From Amazon to Shopify: Catherine Smith's Blueprint to E-Commerce Success
Nov 28, 2023Season 1Episode 205
Firing The Man
Ready to unravel the secrets of successful e-commerce businesses? Prepare to be enthralled as we sit down with the founder of Walton Birch, Catherine Smith, a real game-changer in the e-commerce field. Catherine doesn't just understand the industry; she shapes it, and she's here to guide us through the maze of online selling, specifically focusing on the power of having a standalone website, even when your major sales are through platforms like Amazon.
Catherine opens the door to the world of Shopify, an e-commerce platform with built-in marketing features and affordable pricing plans ideally suited for budding entrepreneurs. She skillfully navigates us through the ease of transitioning from a marketplace to Shopify and why it's a move worth considering. With Catherine leading the way, we delve into the nitty-gritty of optimizing product listings for an unbeatable customer experience and how to maximize both marketplace and Shopify stores for better margins and discoverability.
Switching gears, Catherine lets us peek into her personal life, sharing her favorite book - "The Sum of Us" by Heather Riggie, and her love for paper crafting and diamond painting. We also lightly touch on the open layout floor plans in offices and why it's something she doesn't miss. Finally, Catherine underscores the essence of persistence and patience in achieving e-commerce success and generously offers a free website audit through her company, Walton Birch. So why wait? Take the first step to transform your e-commerce business today. Tune in and let Catherine Smith guide you to success!
Ready to unravel the secrets of successful e-commerce businesses? Prepare to be enthralled as we sit down with the founder of Walton Birch, Catherine Smith, a real game-changer in the e-commerce field. Catherine doesn't just understand the industry; she shapes it, and she's here to guide us through the maze of online selling, specifically focusing on the power of having a standalone website, even when your major sales are through platforms like Amazon.
Catherine opens the door to the world of Shopify, an e-commerce platform with built-in marketing features and affordable pricing plans ideally suited for budding entrepreneurs. She skillfully navigates us through the ease of transitioning from a marketplace to Shopify and why it's a move worth considering. With Catherine leading the way, we delve into the nitty-gritty of optimizing product listings for an unbeatable customer experience and how to maximize both marketplace and Shopify stores for better margins and discoverability.
Switching gears, Catherine lets us peek into her personal life, sharing her favorite book - "The Sum of Us" by Heather Riggie, and her love for paper crafting and diamond painting. We also lightly touch on the open layout floor plans in offices and why it's something she doesn't miss. Finally, Catherine underscores the essence of persistence and patience in achieving e-commerce success and generously offers a free website audit through her company, Walton Birch. So why wait? Take the first step to transform your e-commerce business today. Tune in and let Catherine Smith guide you to success!
Welcome everyone to the Firing the man podcast, a show for anyone who wants to be their own boss. If you sit in a cubicle every day and know you are capable of more, then join us. This show will help you build a business and grow your passive income streams in just a few short hours per day. And now your host serial entrepreneurs David Shomer and Ken Wilson.
Speaker 2:
Welcome everyone to the Firing the man podcast. On today's episode, we have the privilege to interview Catherine Smith. Catherine is the founder and principal consultant of Walton Birch, a web development and digital marketing consulting firm based in Marietta, Georgia. Walton Birch helps small businesses show up credibly and professionally online with expertly built websites, online stores and marketing campaigns. Since 2019, Catherine has helped dozens of small businesses and entrepreneurs launch and grow their businesses. She was recently named to the Georgia Tech alumni 40 under 40 list for her work serving women and underestimated founders. Through her work, she is helping to rethink and invent new ways to support entrepreneurs and small businesses. Welcome to the show, Catherine.
Speaker 3:
Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 2:
Yes, absolutely. So let's kick it off by sharing with the audience a little bit about your background and what got you to where you are today.
Speaker 3:
So full disclosure I never planned to be an entrepreneur. I worked in corporate America for almost 10 years and took what I thought would be a temporary break from corporate America in 2019 and founded Walton Birch. During that time, I was dealing with some health issues and I thought I'll take a quick break, not knowing that there was a global pandemic on the way, and have just stuck with entrepreneurship since then. So my corporate background was in marketing and web development, and I got my MBA in business analytics in 2016. When I started at Walton Birch in 2019, I thought I would be in marketing research, but the universe had other plans, and so I fell back on those web development skills. And here we are.
