Material Retail Dumps

Welcome to the Material Retail Dumps Podcast. If you've listened to us before, thanks so much for coming back. If it's your first time listening, welcome Material. Retail Dumps is a short form podcast with brief but valuable content for independent retailers. As business owners, we don't have time for a 30 minute lesson with a ton of banter, so we get straight to the meat of the topic and aim to give you actionable information that will help you optimize your retail operation and make more money every day.

Welcome to Material Retail Dumps, episode 46. In this episode, we're gonna change it up a little bit. We're gonna talk about Shopify and five sales channels that you should enable in order to maximize your sales. So you have a Shopify website, have your products on Shopify, and you know you're selling online. And you know, the next thing you wanna think about is how can I get my products in front of more people? You can have the best products, the best website, the best everything, but if people are not seeing your products, you're gonna get less sales. Or there's a few ways to get traffic on your website and people to see your products. And most of those involve either doing some work or, you know, paying for some advertising and things like that. There's a few, couple basic things you could do in the Shopify ecosystem, um, to have people see your products more often from outside of your website, and they involve sales channels.

If you're in Shopify, on the left side of the screen in the menu, there's a button for sales channels. And if you click on that, um, you'll see a list of your sales channels. You can hit the button for all recommended sales channels. You could just search for a sales channel. So we're gonna go through five sales channels that we think you should use. Can't hurt, you won't lose anything by doing this. So the first one, maybe the most popular is Facebook and Instagram. So by having the Facebook and Instagram sales channel, you'll be able to have a Facebook shop, an Instagram shop, and all your products can go to Facebook and Instagram. This is great because your customers are probably on Facebook and Instagram, and you wanna probably tag products on your Facebook and Instagram posts, and then customers can look through your products, look through your posts, and it's just another way to get your products in front of customers.

And this is generally gonna be, you know, your own audience and it's getting your products in front of your customers, your existing customers a little bit quicker and a little bit easier, but it's a great place to start. The next sales channel that we think is super important and maybe the most important, maybe more important than Facebook and Instagram, is Google and YouTube. Getting your products on Google and YouTube will allow new customers to discover your products. You'll wanna have a Google Merchant Center account. When you set up the sales channel, it'll just walk you through the entire thing. You'll click, you know, set up, you'll follow the steps. It's super easy. It's meant to be done by someone who's never done it before. And if you have questions, you just reach out to Google. Um, so you'll set up your Google Merchant Center id, you will set up your Google Analytics, um, and all that good stuff just right in here.

Um, going a little bit further, Google Merchant Center is an amazing tool that basically houses all your products and you could come into your Google Merchant Center and see like, where am I getting clicks? Who's clicking on my products? What products are they clicking on? And you could even run paid ads, um, on your products right from the merchant center without doing much. Google just takes your products and it knows what to do with them. So definitely want to have the Google and YouTube sales channel sell new Shopify store. The next sales channel that we love is the shop sales channel. So for those of, you're not familiar with the shop app, Shopify has their own app where customers can track their orders, see products and all things like that. Um, and basically Shopify gives you the ability to have your own store inside the Shop app.

So you could come in here and customize the app, customize your store, choose which products you're gonna feature and put your logo on it, and things like that. Um, and it's just really good for getting like free impressions. You know, it's not gonna make you a million dollars, you're not gonna get anything crazy out of it, but you will have customers that see your products that wouldn't have found them otherwise. The shop app is really easy to set up. You just, you know, go down the, just go search for the sales channel on Shopify and install it, and it'll basically be all set up for you. All your products will go there. Um, and it's just, you know, no brainer to have that. Shopify's definitely pushing it. Customers can get cash back that Shopify pays for and then use in the shop app. So it's just a really good way to get your products in front of customers who may not have found 'em in the past.

After the customer buys something, you ship out the order, the customer will then get a notification in the shop app and in the shop app. Once they get that notification or they're tracking their order, they'll see your other products. Maybe they place another order and it's really cool. The next sales channel that we think you should install in your Shopify store is Shopify inbox. Shopify inbox is just basically a chat so you can chat with customers. Um, you can put the widget on your store if you want to and allow customers to live chat with you. You can do a lot of really cool things with the Shop app. You can, you know, choose where it is in your store. You can make instant answers so customers can, um, just like track their order, see their, your return policy right away without speaking to anybody.

And you can also accept messages from customers. So as a business owner, you have a, just a closer relationship with your existing customers, and if a new customer has a question about a policy or anything like that, they could just go ahead and do that. Um, and you can dial this on your phone so you can answer them on the go. And it's just a really good way to form a better connection with your, the fifth and final sales channel that we think you should install on a Shopify store and send your products to is Pinterest. Uh, especially if you're like a fashion store or you know, someone, home Goods, something like that. Like Pinterest is a really cool place to feature your products and showcase your, you know, cool items, right? People go to Pinterest for inspiration, they go to Pinterest to, you know, scratch that creative itch.

And having your products there is really important. It's important that you also have like an organic Pinterest. If you can get your products onto your Pinterest page, it'll just get your products seen more often. And it's just, again, but getting your products in front of customers in the places they are. So if you think about the sales channels we just spoke about, um, that's where your customers live digitally, right? They go on your website, but more importantly, they go, they're on Google and YouTube, they're on Facebook and Instagram, they're on Pinterest, they're on their shop app, on their iPhone, um, and they wanna talk to you through the inbox. So just meeting the customers where they are and putting your products in front of them is extremely important. It's just a really good way to get your products in front of you.