How I built + launched a Shopify store and made $200 in less than a day
Hey everyone! I was chatting with a friend who was convinced that starting a Shopify store was hard. I wanted to prove him wrong, so I built a store from scratch and made $200 in less than a day (about 6 hours, actually).
The store itself is now shut down, only preserved in memory by a page on my personal website, but I wanted to share the process for other indie makers.
Step 1: Don't reinvent the wheel
I made the store Rand & Nance, a fictional middle class couple that loved "Live, Laugh, Love" signs. This was NOT an original idea, and was popularized through meme accounts like Middle Class Fancy (I don't own / am not affiliated with any).
I knew the niche was popular, so I thought what the heck. I bought randandnance.com and there you go.
Step 2: Shopify
I signed up for a free trial using my free personal gmail. No money, boom.
I then used print-on-demand apps (I used Printify but there are plenty) to find my product catalog.
I used Shopify's generic free one-pager catalog template and did some customizations based on the web builder (all free stuff, no-code). I used all Shopify's defaults (payments, etc.).
Step 3: Designs
Rand & Nance is all about living, laughing, and loving, so I used Google Sheets (with transparent background) to create logos and such that I added to my products via Printify
Step 4: Launch
I launched the site and did 3 things to market it:
- Tweeted about it
- LinkedIn post about it
- Facebook post about it
- Texted a few friends
I angled on the "I built an ecomm store in a day!" to drive initial traffic, which resulted in over $300 in sales (about $200 in profit).
EDIT: I built up all my audiences beforehand, but they were not big (~1900 on Twitter, ~3,000 on LinkedIn at the time). The driver of initial sales came from a friend buying and then a net new customer based on other people sharing / reacting to my social media posts.).
I also made a discount code and gave it to my friend, landing me an additional sale (my mini-affilliates).
Ultimately, I didn't have the drive to take the store any further. While I did try one paid experiment just to see, it didn't work and I didn't tweak it further. So this is not some get rich quick story -- I made $200 and then bounced, shutting down the store. However, it's solid proof that you can absolutely build and get profit in a single day with a bunch of no code solutions, Shopify being one of them.
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Why didn't you sell it on the Shopify marketplace? You could easily sell it for $1k+ within days.
Honestly, I didn't think about it at the time. I was focused on other projects so I let it die. Dumb decision, but hey
Yep, I started this and then stopped. I wanted to sell COVID related goods just temporarily. Unfortunately it was a little too hard for me and I tried 3rd party selling on Amazon and NewEgg and didnt like that either so I just shut it down.
I dunno, you haven't convinced me.
Sure, the actual construction of the Shopify store isn't tricky, but you yourself said that the sales "primarily came from friends interested in the items." That doesn't scale. That's not a Shopify store with real customers, that's you selling some items to friends through an arbitrary interface.
To be a little humorous, this is the "my mom says I'm handsome" of Shopify stores. =) You have to build an actual marketing channel that drives actual customers before you have a real store, and that takes a lot more work than just a single day.
I'm not trying to convince you of anything? But I did build an actual marketing channel -- my network. My social media. I built it ahead of time and it allowed me to promote my business when I built the store.
I did drive actual customers. I don't apologize for knowing a couple of them first. I just followed the principle of building an audience first
You're trying to make the following argument:
So it follows that your opinion that you are trying to convince us of in this article is that starting a Shopify store is easy, and further that you can do it successfully in one day. I don't think that's contentious - you should be trying to convince us of something with this article.
And you don't need to apologize! I'm just saying that you are discounting the most-difficult part - building that audience. That audience took you time to build (you're already halfway up the mountain, your friend is likely at the bottom), and getting a regular flow of traffic to that store to make it truly successful would likely take even longer.
I think the mismatch here is that when your friend says that building a Shopify store is hard, I read them as meaning a successful, ongoing store. A $200 flash sale probably doesn't match what your friend was looking for, and extending this store into one that does more and more regular business than that (and also counting all the time you've spent building an audience) would significantly increase the amount of work involved.
Did you need to get a business license before launching?
I was registered already as a sole prop because of my freelancing, so I used that registration.
However, in Canada (where I live) you don't have to register a business or charge HST unless you're making over $30k. So if you were to start this, you'd just claim the income on your regular job income. Alternatively, registering a business in Canada costs $60 and is done instantly online, so it's not a hard process to get going.
He said texted a few friends. Maybe that’s where the main sales coming from? It’s difficult to scale up.
Yup pretty much. Primarily came from friends interested in the items
This comment was deleted 4 years ago.
I mentioned in the post that I shut down the site - so I won't be scaling it any further