The Ultimate Guide to ShopSite

Introduction

You’ve established trust with your audience, researched their pain point, listened to the feedback, and it’s time for you to transition from influencer to entrepreneur. Whether you’re finally adding a “home on the web” to your social media empire or adding products to your niche blog, you’ll find everything you to need to launch or scale your online store with Shopsite. Thousands of sellers have trusted ShopSite since 1996. For more than twenty years they’ve supported local merchants nervous about expanding from brick-and-mortar store to hybrid seller. For more than fifteen of those years, pair Networks has partnered with Shopsite to support everyone from startups to enterprise sellers in meeting and exceeding shoppers’ expectations for physical and digital products.

What You Need to Create a Successful Online Store

Hiring a website designer to build a new eCommerce website is no longer necessary. Shopsite’s dedication to equipping businesses to succeed has resulted in creating a robust and easy to use tool so beginners launching for pennies on the dollar and developers can customize a store that serves your customers.

Whether you’re taking your passion for jewelry to the next level or expanding your dropship business from FBA to your own website, Shopsite has the tools you’ll need to succeed. Regardless of your business type, you can and will be able to maximize Shopsite when you understand how to use their experience to your advantage.

To build a successful online store your software solution needs to provide five things:

• customized design and development tools to provide a positive user experience
• an attractive way to present your products and communicate how the product benefits shoppers
• secure and reliable payment processors and easy to manage carts based on what your customers prefer
• Simple fulfillment business tools
• Customer relationship and customer service tools

Customized Design and Advanced Development Tools

Having the courage to go from social media influencer to online seller doesn’t have to be stressful. You don’t have to become a coding wizard or website aficionado to begin selling those custom tees your tribe raves about in your DMs. Shopsite’s website builder has a Setup Wizard that will guide you through a series of steps to create the best site for your products. If wizards aren’t your style, you can also choose one of the Store Layout Themes to showcase your products. Once you’ve created the foundation for your store’s look you can customize your text by color and font. You’ll have access to Basic Editing to update and customize the feel of each page so your brand is consistent on each page. Page preview provides the ability to see how each page appears prior to publishing.

Let’s say you’re opening a dropship apparel business. You’ll need to upload a large number of items that will be available for your customers to order. Shopsite saves you time with bulk product uploads using XML. For your store, you’ve decided you want each category to have a different layout based on the product type, for this example let’s focus on shoes. In anticipation of the upcoming season, you want to clear some inventory and find out which of the new designs you’ve selected will be a customer favorite. Shopsite’s Global Customization editing tools give you the ability to change a Global custom layout for all the pages in any category you select and to change the global navigation menu to help customers access the shoe type they’ll want faster.

You decided you like the customization and functionality of Shopsite but you don’t like the store layout themes or the look recommended by the Setup Wizard. No worries, Shopsite works with approved design partners that offer custom templates you can upload and edit to your and your customer’s liking. Shopsite’s Power Edit feature provides a simple way to update any Shopsite field for your all products to save you time designing and updating product pages. Time saved can be used to connect with your customers and continuing to grow your influence.

Adding inventory doesn’t have to be a chore for brick and mortar store owners. Simple Catalog management functions available in Shopsite include a data import wizard to bulk upload your available products. Once you’ve uploaded your catalog you can update or change items by category or across the entire store. You can use power editing to make changes across a product type or Global power editing for bulk editing for an entire product category. When you house and sell a multitude of products your website doesn’t have to be slow. Shopsite provides Automatic Thumbnail Generation and image resizing for special pictures during sales or product spotlights.

Each Shopsite online store is equipped to make finding a particular product easy for the customers and for you. You’re able to search for one page across all pages using the searchable pages database. When you need to select or find one particular product you can input the name, SKU, product description, etc. to find one item whether you sell hundreds or thousands of items on Shopsite using the searchable product database.

Shopsite’s advanced development capabilities make it an easy choice for bloggers with advanced design capabilities and companies looking for a new e-commerce solution. You’re able to access Advanced Image Handling to create image subdirectories and all plans include the ability to resize images for fast website loading and manager and pro plan users can use the Automatic Thumbnail generator. Bloggers who choose WordPress to connect with readers are able to access every feature, function, and all five hundred Shopsites tools when you use the Shopsite WordPress plugin. From beginner to enterprise solution every Shopsite store is mobile responsive.

