Shopify Starter to Basic Plan: Knowing This Could Have Saved Weeks of Effort

[00:00:00] Tim: If you've ever wanted to create a proper online store for your creator brand, one that actually looks like a real business, then you need to have the right e-commerce platform that can actually support that.

[00:00:10] I came to this realization myself recently as I've been building a print-on-demand store with Shopify using the Starter Plan, testing different products, creating a library of designs, just generally figuring out how to do this.

[00:00:23] And it was in that process that I figured out making the conversion to the full basic store was going to be necessary if I was ever really going to test whether the concept of the store was a good one or not.

[00:00:35] So in today's video, I'm gonna take you through everything that I learned out of making this switch: the good things, the things that caught me completely off guard, and a lot of the things that I wish I'd known sooner, which could have saved me so much time if I had just optimized things the right way from the beginning.

[00:00:51] I think if you stay tuned into this, you can learn so much that will save you a lot of time yourself, and a lot of aggravation too if you're going through the process of converting from a Starter Plan to the full Basic Plan or even if you're just going straight to the Basic Plan, there's some things you wanna establish early on that will help you set up your store faster and get a lot further.

[00:01:13] So if all that sounds good, let's get into this.

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[00:01:20] Tim: All right, so the very first thing I noticed when upgrading from the Starter to the Basic Plan was how much better the overall store experience became. With the Starter Plan, you're not creating a traditional storefront kind of experience, which works fine for testing product ideas and doing direct social media marketing, but you're not creating what I would call a high-converting online store experience.

[00:01:42] So for example, here's what the online store looks like as the starter store, and you can see the products are not organized into categories because you can't do that, and the overall layout and look and feel is very basic. However, with the Basic Plan, you can build something that looks and feels like an actual online store.

[00:02:00] This is really important for print-on-demand, especially if you're selling more than one type of product. I mean, if someone lands on your store and they see a confusing mix of products or they can't find what they're looking for right away, they're gone. And so the nice thing about the full Basic Plan is that you'll have a site that looks a lot more like a credible online store, organized into categories that you define.

[00:02:21] And so you can see here I've set up categories like Store Favourites, Trending Products, and also niche-specific ones like Photography T-Shirts, combining niche and products so it's very targeted. And then you can reflect this in a store navigation menu as well, which is another thing you can't create with the Starter Plan.

[00:02:39] And so you can see here I've got a specific category for Video Creator T-Shirts, which you can funnel down to. And these kind of collections are gonna be great for social posts or ads where you wanna target specific segments of the market. In addition to that, the Basic Plan opens up a lot more integrations.

[00:02:55] And for me, one of the biggest ones was email marketing, because with the Starter Plan, you can only capture emails that you can get from outside of your store through social media marketing or other vehicles like that. Now, with the Basic Plan, you can create a pop-up like this one where you can offer your customers a discount in exchange for signing up for your email list.

[00:03:15] That's gonna help you build your list and promote sales at the same time. This is huge for your store long-term. You become less reliant on outside platforms, and you're so much better positioned to get repeat sales and build deeper relationships with your audience. And you gotta remember that any time you're on someone else's platform, you're on rented land, and you can be kicked off or lose reach in that market any time.

[00:03:38] It happens all the time.

[00:03:40] Building your own email list solves that problem. It's an asset that you own as a business, and it's independent of third-party platforms or random changes to algorithms and things like that.

[00:03:52] In addition to that, I also added a couple of other apps that weren't fully functional with the Starter Plan store. And so the first one of these I got was the Kiwi Sizing Chart, and what that does is it allows you to create this really nice sizing chart that looks like this, you know, really clean. Easy to read. And now let's just compare that with the sizing chart you get from Printify, which honestly looks really terrible on desktop and even worse on mobile.

[00:04:17] And then the other one I got was called Dealezy, and what that allows you to do is create this nice shipping bar at the top of your store with an amount to free shipping, and then the amount dynamically updates depending on what currency the customer is using. And you can see, too, that when a customer adds something to their cart, it's gonna update the progress to free shipping bar, and so showing people how much more they have to go to get the free shipping, which can be very effective in increasing average order value.

[00:04:45] And the other useful thing this app will let you do is create product bundles, like free gift or buy one, get one free. Or there's also cross-sell related products, which is helpful, too. Long story short, at the end of this, the store started to feel like a real business. It's not just a random collection of product links that you distribute by social media.

[00:05:05] It's an actual storefront for your brand.

