CALEB NICKERSON
OTTAWA March 4, 2020
Last Wednesday, a dozen entrepreneurs from the Pontiac region got the chance to travel to the Shopify head office in Ottawa for a day of training in online sales and marketing.
Put on by the Pontiac SADC, the event came at . . .
the request of their clientele and has been in the works for quite some time, according to business advisor Amy Taylor. She explained that Shopify is a one-stop shop for online retail, and has a host of additional products to build businesses on the internet.
“Basically, it’s the easiest way to sell your products online, and it’s turnkey, so everything from payment processing to web hosting … they even have the [point of sale] software that you can have in your store and equipment to purchase and keep track of your inventory,” she said.
The group from Pontiac represented a diverse range of businesses and experience levels. Some, like Mélanie Pieschke of Jolie Folie in Shawville, already used Shopify products and were intent on getting into the nitty-gritty of data analytics, while others were just looking into the possibility of starting an online business.
“It’s great because we had a perfect mix of people that are already online using Shopify and wanting to get better, people that aren’t online at all and people that are just thinking about it,” Taylor said. “It worked out really well.”
The morning session focused on how to get a business online using the Shopify platform, including setting up a store and how to display the merchandise online.
After a networking lunch, the afternoon sessions were devoted to using targeted advertising through email or on social media sites like Facebook.
“Everybody has a Facebook page for their business, right? But there’s a little piece of code in there that you can embed in your Shopify system … so when you buy Facebook ads and you funnel people through to buy your product, there’s ways to track it,” Taylor explained. “It’s super simple, but there’s a lot of steps involved and there’s so much to think about that you need somebody to kind of show you or teach you.”
Taylor added that there is a bit of a fine art to enticing shoppers through online mediums.
“The first ads are just to make people aware of your business and your product, then after that you have to target them a little bit more and give them information about the purchase,” she continued. “Then you go heavily targeted. And if they say, put something in their cart and abandon it, or they just walk away from their desk for a day and don’t want to buy it, there’s whole systems where you can just email them back and go, ‘We saw you abandon your shopping cart, here’s 10 per cent off.’”
Taylor said that they lucked out with the timing of their excursion, as Shopify stopped hosting groups at their facility from March 6 until June due to concerns about the Coronavirus. She said the SADC would be planning another visit in the fall.
Next up in the calendar is an exciting evening called “The Rockstar Startup” at the Pontiac Conference Centre on March 12, which will feature tips on branding, marketing and customer service with music industry veteran Steve Jones.