Speaker 2:
Awesome, and so I've got some web development background from a former life, and so it'll be a fun show. We'll dig into the weeds and get on to it. So what role does a website play for e-commerce businesses that sell primarily on marketplaces like Amazon?
Speaker 3:
That's a great question and I get it a lot. So I think the rules for each marketplace platform are different. Some allow you to kind of have standalone websites. Some allow, some do not, in the interest of competition. But either way, I think that having a website is a good thing. So from a branding perspective, it allows you to tell the story of your brand online. I've seen e-commerce brands that are primarily on marketplace platforms to list new products there or have product information or product specs based on their website, even if they're not selling directly on their website. Also, customer service so when people Google your brand or Google your product and if they're not able to submit support tickets through the marketplace platform, your website is in another place that they can kind of reach you to ask questions about the product or ask questions about orders as well. So I still think there is a role, there's a space for a website in e-commerce brands, even if you sell primarily on a market.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, absolutely. It's kind of like your identity, right, like a marketplace is a sales channel and your website's kind of like your identity. So why do you recommend Shopify to e-commerce entrepreneurs over the other free ones like WordPress or e-commerce that I use?
Speaker 3:
A little disclosure. I am a huge Shopify fan. I've been building websites for a while, since way before. It was very user friendly to do so and as web development platforms kind of came online, they would have a little bit of functionality, but not a ton of functionality, especially not for what you were paying monthly. So I discovered Shopify in 2019 or early 2020, right during the early pandemic perhaps and was just blown away by the marketing features built into that basic subscription. So for me, as someone that is very interested in creating successful outcomes for small businesses, having the whole kitchen sink involved in the base subscription so you're not paying a ton of money a month to get the tools that you need to be successful is extremely important. So I'm a huge fan of Shopify because it has those built-in tools to help people be successful. So you're not paying extra for email marketing, you're not paying extra to have the theme kind of built in with the store. You're not paying extra to have the analytics. You're not paying extra to have the integration with Google Analytics or with Google Merchant Center or with Facebook Marketplace or Meta, I guess. And so all of those integrations and marketing channels and customer management like the CRM, all of those are built into the basic subscription. So, needless to say, I am a huge fan of Shopify over some of those free platforms where the functionality is limited, just because I fully believe that marketing and effective customer management and effective order management are huge parts of being successful in online business.
Speaker 2:
For the listeners who are not on Shopify. What are the fees? What is the cost? I think you mentioned a basic plan or there is a premium and plus.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, so Shopify has a couple different plans now and they're kind of expanding, but the basic Shopify subscription, I believe, is $39 a month. So if you literally just log on and you want a store, so an online store, they have a couple of not full store options to buy now buttons that aren't full store options. But the basic store, I believe, is $39 a month. That includes all of the marketing features that I mentioned before. I believe that most e-commerce sellers are going to be okay on the basic plan, especially if you're kind of new to Shopify especially we're new to online selling, and especially if you're not doing millions of dollars in business or millions of transactions, and so Shopify has a Shopify. There's a basic plan, there's a Shopify plan, then I believe there's Shopify plus, so there are at least three and there may be some additional enterprise options where it's kind of powered by Shopify but it doesn't have that same Shopify front end. So it scales very well. But if you're an individual that's running a business, for instance, or even a small business, I think for most people that basic Shopify plan is going to be sufficient.
Speaker 2:
No, that's awesome, and you had mentioned that it comes with a lot of stuff, or I don't want to say free, but it comes with all of the marketing, early plug-ins or what does Shopify call them.
