Arm and a Leg-O

This is a Sample of My New Marketing Material for www.BrickSmarts.com 

The last several months have been busy with getting the online portion of our business up and running.  There are so many hoops to jump through when starting a small business.  But with a little persistence and a lot of luck all the documents have been filed, EIN obtained, tax info registered and we are ready for business!  The most time consuming part of my day is web design.  I compared GoDaddy web builder to Shopify's marketplace and personally found that the Shopify was better suited to meet my needs as an Ecommerce site.  

The Shopify site had over 100+ website themes to choose from and 24/7 web support.  I have already used the web support several times.  Each time there was very little wait time, and the support person or "Guru" that they call themselves, was very helpful and knowledgable.  If you have a small web design budget there are plenty of FREE themes that are very effective.  Overall I have found that the layout I chose was functional, but didn't offer a ton of customization.  The "Guru" told me that my Shopify account allows for 1 hour of custom web design time...so I will be sure to take advantage of that as soon as I am up and running.  For those who need lot of customization assistance there is an option to hire one through the site, for an extra fee of course. 

As far as monthly service with Shopify, I chose the cheapest plan for now, which is actually way cheaper then what I was paying in fees on Ebay, so I felt it was justified.  The other plans seemed more comprehensive but as a fledgling business, I don't have the budget to allocate for upward of $50/month.

My absolute favorite part of Shopify is that they send email Blog posts almost daily regarding small business advice and recommendations.  There is everything from podcasts to articles written by seasoned business persons.  It has been surprisingly helpful and most of the articles are short (4-5 minutes) each.  If you are thinking of building a website and have little to no web design experience, I would definitely check out Shopify.  The design platform is pretty intuitive and within a day or so it's pretty easy to navigate between their admin page and customization tool.