Launch Lab is my FREE monthly series where we focus on a new topic to grow your product business. Expect educational emails, blog posts and the occasional Youtube video.

Which is better, Etsy or Shopify?

Here’s my answer: Neither. Both. Shopify? Ha. 

Let’s get into it.

First, we are not comparing apples to apples with Etsy and Shopify. 

Etsy: a marketplace. On Etsy you can sign up as a seller and create your own shop. It lives on Etsy. 

Shopify: a platform to build your own website. With Shopify, your site is standalone. 

What’s the difference?

Etsy:

• Marketplaces provide their own traffic
• Easy to set up and low barrier to entry
• Lots of competition and knock-offs
• Etsy wants to make a sale, it doesn’t matter if it’s your shop or someone else’s 
• Etsy is in charge of fees and features
• Customers say “I bought it on Etsy” rather than recognizing individual shops 

Shopify:

• You’ll need to bring your own traffic
• Takes longer to set up
• Only the products you want to sell are on the site
• You’re in control of all of the features on your site
• No transaction fees, you pay a monthly plan fee
• Ability to build your own unique and distinct brand
• Can sell on multiple sales channels: in person, POS, Facebook, Instagram, Google and more

They cost different amounts too:

Etsy:

• Listing fee: 20¢ USD
• Transaction fee: 6.5%
• Credit card processing fee: 3% + 25¢ USD (varies by country)
• Offiste Ad Fee: 12 – 15% (some shops can opt out)
• Subscription Fee for Etsy Plus: $10 USD / month (optional)
• Etsy Pattern: $15 USD / month (optional)

Shopify:

• Subscription fee: $39 USD / month or $29 USD / month for yearly plan
• Transaction fee: NONE
• Credit card processing fee: 2.9% + 30¢ USD
• Domain: ≈ $15 USD / year (optional, but recommended)

Join our free live training session about Etsy versus Shopify:

July Launch Lab: Etsy versus Shopify

Live training session: July 25, 2023 at 12pm ET

Where: Crowdcast

Sign up here:

Which should you start with, Etsy or Shopify?

Here’s a question I got via email a couple weeks ago:

“I’m just starting my business and haven’t signed up for Etsy or Shopify yet. It was recommended to me to start with Etsy. Is that still a good idea?”

My answer:

It’s still a good idea to start with Etsy. Etsy is easier to get up and running quickly, and you can start selling your products faster. Etsy is a great testing ground to see what will sell and validate your product ideas. 

I’m a fan of making money with your business as quickly as possible, and Etsy is great way to do that. 

Since it’s a marketplace, Etsy gets a lot of traffic. Listing your products on Etsy is an easy way to utilize that built in traffic and get your products in front of a lot of people. 

When you’re using Etsy to sell products, your job isn’t getting people to Etsy. It’s getting people to notice your products while they’re on Etsy. That’s the benefit of Etsy, it already has traffic and Etsy does loads of marketing to get people to Etsy. 

When you’re ready to start working on your brand and marketing, that’s when you want your own Shopify store too.

Because you don’t want to spend your marketing efforts sending people to Etsy. Send them to your own store!

It takes more time to build a Shopify store than create an Etsy shop, that’s for sure. It also requires more thought and expertise, because you’re responsible for the whole website. (Also, psst, if you’re struggling with this, I can help!) But the payoff is bigger than an Etsy shop too.

With Shopify, you’re no longer competing against all of the other Etsy sellers when someone lands on your site. It’s just your products and your business. You have control over much more and are better able to continue marketing to browsers of your store to turn them into customers. And after someone purchases from your Shopify store, they’re more likely to remember the name of the business they bought it from, instead of “I got it from Etsy.”

So, does that mean after you launch your Shopify store you should ditch Etsy?

Definitely not. Keep using what Etsy’s good at: it’s built in marketplace traffic. Etsy plus Shopify is the best of both worlds. 

Join our free live training session about Etsy versus Shopify:

July Launch Lab: Etsy versus Shopify

Live training session: July 25, 2023 at 12pm ET

Where: Crowdcast

Sign up here:

The post Launch Lab: Etsy versus Shopify appeared first on Launch Party!.

If this is you, I’m here to help. Because email marketing is POWERFUL. 

And it’s the theme of June’s Launch Lab. That means that we’ll be talking all about email marketing this month with (fittingly) informational emails and a free live training session.

Register for the live training session:

First, let’s talk about how powerful email marketing really is. Here’s a chart from Shopify comparing traffic sources and their conversion rates. Email marketing is #1, followed by search, direct and social media.

(Source: Shopify)

Your email marketing list can make you money. It can make you consistent, reliable sales. And it’s not as hard as you think.

So whether you’re starting from scratch or you’ve had an email list for years, this will be such a great month for you in the Launch Lab. 

I’ve had a long journey with email marketing myself. I knew it was a “must-do”, which turned into a “should-do” for me. About 8 years ago, I dutifully started emailing my email list every week. A few months in, I proudly told a business friend about this, and she asked me a question that I didn’t see coming:

“Are you getting any sales from it?”

Sales? Well no. No, I was not. Was that what I was supposed to be trying to do with email marketing? I thought it was just essential I emailed my list, but I didn’t get any further than that.

I told her that no, I was simply trying to provide value with my weekly emails. So I didn’t ever add anything that could sound the least bit sales-y. I didn’t invite sales, and I didn’t get them.

After that lightbulb conversation, I realized that I was wasting my precious time with my email list, which was unfortunate since I thought I was doing the opposite. 

Emailing without a strategy was not doing anything for my business.

Slowly, I started incorporating actual sales strategies and highlighting my offers to my email list, but I fell off the consistent wagon pretty quickly. 

Years later, when I launched my program Shop School, my email list became critical to my business. In preparation of launching, I spent months growing my email list numbers. And I credit my email list to getting Shop School off the ground at all. 

How does email marketing work?

On your website: 

1. A lead signs up on one of your forms (pop up form, footer, newsletter section or when someone purchases and they check “sign up for email marketing). The bottom line is they’re consenting and purposefully joining your email list from somewhere on your site. 
2. Their info will be added to your email marketing platform
3. You can send them marketing emails!

On Etsy:

Same process but your sign up form is limited to a link on your Announcement and/or About section. The link will send someone to a landing page on your website or generated on your email newsletter platform. 

(Note: the exception is Aweber, which integrates more fully with Etsy, but I’m not a big fan of Aweber itself.)

So in order to start using email marketing, you need an email marketing platform. There are lots of other platforms out there but I recommend choosing from one of these.

Built by Shopify:

Shopify Email: If you’re on Shopify, I know it can feel easy to just use Shopify Email. It’s a Shopify app that integrates seamlessly with Shopify. It’s very simple and does allow you to make campaigns and some automations, but doesn’t do anything with customer tagging and segmenting. I’d only recommend this as a starting point.

Learn more about Shopify Email →

Jill of all trades:

Mailchimp: Mailchimp is a good choice with a free option and low priced plans.

Learn more about Mailchimp →

Mailerlite: Free for your first 1000 subscribers. I personally like the interface more of Mailerlite compared to Mailchimp and find it more intuitive. 