Speaker 3:
So that's another thing I really like about Shopify. Some of those basic things are built in, so they're native to the platform. So if you're familiar I guess you are familiar with WordPress, where you get WordPress, and WordPress is like well, if you want to sell some stuff here, you got to install WooCommerce as a plug-in. But Shopify is at its core in e-commerce platform, so you don't have to install the e-commerce section. It's built in. So you have built-in product functionality, you have built-in email marketing functionality and then you can extend that through integration. So an example of an integration would be you can connect your Shopify store to Meta, which is Facebook and Instagram. You can connect your Shopify store to YouTube, which I didn't know. They had a special YouTube partnership. So if you're a seller on YouTube, now they have a special partnership with Shopify. You can connect your Shopify store through integrations to the Google Merchant Center to do things associated with the Google business suite and Google ads and paid search and things like that, so that you can manage all of that from within your Shopify dashboard from these accounts that you already have. And some other integrations would be and this will be particularly relevant for sellers on Etsy and WooCommerce are shipping integration. So if you have an account with Shippo or Pirateship, like those types of platforms, you can bring those accounts to with you to Shopify and integrate them in your dashboard. So you're not like logging out of one platform, logging into the other platform. So base functionality is like email marketing, all the product management, the customer and the order management. All of that is built in. But you can extend that to the platforms that you already have, like Facebook and Instagram or the MetaSuite, youtube, tiktok, pinterest. If you were a job shipper, there's a couple of plugins and platforms for that. Print on demand. Like. All of that is through the integration center.
Speaker 2:
No, that's awesome. I was sharing with Catherine before the show that in our companies we have kind of a mix. It's kind of funny. We're on Shopify. For a couple of them we migrated over to WordPress, woocommerce and so now we're kind of in that we're planning an implementation, going back to Shopify, and so I think a lot of the friends in our circle is like Shopify is the king of e-commerce, it's like the queen, whatever you want to look at it, but it's like the best. And so do you think all of the other platforms like WooCommerce are just going to fade out and Shopify is going to stay on top? What do you think is going to happen over the next three to five years?
Speaker 3:
I think that is a good question. It's really hard to make predictions in the tech space, but both Shopify and WooCommerce have been around for a while, so if I had to bet, I would say that both of them will continue being around and I've seen both of them evolve. And the thing that I think makes Shopify very powerful is that you don't have to have any kind of technical knowledge. You don't have to know what a hosting company is. You don't have to know what a custom domain is to get on Shopify and start selling, whereas I think that there are people who either have existing WordPress websites and they're like listen, I built up a lot of domain authority here. I'm not just going to give that up for a Shopify website and have a hybrid solution, which I've done one of those recently. I have a client that has a WordPress website from 2008 and was like I don't want to give up my WordPress website and also there's not really a good way to migrate all of this content from this WordPress website to Shopify. So there is still a WordPress website and then there's a shopher URL so that she can integrate that Shopify store while keeping the domain authority that she has with her domains and in that way, wordpress at least, and Shopify work together very well. So I think that things like that Shopify is rolling out a new platform to kind of allow for more flexible building, but there are people that have been on WordPress and other platforms for years or decades now and they don't necessarily want to give up what they built there. And there are some features of functionality to WordPress, the kind of open source nature of it. So the ability to kind of create a custom build like that's right size for your organization, whatever that organization looks like. I think that that will remain important. So I think that people that have a high level of technical expertise and or in house web development teams will not shy away from solutions like WordPress, whereas I think you know people that don't have any technical experience or expertise, or people that are running very small and agile teams or people that just really don't want the hassle of having to manage a website, will continue to kind of move towards solutions like Shopify. And I think that both of those platforms clearly differentiate their value proposition to each of those audiences. They will evolve kind of away from each other so that they're not necessarily cannibalizing each other. They're saying like this is why we are not Shopify, or this is why we're not WordPress and WooCommerce. So I don't think that they'll necessarily go away. I think that they will evolve to kind of match their audiences a little bit better.
Speaker 2:
No, I like that answer. I definitely agree. Yeah, I think WordPress I think there's more websites on WordPress than any other platforms on the internet and the internet Right, right, but to the point of e-commerce, it was not designed for that and so it's kind of been molded to that with WooCommerce, big commerce, things like that, whereas Shopify, I think, was kind of developed just for that, and so you have those, you know the tools developed just for sellers. So, I agree there and yeah, you're right, like the websites that we have in our company has been around since 2017, 2018, they have a lot of domain authority, whereas WordPress, it does really really good with SEO and so, whereas Shopify, I think they're catching up, but it's not designed for that, and so I like that hybrid solution that you had mentioned, kind of like having the you know the SEO piece of it on WordPress and then maybe the shop over there. That'd be something for a hybrid solution for someone that wanted to migrate over, but for anybody new, your recommendation is just go directly to Shopify and start from there, correct?
