Hello! If you will recall, I had moved my website from Squarespace over to Shopify in Spring 2026. It was funny because I had first created my website on Squarespace a number of years ago and I could barely remember a thing in regard to how I did it.
I think a lot has changed since then, especially in the AI department. Things are easier now because all you have to do is ask the website assistant, and it generally tells you the answer you're looking forward. However, you might get an answer that has nothing to do with what you actually want to know. The answer to this is you have to ask the right questions.
I spent more time researching websites this time around too. I like Shopify because it's known worldwide, and people have trust in it. The interface is simple, and clean. (Without ads, mind you).
I have four things that drove me mad while attempting to move my website over:
1. I initially tried doing a transfer of all of my merchandise into a csv file. IT DIDN't WORK, and I'll tell you why:
- I had multiple files with multiple types. (Planner charms up to ten styles and stickers with different color ways and different paper types). When transferring these over, it would only allow you to do two, so the rest of the information was lost to the big wide web.
- Technically this didn't matter as I only wanted the one type of paper moving forward, but in multiple cases, different paper types were carried forward and I would have had to go into each individual file to check. This process would have taken longer than just uploading each manually again anyway.
2. I didn't want to pay for both websites so I ended up shutting Squarespace down early before I was fully ready on the new one. It also ended up being an extremely busy time for me in all other areas of my life, so the website fell to the wayside. I had customers asking if they could purchase stickers that I hadn't uploaded yet. While that in itself was fine, most of these inquiries ended up being..
3. SPAM. I think I had 50 e-mails of people asking if I could pay them to help improve my SEO search on my website. I had to keep saying I wasn't done working on it yet. After the initial few, my inbox learned to send these emails to junk. I used to get these emails all the time with my previous website, but I switched which e-mail address I used so it started all over again before going to the junk folder. I actually had people trying to bypass that by asking why they couldn't place an order. As soon as I responded, they tried to get me to work with them.
4. The ads.text file. Need I say more? It's supposed to be simple and straight forward - so why doesn't it work the first time you do it? All you really do is a copy and paste so that's something I'm still working on. (Insert eye roll here).
If I didn't enjoy this kind of work so much, I wouldn't have bothered. If I had the extra money, I would just hire someone to create my website for me. As it is, I'm always looking for ways to improve my knowledge and learn how to do things on my own. It's not that I won't ask for help - I research google all the time! It's nice to know that I can figure things out for myself (even if sometime I feel like I'm muddling through half the time!) rather than rely on an expert in that field. Remember: the more you do something, the better you get at doing it.
It is a daunting task though when you have multiple kids, you're running your household and you have a million other things to do in your business. Sometimes you ask yourself why did I even start this at all?
My advice is simple:
Will your sales be down? Of course...my products are not all up on my site. Is it the end of the world for the few weeks that it's going to be like that? No - it's not.
The trick is to do a little at a time. Sometimes looking at a daunting task of creating your own website from scratch is daunting. It's not really hard, especially when you do it bit by bit. The thought of even starting is scary, because if you start, you need to finish it, but what if you don't? What if you fail? What if people don't like it? What if you don't get any sales? Any creator will ask themselves these questions all the time. The thing is, as long as you start, you're getting farther along than if you didn't start.
I have broken my website tasks down into small increments. I figured out each step as I went, sometime simply by googling how to do something in Shopify. Then I did it, no big deal. Now I'm at the point of adding my hundreds of options worth of stickers.
I did make a few changes:
- I reduced the options of paper to just one type. The others didn't sell that great and the paper was VERY expensive. I'm talking hundreds of dollars for only a few reams.
- I also increased the price of all my stickers from $3.75 to $4.50. My sheets are still on par with my cohorts. They are still half of what some shops charge. Mine are half page sheets as opposed to quarter, and in general, there are many more stickers on my sheets.
Overall, Shopify seems simpler to navigate and looks more elegant overall.
In the end, I'm glad that I switched over to Shopify. Now is better than later, and I'll look back on this too and wonder how I ever did it all!
Let me know if you have had a similar experience and what were your best and worst parts about switching websites and/or setting up with Shopify.
Thanks so much for reading and we'll see you again next week!
Sandra
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