Learn more about Mailerlite →

E-commerce specialist:

Klaviyo: The professional platform for e-commerce with the most features, by far. You can utilize advanced segmenting, make flows (automations) and also use their SMS feature if you want to use text marketing as well. Their free plan is less generous and their pricing is higher than Mailchimp and Mailerlite. Most of my clients use Klaviyo or decide to switch to Klaviyo when we work together.

Learn more about Klaviyo (affiliate link) →

How much does it matter which platform you choose?

At first, not that much. Especially if you aren’t setting up automations or segmenting and just sending the occasional campaign email. 

And I always tell people – even if you have no intention of sending emails right now – still use an email platform and start growing your list. No one ever wishes they waited to do that! Once you’re ready to send emails and set up all the automations, you’ll have leads waiting to hear from you.

So if you’re in the category of just getting started and you don’t have a lot of time to invest in setting up your email marketing, go with Shopify Email, Mailchimp or Mailerlite because they’re cheaper.

And when you’re ready to put more time into your email marketing and setting up all the flows – then it’s time for Klaviyo. 

It’s relatively easy to switch email platforms when you just have a list of emails. If you’ve created automations or segmenting, those will usually have to be recreated on a new platform. I’ve personally switched email platforms 4 or 5 times! 

And for my product business Wildly Bright, I signed up for Klaviyo.

Join our FREE live training session about email marketing

June Launch Lab: Email Marketing 101

Live training session: June 20th, 2023 at 12pm ET on Google Meet 

The post Launch Lab: Email marketing 101 appeared first on Launch Party!.

Want to sell products that you don’t have to produce and ship yourself? Let me introduce you to print-on-demand.

What is Print-on-Demand? (Often referred to as POD.)

Simply put: It’s a way to take your artwork or original design and print it on a product. The print-on-demand provider will print and ship your product when a customer orders it.

This eliminates a lot of time, hassle and risk for product sellers. With POD, you don’t have to hold inventory and you don’t have to pack and ship products. 

That convenience does come at a cost. With literally higher costs and therefore (potentially) lower profit margins. 

How can you get started?

First, you need original art or a design that you want to print on a product. This is a really crucial element of POD — what you actually print on a product. But for now, we’ll focus on the second part of POD — the platform.

There are lots of POD platforms out there and what will work best for you depends on what type of products you want to sell, where you’re based and what platform you use for your website. 

For Shopify, you can use any POD platform — you’ll simply connect your Shopify store by adding their app from the app store.

I personally use Printful for my POD shop, Wildly Bright. I like the interface and it’s been easy to use and I’m happy with the final product. I started with Gooten and ended up switching to Printify because they had more child shirt options. 

Some recommendations for you:

• Printful
• Gooten
• Printify
• Gelato
• Lulu (for books)

Join me in a free, live training session to learn more about how you can use print-on-demand for your business.

What can you sell with Print on Demand?

Now, let’s talk more about what you can actually sell with print-on-demand (POD), and what makes sense to start with as a first product.

First, consider your business.

Are you a jewelry designer? Consider other accessories, like hats and stickers. 

Do you sell a food item? Try a tote bag. 

Are you an artist? The options are almost endless, you can put your artwork on t-shirts, puzzles, mugs, tote bags, phone cases and more. 

Instead of using print-on-demand to slap your logo on merch (though plenty of businesses do that), think of it as a way to expand your brand and grow your community. And of course, increase your revenue!

Here are some examples:

Note: these aren’t necessarily examples of print-on-demand products (though, they could be!), but the point of the examples is that they’re products they’ve added to their business that you could also do with POD.

The Sill is known as a modern online plant store. They also sell this sweatshirt. Putting one of their taglines on their sweatshirt lets their community share and grow the mission. (Product link)

Pattern by Tracee Ellis Ross sells hair products, but also sells a “Hair Care is Self Care” mug.

This mug gives Pattern fans and enthusiasts a visible way to share the value of the brand. And a frequent reminder with an everyday item.

(Product link)

The brand Oat Haus sells granola butter, but also these “Big Oat Energy” socks. I bet these are a fun conversation starter. 

(Product link)

What do you want to make? And as a reminder, definitely order a sample of whatever product you want to try to sell in your store before you make it available for purchase.

How to add a print-on-demand product to your Shopify store

Live Training Session

We’re going to talk more about print-on-demand in our live training session, coming up soon. If you haven’t signed up yet, here’s your invite!

The post Getting started with Print-on-Demand (with video!) appeared first on Launch Party!.

Live training session replay from my free Launch Lab series — where we explore a new topic every month to grow your product business. Sign up here to join us for info emails and a monthly free training session!

Video transcript:

 Welcome to the First Launch Lab session. All right, I am so excited to be doing this. I’m going to be talking about different content, a different monthly theme every month with Launch Lab, and I’m really excited to have you all along for the journey with me. So I see Linda here in the chat. Hello! You are here live, I would love to see you say hi in the chat.

We’re gonna get started and this is just a casual informational session. Your questions are welcome. Danielle says hello, hi, and I’m just glad that you’re here to learn about your e-commerce platform. Sylvia says, hi. Hello Sylvia. Okay, so I’m gonna go ahead and share my screen. I have slides prepared for us to talk through.

Okay. Let’s see. I think I’ve got it all situated. So today in the Launch Lab, April, 2023, we are talking about Shopify versus other website platforms.

And welcome. I’m Shelley of Launch Party. If we haven’t yet, met Launch Party is an e-commerce design studio and I’m also the creator of Shop School.

And Launch Lab is my new monthly free series to explore different topics for your product business. And today we are comparing Shopify versus other website platforms. So I tried to choose the main other website competitor platforms out there, and some less known I’d consider Godad and Weebley a little bit on the lower.

Hey Christina. Hi Stephanie. Glad that you’re here. So I want to be comparing, we’re gonna do a big picture comparison chart of all of these platforms next to each other, and then we’re gonna talk about the pros and cons of each one. So if you have questions along the way, please just put it in the chat and I’ll try to answer it.

As I see, I’m trying to keep an eye on the chat at the same time. So we are starting with this big chart that I made. Feel free to screenshot this for future reference, but I wanted to give you a good big picture overview to start off with, with how to think about these different platforms. Cuz I, I definitely understand how confusing it can be.

They all can kind of sound like the best platform ever. And seemingly the best platform for everything. It’s just hard to discern and distill. So at the top here, I am sharing the price of the basic plan for that is e-commerce. So they, these all have different levels of plans, which again, can be confusing, but this is your base price to compare.

So we can see that Shopify is the most expensive. Basic plan, which can be a little bit of a con here. And a note that Weebly actually has a free plan, and I’m gonna talk about that with when we talk more about Weebly, but Weebly includes ads. So with that free plan, so Michelle, okay, so welcome everyone.

So comparing the price here. We can see Shopify’s most expensive. GoDaddy is the least expensive for their e-commerce plan. Now the big picture here is this key review section to consider. So for Shopify, the key feature of Shopify is that it’s professional level selling and it has the maximum e-commerce features.