Speaker 3:
If you're strictly e-commerce, if you don't have any type of content and content is not unusually important to you, absolutely, I think Shopify is a great solution. Shopify has rolled out like a headless functionality I'm going to call it. It's not really a platform, it's not really a feature, it's like it's headless so which will allow Shopify to be kind of embedded in other types of context. So that's a TBD. I haven't had a lot of time to explore it, so I think that could be the thing that we're looking for, where you're saying, like, listen, I have a lot of content and the content is important and the SEO is important, but the e-commerce is also very important and it's really important to have a robust kind of e-commerce support system. I think that that new headless functionality is going to kind of serve that purpose, but it remains to be seen. It could take off and that will be what Shopify is in five years, or it could flop and Shopify could go back to its core offering. But we'll see.
Speaker 2:
Yeah sure, Now does Shopify play nicely with Google Analytics and there's a new GA4 out now, so does it all play nicely and have you use a little bunch of those features?
Speaker 3:
Yeah. So Shopify has a I'm going to call it native it may not be native, but it's darn close if it's not native integration with Google, like the whole entire Google suite. So the Google Merchant Center, google Analytics, google Search Console, so that you can run ads, you could do paid search, you can manage the Google my Business and the reviews that come along with that. You can have your products featured in the shopping section all through just your Google connection. So as close to natively supported as it can be. Shopify has that built in, which is great because you don't have to click back and forth between the search console and the analytics and the Google Merchant Center and the Google my Bitwag. It's all Google Merchant Center now, but you don't have to click back and forth between those things and you're able to get that same kind of Google Analytics reporting associated with your store. Because as much as I love Shopify Analytics on the basic plan, there remains to be seen a little bit of functionality. So on the upgraded tiers, the reporting is a little bit robust, but I don't necessarily think that some of the sellers that are coming into e-commerce need to. I think that's a little bit overkill for especially new or smaller sellers. So I think that Google Analytics can definitely still fill that gap for Shopify stores, at least until it makes sense for you to upgrade to the plans with the more reporting.
Speaker 2:
No, that's good. Google Analytics is probably the de facto standard for finding out how things are functioning and how to improve. So for someone that's say, they're listening to the show, they've got a brand, they're selling on Etsy or Amazon, but they don't have their website yet, and so Shopify is. You're recommending Shopify, so what are some things that they can do to like? Is it really easy to build their own shop? Is there themes? Can you kind of maybe step one, two and three up, get them moving in the right direction?
Speaker 3:
Sure, I actually get that question a lot. I think there's a lot of concerns with the way that kind of fees and competition occur on marketplace platforms, especially if you're creating a product that you're either kind of making by hand or you really just want better margins on it. It's really kind of difficult to get margins sometimes on marketplace platforms because there is so much competition. And so I get the question a lot of how do I either, like, do I need to either have one or the other? So if I do, I need either need to have an Etsy store or a Shopify store or, you know, sell on Walmart or Shopify, or can I have both. And so to that I say that the process of migrating, so moving your entire store from a marketplace platform I'm going to use Etsy because I do Etsy the most often so migrating from Etsy to Shopify is relatively simple. You can actually export all of your Etsy orders and into a CSV, like a literal file, and then upload them into Shopify, and so they make that very easy to just kind of take full sale, take your products and move them. However, there is a little bit of setup on the Shopify end, so you absolutely need to install a theme, which you didn't have to do with Etsy. So the theme just controls the look and feel. You have to determine what color you want your website to be. You have to, you know, add some photos and you know, images and text and content to the website. So you have to actually build a website to kind of go along with that. But in terms of transferring the products over, that part is easy. Another challenge that I've seen marketplace sellers kind of experience moving to Shopify is that for marketplaces, the way that you optimize product listings to be seen on marketplaces is a lot different. So with Etsy specifically and I'm using Etsy just because I get a lot of questions about that it's essentially kind of keyword spam and whereas Shopify is more like a website on the web. So instead of just having keywords bam, you have to actually kind of create content for your website to help it be found by search engines. So in 100% of cases coming from Etsy specifically, you will have to optimize your product descriptions and the other concept for your website for a Shopify store, in order for it to be found by websites. So SEO is a thing like just it has to happen. You will have to invest in it just be prepared for that. Also, updating the look and feel of your store and adding additional images so like lifestyle images, not necessarily product images and I think that just you have to create a good experience for the customers coming to your website. So it is a store, but it is also a website. So those are the two things that you have to kind of think about when you're moving from a marketplace platform to your own platform, but, that said, if your platform allows it. So if, like Etsy, for example, allows you to sell your products on your own website in addition to Etsy, I would definitely leave a few of your more popular or kind of high volume items on Etsy, because it does have that inherent kind of discoverability, the way that Etsy search is set up like it's a lot easier for people to find your products. And so if you have a store where you're having one or two products on there and people say, oh, that's really cool, let me see if let me Google that name and see if there's an actual website, then you can offer other products on your website that are either higher margin products or products that cost a little bit more for shipping, or products that are just not priced as competitively, because on marketplace platforms you tend to have to price products pretty competitively. So it's with a question you didn't ask. I absolutely think that where your marketplace allows it, you can have a marketplace store and a Shopify store. Migrating from a marketplace to a Shopify store is usually pretty simple, but there's a little bit of setup required to create a positive customer experience and make sure that your store gets found by search engines and that people are looking for it.
