Do I need to pay a fee even though I am not selling products yet but just designing?

Shopify Discussion
1

I am in the process of designing and I am not planning to launch the website online yet as I need to find products to sell. I’d rather not pay a fee if I am not selling but just designing as I am not making any money yet from my store. Does anyone have any suggestions in this regard, please? Thank you

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Hello there,

Story of my life…I’m embarrassed at the amount of times I’ve created stores that were not ready to launch. Sometimes I paid the first month and would still not launch properly, did not pay and store got frozen. I don’t think you’ll let that happen though. So anyway, here is my advice but before we get into that, I’d like to mention that there is a special promotion right now, only $1 for your first 3 months. It’s truly amazing. I see your post is recent, so I’m wondering how you weren’t able to see that promotion displayed at the initial sign up. It’s still going on. Well anyway here are my suggestions

  1. Consider laying out all your plans and have everything ready before signing up for a store.
    Kind of too late for that now but this is a good reminder. It’s so much easier and stress free to have everything ready to plug in to your store and without second guessing. Or aimlessly hunting for products, deciding on a font, organizing your collections etc.

  2. Opt for the “pause and build” your store plan. It costs $14 dollars. I know you don’t want to pay fees, but unless you’re willing to lose access to your store and all that you have been working on, this is the best way. You’ll be able to continue working on your store, it will just be unavailable to customers, and you can’t make any sales. You can only pause and build if you are already on a paid plan. Can’t do this while still on the initial free trial period.

  3. so we’re finally here. Realizing you have no choice but to pay or deactivate your store and start over with another store. Save up until you can pay the membership and be ready this time. Keep reading if you decide to open another store

  4. So here’s the game plan shall you decide to deactivate your store,( avoid not paying and letting it get automatically frozen) . First, down load and save all files to anything you currently have going on. Mostly like all your images. Then make sure to note all your fonts and colors. You can screenshot every page on your store as well to refer back to. Disconnect any custom domain url. Very important to do this because once you deactivate your store or if it’s frozen, you will not be able to log on anymore and disconnect the domain.

  5. Here is my final suggestion moving forward. Sign up and join the Shopify Partner Program. Anyone can sign up for a Shopify partner account. With this account you will be able to create as many stores as you want without paying a dime. These are called development stores and are meant for web designers, developers, freelancers, agencies, to build stores for their client. You can learn more about them later but just know while building these stores, you cannot make any real sales, it will be password protected from public view and the only way to open the store is by transferring ownership, in this case you will transfer it to yourself. The transfer will be complete only after you pay the first month membership. This is a good option for you especially if you require a lot of time to design. Also, these development stores have all the features of being on the advanced shopify plan. You’ll have access to a dash board where you can manage all the stores you are working on.