It’s built for e-commerce. Now let’s talk Squarespace. We’re talk, just doing big picture overview here. The key feature for me is the drag and drop builder. It has a really nice drag and drop builder to build your website. It’s very aesthetically driven with Squarespace. Then let’s talk WooCommerce. So WooCommerce, if you’re not familiar, would be a plugin.

Yeah. It’s a plugin that you would add to your WordPress. Site. So the big feature, key feature of commerce and WordPress, and I’m talking wordpress.org, is that it’s open source e-commerce. So it’s actually free to use that particular software. However, you do have to have hosting and other features for your actual website to run.

So that’s where we’re getting the 20 plus. That can be a pretty big range with WordPress. Uh, because it really depends on what hosting company you choose. They, there’s a wide range there, but a good average to consider is about $20. Next, is Wix. The key review feature of Wix is that it has artificial design intelligence, which on the surface I think sounds pretty cool.

So you can kind of type in some things of what you, what your store is, and it’s going to produce, like with ai. A website starting point for you, which again, that does sound cool, but that starting point is going to require a great deal of customization and it’s a little bit difficult to actually customize your wics website.

Okay, next is Weebly. So Weebly, the key feature for me is that they’d actually don’t have e-commerce anymore. They were purchased by Square. So their e-commerce isn’t, but from Weebley, it is from Square. So for some of you that may be a pro or a con, but Weebly we’re gonna talk more about it. Basically, this is going from where my most recommended to my least recommended, and Weebly just doesn’t have a lot going for it.

Uh, next is GoDaddy. And same thing, it was a hard for me to even put what a key review feature would be of GoDaddy. I’ve researched it more, so we’ll talk about it more when we get to GoDaddy, but. My key feature of that is if you want everything GoDaddy, then, then that would be a good solution for you.

Okay, so next we’re gonna talk about what size stores these platforms best support. So Shopify and WooCommerce are the only two. I would say best support. A large catalog and large can really vary what that means, but I would say over 50 products. Now you can have over 50 products on Squarespace. You can have more than that on Wix.

But if you are getting up into that level, that amount of products, then you’re definitely want going to want to consider an e-commerce platform that is better suited towards having more products. And there’s reasons they’re better suited for that. It’s their inventory management and their apps features and their product management features.

That makes it where it makes more sense if you have a larger catalog to be on those two platforms. And then for Squarespace, Wix, Weebley, and GoDaddy, those are better for small stores, less than 50 products. Next last on this big chart, we’re gonna move on from the chart in a bit, or after, this is the sales channels.

So that is where your product can actually be sold aside from, let’s say your Shopify online store, and aside from your Weebly online store. So for Shopify, they by far have the most sales channels built right in, and they have pos. So you can sell in person, social, any social app that you wanna connect it to, or social platform.

They have their own shop app, which they’re putting more into to make bigger. So if that, so it’s kind of their own marketplace for Shopify stores. And then Amazon, Google more. And really any sales channel you wanna add to Shopify, you can’t. The same goes for WooCommerce. It just requires more know-how in order to do it, and that’s kind of across the board for all of WordPress WooCommerce.

You do have to have a higher level of technical knowledge to be able to use it. Now, Squarespace has Facebook and Instagram. Wix has po o s, social Google, and they have eBay. Weebly has just p os powered by Square. And GoDaddy has POS in pretty limited social. It was limited by product orders. They have all sorts of limitations on both GoDaddy and Weebley in terms of their e-commerce features and then what you’re allowed to do with the limited features they have.

All right, so if anyone has any questions about our big picture, put it in the Oh, I see. I have one question. Put it in the chat or in the question. And okay, so Linda, I love your question. I’m definitely gonna save that for the end, cuz I want to answer that for sure. Or actually I’ll talk about it next when we talk about Shopify.

Okay. So let’s go to each pro and con for each platform next. So with Shopify, Key feature being professional level selling max features. The pros are that it can grow and scale with you. So I say this a lot and you may have heard me say it, but you’re not gonna have to move to the better e-commerce platform, the one that can support a larger store or has more features.

You’re not gonna have to move if you start on Shopify, which is a really, really huge advantage cuz that’s a lot of time saving for you. And also the shop. Shopify has an app store that has 6,000 plus apps, so meaning that you can add nearly any feature to your store. It also integrates with the most other platforms as well.

It’s also good to keep in mind that you can find lots of designers and developers to work on a Shopify store. Myself included. So that’s just important to note when you’re considering platforms like, can I get professional help with this platform? Is it really niche? And people just aren’t familiar with it?

But Shopify, you’re good with that. And there’s, they also have great 24 7 customer support with Shopify. They have phone chat and email customer support, which is the most of all of these platforms. Okay, let’s talk about the cons. So there is definitely a learning curve to understanding how to use the theme customizer in Shopify and how to actually make the most of the features, like how to figure out how to make custom product templates and custom collection templates and things like that.

If you want to kind of go above and beyond with customizing, there’s definitely a learning curve to understanding how to use the platform. And another con is that paid apps can add up to a lot pretty quickly. So if you decide you wanna have this custom feature and this custom app, and this additional app, and this additional app, you’ve perhaps added $40 to your monthly plan price.

So that kinda leads me into the question that I had from Linda. So Linda says, I’m currently using Shopify email, don’t. I don’t want to pay for email marketing. I want to use content I create in Canva, including links, but don’t know how to get it into my Shopify email content. Okay. So Linda, I am at, oh, let me make sure I know I’m start answering this.

I’m actually not familiar with Shopify email. I have not used it. I know that it’s there. But I don’t encourage my clients to use it. It’s something that I don’t feel Shopify has built out too much. They have expanded it a little bit more in the last year, but in general, I suggest using a third party email platform, and I know you don’t wanna pay for it, but they have plenty that have free plans.

So I would start with looking at male or light and Male Chimp. Those both have free plans. I do also like Clavio, but it has a lower amount of. Three emails that you can have on your plan. So first, check out mail or light and MailChimp. And then for creating content in Canva, including links, that’s also not how I normally create email content either.

I try to rely in general on less graphics for email marketing. It helps to not be in the spam folder, but if you wanna have like a nice header, something like that that you make in Canva, or a product image that you make in Canva. That’s fine. You can uh, you can put it in your section blocks of your email marketing platform and with the links part that, I don’t know, I would just be putting my own links in the email marketing platform because I would really wanna make sure that my links work, cuz that’s pretty, that’s number one with my emails.

I want people to click and go to the next spot wherever I’m leading them to. Okay. So we’re gonna move on from Shopify, but if anyone has any other questions, let me just get back to the chat. Hello, Lisa. Welcome. That’s Shopify pros and cons to consider here. All right, now Squarespace, so I have built quite a few sites in Squarespace as well.

And although not e-commerce sites, I built mostly portfolio sites and informational sites, and that is what I consider Squarespace to be best at. So if someone comes to me and they aren’t selling products and maybe they have a coaching business or a consulting business or something along those lines, then Squarespace is a great solution.

It has a really nice drag and drop editor and builder. It’s easy to use and it’s very aesthetically driven, so it has a nice integrated design style. I definitely appreciate that as a designer. Templates are free with Squarespace, which is nice, and you can find lots of designers to work on your store. A lot of designers specialize in Squarespace.