Speaker 2:
Fair enough. No, that's a great answer and yeah, it doesn't sound like it's too complicated, but definitely some steps there. And if you're already on a marketplace you had mentioned, you can repurpose a lot of that stuff. Probably need to do a little bit more SEO research and apply it to your website, but images and copy and stuff you can use a lot of that. So now let's fast forward. Let's say, six months. The seller, they let's say they were on Etsy primarily. They created a Shopify store. Let's say they sell jewelry. They sell five different kinds of jewelry. They created a Shopify store. Now they're selling jewelry. Sales are starting to come in. They've got some data flowing in now. One of the things that I really focus on is conversion rates. So I think e-commerce conversion rates sometimes gets overlooked and I think it's a massive KPI to keep an eye on. What are some suggestions that you make to your clients on? If they're six months in or a year, and they've got a bunch of data to look at now, what are a few things that they can do to increase conversion rate?
Speaker 3:
Oh, that's a great question. There are a lot of things that go into conversion rate. So, for example, it could be that a million people are coming to your website because they saw you on the local news or they saw you on TikTok. 97% of them are bouncing because they weren't interested in buying your product. But 1% of a million is still a lot of people. I think that it's kind of relative. But if you're getting pretty steady traffic, that's the first thing that I would look at. So the traffic is fairly steady, given your understanding of how your industry or seasonality goes for your product. So if your traffic is pretty steady but you're noticing that your conversion rate is low so there are a lot of people coming but nobody's buying the very first thing that I would check would be for technical errors. Shopify does a lot to kind of eliminate the technical error aspect from your store, but I've seen it and we've all seen it like on, like TikTok and Instagram and things like that where either somebody left their store in test mode so all of their products were free and they go back, or they did like a calculated shipping and shipping is showing up as like $57, or they only have local shipping turned on, so it's telling people outside of your state that they can't check out. So check for technical errors first, and with Shopify, there are a few things that could be kind of standing in the way from that perspective. Other than that, from a conversion rate perspective and I think this is unique to Shopify and my only criticism well, not my only criticism, but one of my criticisms of Shopify is, like it's super easy to build stores, but it's super easy to build the same store. A lot of Shopify stores look the same, like you'll see, and be like ah, that's a Shopify store. In that instance, your customer doesn't have a great online experience, and so I definitely think that spending a little time and energy to create a great experience are not just listing your products all on a single page, especially if there are more than like 10 of them is important for a conversion rate optimization. So give people the opportunity to buy the product, but also kind of lead them down the path. So give them the product information, give them some high resolution photos and like a 360 image of the product. If you're selling something large like furniture, do one of those little 3D model thingies where they can see how it fits into their house. You know, like give them a great buying experience so that they A spend a lot of time on the site and then B are kind of led down the path to say, oh yes, this is absolutely something that I want or something that I need. Allow them to buy it. So make sure your shipping is calculating correctly. Make sure you don't have a local delivery as your only fulfillment option. You know, just make sure that your store is not in test mode, for instance, and that it accepts credit cards and things like that. So provide a good experience. You know, make the buying part easy. So give people an opportunity to add to cart or buy now and then make sure your checkout works. I think those are the three biggest things. Those are not the only things, but I think those are the three most common things that I have to look at from a Shopify store perspective when it comes to conversion rate optimization.