[00:05:06] This brings us to the part I really wasn't expecting. Right after publishing my online store, I got this notification from Google saying my products wouldn't be shown to customers because of misrepresentation. I didn't even know what that meant. Like, if you buy a T-shirt from the store, you're gonna get a T-shirt.

[00:05:21] It's kinda like your online reputation is being questioned.

[00:05:24] After digging into it, I started to understand what was going on. I hadn't listed a physical address for my business. The shipping and return policies were still pretty templated, and there wasn't enough information about the actual person behind the business on the site.

[00:05:39] So I found a checklist of what might be causing this issue, and I went through and I made a bunch of these changes. I got a service that provides a physical address for online businesses. I spent a lot of time making my store policies more detailed, transparent, and easy to follow. And I beefed up the About page to talk about the philosophy behind the store and the person who's actually behind it.

[00:05:59] Then I applied for reinstatement. Denied.

[00:06:02] So I got back to work, made a bunch of additional improvements, and reapplied. Denied again.

[00:06:06] At this point, I'm pretty exasperated, so I did even more deeper research and started to get a sense of what was going on. It turns out that full print-on-demand businesses that are using generative mock-ups instead of real product photography can have a real hard time getting approved by Google.

[00:06:22] But if you know anything about print on demand, you know that that's not reasonable, because the whole business model is built around the idea that it's on demand. You only print a shirt if a customer has ordered the shirt. So producing 100 shirt samples just to get product photos isn't really practical, especially when you consider that even on a store with a good designer behind it, average store gets about 10 to 15% of its products generating most of the sales.

[00:06:51] So you're gonna be printing a lot of products just for the product photography. Just doesn't make sense. So as you can imagine, this part of the process was extremely frustrating. I mean, I really had the intent of wanting to sell on my YouTube channel through Google Shopping. But, you know, with a bit of time and perspective, I realized not being approved for Google Shopping is not the end of the world.

[00:07:12] For one thing, Google Ads and Google Shopping are separate campaign types, so you could still run search-based ads, display ads, or even YouTube ads, even if you're not approved for Google Shopping. That's also not to mention Facebook ads, Instagram boosted posts, social media marketing, and your email list.

[00:07:28] The other thing is going through this process pushed me to make the store meaningfully better. An actual address, clear shipping and return policies, and an About page that actually tells a little bit about who I am as the person behind the store. That's a store that has a chance to actually earn trust, and I wouldn't have done all that so quickly had I not been pushed to do it through the denials of my applications.

[00:07:52] So even though this didn't go the way I'd hoped, it really forced me to level up, and I think it's a good example of how, in business often, we can have these challenges that we think are really you know, kind of upsetting and, uh, disruptive, but in the end they might actually help us.

[00:08:08] Now, another big lesson from this process had to do with product mock-ups and descriptions. When I launched the Starter Plan, my focus was on just getting products out there. I really had it in my mind that I wanted to have 100 designs before I was committing to the full store experience. And, you know, because the Starter Plan was so limited anyways, I just kept telling myself, "I'll sort out the mock-ups later.

[00:08:31] I'll clean up the descriptions later. I'll polish everything once the real store is ready." That turned out to be a mistake. Because once I upgraded, it meant that I was staring down a catalog of products that was technically published but wasn't really ready for customers to buy yet. The mock-ups weren't consistent, the titles could have been a lot stronger, the descriptions needed work, and the whole presentation just wasn't where it needed to be.

[00:08:56] I mean, let's just compare these four listings right here. Which one do you think is more likely to get a click and a sale? It's probably gonna be one with a decent-looking mock-up. So, you know, if I had the opportunity to go back in time, I would've taken more care with the product pages from the beginning, even on the Starter Plan.

[00:09:13] Because here's the thing, those products don't disappear when you move from the starter to the full Basic Plan. They're coming with you, for good or ill. So for the mock-ups, I've been cleaning them up using a combination of ChatGPT, Canva's Mock-up Studio, and Placeit to build a more consistent, professional-looking store image.

[00:09:32] And then for the product descriptions, I've been using a combination of ChatGPT and Merch Dominator, which is an awesome tool for print-on-demand research, which I'll share a link to in the description. For me, the big takeaway was this: don't treat the Starter Plan as a throwaway stage. Even if your storefront is limited, your titles matter, your product descriptions matter, your mock-ups matter.

[00:09:56] Work on all of those so you get it lined up, and the presentation is really good for when you do wanna convert to the full basic store, which you're probably gonna wanna do at some point.

