How to Add Videos to Product Listings Using the Multi-Vendor App for Shopify July 02, 2023at 18:03 pm By: James Byrne After Dark Grafx In this video, I’m gonna show you how to add videos to the multi vendor marketplace app in Shopify – https://apps.shopify.com/multi-vendor-marketplace Note you will need to have the app installed first and configured and it’s basic form. Have added a seller or have added some products to test. If you need to understand how to do this, please contact us. We are not receiving a commission for this video. I only receive a commission if you sign up for Shopify Trial below. Let me know if you have any questions or need any paid consulting help. Want to take Shopify for a Spin? https://www.afterdarkgrafx.com/shopify-free-trial Who knows what promo is going on now but click my affiliate link and try it out so I can receive some of your hard earned money. Thank you, James Byrne, Information Architect (USMC VET)
How do I find the product feed for my Shopify store May 07, 2023at 00:47 am By: James Byrne After Dark Grafx Ok, so I was searching online for “How to Find the Shopify Product Feed”. I then tried “How to Find ALL Products for Product Feed Shopify”, then “How to Connect Share a Sale Product Feed to Shopify”. All of the results sent me to several forum posts that recommended I use apps like Flexify or Google Shopping or Facebook Product Feed apps. However, I wanted to find out how to get the Shopify product feed without an app because I didn’t need a feed for any of these websites. I needed one for Share a Sale and did not want to pay for yet another Shopify App. Note: The process below is for individuals who have technical knowledge and are use to using apis for coding. See Shopify API Docs Here DISCLAIMER: The store that I was doing this for only had 1000 products. So, doing it manually didn’t take long. So, if you have a lot of products, it would be better to have a developer create a LOOP for you to obtain thousands of products OR to use an app from the Shopify App Store. The Shopify forums suggest this ( NOTE: (they don’t say this, but Shopify has a product limit for this url feed) only if you have 25 products in the store or only 25 products or less in the collection) If you attempt to use Postman and the api to pull the products, the limit is 50. yourstorename.com/collections/all.atom yourstorename.com/collections/collectionname.atom Using any of the above urls will only show 25 products for Shopify. So, what do we do to get a product feed from Shopify? You can get a product feed app from the Shopify App Store or click this link and find an app that suits your needs or do what I did and do it manually because I didn’t want to pay for another Shopify App for something I could do manually. You will have to determine how often you need this data. If you need it more frequently than a few months, I would recommend using an app for this, otherwise, I just do it manually and takes about 30 minutes start to finish. Want to take Shopify for a Spin? Click this link for a Free Trial or One that costs a buck. Who knows what promo is going on now but click my affiliate link and try it out so I can receive some of your hard earned money. HOW TO CREATE A PRODUCT FEED FOR ALL PRODUCTS WITH SHOPIFY MANUALLY You can hire After Dark Grafx to do this for you (recommended) OR do it yourself, you will need time, some technical know how, a lot of coffee and to create a private/custom app Get the API access ( https://YOURSTORENAMEHERE.myshopify.com/admin/settings/apps/development ) Download Postman Here Add the Authorization Information to Postman Use this URL and replace the api_key, api_password, store_name and api_version: https:/{{api_key}}:{{api_password}}@{{store_name}}.myshopify.com/api/{{api-_version}}/Products.json – Postman will connect and grab the first 50 products, this is Shopify’s Products.json default limit You can add this to the end of the url ?limit=250 so your entire url would be https:/{{api_key}}:{{api_password}}@{{store_name}}.myshopify.com/api/{{api-_version}}/Products.json?limit=250 So it would look something like this https://a-bunch-of-numbers-and-letters-from-the-api(this is the store access token): then a colon then the store access api password@YOURNAMESTORE.myshopify.com/api/2023-04/products.json So, the full url for a store named cool-store would be https://ert2……..:fghj……….@cool-store.myshopify.com/api/2023-04/Products.json This will grab only the first 50 products from your store So, we need to add the limit 250 (Shopify does not allow more than this) So, our Postman GET request would be: https://ert2……..:fghj……….