Like many others with an iPad and bills to pay, I’ve contemplated establishing a passive income stream through a dropshipping store to sell simple designs, stickers, and low-content books. I’ve even set up storefronts on several platforms to experiment with their features and interfaces.

Take Your Store to the Next Level: Automate Shopify

Thanks to eCommerce platforms like Shopify, individuals like me can adopt a curious attitude toward launching a small business. With minimal overhead, the financial barrier to entry for eCommerce selling is low. Additionally, the user-friendly nature of these platforms ensures that the learning curve isn’t too steep. Finally, ensure you form an LLC for your Shopify business with easy instructions from this website. 

If you’re setting up a digital storefront and ready to get started, here’s how to sell on Shopify:

1. Create Your Product Listings

2. Organize Your Products into Collections

3. Choose a Domain Name

4. Customize Your Shopify Storefront

5. Add Key Information for SEO

1. Create Your Product Listings

Creating a Shopify store is one of the ways to start a business. A store without products isn’t a store at all, which is why the first step Shopify will prompt you to take after opening your account is to add your first products. You can add your products directly to your Shopify store, or you can browse the Shopify App Store to find the service you use to create or host your product listings and integrate it directly into your shop.

For example, I create my designs on Printify, so I can connect my two accounts and migrate my product images and descriptions instead of adding them manually.

Sellers can also add products to their Shopify store manually by navigating to the Products tab and opening a new product listing.

Whether you start by migrating products from other sites or you start from scratch, you’ll need to add the following information to each listing.

Add Basic Details for Each Product

You can be as thorough or as sparse as you like with your product information, but at a minimum, each product listing will need a title, description, at least one product image, and a price. If you want to show the customer that a product is listed for a higher price on a different site, you can add a “compare at price” as well.

If a product has variants—for example, if it comes in multiple sizes or colors—you’ll need to add all of this information for each product variant.

Incorporate Meta Information

Once you have a good number of products listed on your site, you’ll want to make sure everything is well-organized and easily searchable. The way to do this is by adding meta information, like product type, tags, and (if you’re selling branded goods) original vendor brand.

Upload Physical Product Information

If you’re selling physical products, you’ll need to add your products’ weight so Shopify can calculate shipping prices. If you’re selling branded goods or already have your products in a store, they’ll have a barcode (a UPC or, if you’re selling books, an ISBN). You should also add a stock keeping unit, or SKU, to help keep track of your internal product stock and inventory. Finally, if you sell internationally, you’ll need a harmonized system code, which will be required for your product to pass through customs.

Additional options will also appear as you’re working if they apply to your product. If you add product variants, Shopify will add sub-listings for each, so you can add basic info for each variant.

2. Organize Your Products into Collections

Adding detailed information to each product will make organizing your listings into easy-to-navigate collections simpler. Shopify uses collections to let you group your products, feature them on your homepage, and make it easier for customers to find items that go together.

Each collection will need a title and description at a minimum. Then, you can choose between adding new products to each collection manually or setting up automated product sorting so that Shopify adds new products to collections right away. If you choose the automated option, you’ll need to add conditions for Shopify to sort your collections (like price range, product type, and tags).

3. Choose a Domain Name

The default URL for your store will be your-name.myshopify.com, so you’ll need to choose a domain name—the address customers will use to visit your store—that’s simple and easy to remember.

You can either purchase a domain name via a third party like GoDaddy or Bluehost, or you can buy a domain directly through Shopify. In either case, a custom domain will likely cost $10-$20. Follow Shopify’s step-by-step instructions to set up your new URL.

4. Customize Your Shopify Storefront

Now for the fun part: with all your product listings set up, you can customize your store’s look by editing your shop theme (under Online Store on your homepage menu). Shopify includes 12 default free themes, along with a Theme Store where you can choose from over 100 paid themes from designers around the world.

Shopify’s theme editor is similar to most website hosting platforms. It starts with a basic site structure that store owners can customize as much or as little as they like.

The default site has blocks like an image banner, site title, button, featured collection, and footer. You can select each one and add your own information, delete or move blocks around, and add new blocks by clicking the plus signs that appear between blocks.

At the bottom of the right-hand menu column, select Theme Settings to open a new menu, where you can edit things like colors, fonts, currency format, buttons, and other site features.

5. Add Key Information for SEO

In the same way that you should add meta information to each product listing so shoppers can easily search your site, you should also add meta information and tags to your shop as a whole so that it will show up in search engines.

