Hey, y’all, I’m so excited that you’re joining me today. There has been a lot of talk lately in TPT, seller circles about how to diversify your income, and not keep all your eggs in the TPT basket. Now, it’s a smart business strategy, and one option is to open a store on your own website.
Today’s episode will be the first in a three episode mini series on opening and running a website store. Now this episode is all about things that you need to think about and decide before you open your store. But if you already have a store on your website, the last couple of things are for you too, so be sure to stick around.
The big question when it comes to starting your own website store is are you ready to sell on your own site. Now contrary to popular belief, this is not about how long you’ve been doing this or what your annual TPT earnings are. The deciding factor really should be whether or not you are ready for the work this will take to set up to maintain and to make it successful.
The first thing you’ll want to consider is setting up and maintaining your website store. Now when it comes to shop setup, depending on your platform, and your tech know how this is something you might be able to DIY, or you may need to hire a designer to set up the pages for you. Now some WordPress themes already have WooCommerce styling built in to match the theme so that can make it easy to add a store to an existing site. The downside there is you don’t have a lot of control over what that store looks like because the theme is controlling it.
If you have WordPress and Elementor, I am currently testing a DIY WooCommerce setup kit. And if you would like to get on the waitlist for that or maybe be a beta tester, you can do that in the show notes for this episode at kristindoyle.co/episode23. This kit will help you get your store set up and customize the way that it looks in a very quick amount of time.
Once your store is set up, the next step will be that initial upload of your products. Now this can be very time consuming, depending on your platform. And depending on how many resources you actually have to upload. One thing that can really help save time here is to export all of your TPT products with the bare wood labs tool. To save a lot of time, you’ll get your product listings in a CSV file, and then depending on your platform, you may be able to just upload directly from there. Or if nothing else, it will help you to copy and paste faster because you don’t have to wait for all of those pages to load on TPT.
Now when it comes to your images, you will probably need to go ahead and upload the original images for your covers and thumbnails and not the ones that would be downloaded from your TPT listings. Because as we know TPT compresses those images very, very small and they’re likely to be extremely blurry on your website shop where the images are shown at a higher resolution.
Now, when it comes to maintenance, the ongoing maintenance for your shop is the same as for your website itself. But additionally, you’ll need to make sure that updates to your products are happening in all of your shops at the same time. So if you have a TPT store, maybe a store on another marketplace platform and your own website store, you’ll want to update everything at one time, covers thumbnails and previews need to be updated everywhere, primarily because of buyer recognition. You want buyers to be confident that this is the same product and that it’s not something that they’ve already bought elsewhere.
When it comes to price, it is imperative that you update your prices on any other marketplaces or your own website store at the same time that you update your TPT prices, because that is actually part of TPTs Terms of Use. We are not allowed to list the same product at a lower price off of TPTs website. So you’ll want to make sure that you’re keeping your prices up to date in all of your shops.
The second thing you’ll want to consider before opening your own website store is how you’re going to handle customer service. Now one big difference between selling on your site and on TPT is that you are the one responsible for all of the customer service. So when people have trouble with a download, when they ask for a refund, when they can’t log into their account, they need a way to reach out to you, and you will need to be able to respond in a timely manner.
Because when people have purchased something, especially from a site that they’re not as familiar with and not as comfortable with, and then they can’t access their purchase, they immediately go to assuming that this was a scam and that they’ve lost this money. So you want to make sure that when people reach out to you with questions or concerns about something that they’ve purchased from your site, that you are responding right away.
So the question then is, can you handle these requests yourself? And do you want to? And if not, then can you afford to hire someone to do it for you. There are lots of VAs out there who are happy to take over your customer service. But of course that comes at a price. There are lots of ways to set up your site to try and minimize customer service issues. And we will talk about some of those in the third episode in this series. So you’ll want to make sure to come back and check that out.
And the third consideration before you open your site is how will you get traffic to your site. Because unlike TPT, selling on your own site means that you have to drive traffic to your shop. Whereas buyers are already searching on other marketplaces, whether that’s TPT, or Etsy or any of the other marketplaces out there. They kind of have built in traffic because buyers are already going there to shop on your own website, it’s going to be imperative that you can drive traffic to it.
One option for this is to use your email list. So if you have a good email list that is active and that people are comfortable clicking through and purchasing, then your email list is a great way to drive traffic to your own website store. I just wrapped up a great series on email marketing. So go and check out the last three episodes of the podcast if you miss those. Another way that you can drive traffic to your site would be through social media or advertising.
When it comes to these, you’ll have to decide if you want to send all your traffic to TPT all your traffic to your own store. Or maybe you want to split it between the two. I would recommend that you really pay close attention to conversion rates when you’re sending people to your own store to make sure that buyers are comfortable purchasing there. Because the last thing you want to do is swap all of your social media over to pointing to your own store or worse your ads that you’re spending money on and then have people not feel comfortable enough to make a purchase when they would have been comfortable on TPT.