@cool-store.myshopify.com/api/2023-04/Products.json?limit=250 This will get the first 250 products from our store. If you have more than 250 products, you will have to send the first request then scroll to the bottom of Postman and view the HEADERS for the request then scroll down to the LINK row and you will see something like this: <https://cool-store.myshopify.com/admin/api/2023-04/products.json?limit=250&page_info=eyJffrtyka…..hc2gifQ>; rel=”next” You will need to COPY this link and paste it into the URL bar for Postman GET so that you can GET the next 250 products. AND IMPORTANT: Remove the < and > in the url (see the RED bolded < and > in previous URL above. Note – url above does not work. Final Url would look like this: https://cool-store.myshopify.com/admin/api/2023-04/products.json?limit=250&page_info=eyJffrtyka…..hc2gifQ; rel=”next” So, as of this blog post the stable API is 2023-04 Once you GET the first request, it will place all of the contents into the BODY You will copy the BODY of this content and then CONVERT this JSON response to a CSV (or whatever you need). There are multiple converters online. Choose the one that works the best for you. This is a good one for CSVs but has a lot of ads (not affiliated with) – so be careful to read between the ads as the STEPS are within all of the garbage but it works great. https://www.convertcsv.com/json-to-csv.htm Paste your JSON request into this URL then download the CSV. You will now have the first 250 products. After remitting the first request, Postman will kick back a response so that you can get the next 250 products from the header as described above in the HEADERS of the response. Then just proceed through the same steps above until you have all the CSVs you need. In my case it was 5. See Shopify API Docs Here Once I had my 5 CSVs I combined them in Excel (ie: MAC –> Numbers) Please note that the URL to the products is not included in the responses. Once I combined the CSVs into one CSV I then added another column called PRODUCT_LINK. In this I added a column called PRODUCT_START_LINK and place https://www.my-cool-domain.com/products/ in it then copied this to all of the rows for the thousand products I had I then created a new column and copied the PRODUCT_HANDLE to this column and pasted down to all 1000 products. So now I have the starting link and then the product handle. In EXCEL or NUMBERS you can combine rows with Function but I just created the FINAL url for the products by COPYING the 2 columns together for all 1000 products. Pasted them into a TEXT editor like NOTEPAD or in my case SUBLIME TEXT for Mac and then REMOVED the SPACE after the first url. So, my initial paste looked like this: https://mycoolstore.com/products/ /name-of-my-product-handle after I removed the space after the /products/ and before the product handle, it created one URL for the product url. I then pasted this NEW url into a new column for the PRODUCT_URL then saved the CSV file. At this point, I have all of my products, the links to the images, skus, handles, and product links all in one document. You can use this as the master doc now. So, in order to MAP this data to Share a Sale or Google or Other Platform, you would download their example CSV for their feeds then MAP your data to their data by copying and pasting. I will cover HOW TO MAP PRODUCT DATA or HOW TO CREATE A SHARE A SALE PRODUCT FEED FOR SHOPIFY In my next post. Let me know if you have any questions or need any paid consulting help. Want to take Shopify for a Spin? Click this link for a Free Trial or One that costs a buck. Who knows what promo is going on now but click my affiliate link and try it out so I can receive some of your hard earned money. Thank you, James Byrne, Information Architect (USMC VET) Over 30 years of providing web solutions for businesses large and small. After Dark Grafx Website Design, SEO Services in San Diego, App Development and Consulting – Since 1992
Migrate Miva to Shopify May 01, 2023at 18:57 pm By: James Byrne After Dark Grafx Moving From Miva to Shopify? There are many things to consider when migrating your website from Miva to Shopify. Before you begin this process, it is best to contact After Dark Grafx via Chat (bottom right of this website), via our Contact Form – click here or via Phone Toll Free (888) 578-8300 or if in San Diego (619) 702-7377. This will save you in both time and money and the 30 minute consultation is FREE! STEP 1: TAKE AN INVENTORY OF YOUR MIVA STORE BEFORE MIGRATION: You will want to take an inventory of what functionality is currently in place within your existing Miva Merchant store and see if this same type of functionality is available within Shopify. In some cases, you can change or alter the functionality to best suit your needs but in some cases, you will either need to add a paid or free app from the Shopify App Store or contact a developer (like After Dark Grafx wink! wink!). To perform the upgrade or add advanced custom coding that Shopify or the theme that you choose does not offer. STEP 2: PAYMENT METHODS What payment methods do you currently accept and what is connected to your existing website? Authorize.net? Stripe? Paypal? Pay On Account? Etc. Then see if these systems are they available in Shopify. STEP 3: SHIPPING METHODS What shipping methods you are currently using and are they available in Shopify. Example: You may be using Worldship with Freight for your large and heavy products. You may need a paid app within Shopify to perform the same tasks and functionality. Shopify, out of the box, offers USPS shipping. If you would like to add UPS, FEDEX, DHL or other shipping carriers it is best to contact Shopify support to have them add the ability to your current plan. See more below. STEP 4: WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT SHOPIFY BEFORE MOVING (PROS, CONS, LIMITATIONS & BENEFITS) Shopify allows you to utilize their own built-in merchant account, therefore bypassing your existing merchant account. If you wish to use your merchant account with Shopify, there is an added fee percentage per order so it’s best to just use their built-in merchant account and keep it separate from your