Hi Maggie. Welcome. So some cons in terms of e-commerce is that they really do have limited e-commerce features, so their plan costs. Almost as much as Shopify’s, but you get significantly less e-commerce features with Squarespace. They also have limited apps to expand functionality. You know, if you wanna do print on demand, then you have one vendor to choose from.

And you can’t add anything that you want Interior Squarespace store, which is a reason why a lot of people come to me when they’re on Squarespace and they wanna move to Shopify because they’ve kind of reached their limit with Squarespace. They also don’t have phone customer support.

I personally haven’t had good experience with Squarespace’s support. I’ve never been able to talk to them, but I did just talk to someone recently who says they loved Squarespace support. So mixed, mixed up messages here with Squarespace support on on that. But for me, my experience hasn’t been positive.

Okay. Next, let’s talk about WooCommerce. So WooCommerce is a free open source plugin for WordPress. If you are using the open source platform for WordPress, so that means it’s free. WordPress is free, WooCommerce is free, but you have to install it onto your own hosting platform. And it definitely, which I mentioned in a con here, it requires a high level of technical knowledge to use.

So the pros, let’s start with that though of commerce. It’s free and open source. I like that in general. And they have a great content management system for blog posts and pages with commerce and with WordPress in general. That’s really where WordPress shines. So I also used to be a WordPress designer and developer, and my website is built on WordPress.

I’m super familiar with WordPress. It’s great for blogs and it’s great for content in general. That’s what it started as, as content management. But I wouldn’t want to have my store hosted on WordPress and be doing checkouts and be processing credit cards, mostly because here, limit here. Notice the con, manage your own security.

So you do have to get your own SSL certificate. You have to make sure your hosting is good enough that it’s going to support you and not go down. Basically all of the things that Shopify does and all of the other, all-in-one platforms, you have to. Put together yourself with WordPress. Some people love that, especially if you have Thai technical knowledge, but a lot of people don’t because it is more work and it requires, you know, more updating.

If you have a WordPress site, then you need to keep your, your plug-ins updated or they can be a security risk. You have to have a security plug-in. There’s all sorts of things that you have to add to your WordPress site to keep it functioning and to keep it from getting hacked, which is also something I have experienced with WordPress sites, and that’s really why I don’t recommend it for most people for e-commerce especially.

And even for informational sites, I’m recommending Squarespace more now because it’s just easier because it’s all in one. You don’t have to manage your plugins and things like that. But if someone has a humongous blog and that’s their main thing, then WordPress would be a good choice.

And that’s probably what I would recommend. That’s why I’m still on WordPress and I don’t wanna move to Squarespace. Because it just has a better content management system, and that’s what I use my website for, for, for launch party. Another con of WooCommerce is that some plugins aren’t well supported, so there’s lots of free ones.

There’s tons when you are adding one and you’re kind of just crossing your fingers and hoping it’s gonna work. Unlike in the Shopify app store or the Squarespace app store where these are plugins or apps that have been vetted. I’m using the term plugin because that’s what it’s called in wo, in WordPress in commerce.

Most of the other platforms use the term app for, for these, adding these additional pieces of functionality essentially. And then the support with commerce is just gonna depend on your own HUS hosting company. Some are much better than others. Okay, let me just check here real quick before we move to the next one.

Oh, Sylvia asked, what’s the basic must have apps for Shopify? That’s a good question, Sylvia. I will, I will answer that after we go through the other platforms and if anyone has any other questions, feel free to add them to the question box. Okay, so now we’re talking about Wix. Wix is not a platform I’ve personally used, but I’m definitely familiar with it and have heard about it for a long time.

So their key feature is their artificial design intelligence. They have a lot of different features. It seems to be geared more towards service providers in general. They have appointments and things like that that you can host lives and such with within Wix, if you wanna keep things all in the same ecosystem and it seems to be relatively easy to use.

They have a Wix app market so that you can add additional features to your store as well. And the intelligent design does seem like a cool feature for basically giving you a starting point that then you would need to customize. And let’s talk about the cons of wics. So they have less e-commerce features and capabilities by far.

You know, we’re kind of just, again, we’re going down in terms of e-commerce abilities, for each of these platforms. E-commerce features that are included. And it’s definitely hard, it would be hard to find designers and developers to work on your store because Wix is just not. Not as popular with designers and developers especially.

So there just aren’t, uh, nearly as many people that specialize in Wick as they do with WordPress, Squarespace, and Shopify. Those are the top three. If you wanna have professional help for your store, you need to be one on one of those three in order to have a large amount of people that could support you.

Uh, Wix doesn’t have live phone support. They only have callback, and it’s not great for large stores. All right, let’s move on to Weebly. So Weebly is e-Commerce that is powered by Square. One of their main features that I think draws a lot of people is that they have a free plan, so you can have a free website.

And the downside of it though, the trade off, is that it has ads. I couldn’t quite tell if you could get e-commerce with the free plan. Or if you have to pay for like an advanced plan in order to actually have e-commerce. That was a little unclear to me, but essentially they are, they are a bit cheaper in general, and it is considered easy to use.

Now, the cons are that they have limited e-commerce features, very limited. You potentially may have ads on your store unless you pay to upgrade. They have limited design control, limited expansion ability. You won’t find a professional Weebly designer or a developer that I’m aware of either. That would be hard to find.

So for me, really not a lot of pros in choosing Weebly and I don’t recommend it. Same can be set for Godad. This is the last platform we’re gonna talk about, and really the only reason I would say someone would want it is if they’re just comfortable with GoDaddy and they’ve used GoDaddy and they kinda want to keep everything together under GoDaddy.

But I don’t recommend doing this. So the pros are that the com, the website builder, is comparable to wics and Squarespace. So a good, pretty good website builder. It’s less expensive, but the cons are, it’s difficult to find designers and developers to work on your store. A lot of design, a lot of developers really don’t recommend GoDaddy at all, even as just your hosting platform, let alone putting your entire website on it.

So it would definitely be difficult to find someone that actually specializes in design or e-commerce to work on a GoDaddy site. They have limited e-commerce abilities and limited design abilities with GoDaddy as well, so I don’t recommend it. All right. My recommendation hands down is Shopify for best in class E-commerce features.

I just put a few websites I’ve done right here so you can see for some inspiration. And I’m going to answer Sylvia’s question. So Sylvia said, what’s the basic must-have apps for Shopify? So I would consider a review app. A must have. And there are lots of free and paid versions of review apps for Shopify.

My favorite is judge.me. I’ve been using that ver that app for many years now and I highly recommend it. That’s really what you need to start with. You might wanna also add Shopify’s order Printer app, which is free in order to. Print out your orders and for, for mailing your labels and such. But otherwise that’s all you need to get started.

You do not need paid apps to launch your Shopify store by any means. And most of the paid apps have free trials, so like 30 day free trials so you can see if it’s even worth adding to your store, if it’s going make you more money, things like that, or if it’s gonna make your life easier, you can try it out for free most of the time.

