably going to get added.

Amber:
Yeah, and I think that it's really nice that it can grow with your business. I know we talked about this before, but even though I don’t really want to invest a lot of money or resources into plugins right now, I think it’s really nice to know that the availability is there.

Shaun:
Yeah, I think you could scale Shopify to be exactly what you want it to be—if you have the budget.

Amber:
Yes, with the money, the possibilities are endless. And you really can make it exactly what you want it to be. I even think that if we found the right plugin, it could probably merge the functions of Shopify and Airtable for us. Because when I was chatting with them about it, they did tell me that there are way more advanced inventory plugins.

But then I went to look at them and, one—they all cost money. And two—it was very overwhelming to figure out which ones could potentially work for us. So I never explored them.  

So there are so many different things that you can do with Shopify, and you can really make it what you need it to be. It's just that it's not necessarily how the most basic version works.

So if you use Shopify, let us know if you like it, if you have found ways to do any of the things that we've talked about—let us know.

Shaun:
Yeah, that would be helpful.

Amber:
Or if there's any Shopify features that you think are really helpful, or that have been, you know, a game changer in your reselling business—we would love to hear that.

Amber:
If you are considering Shopify and you have any questions, you can let us know that in the comments too, and we're happy to help if we can. I feel like it's an area where I just know a little bit, you know? I don't really feel like I have a lot of Shopify knowledge yet. I felt like with WordPress, I really knew a lot of the ins and the outs, and I had really kind of learned how to navigate almost everything. I definitely still—you know, I'm not an expert coder by any means—but I feel like it's definitely been more of a learning curve to figure out Shopify.

Shaun:
But we are still relatively new at it, and we really didn't give ourselves a lot of time to really dive into it and try to figure it out.

Amber:
Yeah. I mean, I've had very little time to even explore all of the options. So like Shaun said, these features may be available—maybe I just haven't found them yet.

Shaun:
We might be complaining about nothing.

Amber:
At the end of the day, I think it has been a great asset to our business, and I don't have any plans of changing up the platform anytime soon, because I think it is working.

Shaun:
Yeah, it's definitely working. And I would recommend it. You know, I really would.

Amber:
Yes, I would too.

Shaun:
And like I said, it's a very low-risk trial if you want to try it out. You know, $3 or $1 if you can find a promo code. Like that's no risk, really.

Amber:
We may have a promo code.

Shaun:
If we do, we'll put it in the description below. I don't know if we do or not. We're definitely not sponsored by Shopify. So...

Amber:
I think I'm part of their affiliate program. I don't know, we'll see.

Shaun:
You'll find out whenever we do—when you look at the description of this video—if we have one or not, because we do not know right now. It's a great tool. It's a great website. It's a great asset for your business. So even though it's not perfect—what is? Is anything perfect?

Amber:
No. And I think especially as resellers, that is something that I've had to come to terms with—is that every time we pay for a different service or a different software or a different platform, nothing does exactly what we want it to do. And nothing is perfect.

So I just think that it's important to be aware of some of these hiccups if you are considering using Shopify as a very small business—especially if you're reselling. But at the end of the day, I think that it will help in more ways than the problems that it brings up.

Amber:
That's all for episode 10.. We will see you back for episode 11, which is going to be about our relationship and how we navigate life and a business together—for better or worse. 

Shaun:
Let’s go find some vintage.