Merchandising and Marketing

When you’re waiting to check out at the local grocery store, you see so many last minute impulse buys at the register. Shopsite provides online merchandising tools in addition to the bulk uploads, custom page layouts, and other brand customization options. Consider how important those last minute purchases are to your shopping experience.

Cross-selling online merchandising is another feature available when you choose Shopsite. You’re able to implement this feature by configuring certain products to show when your customer places a related product in their cart or visits a related products page.  Sale items you’re trying to move can be placed in a global cross-sell to show no matter what the customer purchases. eBay sellers can export products in Turbo lister format, and shop owners are also able to submit products for indexing and increased discoverability in Google Product Search. So if you’re a specialty shoe boutique and a shopper types “aquamarine wedges” on their phone, your items may populate in the search results.

Search engine optimization has matured and grown alongside e-commerce. Shopsite stores provide shop owners who upgrade to the Manager and Pro Plan access to edit metadata using Meta Tag Editing. Manager and Pro plan store owners are able to access meta descriptions and keyword tag editing for pages, product pages, and more information pages in order to help achieve prominent SERP ranking.

Search engine marketing using SEO is partnered with social media marketing across the major social media platforms. Shopsite store owners are able to cross-sell by placing products for sale on a Facebook page store tab. Customers can share products on Facebook including inside Facebook Messenger, connect using facebook registration, and like your brand’s Facebook page from your site. Connecting with your customers on Facebook includes them in any future Facebook ad campaigns targeting your Facebook page fans. Customers are also able to share your products or follow your brand on Twitter and Google+ using the Share with a Friend tool. Products are able to be shared across Pinterest as well as an opportunity for customer’s to follow your company’s boards on Pinterest.

Management and Commerce Tools

Business to consumer online stores as well as business to business enterprises can benefit from choosing Shopsite. Configurable payment types include but are not limited to:

• Real-time credit card processing
• Authorize.net
• Paypal payments
• Amazon pay
• Apple pay
• Recurring billing and subscriptions
• ACH Direct Payments

Wherever you are in the world, Shopsite has the technology and tools available to adhere to the legal requirements for your customers and business as well as protect your customers’ sensitive information.

Fulfillment Business Tools

Marketing and merchandising attract your customers. Providing quality products that meet or exceed their expectations will win you an initial purchase or maybe even two. Organized, customer focused systems and streamlined processes that make shopping with you a pleasant experience is what transforms you from a provider to a partner or part of your customer’s life.

Two decades of powering eCommerce resulted in the majority of the features offered by Shopsite focusing on giving you everything you need to fulfill your customer’s orders in a professional and timely manner. Each customer, regardless of the plan selected, has access to secure order management, easy order printing, notes from customers for the order, packing slips, mobile support, display store ID, user accounts, order system tracking, merchant notifications, flexible tax options, and automatic customer receipts. Advanced options for Manager and Pro plans enable shipping tracking, APIs, dropshipping capabilities, abandoned cart integration, and other custom functionalities. These automated processes make the customer buying experience as easy as possible for the customer and as efficient as possible for the store owner.

Customer Relations and Customer Service Tools

Building a relationship with your customers while providing stellar support and customer service is easy to do with Shopsite. Customer registration is included in every plan. Whether you offer scented candles or printable templates for children’s parties, Shopsite provides gift certificates, customer reward programs, coupons, and affiliate tracking for pro shop owners.

Customer service tools available for every shop owner include automatic customer receipts, merchant notification of order, opt-in email marketing, and zip and postal code-based tax calculation. Dual currency, global cart, and tax integrations are provided for international Shopsite clients. All plans receive every security tool provided to protect your reputation and relationship with your customer.

The Ultimate Guide to ShopSite

With more than five hundred tools to help you build your online store, Shopsite’s dedication to powering successful online shops is unquestionable. As you explore how to add eCommerce to your blogging platform, influence as a social media star, or to expand into offering digital products based on your expertise you’ll need an online sales partner with experience, reliability, and dedication to seeing you succeed. Shopsite’s commitment to developing features to benefit shop owners has proven to be their ultimate asset. Find out how to add Shopsite to your blog or website by going to pair.com.