Shopify. Multiple Sales Channels

Have you noticed that Shopify has broken apart it's admin interface?

You might have seen that Online store, Facebook, and Buy Button are now distinct areas of functionality within the dashboard?

There are others too, but for now, we can concentrate on these three as some new features are only available under specific circumstances. We will cover each of these in separate posts because they are all useful.

To begin, we'd like to mention that the developers and thinkers at Shopify are well aware of the efficacy of potential channels on the web and your success when using them.

The primary function of multiple sales channels is to take your products to your audience wherever they may be, rather than the reverse which of course means that your customers always have to come to you.

The core, as usual, is your leading Shopify Online store. All products that are spread out to other channels originate from the products that you set up within the shop.

So let's break down the three channels; Online Store, Facebook, and Buy Button.

Online Store

The sales channel that we are all using if we are using Shopify as our primary sales platform. The one that we go the great lengths to promote and spend most of our time with agonizing over keywords, product images, and landing pages. E-Commerce has been around long enough for us to understand the process of making the best and most welcoming environment possible before inviting customers to see our products.

Facebook Store

We have had access to a handful of applications that build a Facebook shop for a few years. Some of them are pretty good (we've tested them all), but Shopify now has the functionality 'baked in' and it's excellent. Having a busy Social strategy is one of the roads to success, but you always had to pull people away from their natural environment. The Social 'like' buttons went some way into connecting to the Social Graph, but now we have the opportunity to enhance Shopify's offering and our own by presenting our shop on our Facebook page. We'd be interested to see what sales conversions stories you have.

Have you had any success?

Buy Button

Now this is fascinating! We have been able to embed products for a long time now, but with limited functionality and styling. Now we can grab any product and pop it anywhere we like that accepts the code snippet provided. The strongest implementation is within the ever popular Wordpress blogging framework (more on that in another article), where you can turn your blog into a shop without using something like WooCommerce.

The dynamic changes somewhat in that, we think that Wordpress is the stronger SEO driven blogging platform, whereas Shopify is the best shopping environment.
Have you had any success using the Wordpress Shopify plugin? We'd like to know!