After you’ve successfully ran a Kickstarter campaign, you have likely generated a tremendous amount of momentum, which you can carry forward by accepting pre-orders or orders through a Shopify store.
Step 1: Create a 14 day free trial.
You can create a free trial of your Shopify store to begin to get used to the interface and ultimately decide whether or not you’d like to set up an online store for your product.
Below, I’ve selected that I want to create an online store and after this screen, filled out my necessary information to create an account.
Step 2: Set up your Shopify store.
Next, you will be able to enter products, customize the look and feel of your store, and also assign a domain name to your shop, all without having to enter a credit card! If you choose, you can also add a discount for a particular item or start selling gift cards to your online store.
As you might notice, there are a lot of different apps which will integrate with your Shopify store and themes that you can choose from to improve the design of your webpage. I’d recommend checking out the Kickstarter post-funded template.
Changing your theme can be accomplished with the click of a button and it’s very easy to see how your website will look like on desktops, tablets, and mobile. Although it might take some time to fully customize your theme to your liking, I think it will be well worth it knowing that you can change around elements at any time in the future.
Step 3: Promote your Shopify store.
Once you’ve set up your online store, it’s time to promote it to your existing backers, your social network, and your following. I’ve put together a good guide on how to do this and Shopify has explained how to get your first sale!
I would recommend not completely flooding your marketing channels with self-promotional messages. It’s best to include other types of posts that will be relevant to your followers and to only promote your store once every few times on a given social network.
In addition, while promoting, be sure to give those initial adopters a good incentive to go an check out your store or share it with their friends! This could include a special discount for people that purchase a product within the first few weeks, or a gift card of some kind.
Finally, it’s best not to get ahead of yourself with aggressively promoting the store before you’ve shipped out your rewards. Your commitment first and foremost is to the backers of your Kickstarter campaign. Make sure that they have an awesome experience first and they are happy with their rewards before you go about devising unique ways to bring in more pre-orders or sell more product.
Step 4: Is Shopify for you?
I’m the first to admit that Shopify is not for everyone. Some people choose to set up an online store with a tool like Wix, SquareSpace, or Weebly combined with Bluehost. Depending on your coding ability, you could save about $10 per month with the cheapest Shopify plan and build the online store yourself.
However, for the non-technical savvy and those that want a working solution in place with a host of themes and apps, I think that Shopify is a pretty good fit. The pricing starts between $14/month and $30/month, which is what most people use.
If you’re debating on whether or not to go with Shopify, I’d try their free trial, which requires no commitment on your end. You can try our a bunch of e-commerce softwares!
Finally, if you do choose to go with Shopify, be sure to leave a review down below as a comment so that others can judge whether or not they should consider this company after they have successfully run a Kickstarter campaign.