retail or physical locations to keep costs down. Shopify currently has an attribute limit. This means if you wanted to have a T-shirt company and you had size, color and material it will be fine but if you were to offer additional items like inseam or brand type in addition to these three options, then you would need an app or some customization in order to allow this functionality. If you have a lot of products that have attributes/variations drop downs that are connected to those products, you will definitely want to reach out and see if there is an app available to help with migrating all of your options, otherwise you will have to do this manually. Shopify Benefits Shopify allows you to get started with an online store quickly. You can sign up for a free trial, build your store, add your payments and add shipping and launch your website in a matter of days. (ie: Smaller websites of course). You don’t need your own merchant account and shipping is built in if you are using USPS. There are free and paid apps that allow you to click and install easily to add major custom functions that would cost a lot to be added if it were a custom solution. STEP 5: VIEW EXISTING SHOPIFY THEMES Shopify comes with a few free themes, however, these free themes may not be what you are looking for along the lines of design for your new website. See https://themes.shopify.com. The other option is to use a paid theme or reach out to a designer like After Dark Grafx™, to create a custom design for your website. STEP 6: VIEW EXISTING APPS Miva merchant has a lot of functionality built into it plus modules that are added to it to extend its’ functionality. Shopify, in the same regard, has an App Store that allows app providers to offer functionality that may emulate or provide the same functionality for a fee. OPTIONAL BUT RECOMMENDED: CONTACT A SHOPIFY DEVELOPER (We are Shopify Experts) After Dark Grafx™ is a Shopify Expert. Since Shopify’s inception, we have been developing and creating themes, apps, custom code as well as designing for Shopify. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us for a free consultation. OPTIONAL: USING A THIRD PARTY MIGRATION SERVICE PROS & CONS There are many third-party services that can help with migration from Miva Merchant to Shopify. These companies such as Cart2Cart, and others will copy existing data from your Miva website and import it into your Shopify website. However, these migration services rarely migrate all data, you have to double check everything that was migrated and test it yourself, then contact the company over and over again until the data is moved correctly. STEP 7: EXPORTING AND IMPORTING DATA You will want to make a full backup of your database of your existing website and files before doing anything along the lines of migration from Miva Merchant to Shopify make sure that you export your customers, products, categories, orders, shipments and data needed. You should log into the backend of Miva and copy the settings for your shipping and payments and try to keep in mind any customer functionality or code that was built in for your website. Please note that all data will not be migrated from the old system so you will want to make a checklist of exactly what you need from the old website i.e. orders, payment data, etc. and, in some cases, you may not be able to transfer the payment transaction data because it is with another system. Migrating Customers: Customers will need to create new passwords for their account on Shopify. Their old passwords and transaction data will not be migrated. Migrating Orders: You can migrate orders but not payment transaction data STEP 8: INTEGRATING DESIGN CHANGES In some cases, you may want the same exact design and building it into Shopify will take a little effort. It will not be an exact replica, but will emulate it closely. Otherwise, it is best to get a new website design that converts on Shopify. STEP 9: CODE FUNCTIONALITY CHANGES You should go through your existing website as a customer and go through the checkout process. Write down what is happening along the way. What’s happening on the product page, the category page, the checkout page and finally the invoice page. Are you getting a follow up email with an offer. Do you have an email system with follow ups or abandon carts? You may have up sells or other functionality that you forgot about. STEP 10: SETTING UP THIRD PARTY SHIPPING AND THE COSTS INVOLVED In some cases, adding UPS, or FedEx or additional shipping carrier is easy as contacting Shopify and having him add a small fee to your monthly plan. Otherwise they may make you upgrade to the next plan, which is usually more expensive than the small fee to add this ability to your existing plan. Simply contact Shopify support to have this fee, added and tell them that you are interested in adding additional shipping options. STEP 11: SETTING UP PAYMENT GATEWAYS AND THE COSTS Shopify comes with its own built-in payment system, meaning that they accept credit cards on your behalf and will release the funds into your account. Once they process the credit cards and take their fee. You can, however, utilize your own merchant account, but this will incur an additional percentage cost on top of the fee that is charged through Shopify so if you were paying 2.49% before you’ll end up paying 3.49% or more for your transactions so it is best to use