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Build for the long-term in 2023 with Shopify

Raising money is a common challenge for many entrepreneurs. Crowdfunding is the common solution. Here are the 10 best crowdfunding sites to help you bring your idea to life.

Buying a website is like investing in online real estate. Chosen carefully and maintained correctly, purchasing an online business creates an additional income stream that you can own and grow without having to build it all from scratch. Between budding entrepreneurs and veterans, successful ecommerce brands and dropshipping businesses, there are hundreds of thousands of ecommerce websites on Shopify. And now with Shopify Exchange, there's a marketplace for these merchants to buy and sell their stores.

The fear of missing out can have a powerful effect on shoppers. Creating a sense of urgency among your website visitors can help make more people buy and less people “go home and think about it”. You can introduce perceived scarcity to your store by creating a product or time shortage. In this blog post, I'm going to share how to create perceived scarcity in your store and a few actionable examples you can use to create urgency.

Instagram can be a highly targetable, visual marketing channel for your brand and an opportunity to build a loyal audience that grows with your business. In this post, we’ll show you how to effectively build a big, engaged following on Instagram.

We spoke with two Instagram marketing experts to get their best advice on how to write compelling captions that can help improve your reach, engagement, and sales.

T-shirts aren’t just a staple of casual wear—they’re articles of clothing that often reflect our personalities, interests, and identities. Because of this, selling t-shirts online has become a popular choice, especially for entrepreneurs and artists looking for a relatively inexpensive way to start a business. Here’s our complete guide to creating your own t-shirts to sell on Shopify.

Say hello to Shop, a digital shopping assistant that makes it easy for customers to speed through checkout, track their order and shipment details, and rediscover brands they love. Shop takes care of the little extras to make online shopping more personal and convenient.

Imagine being able to combine the best of search engine and social media advertising. That's essentially what you get with the Pinterest advertising system and Promoted Pins. Here's our beginner's guide to running a successful Pinterest advertising campaign for your own business.

Recently at our Unite conference in San Francisco, we announced, among many other exciting things, that in the coming weeks, we’ll be rolling out improved discounts within Shopify. Soon, you’ll be able to create, manage, edit, and track discounts more easily. To complement the native discount functionality in Shopify, our App Store contains dozens of discount-focused apps that plug seamlessly into your store. The right app can help automate your processes, letting you focus on the areas of your business where you shine. We’ve handpicked a cross-section of top-rated discount apps to suit a range of budgets from free to premium. Whether you’re running a BOGO (buy one, get one) deal, trying to grow your student audience, or counting down to a massive site wide sale, there’s a niche app to help you do just that. Let’s make a deal!

Most online stores and theme templates have one major component in common, a large, featured image or series of images prominently displayed on the homepage. These images are often referred to as hero, banner or carousel images. No matter what you call them, they’re the same and serve a very important role for online businesses. In this post we’re going to look at the importance of hero images, introduce you to some best practices for using them as well as provide some incredible tools and graphic resources to help you create beautiful and persuasive hero images for your online store.

Stoked about a new business venture? Learn how to calculate if there’s market demand for your million dollar product idea.

Google Analytics is a valuable ally in the ecommerce battle for consumer dollars. The insights it provides contains a wealth of information about your site, your visitors and where they came from. All this information can be used to find new customers and increase conversions. In this post we will look at exactly how to set up Google Analytics for your store, the basic reports you should be checking and a few other goodies to help supercharge your knowledge and drive sales.

The more time (and money) you spend advertising on Facebook, the clearer it becomes that good creative is the key to improving your ROI.

How do you measure your online store’s success? Do you focus on things like sales and revenue? While those are good short-term performance indicators, they don’t always paint the picture of your business’s future. Customer lifetime value can.

The name of the game for online merchants is attracting new customers at an acceptable cost. Not just new visitors, but new buyers. Since the first online marketing campaign I launched in 2004, I’ve never seen anything that works as consistently well as Google Product Listing Ads (PLAs) aka Google Shopping. They're the little product images you see when you Google search "black tweed jacket" or "red shoes." Unbranded searches can drive a massive amount of traffic to your store. Want to learn how to run successful Google Shopping campaigns? Check out this comprehensive review, The Ultimate Guide to Google Shopping. From planning and structure to bidding, reporting and optimization, this guide covers it all.

The only people who truly understand entrepreneurship are entrepreneurs. Until you've taken the leap yourself, it can be difficult to appreciate the magnitude of it. You might be the only one of your friends or family that owns a business. Each step along your journey presents obstacles and forks in the road which can be hard to navigate, especially if you feel like you don’t have anyone to ask for help. That’s why we’re bringing you Shopify Masters, the ecommerce marketing podcast that provides you with the knowledge and inspiration you need to build, launch and grow a profitable online store. Here’s what you can expect.

