Choosing a home for my art business | Shopify vs Squarespace + ⭐Upgrading⭐ my website

all right let's talk Shopify squares phas who will I choose look how freaking cute it is and we have 10,000 of them which is very ambitious I think in total sales last year I had like 1500 sales which is a good amount but I did take like a four to 5 month break from like really advertising my shop so that affected sales but let's say in a year I'll make like 2,000 sales right this will last me 5 years call me prepared okay I have never been this prepared in my life let's get started talking on website and where your shop is going to live hold on all right and we are back hey D and welcome to the channel and or welcome back to the channel I'm Julianne and if you needed that intro then you might be a little confused but you have now been plopped into the middle of a multi-part series of me upgrading my art shop and we are getting into the nitty-gritty guys we are upgrading every part of my art business so so last video we did branding assets this video we're going to talk about where my art business is going to live online because it mostly lives online I do do a lot of markets and stuff which I will go into at another time in another part of this series but for the most part a huge amount of my sales come from online so I really really need to upgrade this website like I'm going to put a little I don't know overlay over here of what my website looks like currently it is pretty trash I think I guess it's like kind of cute and it is functional which is basically the main thing I made it for I just needed a place to start selling cuz previously I was on Etsy but Etsy was robbing me blind legally Legally I did agree for them to rob me blind I guess they robbed me in full vision then I suppose but ever since I had like kind of like a growing presence on social media and kind of a recurring customer base I wanted to have a separate place for my shop to live where I wasn't getting charged 6.5% for every single transaction an additional credit card fee fee of like 3% plus like a 20 C listing fee for every single item and then also the kicker with Etsy is that once you pass $10,000 in one year like in 365 days then you are automatically opted into a like off-site ad program that charges you 15% that is so much 15% of your total sales that is huge anyway sorry that was like a whole rant about Etsy but that's yeah that's why we're not going to talk about Etsy at all we're really only going to talk about Shopify and Squarespace okay actually I feel kind of bad one last note on Etsy before we get started with Shopify and Squarespace if you are starting from scratch and you do not want to really do that much like social media branding or like garnering your own audience in order to funnel them to a website then Etsy is actually pretty good for that so people can just go on there and scroll and buy things randomly not really caring who it comes from it's also free to get started on Etsy and yeah they make it really really easy for you they just take a huge transaction fee because they make it so easy for you so you can start getting customers without ever advertising any of your stuff just like have good SEO which you can use chat GPT to figure out if you want to make everything like super easy but since that is not the case for me since I do want to do my own branding I do want to build this art business from like the bottom up to be like a real e-commerce or just full-on Commerce business maybe one day we'll have a storefront that's just not for me but anyways let's get started with the meat and potatoes of this video and right off the bat I'm just going to give a quick overview over what I found during my research between Shopify and Squarespace Shopify and Squarespace are both really good website Builders they will serve whatever purpose you need them to serve and you really can't go wrong with either one however they do specialize in different things and I do think that one is built to make your life easier if you are running like a small art business so for one Shopify is basically made for e-commerce everything about it is built to make a business online Squarespace is generally a website builder you can make really really pretty websites on it and it has e-commerce functions and again you can sell them both you can't really go wrong with either one but those are just my general thoughts right off the bat so let's get into the planning and the pricing and I do have a little cheat sheet over here cuz there's no way I'm going to be able to remember all of this and all the features so if you see me looking this way I am cheating and yeah just that's just how it's going to be for plans Shopify offers three different plans and they are basic which starts at $39 a month if you're paying the monthly fee the next is Shopify which is $105 a month and and then the last one the most advanced one which is made for like medium to large businesses is $399 per month and if you're watching this video you are definitely not going to be using that plan actually if you're just getting started in general you're probably not even going to be using the Shopify plan because that's made for small businesses with employees for the purposes of like me and probably a lot of you we're basically going to stay with just the basic plan so like I said earlier the basic plan does start at $39 a month if you play the monthly fee however I pay for a full year because because I don't plan on my shop going anywhere in the next year if you pay for the yearly plan then you pay $29 a month which is a lot cheaper and actually a very very fair price for everything that you get when it comes to Squarespace their plans start off with personal which is at $16 a month and once you have a business that goes from $23 a month to $49 a month and within the business plans there are three different ones and those are business Commerce and commerce Advanced so what's really cool about Squarespace is that if you're started and you don't have a domain yet they do offer you a free domain if you go with a business plan right off the bat and this free domain really only lasts as a free domain for one year and if you plan on being a business for more than a year then you'll need to pay for a domain