Speaker 2:
No, excellent, I really like that. I like how you had mentioned you know, taking the visitor or the customer through a path or a journey to the product. Like sometimes I go to websites and they're just cluttered with everything. It's like where do I even start? And then you know your bounce rates go up right, and so you know, kind of like holding their hand. Some of the best ones I've seen were when you land on the homepage and they have more than one product, they ask you a question or like are you looking to research or are you looking to buy? And then it takes you directly. Those are. I think those are brilliant. The other thing you said I wanted to highlight was you had mentioned and this is something on the psychology piece of it, I think with online purchasing. I think the last statistic was 2022. I think e-commerce had 15% penetration in all of retail and I think we're looking to go to 20 in the next couple of years. One of the things that stops people from buying online is that they can't touch an item, feel an item, like they can't picture it in their room, and you had mentioned that. The 3D model of a couch that's a perfect example, because you know you could. Then you could just go into your living room, take a picture of it, throw it up there and put the couch on there and see what it's going to look like in your room and that's I think that's brilliant. You know, kind of like getting through that gap of, hey, what is it, what is it going to look like? You know on stuff like that. So those are great, great examples. One follow on question that I have, and I think this I think we learn the most from our mistakes and so you know, from you working with a bunch of clients like what are, like some of the top two or three mistakes that people make whenever they start building their website or get into e-commerce.
Speaker 3:
Two of the biggest mistakes zero product images or especially in print on demand like the default images that come with the product, just not changing them or not including any images and no product descriptions. The product is out here. It's just kind of like hey, do you want to buy it or not? I need so much more information. I need a size chart, I need a 3D model of what was fit in my house. I need a comparison. I call it the wish effect and because it happens on wish, you're just like oh, this chair is like $2. I'm going to buy it. And then the chair is the size of my head and you're like so those are the two biggest mistakes that I've seen. A, because if there are no product descriptions, if there are no words on your website, obviously it's not showing up in search engine results anyway. So if you do somehow manage to get people to your website, no product description gives them zero information about this, to them, is this the size that they're expecting it to be? Is it otherwise what they are expecting it to be? So those are big mistakes. And then also little known mistake not updating your website or your products. So this is kind of complicated to explain. So search engines reward websites just generally for updating the concept frequently. So if it goes stale, they're just going to say listen, this is not relevant from a search engine perspective. And I know that seems kind of contrary for e-commerce sites, because products should theoretically be always relevant. But if you're not adding new products or updating your product descriptions, you will see a drop in your website traffic organic traffic anyway and engagement. And then also if you're not reaching out to your customers. So Shopify has built in email marketing, so you really just don't have an excuse not to be talking to people. To the extent that you can Reach out to people, tell them what's going on with your company, tell them what new products that you have, and occasionally do promotions I don't necessarily recommend promotions all the time for everybody, but to the extent that you can use those marketing features to engage with your customers. And so sometimes people come to me and they're like people. I have had great success with my website. I have a steady clientele, but my views and purchases have dropped off dramatically. What can I do? And my very first thing is are you sending emails? Have you talked to people in a while? And that, for me, is the low hanging fruit of in terms of trying to do conversion, re-optimization or get people re-engaged with your brand and your products. Just reach out to them, talk to them the ones that are subscribed to your email list send them an email, even if it's just an update, with what's going on with the company and, of course, update your website. So update your photos, update your product descriptions, add some blogs. So make sure that the date stamps on your websites are being updated periodically. So I guess those would be my big three and I'm going to put the first two in two different categories because they are important. Images, product images. You have to have product images. It's so important I'm going to list it in its own category Product images descriptive product images. And then, second would be product descriptions actual words, at least 300 of them, but more you know actual sentences and descriptions of what the product provides. And then, of course, engaging with your customer clientele and updating your website on a regular basis. I would put that into the kind of the same category of staying relevant, basically in front of mind for your customers.