So you’ll want to make sure that you are considering those factors, and that you’re setting up your store to be the best it can be so that buyers are comfortable making a purchase. A third way to send traffic over to your website shop is of course SEO. You’ll want to use keyword research and SEO tools to optimize your product listings. And to get them to show up in the right search results. The benefit of this is that it is a little more passive. But the downside is this does take time. So your store is not likely to see huge amounts of traffic immediately through SEO efforts, you can expect it to take three to six months, maybe even longer for your SEO work to start paying off in your shop.
Now when it comes to SEO for your TPT products that you are listing in your own website store, a very common question I get is it? Do I need to completely rewrite the description or can it be the same? My recommendation is that you use the same description, but you optimize it for different keywords. Doing this will change your description just slightly, just enough to be good for SEO purposes. And the reality is that when people go to TPT, to search for something, they are searching in a very different way using different keywords than the ones that they would put in on a Google search.
So you’ll want to use keyword research tools like Uber Suggest or KW finder to help you find the right keywords for your product on your website store and then just re-optimize your same listing for the new keywords. Now if after you consider those first three things, you decide that you are ready for a website store. Here are the top three things that you’ll want to think about and make decisions on as you are getting started.
The first one is what platform will you use. Now if you’re on WordPress, then WooCommerce is a free plugin with lots of available extras through additional plugins. And it makes it very easy to sell digital content but also physical goods if you happen to do both. The WooCommerce plugin itself is free. And the additional plugins to add extra features can be free at times. The paid ones typically range from $20 to $200 a year, depending on what special features you want to add
Those most expensive plugins in the $150 to $200 range are usually for things like adding memberships or subscriptions, so that usually makes it well worth the cost of those. Because WooCommerce is a part of your WordPress site. The design and the layout are very customizable, they’re typically controlled either by your theme or by a page builder like Elementor. This makes it really easy to create a streamlined and perfectly branded shopping experience.
Two other platforms that are very popular and that I do recommend for some sellers are Shopify and Ecwid. Now both of these are very similar. They can be used on their own as a stand-alone store, or you can use them alongside your website. These are a subscription model as opposed to a free plugin, like WooCommerce. So you will pay a monthly subscription fee to them. At the time of this recording, both of them start around $20 to $30 a month.
Now, they both integrate with WordPress, but you will be a little limited on design and layout options for your products and checkout. Essentially, what they allow you to do is embed your store from their site into a WordPress page. So it may not look quite as seamless. The benefit though of Shopify or Ecwid, is that they handle some of the customer service, they host your files for you. And they also help out a little bit with sales tax, which we’ll talk about in just a minute. Now, there are some other platforms out there. But those are the first three that I would recommend you look into. And they’re the ones that I recommend for most TPT sellers.
The fifth thing you’ll want to consider is sales tax. Because the minute that you open up your own shop, you might be required to collect and pay sales tax in certain states if they tax digital goods. So it’s really important that you look into this before you get started so that the day your store opens, you’re prepared and know what you need to do.
Now, sales tax is not one of my areas of expertise. So you will want to check out next week’s episode with a special guest, Katherine Tucker, who is going to tell us all about what teacher authors like us need to know about sales tax when it comes to TPT and our own stores.
Now the sixth thing you want to consider is how you can make shopping on your site a really good experience for buyers. In order to get buyers to shop on your website, instead of somewhere like TPT that they’re already comfortable, you’re going to have to make sure that they feel confident in the layout of your shop, the checkout process, buyer account pages and especially confident in the security of your shop. Remember, you’re asking these people essentially to hand you their credit card. And so in order for them to feel comfortable doing that, you’re going to have to make sure that your shop looks professional, that it’s easy for them to browse and find things that they know where to find their downloads, and that they are 100% positive that their private information is secure.
Now this episode is already getting a little long. So in two weeks, our third episode in this series, I am going to share lots of ways to improve the buyer experience on your website. So make sure that you check that episode out as well. Opening up your own shop is a really great way to diversify your business income so that you’re not completely reliant on any one platform for all of your sales, but it is a big step. So you want to make sure that you’re ready.
Today’s action step is just to set aside a little time to think about whether a website store is right for your business or not. If it is, then start taking some steps toward getting that set up. Whether that means hiring a designer to do it for you or DIY-ing it. If you decide that this is not a good step for you right now, then your action step is to start brainstorming some other ways to diversify your business income. Things like setting up shop on other marketplaces or finally starting that email list you’ve been meaning to get around to.
Thank you so much for listening today. Don’t forget, if you want to get on the waitlist for the WooCommerce shop DIY kit. You can do that in the show notes. Or if you’d rather hire someone to just do it for you. I can do that in one of my VIP days where you can have a WooCommerce site up and running in just one day. Either way, you can get all the links and info in this week’s show notes at kristindoyle.co/episode23. Join me again next week for the second episode in our selling on your site series, all about how to handle sales tax. Talk to you then.
I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. If you did, please share it with another teacher seller who would also find it helpful. For more resources on Growing Your TPT business. Head to kristindoyle.co/episode23. Talk to you soon.
