Setting up a website with ease during lock-down

So many people are forced to make a living by starting their own sideline business with the lock-down causing many job losses or payment cuts. In these difficult times, we would like to do our bit and share a few of our lessons learned to help you get your business off the ground. We will start with the most important thing, how to setup your own website.

We started Simply Favours early in 2009 during the previous recession, we realised that one cannot rely on a job alone and must create a separate income.  We initially hired a web developer to create our first website, it was a stunning black and white classic website, perfect for the wedding industry, but it was very costly, and we struggled every time we wanted to add new products or make changes.  We also couldn’t manage our stock on the site or receive payments online.

We decided we needed to find a more practical approach as the website is our only interface with our customers. That is when we discovered Shopify, what a revelation!!

It is user friendly, no development background needed, and it has everything you need already available on the platform.  They have a built-in stock management system which even helps you to track incoming stock, the cost of your products and the vendors you rely on for the specific products.  You can easily add a payment gate to your site, allowing people to pay you instantly via debit/credit card. These things are all brilliant and allow you to manage your online shop effortlessly, but perhaps the most useful  benefit of all, they have fields that help you to set up your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

SEO is extremely important as this determines where your website will appear when someone search something on Google. In our next blog post we will share some helpful tips on how to setup your SEO in such a way that you increase the possibility that your website will be on page one of Google.

Shopify also allows you to send notifications to your customers at every check point of the order.  For example, when the order is placed, an automated email will go out to the customer with their order details and what ever welcome note you want to send to them.  Shopify has generic emails that you can change to suit the tone of your company's culture.

There is a 7 day free trail that you can take advantage of to see if Shopify works for you, go have a look here: www.shopify.com

All the best in these difficult times, stay the course and remember that your destiny is in your own hands.

The Simply Favours team