Speaker 2:
No, I like those all in and definitely they'll all like move the needle. You know email marketing, updating your product descriptions, having images that relevant and updated. I like that. And funny story when you said that earlier, it triggered a memory of mine. I got wished, if you will, two years to cope for Christmas. I was buying my kids Rich Dad, poor Dad, I always bought my kids a book for Christmas and I bought and I saw it. I was shopping on Amazon and I bought four of them and they came in and they were pocket sized editions and I was like, are you hitting me? I went to the Amazon listing and, sure enough, on the third image it showed like three and I'm like, oh my God, because I just like click through it.
Speaker 3:
So it happens more often than power seems. But yeah, it's so important.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I'm just glad I didn't buy a couch or something and then I get like a little buggy couch. We've covered a lot Shopify how to start it you know Shopify's the premium how to start a Shopify store or whatnot to do. Are there any other topics that I didn't ask you that you want to share with the audience today?
Speaker 3:
I don't know. I'm trying to think about questions that I get frequently. I think the theme thing, especially for people coming from WordPress Blue Commerce, is usually daunting. They're like, do I need a developer designer? Like, do I need to buy a theme? No, you absolutely don't need to buy a theme. Shopify, at any given time, has like 12 free themes kind of involved and they're pretty user friendly. You're absolutely. If you're not a web developer, you're going to spend a little bit of time kind of clicking around and making things look the way that you wanted to look, but you can absolutely do this with zero technical ability. If you can use a PowerPoint or like any kind of image processing, word document type thing, you can use the Shopify page builder. So that's not something that you need to worry about. You will absolutely need to start from scratch. That's not something that you can import, especially from, like a Blue Commerce. So that's a question that I get asked about a lot but, other than that, I don't think I have anything else to add.
Speaker 2:
So, yeah, if you are planning on migrating to Shopify or start your own Shopify store, there's free themes you can use, so don't worry about that. So, catherine, we put all of our guests through the ringer and we call it the fire round. Are you ready? Yes, all right. What is your favorite book?
Speaker 3:
Oh, the Sum of Us by Heather Riggie. It talks about cross-racial mobilizing around non-racial issues and I think it's super helpful in terms of thinking about creating equity and equality and opportunity.
Speaker 2:
Awesome. I'm going to put that on my list. What are your hobbies?
Speaker 3:
I have lots of hobbies. Paper crafting is one, so I create 3D paper sculptures from like cardstock, which is exciting. Also, I love like diamond painting and rhinestone and things a little small detail oriented task like that.
Speaker 2:
No, that sounds fun. What is one thing that you do not miss about working for the man?
Speaker 3:
Oh, open layout floor plans. I got it. Generally, working in an office was just not great for me. I am a person that kind of needs to silence to be able to hear my own thoughts, and so the switch to open layout floor plans was really difficult for me in the workplace and just generally working with a ton of people just wasn't it for me.
Speaker 2:
I agree with you. I had a job once where they switched the company I was working for, switched to the, I think like the three foot cubicle walls, and then you could literally see every almost like. This is not good, not okay, all right. Last one, what do you think sets apart successful e-commerce entrepreneurs from those who give up, fail or never get started?
Speaker 3:
Persistence Like you have to show up every day and do at least one thing that gets you closer to where you need to be. And patience Like I guess persistence and patience it's seasonal. There are a lot of people out here kind of doing the same thing and you know, despite the stories of people going viral, I don't think that that is the typical experience and not a whole lot of people talk about that. So I think showing up every day consistently doing one thing to get you closer to where you want to be, being patient and looking for those slow and steady results is the difference, because it will absolutely take a while and sometimes you will absolutely go viral, but you have to put in the work to be prepared for when that happened.
Speaker 2:
So, catherine, before the show we went over an offer to the guest. You want to share that with the guest?
Speaker 3:
My company, walton Birch, provides website audit. So if you have a question, if you're just like hey is this right doing the right thing? Or like will this be a very difficult website to you know, migrate or transfer? We do free website audits so you can reach out to us through our website, which is waltonbirchcom, sign up for a free audit or just sign up to get some time on my calendar. I'd be happy.
Speaker 2:
That's awesome and really appreciate it. I want to thank you for being guests on the firing demand podcast and looking forward to staying in touch.