How I Built an eCommerce Store in a Day & Got First Sales Within 12 Hours

The other day I built and launched an eCommerce store in a day or to be exact 9 hours and 14 minutes.

The store is HoneyJoy and I built it to help my mum, who is a hobby beekeeper, sell her excess honey.

There is one product for now, a 530g jar of raw Australian honey. I priced it at $24.99 (AUD) plus $9.95 which I plan to make free of charge for larger orders.

Tools to Build the Store

I built the store on WordPress with GeneratePress theme.

Thought about going with WooCommerce for eCommerce functionality. Then I came to my senses and decided to use Shopify Buy Button instead.

This way I get the best of both worlds – content management of WordPress so I can do SEO down the track and eCommerce power of Shopify.

I did the copywriting and took the photos.

My designer previously made the logo and I got the labels printed.

Shipping

I didn’t want to handwrite shipping labels or go to the post office to send the products.

Did some digging and found Sendle. Connected it to my Shopify store. Then in a couple of clicks, I printed professional-looking labels.

The best thing? They come to you to pick up the packages. Absolute time-saver! 

Here is an example label from their website:

Making Sales

First thing I did was post on Twitter. I only have about 120 followers so the tweet got 133 impressions and 10 link clicks.

Then I made a post on LinkedIn where I have about 500 connections.

This post got 549 impressions, 28 likes, and the first sales (not counting one my friend bought just when the store went live). All within 12 hours since launching the store.

One customer bought one jar, while the second customer bought four.

Then I retweeted the first tweet, added a screenshot of the first order, and tagged Shopify.

That tweet got 2550 impressions, a few likes and clicks.

While it didn’t lead to any sales, owner of an email templating app on Shopify App Store noticed how basic my email templates were.

He gave me a license for his app for free. And now HoneyJoy emails look like this:

I also made a couple of posts on Facebook which got a few likes and positive comments regarding the website design.

Plan Ahead

Quite happy with what I achieved in a day.

I have plenty of things in my Trello board to do from here.

The first task is to drive more traffic and sell the current batch. Then use the Aussie winter to get ready for the next season.

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