[00:10:05] That brings us to another thing to think about early on, which is the target markets and your business strategy. Now, this is an interesting one because there's some things you can't know until you actually get into it and start learning all of the nuances. However, with print-on-demand, there are some decisions that you should try to make sooner rather than later.

[00:10:26] So for example, one path is to focus on the biggest, most accessible market available through Printify, which in this case is the United States. This is the largest country market by size, and Printify has an excellent network of US-based print providers. This makes shipping, store policies, and marketing all the more straightforward when it's just the one market.

[00:10:46] The other option is to go global from the beginning, which does give you a larger total addressable market, but is, of course, more complicated to build. And I was kind of on the fence between these two. Now, smart money says you do the one market, one product, one niche, and you stick to that. It's boring, but it's effective in terms of knowledge acquisition, production, marketing, all that stuff.

[00:11:07] I went the other way, but there is a few reasons for that too. One, I'm kind of just doing this for fun and to get knowledge for the YouTube channel, which I can then share with my audience. Um, two, when you're still figuring things out, it, it does actually make sense to do a few different things because you don't know what's gonna work yet.

[00:11:25] It's kind of like content creation. You have to do different types of content creation for different audiences at first so that you can actually figure out where your fit is and then, you know, maybe go more targeted there. Last thing is with, um, multiple products, you can do more in the way of bundling or allow your customers to bundle more, and that'll increase your total order value.

[00:11:50] But this decision early on is so important because it's gonna affect your supplier selection, store setup, and shipping policies. And if you're planning to sell into the European Union, there are additional legal and labeling requirements you need to be aware of, and it's hard to know all of that until you actually really dig into it.

[00:12:07] So right now I've gone this middle road of setting up my store for Canada, the United States, and the UK. That kind of mirrors where a lot of my audience is from on YouTube and my social media channels. And then there's always the possibility of global expansion down the road. Now, it would've been better if I made this decision definitively from the start because then I could have set everything in the store up accordingly.

[00:12:29] But as it is, I waffled, so there's a bunch of stuff I have to go back and fix here and there.

[00:12:35] So overall, how do I feel about making the transition from the Starter Plan to the Basic Plan? Well, I can say that I'm glad I did it. However, if I was starting over again, here's the list of things that I would do differently. First, I would decide on the target markets by geography sooner. Am I focusing on the US?

[00:12:52] Am I building for Canada and the US? Or do I have the ambitions of selling globally? That decision affects so many things. You can't leave it vague at the start. I would add to that, do select a specific type of target customer. Don't be one of these stores that is selling multiple products to multiple niches in multiple countries, 'cause that will sink your store.

[00:13:13] Like, don't sell stuff for gardening, photography, pets. Like, if someone comes to your store and there's all these different products for different types of interests, and it's not immediately clear who the store is for, they're gonna bounce. Like, my store has different types of products, but it's all products for content creators.

[00:13:30] Secondly, I would create better mock-ups from the beginning, not something I would have to fix later, but something consistent and as professional as I could make them to be. I mean, part of the whole benefit of the Starter Plan is you've got this time while you're paying the lower fees, so why not use that time invested in creating really good product mock-ups and descriptions so everything is all kinda ready to go when you do make the move to the full plan?

[00:13:57] Same goes for titles and descriptions as number three. I mean, yes, they're not gonna be perfect. You're gonna go back, and you will wanna tweak some things from time to time. But if you start strong, you're in a much better position when you make that switch. Number four, I would set up clear store policies earlier.

[00:14:14] Temptation is to cut and paste the Shopify template into your store. That's not ultimately a good idea. The templates are not specific enough, they're not tailored to your store, and they're meant as a starting point, not a replacement for your own policies. And number five, I'd be more realistic about Google Shopping and YouTube Shopping as a selling vehicle, and, you know, think about all the other things that you can do from a foundational level right away that are probably ultimately more important: email list, social media marketing, Google AdWords, stuff you kinda have access to a lot more easier anyways.

[00:14:51] So that's been my experience going from the Shopify starter to the Basic Plan. Overall, I like the more professional look of the store and its better organizational structure. And it also opens the door to doing a lot more, including selling both physical and digital products, which gives you a hint of where this is going.

[00:15:08] I'll be sharing more about what I'm building, what I'm learning, and how things are going in future videos, so if you're interested in Shopify, print on demand, content creation, and building an online business, then hit that Subscribe button. Thanks for watching. I hope you have a great day, and we'll see you in the next episode.