Hi everyone,
I was thinking of closing my clothing website and starting a new business. What’s the best way to do it? Example shall I deactivate my clothing website and start a new website with new products? Or is it possible to use the original login for my clothing website and switch different websites? Or shall I just start the second business from fresh and new email etc? What’s cheaper?
Thanks
Hi, @mrsun .
There are a few things you’ll need to consider, but ultimately the best approach to this situation will depend on your specific circumstances and preferences.
If you decide to deactivate your clothing website to start fresh, some pros and cons that come to mind are:
Pros: If your new business is significantly different from your current one (a food business, for example), then deactivating the clothing website and starting a new one may be a good option here. It’ll allow you to start fresh without having to go through all of the trouble of deleting all unrelated aspects of your current website, which may take a bit of time. Opening a new Shopify account solely for the new business will allow you to start fresh from a blank canvas.
Starting fresh with a new email account and domain name for your business, for example, can also provide a nice clean slate. This is good to do if you prefer to have a complete separation between your clothing website and the new business. This approach will ensure a clear distinction between the two businesses, and will also avoid any potential confusion or overlap between the two unrelated businesses.
Cons: If you’ve already built a loyal customer base with your clothing business, keep in mind that creating a new business and website altogether will require you to establish your online presence from scratch. While you’re welcome to announce to your customers that your clothing business is closing, and that you’ll be opening up an entirely new business, it’s still highly likely that you’ll need to build a new customer base — your current one may not have the same interest to engage with your new business.
Keep in mind, however, that starting a new business altogether may require additional setup and management of new accounts (such as your domain and email account). There are also some initial costs involved, including domain registration, and marketing expenses.
If you do decide to start again from fresh, you can indeed use the same email address to start your new store, much thanks to our Shopify ID feature. Creating a new store also means that you’ll be able to take advantage of our promotional pricing for your first 3 months as listed in our plan and pricing page here — so that’s another pro to add to the list.
Hi Kimi,
Many thanks for your reply. So sorry for late reply. I think I understand.
Just wanted to kindly ask 2 questions. The new business is completely different from the fashion clothing store, so I guess it makes sense to start fresh with new domain and email.
I wanted to ask the new business is a service and not actually selling a tangible product, can I build a website which allows the buyer to click an option for a service and takes them to the checkout? And maybe later on i can write a blog post or articles and then sell an ebook, pdf for a fee if that makes sense.
So the login I have now for my clothing store I can use that to deactivate store from settings, plan, deactivate store, start new store, and then I can start creating my new business/website with new domain and new email, and I just pay for the one store, while I can use my existing login and shuffle between the two stores? Is that correct?
Thank you for your time.
Sunny
No worries at all, @mrsun !
Yes, that’s totally possible to do on Shopify. You’ll just need to install a digital products app, such as our Digital Downloads one here, to help with configuring and selling non-physical products on your store. I’ll leave some resources below for you to further help with understanding how you can sell a service or non-physical product on our platform:
In regards to deactivating your clothing store, it looks like you’ve located the correct section within your admin to do this! We’ve got full instructions on our help guide here too, in case you need it, and to double check other considerations prior to fully closing the store for good.
With using your existing login to shuffle between the two stores, keep in mind that this will only work if both of your stores are active. If you deactivate the clothing store, you will no longer be able to access it, so your login will only work for the new digital product store. Also note that while you’re welcome to use the same login and email address across multiple stores, each store will still be required to subscribe to its own subscription plan and would therefore be charged its own fees.
Hi Kimi,
Many thanks for reply.
Yeah that could work the download of a pdf file for a fee.
I just want to ask you another question, but I don’t know how to explain fluently. Is there an option on my website where the customer can click for a service, example let’s say I’m a broker, the middleman, for a service such as real estate purchase to get in touch with an agent. So the customer clicks on an option for a service for me to sort the paperwork and agent information in regards to a house purchase. Is that possible?
And the second option would be a digital download for pdf file which has the necessary information on how to purchase a house.
So basically the customer has two options: 1) pdf download of step by step how to purchase house. 2) if customer is lazy to do the work he/she can click an option for me to sort it all out such as getting in touch with an agent, paperwork etc. And then when it’s done I can send the finished paperwork to the customer with everything all sorted by email I guess.