which is honestly like really affordable it's not that scary but I think this is really cool if you're just getting started you're just making a website just make your domain right there and you might be thinking like wow the Squarespace offers are like way cheaper but actually it's quite tricky and it's not true the most advanced version commer Advance which is $49 a month is basically equivalent to the most basic plan on Shopify which is $39 a month which is kind of insane which kind of hearkens back to the very beginning points when I did the overviews that Shopify is made for e-commerce and Squarespace is made to build a pretty website with some e-commerce functionalities we're really not even going to be talking about the personal plan which is not functional for e-commerce at all but personally I think that the business plan which is like their best value one where you can start with e-commerce is not even really functional because they do char like a 3% transaction fee which is similar to the Etsy one where it's 6.5% for the transaction fee and again that is on top of the 2.9% plus 30 C fee for credit cards which Shopify does charge the exact same I do believe in Shopify like the 2.9% credit card fee is fluctuating for some businesses they give you 2.4% I don't really know how to access that but I get charged 2.9% plus 30 cents for every transaction processing fee also for the business plan you cannot have like really customized discounts or customized shipping profiles which is kind of insane it's not until you get into the Commerce plan where you can have like Advanced shipping profiles and like custom discounting for your customers which I think is really crazy because Shopify offers all that right off the bat and their shipping profiles and their discounting um system is more advanced than the Commerce Advanced version of scores space I think the only thing extra that commer advance and Squarespace offers that Shopify basic doesn't offer is a subscription plans which is actually really cool because you can add subscriptions onto your website which is something maybe I want to do you don't want to have to go to patreon you can just host it right on your website but Shopify also offers that but it offers it as an add-on which I can get into more later but yeah those are the differences between the plans next up we are talking templates Shopify offers 10 free templates and then there's like 50 premium ones that you have to pay for these templates are pretty basic but they are nice and their appealing and you can add pretty assets to them to make it like really cute on your website and of course it really comes down to the assets that you add onto the website that make it like really cute Squarespace offers like essentially an unlimited amount of templates you can basically whatever template you can think of it's there and available for free I do believe they have a couple that you can pay for but really the library of free templates is insane on SAR space some of the prettiest e-commerce websites I've ever seen in my life have been built on Squarespace they really do offer like incredible customization and also I think it's a little bit easier to build on there as well when I was playing around with building a website on Squarespace for the research of this video it was honestly like really fun a lot of time is just drag and drop Shopify is also drag and drop but it is a little bit harder in terms of like the UI to figure out where everything is in order to customize your website that being said it's really not that hard both websites are very easy to build a website on in the same vein of building a pretty website in the templates that they offer I'm going to talk a little bit about blogging in case your business requires a little bit of blogging Shopify doesn't really have a tool specifically made for blogging they do have tools for like categories comments and like a little bit of like analytics however Squarespace is like super powerful when it comes to blogging if that's something you're interested in for your website they have built-in analytics tools for like categories comments and moderation which is pretty cool they have tagging and also like post scheduling which is pretty huge and Shopify doesn't have post scheduling and again you can make like a Way preter blog on Squarespace than you can on Shopify Shopify there's a lot less customization when it comes to just like building a page of like text and adding in random pictures so so not super wellb built for blogging but you can do it for the purposes of like my small art business I do not have a Blog at all I do want to create a newsletter which again I will talk about later but for me yeah I don't really have a blogging section the only part where it's just like text and a picture is the about section and that's good for me like my website is built to sell stuff and lastly let's just get into the other tidbits that I couldn't add into like any other category basically just different offerings that each website offers for you to build on your website and let's start with Squarespace this time I feel like we've been starting with Shopify the entire time so Squarespace offers really cool things like they offer loyalty points subscription services and also email marketing which is super sick and these are all things that you have to like Buy in addition to your Commerce advaned plan which is again $49 a month with the exception of subscriptions which I think just comes with the Commerce Advanced plan but I think like the email marketing is an extra $9 a month which is pretty cheap and the loyalty points is like another $7 I'm not not quite sure I'm not going to tell you exactly how much it is but it is like an extra fee on top if you want to do loyalty points which is super cool and it's something I would love to do for my business when it comes to Shopify again their basic plan basically has everything you can possibly need to just get started with a really good business however if you want to add on things like loyalty points subscription Services Inventory Services where it tells you like what's back in stock and what you need where it gives you like little alerts about your inventory or email marketing basically anything you can think of in