Daily Quote:  When life give you lemons make lemonade!

Success is what you can achieve when you are able to learn from your failures. I say keep stirring! Never give in and never give up! Every day is a challenge for everyone walking this earth in some way. It’s how we deal with those challenges that make us a success or a failure.

Thank God it’s FRIDAY 🙂

Shopify store status updates & lessons learned:

My days are my nights and my nights are my days from working on my newly remodeled, completely overhauled Shopify store Judys-StopNShop! I had literally all but deleted it less than a month ago. I did delete the 600+ products from oberlo app out of it and cancelled the extra $30 per month it was costing me to have more than 500 products uploaded from their site. But all is well that ends well because I learned something. All of my mistakes I made with that first Shopify store needed to happen and here’s why… practice makes perfect!

Here is what I learned:

First you must create a menu in the Navigation screen for ALL Sub-menus you want to use in your store. This is also where you will create your Side-bar menu.

1. Main Menu – Menus are very simple. The problem is not knowing which design (theme) your store is formatted in when it comes to the design of your menus and what level of drop downs you can use. The main menu can only do so much. the flexibility is in your side menu! I do 1 tier drop down menu in the main menu. I tried for 10 hours straight to do 2 and 3 tier level options. (OMG!) It would work when I built my menu tiers in the Admin section of my store under Menus but then I would go view my store and it wouldn’t be there. So here are my steps to build my menus in my store. You can check out my store to see my menus by clicking HERE.
   1. Go to the Admin section of your Shopify store.
   2. Click Online Store in the side menu.
   3. Now click Navigation in the drop down menu under Online Store. Navigation navigates your store. This is the section that creates the map for your store by using the Menus.
   4. You will normally already have a few items in your menu section that was built into your theme when you picked it out. There is usually a Home, Catalog, Collections, About Us and Blog.
   5. Click on the Main Menu. When it opens up you will see a list of all the items already included in it. In this section you will be able to “grab” a menu item by hovering over the 6 little dots on the left and clicking your mouse to pick it up and rearrange your menu.
   6. If there is another Menu item you are wanting to have for a collection of products such as NEW ARRIVALS this is where you add it.
   7. Sub-menus, also called drop down menu, is a way for us to group our products and information we want our customers to see instead of lumping it all together under one title.
   8. For sub-menus you, while in the Main Menu still, you grab the menu item you want under another one, we’ll call it the header item, and drag and drop the item just under and to the right so it sits indented under it intended header.
   9. You can add as many items as you want in this sub-menu but you can not do a 2nd sub-menu under the sub-menu items. This is what I would call a 3rd tier and what I tried to do for hours on end!!! It does work in the menu setup but don’t always test it first because my theme would not allow it. I chose the CLASSIC theme. Maybe you can find one of the other themes that will let you do it but I’m thinking you won’t find one it the FREE THEMES section.
2. Side-bar Menu – this is where I added all my drop down menus that couldn’t fit in my Main Menu… for example… Catalog(Top tier)>Clothing, Shoes & Accessories(2nd tier)>Men’s Apparel(3rd tier)>Men’s Shoes(3rd tier)>Men’s Accessories(3rd tier)>Women’s apparel(3rd tier)>Women’s Shoes(3rd tier)>Women’s Accessories(3rd tier). I couldn’t make this happen because my theme html formatting did not support it. Instead of attempting to learn the procedure to update the formatting and change the theme design in the html i chose to add these items to the side bar menu. It worked marvelous and looks great too! Here is what I did:
   1. Make sure all drop down menu “tiers” have been built in your Navigation page under your list of Menus.
   2. Then go to Customize Theme at the top of your screen when previewing your site or click Online Store in the left margin of your Admin section.
3.  Slide Show – Home Page – I hated the way my screen would go up and down as the pictures in my slide show rotated. I figured out that as long as you use the same size pictures it will not jump around!
4. Spreadr App – Amazon products importer – I started using this app this week! It is amazing so far.
   1. You sign up for the Amazon affiliate program first. The Affiliate link is at the very bottom of the website page in the footer. (NOTE: If you do not already have an Amazon account, then you will need to create your one. It does not have to be a seller account but if you are able to pay the monthly fees it would be good because then you can list all your shopify items straight to Amazon too.)
   2. Then go to and login to your account.
   3. Do a search to find an item you want to sell in your store and copy the URL for that page.
   4. Go to the Spreadr app program and paste it in the box at the top where it say Amazon product link and hit Add Product.
   5. Then go to your Products in the Shopify Admin and review it, update pricing and just make sure it loaded okay. (Spreadr app does have a program to upload in bulk but it costs $1 for every 50 count uploads of products.)
   6. Make sure you have also gone into your Settings on the Spreadr App to set the markup pricing and other syncing options for a smooth upload to your store.

*** Instructions to replace the View on Amazon with a normal Add to Cart button: (for dropshipping and selling your own products on both platforms)

1. Install Spreadr App.

2. Import products from Amazon to your store via Spreadr App.

3. Here you do not linkout (redirect) your customers to Amazon.

4. Customers place the order on your site and you have to fulfill it.

5. It is like selling a regular product on your site – you get the payment.

6. Amazon is not the drop-shipper. You are responsible for sourcing the products and delivering to your customers. You have to provide customer service.

This option is best suited for people who sell products on Amazon to also have them on their Shopify website.

We do not recommend drop-shipping for those who are looking to place manual order on Amazon in response to their customers placing an order on Shopify site. It leads to fulfillment, customer service and IP issues.

In order to enable dropshipping – just add a tag called spreadr-hidden to any product you want to dropship. ‘Add to cart’ button will not be replaced with ‘View on Amazon’ button.

You can also add spreadr-hidden tag by default to all products you import from Amazon via Shopify. To do this simply, go to Dashboard –> Settings –> Default Values and add spreadr-hidden in the Tags input box.

Detailed instructions on how to add spreadr-hidden tag can be found here.

 

Thank you for stopping by, I’m outta here for now!

Judy