To decide if it’s actually worth paying for, but I would definitely start with a review app because that really affects sales and get started with it right away so that you can get more reviews coming in. You may also wanna have, like I recommend, so Linda having a third party email newsletter platform.

So if you have male or light, then you’d need to have the mail or light app, and that will connect your newsletter section to mail or light. Which means it’s just automatically, if someone signs up on your email list, sign up, then they will be added to your mailer light and you can send them email. So that would be another one too.

And then Ellie, you asked why use judge.me instead of native Shopify reviews? So in native Shopify reviews that is a free app is Shopify’s reviews. But as of now or last time I checked, they do not, they do not automatically send email review requests, so you have to manually send those for product orders.

And judge.me does manually send them. It has a lot of nice features too, and I just prefer it. And it’s also, I use the free version and that’s what I recommend, so it just has better features. And it works better for me. I like, I like the widgets that you can put everywhere as well with judge.me. It’s a really good app.

They have really excellent support as well. Like they will help you within an hour, typically, or less than. Ellie also asked, what are your favorite Shopify themes to use for building stores? So let’s see this example with Ami Creative. On the very left, that is the Dawn Shopify theme, and I’ll go ahead and get a link for you.

That’s a free Shopify theme built by Shopify that I customized a fair amount on that one, and I really love that theme. That’s what I typically start with is just the free Shopify theme. Now I did recently just do another site where I used a theme called Fetch from Shop, not from Shopify, I think from archetype, archetype themes.

And that’s a paid theme. But typically I’ve been using the free themes, but I’m putting the link in for that too. And if you’re seeing this later, look for the Fetch Shopify archetype theme, and you’ll find it. But that one’s nice. It has some more design features that are fun. So I like that too. But generally, you can’t go wrong with the free Shopify themes.

Now they are really good and they’re just great starting points for customizing. And I wanna show you a site that I customized only with the customizer for this site on the dawn theme. And so I didn’t do any custom CSS at all. This is all just things that you can edit in the customizer for farrenceleste.com and it’s really beautiful.

So I see another question. So Danielle said, how do you feel about the rewards loyalty type Shopify apps? I like those. My rewards app of choice is called Smile. So it’s smile.io and it’s really good. It has a free version. It’s really easy to use. It’s used by lots and lots of different big companies as well, and it’s really easy to choose what rewards you want, how you wanna do it.

It’s, it’s just easy to use for the customers and for the Shopify store owner, Shopify merchant. I do like that. I do like that app, and I generally do recommend it. I like to encourage repeat orders of course, and reward customers and just, you know, foster goodwill with rewards programs like that.

If you want to learn more about Shopify, I just published a blog post last week. That is related to this training, and it is called Rating Shopify in 2023, and I have five points that I go through about Shopify to just understand the platform a bit better and what it offers.

And yeah, Danielle, I do like smile.

So Danielle said, awesome. Thank you. We recently added smile, but hadn’t seen traction. I appreciate the feedback that it’s a good one. So if you haven’t seen traction, maybe consider having a dedicated page for it, making blog posts, and then just promoting it in your email marketing as well as your social.

That can help get more attention to it, aside from just the little bubble on the bottom. And then if you want to learn more, I have a free 60 minute plus workshop that you can watch over at shopschool.live to learn how to sell more with Shopify. Okay. And we will talk soon. Yeah. Thanks everyone. Thanks Danielle and Mayra and Laura.

I appreciate it. Thanks, Lisa. All right. Bye!

Join the Launch Lab and let’s keep learning together:

The post Shopify versus other website platforms: in-depth comparison appeared first on Launch Party!.

To give you background, I’m a web designer with 15 years of experience. My services used to be exclusively for service providers using WordPress doing design and development and I’ve also offered Squarespace website design. About 5 years ago I switched to Shopify and working with product-based businesses. Over the years, I’ve talked to clients about their own platforms too, when discussing why they want to move off of them. 

So let’s dive in, shall we?

I’ve come up with a rating system based on factors that are most important for your business:

1. Price
2. Sales Channels
3. Inventory & Product Management
4. Page Building and Design
5. Expandability 

Let’s rate Shopify, shall we? 

Shopify is an all-in-one solution for ecommerce. 

$39/month for the Basic plan. 

Price

The Basic plan is Shopify’s cheapest plan and it’s now $39/month (up $10/month from previous pricing). As with most subscription plans you can save money by paying yearly. This price covers a lot and is what most of my clients and students in my course, Shop School use. 

There is no transaction fee on sales! There is still a credit card processing fee.

For the Basic plan you get:

• Hosting and a myshopify.com domain. (You’ll want to connect your own domain which varies in price, but typically around $15/year.)
• Shopify security and fraud analysis 
• Unlimited products
• Ability to sell gift cards
• Shopify 24/7 support
• Discount codes
• 1000 inventory locations
• SSL certificate (so your domain is secure)
• Basic reports and analytics 
• Up to 77% shipping discount with DHL Express, UPS or USPS
• Shipping labels 
• Shopify tax calculations and tax liability tracking
• Shopify POS Lite (sell in person at markets)
• Sell internationally with language translation, currency conversion and international pricing

To summarize, you get everything you need to sell online and in person with the Basic plan for $39/month. Your other cost will be your domain (≅ $15/year). 

Rating: 4.5/5. 

I went down 0.5 because of the price increase, but this is still a really good price for what you get. But naturally, I liked the old price better.

Sales Channels

Shopify can’t be beat on sales channels – you can sell your products in more places than anywhere else. This means that your inventory is in one place – on Shopify – and available to purchase on all of these different channels.

Here are your options:

• Online Store: that’s your website
• Shop: Shopify’s app
• Point of Sale
• Facebook: Sell directly on Facebook or just have your products tagged and linked to your online store
• Buy button: you can add Shopify buy buttons to your own website on WordPress or Squarespace (I don’t really recommend this though). 
• Instagram: Sell directly on Instagram or link your products
• Shopify Inbox: have conversations with your customers in their messaging app and they can buy directly there too
• Handshake: Shopify’s wholesale marketplace (US only)
• Tiktok: Create ads, track results and manage orders from TikTok
• Pinterest: Publish Product Pins and add your product catalog
• Amazon: Sell on Amazon from your online store

Rating: 5 out of 5

Shopify has the sales channel market totally covered.

Inventory and Product Management

Don’t overlook inventory and product management – this is a key part of your product business. 

You can set up inventory tracking, view your inventory and adjust inventory levels with Shopify. You can view the history of inventory adjustments and transfers as well. 

With Shopify, you can have up to 1000 inventory locations. You can track the quantity on individual products and continue selling when out of stock if you choose to. 

If you need more refined inventory management, like tracking raw goods, there are a variety of Shopify apps (mostly paid) to choose from. Check out https://apps.shopify.com/materials-inventory,  https://apps.shopify.com/airpower and https://www.trunkinventory.com/.

Now with product management, it’s important to have flexibility and customization options. With Shopify, you can create multiple product templates to display different information and design. Let’s say you sell coffee and tea. You could have a template for coffee products and a template for tea products. Your coffee template could have a “Coffee FAQ” section, a coffee brand comparison chart, subscription feature and so forth. Your tea product template would share different information that’s relevant to your tea products. 

