I’m happy to finally announce my Shopify store, MY Hankies, has finally launched! It’s taken me months of preparation, finalizing production details, and forming partnerships to finally reach this point. As I mentioned in my first post about launching MY Hankies— I’m not a computer programmer. So when I had this idea to create my own online store that would sell crafts, handmade by the Mexican Mayan women, the whole building my own website thing felt like it was going to be a huge hurdle to overcome. Fortunately, Shopify seriously prevented many future headaches I could have had during this process.
My store sells handmade hankies, jewelry, clutches (and more) from the Mexican Mayan community to help alleviate poverty and raise awareness about child labor. During my January visit to the village of Chichen Itza, Mexico, where the Mayan calendar is located, I was moved by the large number of children begging my mom and I to purchase a handmade handkerchief. After that trip I wanted to find a way to sell those handkerchiefs and other crafts to help them.
My first post discussed how I was creating and finalizing the design of my store. However, it wasn’t too long after that I went back and completely redesigned the site for the fourth or fifth time. The best part though is that I never had to actually change the theme or do tons of work to make it look completely different than it did just days before. It was only a matter of changing colors and uploading my own photos — an easy task using Shopify.
Look at the final design of the front page here:
After finalizing the design, I felt like I was stuck in limbo as I waited for the Mayan women to finish sewing the handkerchiefs, purses, and jewelry, and send them to me. Since this was going to be a time when either a lot or zero activity would be occurring on the site, I didn’t want people viewing it during its stages of construction. Shopify solved that problem by providing me with the option to set a password lock on the site.
Another issue I had to sort out before the MY Hankies launch was how my website ranked in search engines (SEO). At first, when I would enter “MY Hankies” in Google, my website would not appear until a few or even a dozen pages down the line. This was puzzling to me and would not be good for my store or potential customers. But, another great part of Shopify, is that exploring your website’s interface really isn’t intimidating at all. After recognizing this problem, I ventured into the “marketing” tab and learned that Shopify creates a “sitemap” for your website. Now, if you asked me what a site map was two weeks ago, I’d probably tell you it’s a map on a website (Uh, like, Mapquest?). I’m just kidding—sort of.
Shopify taught me that when referring to your website’s sitemap, you are referring to a code that is used as a marketing tool to increase your search engine optimization (page rankings). Now that I had this sitemap, I wasn’t quite sure exactly what I was supposed to do with it. Thankfully, those directions were readily available to me, and then waa-laa, my website showed up on the second page of Google after searching “MY Hankies.” Thank you sitemap!
When my products arrived, I was finally able to upload them to the site which was easy to organize and fun to do. With Shopify you are able to organize your products by color, weight, size, and more. Since my products were a little more complicated to categorize (the designs of the handkerchiefs are all completely different), I didn’t utilize this as much as I would have liked to, but it will definitely be helpful for future products. Shopify also allows you to set a lock that will prevent customers from making purchases when a product is sold-out.
Now that my store is ready for sales, I’m excited to start managing my orders and customers using Shopify. Make sure to check out MY Hankies and purchase a hankie, or my favorite, a primitive clutch (they are seriously so adorable and well-made). And follow me next week as I blog more about using Shopify to create my own online store!
Sound off with questions below, collegiettes ™!