From your dashboard, select Online Store and scroll down to Preferences. This will bring you to a page where you can add the title, meta description, and image you want to appear on search engines and social media. If you have Google Analytics or if you sell via Facebook, you can link those accounts here as well to track site and customer data.

Managing Your Shopify Store

Your basic store is enough to get started, with product listings, a customized theme, featured collections of products, and your domain name. Shopify will email you whenever you get a new order, and you can ship the order to the address in that email.

To run an efficient, well-maintained store, though, you’ll want to put a bit more work into Shopify. Here are the tools you need to keep track of your sales, add more info and features, and let your store take care of itself with automation.

Manage Your Orders

By now, you should have the Shopify menu down pat: to see your orders, select Order, and you’ll jump right to the Orders sub-page. You can open any order and see which ones are paid and which still need to be shipped.

Open your first order to ship and look through the page. You’ll see the products ordered, order total, customer’s shipping address, and even a risk analysis where Shopify tries to detect if an order is fraudulent. You can add a comment or note on the order—perhaps to list something the customer said or to note which specific product you sent them—and add tags to categorize that order. Then, click Continue to print a shipping label with pre-paid shipping from your postal service, or you can make a shipping label and mark the order as shipped.

Add Extra Pages

Your store will include a few pages by default: your store’s front page, a catalog of your products along with individual product pages, and perhaps an About page with details about your store. To create a more fulfilling shopping experience, you’ll need to flesh out your site with additional pages. (You can find these options on the left homepage menu under Online Store.)

Blog posts are perfect for sharing news or updates. If you’re looking to garner organic search traffic, this is where you’ll write SEO-driven content as well. Blog posts display in reverse chronological order, with the newest post on top.

Pages, on the other hand, appear permanently in the top menu of your store. If you want to add contact forms, store hours and info, directions, and any other reference information, you should use Pages.

Sell in More Places

Your online store is a great place to sell products and put all your marketing efforts into one place. The only problem is you’ll have to attract potential customers to your store. That’s tough—and sometimes it’s easier to put your products where customers already are.

That’s what makes selling products on marketplaces so appealing—and Shopify can help you do that while still managing everything through your main store site. Go to Settings, and click on Apps and sales channels in the menu. There you can add integrations for marketplaces, including eBay and Amazon, along with social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. You can even add Shopify to Messenger to chat with customers and close sales inside Facebook Messenger chat.

Add Features with Apps and Integrations

Shopify includes everything you need to get a basic store up and running within its setup guide and homepage menu, but there are a lot of other things you can do with your store by adding app integrations from the Shopify App Store.

Here are a few apps you might want to install as your store gains momentum:

• SEO tools like Yoast SEO, Schema Plus, or Swift

• Automatic language and currency translators like Transcy, T Lab, or LangShop

• Additional site features like product reviews, email opt-in pop-ups, and “customers also bought” recommendations

• Invoicing and accounting platforms like FreshBooks or Xero

• Report generators for sales, inventory, and customer data

• Email marketing platforms like Mailchimp or Brevo

Shopify offers thousands of different integrations, but there are some notable exceptions like Discord, Keap, Google Workspace, Asana, and Trello. For some apps, like Slack, you can find third-party integrations designed to integrate the two platforms, but they can be hit or miss. If you use a platform that isn’t natively supported by Shopify, you can always use Zapier’s Shopify integrations to connect it to thousands of other apps.

With Zapier and Shopify, you can streamline everything from promoting new products and contacting customers to following up on abandoned carts. That way, you can focus on the more important aspects of running your Shopify small business.

Apple’s Let Loose event is going to happen on May 7, 2024 and there are many exciting new products which will be unveiled. It includes new iPad Pro models with OLED displays, a wider iPad Air lineup, and new accessories like the Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil. Fans are eagerly waiting for the latest tablet innovations.

The setting is perfect for the much anticipated Apple “Let Loose” event on May 7 and Apple is expected to unveil a range of new iPads and accessories. This event is going to happen after a brief hiatus because Apple has released its latest iPad version in October 2022 and fans are eagerly waiting to know what Apple has in store for its tablet lineup. Fans can view the event live on Apple’s website and the Apple TV app at 10 am PT.

