As a small business owner, marketing is a daily pursuit. You’ve worked so hard to create a brilliant product; it’s important that people know about it so they can buy it. Shopify makes it easy to get your product in front of as many people as possible using our sales channels. A sales channel gives you a new way to sell and promote your products.
You’ve actually already launched your first sales channel: your online store. There are great benefits to having multiple sales channels. Firstly, it keeps your business organized. You can sell through many sales channels, but you manage everything in one place. Secondly, sales channels help you grow your audience.
You have the opportunity to get your products in front of your ideal customers where they’re already spending their time. Thirdly, sales channels boost sales. You can customize where your products appear, so you can feel confident the right shoppers see your products and services.
Let’s install a sales channel together. From your admin, click on the plus sign besides sales channels. You’ll see the top sales channels we recommend for your business. Right now I’m going to choose the point of sale channel, which will allow me to sell in-person at pop-up shops and farmers’ markets.
Click the plus icon beside the sales channel you want to add. This opens the channel where you can add additional details. These steps may be different depending on the channel you select. You can review a list of all available channels at Shopify.com/channels.
When you add a sales channel in Shopify all of your existing products are automatically available in the channel. Review the terms of use for a channel before you start using it. If you don’t want to sell a product on a particular channel, then you need to remove the channel from the product’s availability. Let’s do this now. Go to a product page, then click “Manage.” There, you’ll see all of your available sales channels. Take the time to explore and add more sales channels to your store. Most of the time, this does require you having a separate account for the channel. To integrate Facebook, you need a Facebook account. For Amazon, you need an Amazon seller account. Before you start adding every sales channel, research where your audience spends the majority of its time.
This is also what you should do as you consider where you’re going to start marketing your business rather than going after every social media platform or marketing opportunity. Start small and focus on where your target audience already spends their time. Once you set up your sales channels you have access to millions of potential customers.
In the next lesson I’ll show you how to add an app.
