About

What was the biggest challenge you faced in creating your store?

I can’t honestly say that setting up the store was challenging. In fact, the initial setup was virtually automatic. I could fill out some forms, enter some info in a pretty user friendly interface and voila my store now exists. Adding a theme to the store was exciting, and also easy. Adding products is slightly more difficult, but still on the easy level. The challenging part is polishing the store and making it really “ready” for customers. You can get 80% of the work done almost without any effort, but the last 20% is really where the difference lies and this is a little trickier.

The biggest challenge I faced in completing this 20% (I actually didn’t complete it entirely) is the daunting scale of options, apps, plugins, and extra mini-features there are available. How to set up variants on your products for example. If you know “exactly” what your product is, how it is sliced, and how you want to market it, then this part is also easy. But the interface is so intuitive, it almost invites you to try and figure that part out in the tool. This I would recommend against. First, you should sit down and write it on paper. Draw it on a white board, and only after you know exactly what you want to do, try and build the simplest version of that in the tool.

Integrating apps is also challenging. Since they are developed by third parties and often require setting up a separate account and using a separate interface, it can be intimidating to get started. They are incredibly powerful, but again, it is almost too easy to wade out into the deep waters of the app store and before you know it, you are up to your waist. So take it slow and use only what you need. Those 9.99 per month fees really add up quickly, even with my test account.

What worked really well when using our platform?

The interface is really user friendly. Very smooth. The UI is optimistic and most things are really easy to find. This makes getting started feel a lot faster.

What could be improved when using our platform?

It’s hard to say with such little experience, but I have a feeling that the product editing page could have a more powerful interface. For example, if you set a price of an item, then add a variant option with 5 values, and then another option, and another…. You can easily end up with a lot of variants and the table view is really small and cumbersome, also once each variant is created, there is no obvious way to control them as a group, or sets. It feels to me like this could be more intuitive to edit and visualize a product as a vector space of its variants.

How did this experience help you build empathy for our merchants?

If you want to understand a customer, then being one is probably a pretty good place to start. I’ve actually set up shopify stores before, but what was unique about this experience was I pretended that I was the client. It actually does feel different to make a store for your own idea than to do so for someone else’s.

What is your biggest takeaway from this experience?

Shopify is a really powerful platform. It amplifies the starting power of your online business. Like, you can go from 0-60 in Tesla time. I understand exactly what is meant by the walking versus speaking a new language metaphor. There is a little bit of awkwardness at the beginning, but once you understand the way the theme editor works, for example, then you can do anything with it. It’s really not that complex. There are a lot of hidden details though, and I believe that you can trick yourself into thinking you are more advanced than you are. This is a blessing and a potentially a curse of the great UX. It’s so easy you think you know what you are doing, even when you don’t.