New iPad Pro models could have OLED screen, and a more powerful chip

The star of the show will be the new iPad Pro models which are expected to feature an OLED screen for the first time. The OLED screen will afford the users with a more real life and immersive experience as compared to the current Liquid Retina XDR mini-LED displays. The new versions of the iPad Pro are expected to be available with the familiar 11-inch and 12.9-inch sizes.

The latest 2024 iPad Pro models are expected to be powered by Apple’s latest M4 chip and are touted to boost performance and are also energy efficient. The M4 chips are also a sign that Apple is going to incorporate more advanced AI capabilities into its devices.

The upcoming models of iPad Pro are also expected to be thinner than their predecessors. The 12.9-inch model will be 20% thinner while the 11 inch model is expected to be 15% thinner. The new models will feature the OLED screens thus enabling Apple to reduce the thickness of the iPad  Pro.

Front-facing camera in the middle

The iPad Pro is expected to feature the front-facing camera in the middle and will follow the base model iPad by shifting the front-facing camera to the landscape bezel, making video conferencing more natural and intuitive.

iPad Air Will Be Available in two screen sizes

It is rumored that Apple will be introducing two new iPad Air models and they could include a larger 12.9-inch model alongside the standard 10.9-inch version. However iPad Air models will not feature the OLED screens like their Pro compatriots; they are still expected to get a new chip, most probably the M3 chip.

New accessories: Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil

Apple is also expected to unveil a refurbished Magic Keyboard which will feature a better and more robust aluminum design and a bigger trackpad area which will make navigating and interacting with the iPad much easier. The new keyboard is also expected to feature a USB-C port for improved connectivity, similar to the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro keyboards.

Apple is also rumored to introduce a better stylus at the “Let Loose” event. The Apple Pencil will have better and enhanced functions as compared to the past. The new Apple Pencil is expected to offer the users with better and more precise and responsive drawing and writing experience.

The event will be focused on the updated versions of iPad Pro and iPad Air but there is little possibility that there will be any updates on the base models of iPad and iPad mini. However there are unconfirmed reports that these could happen sometime later in the year, possibly in October

While the event is likely to focus on the there have been whispers of potential updates to the base models as well. However, it is highly unlikely that these models will be announced at the May 7 event. Rumors have it that Apple might announce them later.

FaZe Clan is in reboot mode and is making significant changes, which sadly include another round of layoffs following its acquisition by GameSquare. FaZe Clan and its esports teams are undergoing a transformation, and in a stark, command line terminal-themed video, they disclosed the lists of all members being retained and cut by the organization.

FaZe Clan has faced multiple challenges recently, including numerous layoffs, departures from the VALORANT and Rocket League esports scenes, and declining stock prices. Since being taken over by new ownership, these recent moves are seen as attempts to rectify the situation and turn things around.

FaZe Clan – Who made the cut?

Two videos were posted on X, detailing the technical aspects and featuring two lists of names. The first video showed the members selected to remain with the organization, while the second, which could only be viewed briefly, contained the names of those affected by the layoffs. The restructuring resulted in 20% of the employees receiving pink slips.

Today’s announcement reveals that only 14 members remain in FaZe Clan:

• Adapt
• Apex
• Banks
• Jev
• Kaysan
• Nickmercs
• Replays
• Stable Ronaldo
• Rug
• Scope
• Swagg
• Temperrr
• YourRAGE
• ZooMaa

Listed below are the 16 individuals affected by the FaZe Clan layoffs:

• Agony
• Blaze
• Booya
• CBass
• Cizzorz
• Faculty
• Flea
• H1ghSky1
• JSmooth
• Kalei
• Nate Hill
• Nio
• Proze
• Santana
• Sway
• Testy

In another tweet, FaZe Esports laid out the roadmap for the future and the group’s plan for competitive operations. The company also revealed that the esports division will field 12 teams across the following titles:

• Apex Legends
• Call of Duty
• Counter-Strike
• ESL R1
• FIFA Online 4
• Fortnite
• Halo
• PUBG
• PUBG Mobile
• Rainbow Six Siege
• Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
• TEKKEN

The list does not include VALORANT and Rocket League, indicating that FaZe does not intend to return to either game in the near future.

FaZe went public with a $725 million valuation last year, and in May 2023, laid off 40% of its staff following a long period of uncertainty about the future sustainability of the esports industry. Earlier, in February, the company also laid off 20% of its staff.

Also Read: LightFury Games secures $8.5 million funding to develop premium games in India