Starting an online business might seem easy but it's not, it involves a lot of hard work and patience, as you will probably start over a couple of times until is working.
Fortunately, there are a lot of tools today that help you with that. One of those tools is Shopify.
Crysia.com is a baby clothes and baby care products online store build on the Shopify platform. It uses the basic Dawn theme (wich is free) with a couple customizations.
Most of the work I did in this project was bulk image optimization, bulk product upload and writting the text descriptions.
Since most of the product descriptions we got from our suppliers where poor and already used by other businesses, we had to rewrite all product descriptions. I discovered that doing this for almost 300 products might be quite challenging.
Fortunately, Excel is great for managing a lot of products. My previous experience with the Product Management Component surely helped with crysia.com project, as Shopify platform uses the same .csv file type which is organized kindly in the same way as I organized the Product Management Component, with title, description and metafields in different fields and with every product item in a different row.
To make the process of creating product descriptions easier and faster, I created an Excel file where I used field concatenation to create phrases based on common product features. AI writers such us Ubbersugest (wich I think is the best for generating product descriptions) and Chat GPT helped a little to generate some product descriptions that served as a guide of how it should be organized.
I also used a lot of Find and Replace, both in Excel and plain text editors to improve the descriptions and eliminate errors. Find and Replace was also great when dealing with website translations. Crysia.com was first published in English and then translated into Romanian and German. For both languages we used Shopify's autotranslation feature, wich is a great tool. For romanian language, since is the main market for Crysia.com, I used Excel to further improve the text descriptions, as the translations where often very weird.
Next, I had to take care of how the website is organized and make a SEO strategy, as well as a marketing strategy.
Sales Channels are very important for any online shop. I used Facebook, Instagram, Google and Pinterest Channels to publish the products. Shopify offers apps that may be easily integrated with all those channels. However, you still have to meet the requirements of each channel, such as having detailed product descriptions, EAN codes, shipping policy, return policy, s.o. I successfully listed crysia.com products on every channel. I also created ad campaings on Facebook/Instagram, Google and Pinterest.
Skills developed with this project:- Everything needed to start an online store from skcratch using Shopify Platform
- Bulk image optimization
- Bulk produt description generation
- Bulk product upload
- Translation management
- Shopify store management
- Basic {% Liquid %} development