terms of functionality Shopify has but they come in the form of like add-on apps so Shopify has like access to thousands of these Shopify apps that are basically like apps built specifically to add on to your shops so basically you have to pay for these extra subscriptions to add on functionality to your Shopify but they are super worth it and they're usually really cheap and again this is already on top of a highly functional basic plan when I was scrolling through the Shopify apps honestly I was a little bit intimidated because they did offer so many and some of the tools are like really really powerful analytic tools which I would love to be able to use or learn how to use because I mean if you don't know the numbers of your shop then you don't really know your shop but specifically I was really interested in like the receiving the low stock alert ones because the current Shopify plan you have to kind of like go into your bulk inventory and look like oh what am I low in stock of and the same thing with Squarespace however I don't think that there is an alert system for Squarespace so you can't even like add anything on to be able to receive that and lastly this has nothing to do with selling online but as a business I do sell in person I do conventions and local markets and that makes up about like 35% to 40% of my income which is pretty huge and luckily for me both Shopify and Squarespace do offer inperson POS systems in order to sell in person and you can sell directly on your phone which is super sick so starting off with Shopify Shopify in order to sell in person you do have to pay like an extra $5 per month which is pretty negligible and I really don't mind paying that if that is the case however what really cool with Shopify is that everything is combined into one system so if you're looking at your business as a whole all your analytics all your numbers are all in one place which is super nice the Shopify posos does offer like if you're selling on your phone and someone else is buying with their phone or a tap credit card you can directly do the transaction on the phone which is really really cool I recently just discovered that last year however that's not always reliable cuz then people also have like nonta credit cards and also sometimes the tap just like doesn't work for what some technological reason Shopify sells their own the card reader and I believe it's like $49 but it's just like one time fee you're just buying the card reader when it comes to Squarespace I believe that Squarespace doesn't have its own like inperson POS system however they have teamed up with square I used to think that Squarespace and square were like the same company but they're not to get started with square it's literally $0 it is for free which is just so convenient we love free and what's really cool is that they give you like a sliding magnetic like card reader there you just like plug it into your phone and you just swipe a card and it does the transaction for you and that little thing is free however it doesn't take top so if you want the one that takes top and also can like insert the chip or like slide then you need to buy their um credit card reader which is also $49 and full transparency I'm actually really familiar with square because I've been using for the past 2 years to sell at my in-person market and at my conventions and basically the usability of square is so easy I know the Shopify one is also pretty easy to use but just in terms of like how much experience I've had with the square system it is Flawless to me I think it's so easy and yeah that's pretty much it for my comparison of Shopify and Squarespace I'm sorry if it was like a little scatterbrained and a little bit disorganized that is just like how I talk I'm so sorry but just like some final final thoughts Shopify again is built for e-commerce the basic plan is so freaking powerful for someone who's trying to start a online business especially an art business because it has so much functionality just as is for $29 a month if you do pay the yearly fee in general outside of the basic plan Shopify offers a way more functionality than Squarespace in terms of like scaling a business so if you're really trying to take like a very small business to become like a pretty medium or big-sized business then Shopify is the girl for you Squarespace is basically an all-in-one platform and it's very very beginner friendly you can build a very very pretty website and you oh my God sorry this truck just interrupted me it was so loud C anyway you can build a very very pretty website with e-commerce functionalities on it but I do believe that it is a primarily website building system without the advanced Commerce plan basically You Can't customize anything about your business outside of just the website itself and because of all the reasons that I have listed I am going to be sticking with Shopify and I I'm not sponsored or anything it's just like what I have my website currently on I was very willing to move it to Squarespace cuz I was fighting with Shopify like 2 months ago but after doing This research I think for the purposes of my goals and what I want with my business Shopify is the girl for me with that being said we are actually going to be doing like the beginning portion of upgrading my website in this very video and we're pretty much going to be laying down all the groundwork and fundamentals for building a really great website for the rest of this video so when it comes to building a really good e-commerce website it doesn't just have to look good but it has to be highly usable and currently my website is both not very cute and also not very usable so what I'm really going to be doing for the rest of this video is I'm going to be conducting like a little research uh interview session and what I'm going to do for that is I'm going to put out a survey in order to find qualified candidates to be able to participate in this um research session so the first step is going to be finding participants and the way I'm going to be doing that is I'm going to create a like little survey to post onto my social media in order for people to fill out and submit themselves in for participation and hopefully I'll get enough participants where I can search through them and find