Shopify’s built in merchant account system. STEP 12: USING REDIRECTS SO YOU DO NOT LOSE “*SEO JUICE” Before pointing your domain name over to Shopify, it is best to find out exactly what URLs are listed on the search engines, and if you are interested in keeping your “SEO juice” for your existing listing pages, this means that your old pages will point to your new pages so you will want to create your redirects to the new pages within Shopify. This should be done before finally pointing your domain name to Shopify and launching your website. STEP 13: POINTING YOUR DOMAIN NAME Once everything is migrated and the website is for working on a test or temporary URL and you are happy with the way the new website is working, you should perform one last export of customers and any other data that has changed since the last time you did an export. Once this has been imported into Shopify and you’re happy with everything, you should then point your domain to Shopify. We recommend that you keep your existing hosting in place for a few weeks to make sure that the new website is working for you. Otherwise you can easily switch back to the old server and website in the event that there are issues with the new store. STEP 14: LAUNCHING YOUR NEW STORE Everything is ready. Your new website is working perfectly. All of the functionality is in place. Your customers have been imported, your products have been imported you have tested out the payment processing and shipping and all of the emails in regards to the order process and you are ready to launch your website. Simply point two records to Shopify. One is an A record and the other a CNAME record. See how to connect your website to Shopify manually. STEP 15: UPDATING THE SITE MAP WITH GOOGLE, BING, OTHER Your website is now live on Shopify but now we need to tell the search engines that your new site map has been updated with your new address and website, your sitemap address has changed and you are going to want to create a Google search console account as well as a bin web master account and another of webmaster accounts in order to remit your site maps so that your new pages get indexed faster and you do not lose any of your wonderful search engine rankings. Sitemaps would include: (change YOUR-DOMAIN-NAME-HERE with your website domain name) https://YOUR-DOMAIN-NAME-HERE/sitemap.xml https://YOUR-DOMAIN-NAME-HERE/sitemap_products_1.xml https://YOUR-DOMAIN-NAME-HERE/sitemap_pages_1.xml https://YOUR-DOMAIN-NAME-HERE/sitemap_collections_1.xml and if you have a blog https://YOUR-DOMAIN-NAME-HERE/sitemap_blogs_1.xml This is just a basic list of what needs to be done before, during and after a migration from Miva Merchant Shopping Cart to the Shopify Platform. Contact us today click here for a FREE, 30 MINUTE, NO OBLIGATION consultation. Toll Free (888) 578-8300 Local: (619) 702-7377 Shopify’s post about Migrating to Shopify Click Here After Dark Tip: Make a Backup of your entire site and database before starting or making any changes or migrations. In your Miva Control Panel (not admin.mvc) you can export the database and all files from within Miva’s ecosystem. Their my.miva.com control panel allows you to login to the server and export the database and files OR just contact Miva Tech Support and they will do this for you. *SEO JUICE = Your current SEO standings or what links you currently have within the search engines. You should also take into consideration the age of your Miva website. Was it developed recently or years ago. Sometimes, performing a migration will not grab all of the data correctly. Utilizing an online utility to migrate your data, in most cases, does not grab all of the data you need because there is no “face-to-face” or human interaction analyzing what your site actually needs. Over the years, as you utilize Miva for your eCommerce website, you have probably added modules and custom code to make the website perform in a certain fashion needed for your company. Some of these modules or functionality will need to be re-added to your Shopify store in the form of paid or free apps plus custom coding. So, what do you do? Call After Dark Grafx for a FREE, No Obligation Migration Consultation and Cost Analysis. This way, you can understand what exactly you need and how your website will be affected by the move. It is best to spin up a test store, put it onto a paid plan and integrate and add the apps you need before moving the entire website. Note: All existing customers will have to RECREATE their passwords. You can send them out an invite one-by-one (Shopify Plus allows for mass invites) otherwise, you can use your email system like Mail Chimp, Constant Contact or other to send emails to your existing customers notifying them that you are moving to a new system and they will have to recreate their password on your website. Have a Rewards System in place? We should talk. What about Email? We should talk. Have other special coding or integrations that you may have forgotten about? We should talk. It is always best to keep your Miva Merchant account live as you transition away for the first few weeks to make sure everything is running efficiently. There are a multitude of other things to consider when migrating pertaining to orders, customers, categories and so forth so you should do yourself a favor and contact After Dark Grafx for a FREE Miva to Shopify Migration Consultation!