When it comes to starting an online business, you have a lot of choices to make. The biggest of the choices may be the most important as they will ultimately define your business model and much of the future of your business. In this post, we’re going to introduce you to the four questions you must answer to begin putting together a business model for your new online business.

The more you know about the people you’re advertising to, the better your ads will perform. When you market to a Facebook Custom Audience, you know exactly who is seeing your ads, and your messaging can be laser-targeted. This will help you increase your conversion rates and get a better return on investment.

As shipping and packaging play a crucial role in any online store, consumers are curious and conscious about the environmental impact. To kick start your research for sustainable shipping and packaging solutions, we’ve rounded up eight merchants to share their journey and approach to shipping products with the environment in mind.

While shipping carriers continue to operate as an essential service, there may be some changes that could temporarily impact the way you fulfill orders. To keep your business moving during these uncertain times, we’ve put together a list of strategies to help you ship orders and communicate with customers.

I know your pain. Tired of cheesy stock photos of people high-fiving and laughing into their salads? Find the best stock images for your brand with these top 23 sites.

When does a sneaker become more than a sneaker? What makes a consumer choose one seemingly identical gown or coat or swimsuit over another? Emotion. Branding at its best, speaks to its intended audience like a BFF – it, like, really gets you. And in fashion, it stands up for you, becoming the outward-facing expression of your personality. For small brands and emerging designers, widespread logo recognition is an unattainable (or at least very far-away) goal. But branding is more than a logo. It encompasses values, voice, and design choices that run like a continuous thread through product and packaging and online presence. Good branding is storytelling – a consistent and continuous message, weaving meaning into every piece. How do your nail branding for your own fashion brand? 14 experts weighed in on the discussion.

When was the last time you made an effort to re-engage customers to get them to come back? If you've yet to market to current customers after the sale, now is a good time to build a cohesive strategy for customer retention. Today, we'll look at how to get started.

Key learnings and actionable tips from The Future of Commerce report.

Ecommerce has revolutionized how artisans and makers sell their handmade items. It has become increasingly easier for creative DIY entrepreneurs to build and grow a handmade goods business, from scratch, online. Still, as creatives and makers, it’s easy to forget about the business-side of, well, your business! Merchants that create their own products by hand are much more invested in their product. They pour their heart, soul and energy into each and every item they produce. Some artisans might not see the business opportunity or the opportunity to make a living or side-income from their passion. While others, see the opportunity to build a real brand from their creations, not just selling one-off products. I recently had the chance to talk with four handmade goods merchants: Coralie, who sells handmade jewelry at Coralie Reiter Jewelry, Robin, who sells modern leather goods at Fitzy, Sahnda, who sells soft sole baby shoes at Sahnda Marie Kids, and Valerie, who sells leather goods with her husband Geoffrey at Walnut Studiolo. I asked them about their passion, how they turned their passion into an online store, and how they managed the marketing and business side of their company, all while creating their products by hand.

When you’re starting out with your business, you’re doing it all: fulfilling orders, responding to customers, managing your social media, and so much more. But while we pursue entrepreneurship for many reasons, having less time in our lives isn’t one of them. That’s why the first “employee” many ecommerce entrepreneurs hire is a virtual assistant: someone who can take on the daily tasks and processes that are important for running your business, but not necessarily focused on growing it. If you’re experiencing stress and the other “good problems” that come with success, it might be time for you to consider hiring your own virtual assistant and get back some of those hours in your day.

It's a dilemma that almost every new entrepreneur has to face: Customer trust is hardest to earn when you don't have any customers. Yet, you need to earn customer trust before they'll choose to buy from you. Luckily, these strategies can help even brand new businesses earn customer trust early on.

Buying clothing, jewelry, accessories, and beauty online is a harrowing experience at the best of times. Luckily, Shopify’s App Store, replete with handy add-ons for your ecommerce store, has oodles of options for fashion businesses. Apps that visually convey your products in the best way, apps that alleviate sizing challenges, and apps that help you sell more. These are our picks for the 22 best Shopify Apps for fashion stores based on uniqueness and top user ratings.

Shopify and eBay have partnered to give you access to eBay’s customer base of over 170 million buyers, and this new sales channel is ready to use, just in time for Black Friday Cyber Monday. Just like Shopify’s partnerships with Amazon, Facebook, and other top selling channels, the new eBay sales channel effortlessly syncs with your Shopify store. Merchants based in the U.S. and selling in USD can easily list and sell on eBay while conveniently managing the fulfillment and inventory process within Shopify. Expand your brand footprint on eBay’s marketplace and gain access to millions of active buyers worldwide.

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