ideal candidates so once I find these participants I will schedule them for interviews each interview will be like 10 to 15 minutes long and it's pretty much going to be them and me and yeah maybe that does seem like a lot of work just to like upgrade your website but again upgrading your website is not just about making it pretty it's about making the experience for your customers a lot better so yeah let's get started with that um I actually filmed all of this before I filmed this portion of the video so uh my bangs are going to be a little bit longer in that portion and I'm going to be a little bit uglier so yeah be prepared anyway uh yeah let's get into into it good morning I really need to get a vlogging camera at some point even though I did like last year and it was really expensive and I broke it immediately Okay so yesterday we sent out the survey and we waited for responses and in total we got 210 responses which is really really good and of those 210 responses 160 volunteered to be interviewed and last night I sifted through them even though I didn't get all the responses by that time I think I had like 125 or something and of those 125 I sifted through the responses and each candidate and I picked out five candidates that I think would be good for this study who match the criteria that I'm looking for and I have them scheduled for interviews today which is really great and I am so appreciative for the fast turnaround time because quite frankly I scheduled this video to come out for next week and usually I need to turn in the footage by tomorrow or the day after and we're not going to be able ble to really do that let's hope we can doing these interviews with this fast of a turnaround is very helpful in terms of that endeavor so so sorry Mart you might have to be uh editing this quite fast so now that we have our participants and we have all of our invitation sent out and all of our interviews scheduled we have one starting in 30 minutes I'm just going to write out some of the questions for this study they'll pretty much be like what are your general thoughts on the homepage or like what do you think about the menu section or can you find the Kirby sticker sheets and check out and then let me know what you think about that checkout process or buy a 11 by 17 print or waterproof something something like just specific task for them to go through the website and tell me what they think about the flow of it but also tell me what they think about in each individual page and step that they come across we're going to get down to the nitty-gritty hopefully and I'm just going to be basically just taking all their input as they're talking to me I'm just going to be typing out literally everything that they say and then later we're going to sift through it we're going to condense our research and see if there's like a general theme to The findings like three out of five participants say that they don't love the menu layout probably means the menu layout kind of sucks so and then we got to figure out a solution to it that's kind of just like Basics on ux Research oh also right at the beginning of the interview I'm going to let them know to talk as much as possible like literally give me every single thought from your brain and if you get stuck on anything or if you find anything difficult like in terms of the task that it's not their fault it is the fault of the website the website sucks not the participant and I think that's really important to get clear from the beginning so yeah now I'm just going to write up those questions and then uh get [Music] interviewing okay and that's basically our little script that's it nice easy and simple and now we are 15 minutes out from my interview so that is very exciting and also kind of nerve ragging cuz these are people that I have bought from my shop before and I have never you know talk to them so it's a little scary but I'm also like really excited because of course I want to like meet the people who are supporting me but then again like what if I do not live up to standard you know what if I'm like more annoying or like not I don't know yeah just generally more more annoying than they expected so yeah that's a little frightening so I'm going to be talking to them on this computer and then I'm going to be taking notes on the one that you guys are sitting on very exciting and scary okay hi good okay you can totally hear me hi nice to meet you [Music] [Music] Kayla [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] I have now finished doing all of my interviews so it actually turns out that I had another interview scheduled for tomorrow but they messaged me and they said that they needed to reschedule so we decided to reschedule it to today which actually worked out perfectly because I was able to to slott it in between two different other interviews and it's so convenient so we actually blasted that out of the park got it all done and now I have all my information to sift through and sort through and see if there's like a common Motif or like just something that is reoccurring like a reoccurring complaint or suggestion and then I will consolidate that make that my findings and we will start ideating how to fix all of that once I have that all Consolidated sorry I just got an email about a convention and it looks concerning I actually really love this process of um building a website I love the ux research and I'm actually not very good at the UI design which might not seem intuitive but I don't know I I just don't feel like I'm very good at design I feel like I'm okay with art but design yeah I don't know I'm not very versatile when it comes to that so we'll see how it goes yes this is like a lot of footage of me just like sitting at my desk uh typing but that is the nature of building a website hello we have now organized all of our research and our notes into little findings which I will put right here and I'm going to be addressing each one of these with a design change so this is what we came up with the first one I'm going to deal with is that people could not find the waterproof sticker sheets and that really is to no fault of their own basically the way I have it set up right now is you basically have to memorize which ones have the option with waterproof and