Is that possible to do with shopify website?
I hope that makes sense.
Thank you
This should be possible to do, although you’re most likely required to apply a custom solution to your store to help achieve this. This can be done by either hiring a Shopify Expert to help implement custom coding onto your store’s theme, or to find and install a third-party app from our App Store to add the specific functionalities you’re after.
So for example, if a customer would like to contact you in order for you to help with their retail purchase, you can look into making changes to your store’s Add to cart button in the Product pages and change them to show a Contact us button instead. This button can then link to your store’s native Contact us page, which will prompt the customer to leave their message to you so that you can then continue communicating with them via email. If you require further fields with your store’s Contact form to capture specific information, such as their budget perhaps, you can look into installing a third-party app that can help customize your Contact form to add specific fields that’ll best suit your needs. From there, once you receive a customer’s message via your Contact form, you can feel free to continue communicating with and assisting the customer via email. To bill the customer for your service, you can send them an invoice by creating a draft order from your Shopify admin.
So the two options that you’re looking to offer on your store are technically possible to achieve — as explained in my previous reply to you, for your first option you can utilize one of our digital product apps in order to help customers download your PDF document. With the other option of getting the customer to contact you, depending on how you’d like to configure this on your store it should work out nicely with the explanation and steps I laid out in my reply above.
Kimi,
Many thanks for replies. I will start designing later in the year. I will research and sketch out how I want my new website to look like.
You so cool with your detailed replies.
Thank you again
Respects
Sun
It’s my absolute pleasure, @mrsun !
If you need any guidance during the set up of your store, just remember that we have a variety of different resources at your fingertips to help build your business, including our Shopify Blog and our Shopify Learn channel. There are also a lot of different guides and tutorials for store owners listed on our Forum post here too, if you’re more of a visual learner and prefer video tutorials.
And as always, our wider Shopify Community is here if you have any questions or require further assistance, so feel free to create another post if anything else comes up. Wishing you all the best in building and launching your store!
Hi Kimi,
Hope you are well. Not sure if you remember me.
Quick question, I’m on test mode using Shopify payments, after checkout out I don’t receive an order confirmation. Why is that? Is there something wrong ?
Thanks
Sunny
Hi, @mrsun !
Thanks for reaching back out. I’m helping Kimi out with some responses today!
An order confirmation email should have been sent when you placed the test order. I recommend checking your spam and promotions folder to see if it ended up in there. If not, feel free to get in touch with us through the Help Center so we can investigate further! Simply enter the details of your issue into the chat assistant and click I still need help to be connected with a Support Advisor.
Please let me know if you have any other questions!
Hey Greta,
I tried it again using the stripe fake numbers, and i think it worked. I received an order confirmation stating an email has been sent to customer. So I got an order confirmation and received an email stating my order. So I guess everything is okay? I think before it wasn’t working because I was inputting random numbers for credit cards at checkout. I thought it didn’t matter since I was on test mode.
It would be nice if the email order confirmation does not go to junk/spam folder for customers. Any solution? Lastly, I noticed the order confirmation for me, the merchant, goes into the email i had setup shopify and login in with, how do I change that so the orders I receive from customers go to another email address and not into the email account i set up shopify with and log in with?
Thanks,
Sunny
Hi @mrsun ,
Thanks for the prompt response!
I’m glad to hear that the email confirmation is working as expected. As for them going into spam/junk, has a customer mentioned that this has happened?
To add another email address to the account, you can head into ‘Settings > Notifications’ from within the Shopify admin. If you select ‘Staff Notifications’ and scroll to the bottom of the page, you will the option to add additional recipients. To learn more about this, you can check out our New Order Notifications documents as it touches on this further.
Please let me know if you have any other questions.
Hi Blair,
Quick question how do I go about adding meta tag and meta description, keywords into the html source code? And how do I code it ? Also do I need to do this or is the shopify admin entering the seo is sufficient?
Thanks
Sun
Hey Sun! Great questions.
Shopify automatically creates meta tags and meta descriptions for your products and our SEO functionality is optimized across all stores. You can customize this in your theme code if you wished, but that would be outside our scope of support.