With Shopify, there’s many different ways to expand upon the customization features for products.

Rating: 5 out of 5

Page Building and Design

As a designer, I can tell you that the design of your online store really matters! Your store needs to look good and professional in order for potential customers to even consider shopping with you. 

Shopify uses themes, which are edited in the customizer. Themes are separate from your inventory and product area in the Shopify dashboard. So you can change themes and edit your theme without affecting your products.

Shopify’s theme editor and customizer has improved significantly in the last year. Some themes have a lot less flexibility than others and some have more available section designs than others. 

There are free themes by Shopify and a growing collection of paid themes in Shopify’s theme store. It’s easy to try paid themes in your own store before purchasing. You’re able to customize colors, fonts, add your own logo, choose your header style and then put together sections to build out all of your pages. 

There’s still a learning curve with designing on Shopify and it sometimes requires creativity to put together different sections to achieve the desired layout. Although if you’re interested in more flexibility and available sections, then I suggest looking at paid themes. The paid themes are more stylish and trendy now. Themes are a one-time cost. 

Rating: 4 out of 5

This is an area that is currently improving but I still think has more room for improvement and ease. 

Expandability

If you want to add a feature to your store (say a bundle builder, for example), can you? With Shopify, the answer is yes. There will be an app or a way to customize your theme/store to come up with a solution for just about anything. 

Take a peek at the Shopify app store to get an idea of all of the things you can add to your store. 

https://apps.shopify.com/ The possibilities are endless.

Rating: 5 out of 5

Shopify really shines with the amount of quality apps and integrations.

Quick summary of Shopify:

1. Price 4.5/5
2. Sales Channels 5/5
3. Inventory and Product Management 5/5
4. Page Building and Design 4/5
5. Expandability 5/5

The post Rating Shopify in 2023 appeared first on Launch Party!.

I’ve long wanted a way to create a community while fostering business growth and sharing ideas. And at the end of my morning walk Monday morning, this idea popped up. A way to have a monthly live session and educational content centered around relevant topics for your product-based business.

Introducing … the Launch Lab!

Each month, I’ll be sharing about a topic with educational emails AND a live free training. I got so excited that I went ahead and planned out a whole year’s worth of topics and scheduled all of the live sessions.

Sign up now and start learning!

The post Introducing: The Launch Lab! Free resources to grow your product business appeared first on Launch Party!.

Even better, if it’s a Shopify website you can find out the theme being used as well.

Watch my video below for a demo:

Transcript of the video:

Have you ever wondered what website platform a website is using? Well it’s actually pretty easy to find out and if it’s a shopify website you can find the shopify theme too! I’ll show you how in this video.

Hi, I’m Shelley, owner of Launch Party, an e-commerce design studio and creator of Shop School — an online course designed to teach you how to go from zero to launch with your own Shopify store.

Let’s talk about how to sleuth on websites. This is the method that I’ve been using for over 10 years as a web designer so that I can get a peek behind the hood on my favorite websites. There are many ways to do this this is just my way.

When you go to a website right click find view page source and it will open up a whole long page of code that thankfully you don’t have to read. You’re just going to use your control find or your control f or command f button to search. If you think the site might be a Shopify site then search ‘Shopify’ and if it comes up, then it is.

Other ones to search are Showit, Squarespace, WP for WordPress or any other platform you think a site might be built on. It usually only takes a couple seconds and then you know.

It can be helpful to know what website platform a website is using so that you know the potential for that platform maybe you see a really cool feature and you want to know if it’s possible with the website platform you’re thinking about using or are already using.

If you’re still wondering what website platform to use for your product based business I have a video for that!

Now, if it’s a Shopify site and you want to take it a step further you can actually find out what Shopify theme a store is running on. Again there’s a lot of ways to do this but this is my way that I’ve been using.

I go to shopthemedetector.com, enter in the url for the site in question and if the theme hasn’t been renamed or it’s not a custom theme, then I can find out what theme the store is actually using. And again that can just be really helpful so that you can see a theme in action and maybe decide if you want to use it for yourself.

The post Which platform & theme is a website using? appeared first on Launch Party!.

Full transcript below:

Shopify sales, where do you get them? Where do they come from?

Welcome back to my channel. Your place to learn all things Shopify.

After my last video, I polled my audience and asked what they wanted to see next, and the winning answer was “how to get your first sales on Shopify”, so here we go. Let’s get into it!

If we haven’t met before, I’m Shelley, your friendly Shopify pro. I have an e-commerce design studio called Launch Party. And I have a course called Shop School, designed to teach you how to go from start to finish to launching your own Shopify site.

Many new Shopify store owners don’t know how to actually get their first sales. Ultimately, that is the whole point of our Shopify stores — making sales, building relationships with our customers, and building a long lasting brand and business. And getting your first sales on Shopify is the starting point of all of that.

There are three things that we need: brand clarity, an email marketing system and visibility.

But first, let’s back up. A lot of businesses creating their Shopify store may have started on a different platform, like a marketplace, like Etsy or Amazon. And marketplaces are very, very different from standalone Shopify stores. Etsy and Amazon are doing everything they can to get traffic to Etsy.com and Amazon.com, not necessarily your specific shop. With your own standalone Shopify store, getting traffic is entirely up to you.

Let’s talk about how sales work on Shopify. Here’s how a lot of people think Shopify sales go: a new customer lands on your website, they find a product they want, they add it to their cart, they purchase it, you’ve made a sale. But there are many other components missing in that sales process. So let’s talk about the three foundations to getting sales on Shopify.

Let’s start with number one: brand clarity, which is the easiest to overlook, but also the most important. A mistake that so many business owners make, including myself, is trying to appeal to everyone. Trying to maximize your sales by maximizing the amount of people who can potentially buy from you. It makes sense, kind of, but it does not actually work in progress. The saying is “appealing to everyone appeals to no one”. So by trying to maximize who can buy from you, you’re actually pushing away most people. Instead, you want to get really specific into who your target customer and audience really is. And you can do this whether or not you’ve had a single sale.

Let’s use the brand that I’m creating as an example. I’m working on launching a kids clothing brand called Wildly Bright. I’m working with my own kids to create the designs, they are all animal-related, and they’re specifically for kids that are obsessed with animals. But not just any kids, they’re actually for elementary school aged children, since my kids are elementary schoolers. There’s also a really defined aesthetic, so it’s very bright and bold and playful, and that is one of the features of the brand as well. We’re already starting to narrow in here. We’re talking about elementary school aged kids, who are obsessed with animals and also like bright, bold and colorful designs. Thinking about the specifics of my brand helps narrow it in and helps me define who my target market is so I can talk specifically to them.

The brand clarity step takes time and takes thought, but it also takes the knowledge that it will evolve and change as time goes on. As you get to know your customers better, you can become more and more specific with your brand strategy. But it’s important to choose a starting point so you can know where to move from there.