Downtown Tabby Pet Store, Gainesville Florida – Website Design Shopify eCommerce Development – After Dark Grafx October 19, 2022at 21:41 pm By: Assistant After Dark Grafx After Dark Grafx is please to announce the launch of Downtowntabbypetstore.com. Thank you for choosing After Dark Grafx to design, develop and market your new custom Shopify website for your Pet Store in Gainesville, Florida. We initially created a website for Downtown Tabby Pet Store last year. After learning more about Shopify and their customer needs, we redesigned and developed a new website to focus more on what their clients need. The pet store industry is “dog-eat-dog”, pun intended. And having a new, professional website that is easy to navigate as well as shop from was key to their success. If you too need a new website design or redesign, eCommerce, search engine optimization (SEO) or other service or assistance, please contact us. After completing this website, we created several videos to help Downtown Tabby Pet Store on how to How To Edit their Website, Manage Orders and Understand the overall system and how to add or remove Shopify Apps (don’t do this yourself, hire afterdarkgrafx.com). Downtown Tabby’s Testimonial: “James is our bestie! We have been working with James for some time now and he is AMAZING! Shopify Expert, SEO Expert and all things related. We always bounce our ideas off of him and he always comes back with the best information.” The D’s Please visit Downtown Tabby Pet Store in Gainesville Florida today at: https://www.downtowntabbypetstore.com and tell them James from After Dark Grafx sent you! Do you want the Best Website Design in San Diego? Looking for the Best SEO Company in San Diego? How About the Best SHOPIFY Expert in San Diego? Contact us here! Call Toll Free (888) 578-8300
How to use the Dawn Shopify Theme Start to Finish August 24, 2022at 21:01 pm By: James Byrne After Dark Grafx In this video I will show you how to use the basic Dawn Theme for Shopify which is now installed by default whenever you sign up for Shopify. You will need to skip ahead in the video if you want to just jump to editing the Dawn Theme. How to Use the Dawn Theme with Shopify Speaking on signing up for Shopify, if you are interested in a 14 FREE Trial you can click here: https://shopify.pxf.io/dojygQ (affiliate link of course) Pros of using Shopify: – Quickly Start and Launch a Store – Thousands of FREE Apps to help you sell and run your store – Inexpensive if using free apps but can get expensive if you use a lot of paid apps. – Low Learning Curve – No Need for a Merchant Account – No Need for a Shipping Carrier Account – Easy to Add Apps, Change Themes and Update – Easily Add other Sales Channels (ie: Facebook, Instagram, etc.) – Easily Add a Buy Now Button onto an EXTERNAL website. (You can add a product button called BUY NOW to a website that is not hosted with Shopify but would process the checkout through Shopify Cons of using Shopify: – There is a 3 option limit for products. Example: If you sell t-shirts and have Size, Color, Material (you can add all kinds of variants to these options like small, medium, large, etc.) but Shopify has a 100 variant limit for these so you would need an app to extend the OPTIONS to get you past the 3 options threshold and the 100 variant threshold. – You use Shopify Payments, otherwise, if you use your own merchant account, then they add additional fee to your monthly plan plus you will pay a percentage to Shopify in addition to your existing Merchant Account and Gateway Fees. – If you add another Shipping Carrier (Shopify’s built-in carrier is USPS) if you add: FEDEX, UPS or other carrier there is an additional monthly fee approx $20 per month as of today’s date but this is cheaper than upgrading to the next plan on Shopify. – No direct access to the Shopify database without an app via Api – No direct backup mechanism without an app. You can export the products, customers and orders within Shopify but that is it. You would need an app to extend this functionality. ( excellent paid app to back up Shopify Rewind – https://rewindio.grsm.io/afterdarkgrafx (affiliate link ) ) If you need a Shopify Expert or just want ask some questions, please feel free to contact me at any of the links below. Main Website: https://www.afterdarkgrafx.com TWITTER: https://www.twitter.com/afterdarkgrafx FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/afterdarkgrafx INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/afterdarkgrafx/ LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-byrne-755b9217/ PINTEREST: https://www.pinterest.com/afterdarkgrafx/after-dark-grafx-portfolio/ YOUTUBE CHANNEL: https://www.youtube.com/c/JamesByrneusa/videos We Use Quicktime Player To Record My Screencast Videos and edit them with: https://fxhome.com/hitfilm-express (its freeish) and Premiere Pro. You can sign up for a 14-day free trial of Shopify Here and Try it out as well as make sales before you even have to pay them their monthly fee: https://shopify.pxf.io/dojygQ Questions? Contact Us Call Toll Free (888) 578-8300