then you click on that sticker sheet which there's no way to find it unless you like search it or just scroll through and then you had to go into the options and click waterproof or non waterproof and that is really bad so what I've done here is what I'm going to do is I'm going to just create like a little nesting situation so when you click on sticker sheets I want it to go to the all sticker sheets but then specifically you also have the choices to go to journaling and also waterpro also I'm removing the word print shop and sticker shops cuz that seems to have been kind of confusing like people were like what do you mean is this like a whole new shop I actually don't even know why I had that kind of verbage in the first place but we're going to change that I don't know if I'm going to keep the word journaling for the non-waterproof that might be a little vague but I'm just going to keep it there for now and see how it goes okay the next part is that people wanted a shop all option not just like a shop all for individual categories like stickers and Prints but they wanted to be able to see basically everything so they wanted a whole new button that would be like this so the menu would be like the home shop all stickers prints and then what other categories I have like about and then contact here right and this one inside we have like new arrivals holiday best sellers things like that I'm going to just write that down right now before I forget arrivals best sellers and then just like all right another suggestion that came up quite often is shipping FAQs so just like an FAQ section which means frequently asked questions and most of it's going to be revolving around shipping because a lot of people ask questions about shipping for the most part people are on board they get it they know that it's going to take some time to fulfill you get an email that it's fulfilled and then you get a tracking code and you check the tracking code however some people just don't get it and that's okay sometimes I get an order and then literally the next day someone asks me why why it hasn't been delivered to their place yet and they'll be like in New York I'm in California it's a large distance but that's okay it's okay because now we're going to have FAQ section next to the PRS or whatever and that's going to have all of your shipping questions and needs in case you get nervous about it so just going to have that there just in case new section to add also the last most pressing thing that we came across is that people wanted hold on got to get a new page people liked the homepage I think it's a little bit plain right now I want to fix the banner and stuff and that's just like an aesthetic thing but they did like the featured categories and they said that they likeed scrolling through it and a couple of people said that they wish that there was more there outside of just like the featured collections just like more featured collections like here are the ones that like editor's favorites so like my favorites or like best sellers or new arrivals just to peruse through and then at the bottom we have the future collections I already have so that would look like hold on Banner let me draw that real quick hold on okay so this is what we're working with so here would be the banner and that would be the main focal point and so the way that people look at things is they look at it in A Z formation like this and these are the key points where you want to put like call to action so I would have like a new thing I'm highlighting here and then shop right here or shop right here these are the new collections that I can add so like new arrival bestsellers things like that that will be rotating just so that there's more things happening for uh people who are revisiting the website and then the current section I have will just be pushed down here and I think that's a good idea I think it gives my homepage a little bit more to look at people did say that they wanted just a little bit more to look at but not too much because clutter is bad and it distracts them and I do not want people to get distracted so that is what we have to work with right now I am going to do a lot lot of this like skeleton work so just like basically the structures of the changes right now and I don't think in this video we have time to create all the assets because that means I'll have to do photography and all the drawing I want to do I want to have like the Sprouts in different parts of the website just to add a little bit more um interest and personalization to the to the website also I want to redo my banner because it's kind of ugly IMO but yeah that's going to take some time it's going to take some photography I'm not really a photographer I might have to hire a friend to do it for me or I'm just going to do a little iPhone photo shoot who knows but right now we're going to do the structural stuff let's do it hi okay sorry to scare you like that but I think that me said that we're going to be showing you guys the structural update of the website in this video and we're not I I lied sorry this video is already probably too long and I kind of want to do like the website reveal as like one full video so in the next video in this series we're going to be doing all like the assets all the pretty stuff of the website but that's going to be along with all the structural changes to the website as well and at the end of the video we'll have a beautiful functional new website and yeah I don't think that'll be the last part of the series though it'll be like part two of the website upgrade but then we're also going to do like an upgrading my market setup and my convention setup so that is going to be really really fun as well and I haven't decided if I'm going to do one after that yet maybe I'll do like an upgrading my my office space because it really does need upgrading but we're not sure but we are confirmed on the part two of the website and the market setup and yeah thank you so much for watching this video really means the world to me [Music] bye oh

Channel: JulianneDoodles

Views: 14,497

Keywords: juliannedoodles, studio vlog, artist, small business, shopify, squarespace

Id: 40QN54myoZE

Length: 29min 31sec (1771 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 22 2024