Next, let’s talk email marketing. Most of the store owners that I meet have not put email marketing at the forefront of their business and don’t realize just how helpful it is to getting more sales. I’m a huge fan of email marketing automations that you can set up ahead of time, and can just be running in the background of your business. And I’ve seen the power of them in action. Automations that you want to have in place right away are a welcome sequence, an abandoned cart sequence, and a new customer thank you. There are a lot of different platforms that you can use for email marketing, the three that I like are Klaviyo, Mailchimp and Mailerlite. They work really nicely with Shopify.

When you take up the time to set up these automations, they essentially act as follow up for anyone who has visited your store. When we’re thinking about sales, it’s important to remember it’s not always a straight line from someone visiting your store to purchase. They may have visited the first time, got distracted, but they signed up for your email list and then they remain on your email list for a while before they will eventually purchase. Or the type of product you sell may just need some more education, and someone isn’t able to make that purchase right away, and your email list can be such a great way to follow up.

Lastly, let’s talk visibility. This is the step that I think most business owners think of when they think of sales, this is kind of the “marketing” step. But remember, you really need to have those first two steps in place before tackling visibility. And visibility is going to be something that you will be working on for the whole lifetime of your business. Visibility is the mechanism for customers to actually find your website.

The first step I suggest taking is to tell your personal network about your Shopify store. You can do this before or after your Shopify store has launched. You’ll be using that information that you came up with for your brand clarity to tell people what your store is about.

The reality is, for most Shopify store owners, your first sales will come from your friends and your family. By doing this step, you’re helping that process maybe happen a little bit faster.

The next step I suggest taking with visibility is setting up on a social media platform. You’ll have to again come back to your brand clarity and your target audience to think about which social platform would be best for you to start on, because there are so many, I suggest starting with only one. Try to think of it as an experiment, that you’re seeing what is going to connect with your audience and what’s going to actually bring people to your store.

Beyond social media, there are so many ways to bring visibility to your business. There’s all of the other social platforms that you may not have started with, like Youtube, Tik Tok, Reddit, Facebook, Pinterest. Then there’s SEO, content marketing, giveaways, SMS (or text) marketing, and also paid advertising like Google shopping, Pinterest ads and Facebook marketing.

And I know there are so many options I just listed, but just remember, stick with those first three steps to get started to your first Shopify sales: brand clarity, email marketing and visibility. Let me know if this video was helpful for you. I would love to hear in the comments how you got your first Shopify sales or how you’re working towards that goal. And be sure to subscribe to my channel to keep learning about Shopify.

The post How to get your FIRST Shopify Sales (Video!) appeared first on Launch Party!.

Full video below!

Transcript:

Shopify just released three new free themes and they’re really, really good. And I want to talk about them.

These new free themes use Shopify’s Online Store 2.0, which is their updated and upgraded online store customizer.

It has a lot of new features so if you haven’t checked out Shopify in a while, you definitely want to see what’s next. So let’s take a tour of the themes.

The new themes: Sense, Craft and Crave.

Dawn was released last summer.

And I’m at the Shopify theme store at themes.shopify.com to see these themes.

And I can easily just add any of them to my Shopify store, right from here.

So, these themes all seem to have the same functionalities and features, it’s really just the starting off point design-wise. So whichever feels the most similar to your brand.

For instance, if you’re looking for something more modern, then Sense or Dawn would be a good starting point. If you’re looking for something a little bit more handmade feeling, then Craft is a great starting point. And Crave is geared towards restaurants.

But any of them can be fit towards any type of brand because all of your colors and fonts and products and everything will be able to be changed.

So let’s try out Sense and see what that’s going to look like.

Clicking Sense and I’m going to click “Try Theme”. And it’s adding it to our store. We can see Sense being added to our theme library. And now it’s added. So let’s go to the customizer. I’m going to click Customize.

So this is what it looks like right out of the box.

We have these kind of fun yellow, orange-y gradients happening. Featured collection, talk about your brand… so all of these different sections are just our starting off point. And we don’t have to keep any of them.

So, we can go and see everything that we can change over in Theme Settings — we have all of these different color options. And I love that these gradients are built in here now and you can select your own gradient or adjust colors or add new colors. That’s really a cool feature now.

And there’s just a lot more choices with these new Online Store 2.0 themes that we can customize versus the old Shopify themes. So it’s really exciting.

And now, just for fun, I’m going to customize Sense, creating a fictitious store. So you can see just how easy it is to create your own unique store using Shopify’s themes as a starting off point. And watch it come together super fast!

Here’s a time-lapse. I’m condensing about 20 minutes worth of work into a minute and a half so you can see everything come together.

I’m starting with the Theme Settings, which are the colors and the fonts and I’m trying some different options here. And I put in a new logo and configured the header a little bit differently.

And then next working my way through the actual sections on the homepage. So I just styled out the image with text section, and then adding in some other sections. I added in an image banner section to use for the hero.

I wanted to try a different look for this example with the buttons and rounded corners everywhere that’s on the default Sense theme. Here I am adjusting the corner styles so that they’re not rounded anymore. To have sharp corners. And then just adding in some more sections below. So we have a rich text section and then column section that I’m using for icons.

Icons are a great way to visually communicate and these are from The Noun Project. They are free to use, so definitely check that out. The other images on this website are either from Unsplash.com or from Shopify’s Burst free stock photography. Lastly I’m customizing the footer of the website.

And you can see where we started, this was the default for Sense. And then where we ended up after only about 20 minutes of customizing.

What do you think about the new Shopify themes, would you try one?

The post Free Shopify Themes (2022) — My Review & a Demo appeared first on Launch Party!.

Learning how to do PR on your own can often be overwhelming, especially for if you’re a small business owner who’s new to this kind of activity. Media outreach has a lot of moving parts, and often it’s hard to know exactly where to start. 

How do you figure out what outlets would even cover your products? Who’s the best person to reach out to? What types of images should you send? 

l always say that the best place to start is research. If you sit down to a blank email and say “I want to write a media pitch about X product” you simply won’t know where to start. Why? Because you haven’t done your research. Wayyyy before writing a pitch you need to know what outlets and editors cover what you’re selling and what types of assets you need to be appealing to that publication.

So, let’s get into the five first steps to take if you want to pitch your product to the media.

1. Discover what’s working in your industry

We’ve all had that moment where we see press on a peer company and think “I can imagine my product/project/brand in this article.” 

If this has crossed your mind you know exactly where to start your PR research. Look at the companies who you admire and aspire to, the ones that have a greater reach than you… for now. 

In fact, peer research is the very first homework assignment I always give my 1-1 consulting clients. 

The Assignment: find 5 peer businesses, those that are slightly aspirational/ 2-5 years ahead of you in their career *and* have press coverage. Look at how their websites are structured, their photography, social media presence, and the types of press they’re getting and where. 

You can make metrics based on this research and start to create a roadmap for website updates, photography, press outreach, etc.

I suggest making a specific spreadsheet for peer press. This will become your Media List and you’ll continue to build on it as you do more research and reach out to publications. If you’re just starting out you may want to limit your research to digital press, which can be easier to sift through than going through back issues of print magazines on a platform like Apple News+.  

