As I am sure some of you have seen already, @vicious1 has graciously allowed me to start selling fully built LR4s
Here is where I need the forum experts help!!! I know several here have shopify stores. I have never set up a website, or anything like this before. If any of you have time can you please take a look at the store and give me any help and suggestions you can to make it better? And please dumb it down for me. I am a boat captain, not a software dev
Key things I know are wrong off the bat:
Shipping on the LR4s doesnt work at all. I have read everything I can find, tried the shopify help (total waste of time) but I just cant get it to work.
Also @CarmenJ has some of her laser crafts on the site as well (many more to be added soon) but if someone orders more than one set, it doesnt know to go to a larger box for shipping. I have read that I need to tell it dimensional weight (I think thats what it was called) but I dont see any way to do that.
I will be honest. I have been up since 6am yesterday morning (9pm here now) so I am flat exhausted lol. Just got back to the boat today. But if anyone can just take a look and jot down a few notes for me to look at tomorrow I would be beyond greatful!!!
I would remove the white border around each item in the shop looks funky to me, but thatâs a matter of taste I guess.
I noticed at the bottom of the email you use a Gmail account, I would really suggest setting up at least a email forwarder using your custom domain, there are a ton of options for dirt cheap. Especially if you want to sell to schools and the like
I feel like it is reasonable to expect the LR to come in the same box regardless of what you order. I wouldnât expect to save on shipping if I ordered a LR and a craft. The craft ships separately. You could put on your LR page that the LR will always ship in âthe LR boxâ or something. Iâm assuming you have a specific box or plan and a craft shouldnât change that.
Did you consider linking back to Ryanâs store or the documentation? Maybe you two already talked about it, but in the interest of transparency you could say something like âthis is an opensource machine, you can buy all the parts, print everything and make it yourself. This is sold pre assembled under an exclusive licenseâ (like reword that better). I guess what I am getting at, is you wouldnât want someone to buy it and then be disappointed they could have made it themselves. Maybe I am overthinking it.
Do you also ship a Y rail? Are these fully assembled and tested? You should talk more about that. What do I have to do when its delivered?
I have a shopify site and I can help you with yours if you like. PM me if you want specific help. I own a shopify site where I did the theme code modifications to get it to allow user input for the product customization because I was poor when I started it (some things never change) and didnât want to add monthly anything to it just for basic functionality. I paid the one year fee to keep it going and I think it renews in November.
Yes I would like to do that! But can that be done free??? Trying to keep this as absolutely low cost as possible at least until sales are rolling in enough for it to all pay for its self and me still make a few bucks lol.
That will depend on which size. I went to the UPS store a few months ago with the measurements from my full sheet LR3 just to get an idea. $250 to ship it from me to Washington state with $1000 in insurance on it. So I am hoping that will be the highest cost. But I donât know how to get shopify to know which box is for which machine. I think I set it up wrong. I need a ârateâ for each box not just all 3 machines tied to one rate.
And for the Laser stuff I was playing around with just ording 2 sets of the ornaments and it put both in 1 small box. well both wont fit in one small box. The weight is fine for one but the actual size is not. So I need to figure out how it can know when an additional small item cant fit in a small USPS box. I am not thinking about this as the ornaments being bought with a CNC Machine, but as them being purchased seperate.
Yes! I need to come up with some kind of alteration of Ryanâs docs. Or just link to the mounting it to the table section lol. And I need a lot more in there about how the machine will arrive and what all still needs to be done by the end user.
In terms of Y rail I am hoping that most customers would rather get their own Y rail. But Ryan and I also talked about the possibility of making a joint in the Y rail so I can cut it in half and fit it in the same box that the assembled LR is in.
Yes! Soon I am building a full test table to run these all on. I plan to video the entire test as proof that it was done and everything passed successfully. I wont be actually cutting with them, but will make gcode for them to move around to the extremes and some other kind of test for them to run a hour long job or something to be sure nothing is going wrong with them. All stuff that is kinda figure out as I go type stuff.
Yeah I am horrible at this part LOL. I feel I either donât say near enough, or I say WAY too much! I am not good a clear concise communication. I blame it on the ADHD
That would be awesome! I will PM you later this evening when the day is done here if thats ok!
If you bought/rented the URL, it should be included in the basic package. I am paying 5,5⏠for www.hawiwe.de a year and I am getting like, 5 e-mail addresses for free (but only forwarding, I think, not sending from them, as far as I know). But thatâs something at least.
Usually, yes. Most web hosts allow you to create forwarders for free. The forwarder is an email address thatâs usually without any inbox. It just forwards mail to some other inbox you designate. It can also forward even when there is an inbox. If your host does not allow that, itâs a slight gouge trying to force you to buy email addresses.
Hopefully pressfit. Possibly with an m3 screw in from the bottom to hold it tight. Just something to make the joint as smooth as possible for the rails.
You might consider going stockless at the start and do builds to order. Once you have a good feel for what folks want, stock those. If each one is custom, then it also commands a premium for that personal touch.
Email forwarding is pretty easy to set up as well.
Donât pay MSRP at the UPS store. Get a https://www.pirateship.com/ account. I ship my Etsy stuff via UPS with labels from Pirate Ship and it is at least 50% discount.
Yeah, doesnât really make a difference. But you can follow that link if you want to forward email from sales@your fancy domain.com to personal@gmail.com for example.
If you reply, it will still come from the gmail though. Itâs debatable if anyone cares anymore.
Ok I got that set up. Now I just have to find where I put them in at LOL. Sucks not being home and at my main computer where I can just leave tabs open and access them simple LOL
One advantage of this⊠If you donât use a forwarder, and instead send emails from a real inbox at your custom domain name, it would need all the security stuff setup, which unless the host does it for you, is a pain. By responding from a gmail account, you know that Google takes care of validating your message for acceptance.