Pro tip: when selecting peers for research you don’t have to choose someone who makes products you love, you can dislike their work but still learn a lot. Look for peers who have similar products at similar price points, sell to a similar type of customer, and have a press page on their website. Finding businesses who list press placements on their website or their instagram will make this initial research much faster.  

What to include in your Media List – step 1: 

1. article link and title
2. media outlet – where was the article published?
3. editor – who wrote the article?

Your list may include a few articles from the same outlet or even the same editor, that’s okay! Each new entry does not need to be a new publication or new editor. Finding overlaps, especially between different businesses may help you narrow down places that may be an especially good fit for your work. 

After looking through the press placements for 5 peer businesses you should have a good start on your media list and are ready for step 2. 

One important note, doing DIY PR can take a lot of time so set limits for yourself. Once you’ve found 10-15 articles about peer businesses you can start step two. No use listing fifty articles if that leaves you no time to actually pitch! Creating boundaries in PR work is very important to doing the work.

2. Research relevant media outlets

The press spreadsheet from your peer research is the foundation for your Media List, one of your most important tools and something you will add to as you build PR outreach into your ongoing biz work. 

Your initial list should include several links to articles, the editor who wrote them, and the outlet where they were published. You’ll use these articles to better understand what these target publications and editors write about and what you need to pitch them. 

For each digital article you should be able to click on the editor’s name and see a list of everything they’ve written for this publication. This is helpful because you’ll see the types of articles and themes this editor writes about and the frequency. 

Go through your Media List and make notes on the regular features these editors write about so you have a solid idea of what makes sense to pitch which editors. Feel free to get as granular as you like, even including which projects or story ideas you’d want to send that particular editor for a particular section or particular recurring feature.  

What to add to your Media List – step 2: 

1. story angle – what was the article about? A product round-up based on color or an in depth story about how something was made?
2. editor info – types of articles they write? Frequency? Regular recurring features?
3. pitching notes – based on what you’ve found, what products do you want to pitch to this editor/outlet?
4. editor email 

Tips to find emails of editors/writers/freelancers

• Look at the Masthead
• Find the email formula from what you can see on the publications website (firstname.lastname@publisher.com, firstinitallastname@publication.com)
• Twitter (email is often in the Bio, or you can DM for best email to send pitch ideas to)
• LinkedIn
• Muckrack – even free, this tool has changed the game for researching what a writer has written.

Pro tip: this research is often cyclical. As you look at articles you may find more peers you didn’t even know about that you want to look into in the future for more opportunities and ideas. Be sure to log these somewhere too! 

3. Make sure you have press-quality photography

Once you get to know me, you’ll quickly learn that I’m a broken record when it comes to photography. 

Great photography is truly the most important part of a successful media outreach plan. 

Magazines and blogs are essentially big picture books. There isn’t a design editor in the world who will care about what you’re working on if you don’t have big, beautiful photos to go along with it. 

Design media is visual first, and everything else second.

In order to successfully secure media placements you need to have assets that meet the standards of the publications  you want to pitch. So, how do you figure out what these standards are? With your Media List. Look at the articles you’ve already been taking notes about and add information about the types of photos and styling. 

What to add to your Media List – step 3:

1. types of photos and styling – what did the photos look like? All simple product photos against a white background or something else?
2. asset gaps – do you have the right photos to pitch this outlet or do you need to take new ones?

Pro Tip: If you make products and you have a limited budget, you need to prioritize one type of image— it should be “silhouette” shots, also known as “solo-against-white, white sweeps, and e-comm photos.” In these images your work appears well lit with minimal shadows against a completely white background, with no wrinkles, shadows, or extra information.  

If you’re feeling ambitious and want all the instructions about *exactly* how to create media-quality images, we put together three guides all about photography for media outreach.

4. Tweak your website so it’s editor-ready

Put yourself in the shoes of an editor who gets 100+ emails a day. They’ve never heard of you and an email about you popped in their inbox. 

The first thing they are going to do is go to your website and your Instagram. 

You have about 10 seconds before they decide to stay on your site or move on to something else. What you do and who you are needs to be crystal clear right up front and the images on your homepage need to be great, this lets them know that you’ll also have media-quality assets they can share with their readers. 

Your peer research will continue to come in handy here! If your peers are getting press placements for their products they’re likely doing something right on their website also. An editor won’t send their readers to websites that are unprofessional, broken, or confusing no matter how good the pitch and images you send over are. 

An editor-ready product website includes 5 key elements:

• High-quality, compelling imagery (aka a great banner photo and product images across the site)
• Consistent graphic language and POV (logo, color, layout, navigation, graphic elements)
• Short, clear copy that states the who, what, how of your biz (I call this your “elevator pitch” and it typically lives just under the banner on your homepage)
• Clear easy way to purchase the product(s) you are pitching 
• An about page that describes your business, process, who you are, and any important details like local sourcing or sustainability. This is especially important if you want to pitch more in depth stories.

During this step you won’t add any additional info to your Media List but you will make sure your website is up to snuff so when you reach out you’re putting your best digital foot forward and giving yourself the best chance at getting a placement. 

5. Develop a Pitch

Now that you understand the outlets and editors that cover products like yours you’re ready to craft your pitch. 

Pitches are short emails. To be effective they need to be clear and have structure. Your pitches should be a few sentences to a few paragraphs, tops, and still explain the “who, what, where, when, why, and how” of your product /story. 

Essential pitch elements:

• Show you know the editor.  Reference an article that the editor has written that’s most directly related to what you’re pitching. This shows you know their beat and you’ll be easier to work with. 
• Don’t bury the lede. Start your pitch with the reason you’re reaching out. This is your news peg or why your story is newsworthy. If you don’t include this information after the first paragraph, it may not get read at all.
• Share the context, briefly. Now you can get into some more detail. If your story is that you’re launching a new product, talk about the product first, then you can list out a few of the elements that make it sustainable. Lead with the new, then give context.
• Include a call to action. What do you want the editor to do as a result of your pitch? If you want to be interviewed, say you would be happy to do a Q&A. If you have more high res images, let them know they’re available and include a link. Be sure your intention is clear.

What to add to your Media List – step 5:

1. tracking – create a column in your Media List where you can record when you send pitches, follow-ups, and the responses you get from editors. 

If you don’t get a response be sure to follow up, and don’t worry that it will come off as annoying. Following up is a big part of the pitching process. I suggest always following up in the same email as your first pitch, rather than sending a new email. This will show the editor that you’ve already reached out and when. 

Be friendly and courteous, short and sweet. We suggest waiting a few days between emails and we never follow up more than twice.

Written by Nora Wolf of Wolf Craft. Nora’s been a full time publicist since 2007 and founded Wolf Craft in 2020 to work with creative businesses who haven’t been able to engage with full time retainer PR firms because of budget or content constraints. She’s also the creator of How to Pitch Holiday Gift Guides, a self-guided digital course where you’ll get all the scripts and tools to pitch your products to the best media opportunity of the year.

If you read this post and are jazzed about doing some media outreach on your own and want a few more step-by-step tips to get that first pitch out the inbox check out Wolf Craft’s *free* 5-Day Pitch the Media Mini-Course. 

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