Month: June 2019

I should add, I gave in. I created an actual Shopify store for Incognito Guy.

Can’t help it. He’s taking on a life of his own.

Frankly, the Shopify store will not be rants.

No, I hope to sort of corral all the information one needs to know to handle your identity upon death.

Yeah, not a fun humorous subject. But man is it an issue. Because with the state of AI marching on without us, there’s no telling what they’ll be able to do with our identity when we are not here to patrol it.

There are too many horror stories already of family members unable to take down social media sites of loved ones.

I’m sure there’s information out there somewhere. I’m going to try to put it all in one spot.

But yes, Incognito Guy will still author rants about Shopify and Facebook and Instagram. Because why? Well, he can.

But he’s also a softy and he needs his own darn Shopify page. Poor guy. Such a push over. Sigh.

It’s very strange how all of the stress associated with getting some sort of approval from Facebook and Instagram can just burn you right out.

The intensity of the worry and concern and trying so hard to get the approval just zapped me.

It’s like reaching the top of the mountain and not having any urge to go back down to celebrate lol.

So yeah, that one Shopify site. Mission accomplished. I think it took me a week or more to decompress from the struggle. The sincere struggle and insanity of it all which is out of your control because the process is not a process. It’s you at their mercy. Directions are clear as mud. You just do the best you can and cross your fingers.

Now I’m in reboot mode to restart the war lol. No, it’s not war lol. But I feel like the wind got kicked out of me so that it was hard to do the next steps.

This? This is why every one is not an entrepreneur. You have to have an impossible amount of stick-to-it-iveness lol.

And I read an article yesterday that the whole 10,000 hours to mastery is now a crock of you know what because we have to just think on our feet nowadays to succeed.

The kinds of traits that made people successful in the past no longer work to our advantage unless you’re in a very specialized field like brain surgery.

You have to be inventive and roll with the punches and not expect routine or patterns. You know who succeeds in this type of environment? The anti-student lol. Well, that’s not wholly true, as you have to be a quick study.

And you have to be able to dust yourself off and keep going even if there’s no clear path. You just have to put one foot in front of the other and do your best. Because everything is in flux.

You don’t put in your 30 years and retire with a nice watch or clock.

You keep moving.

And from everything I’m reading, Shopify is poised to keep doing that and be the next megillah, rivaling Amazon. I don’t have to read the people doing the analysis, I see it in my every day intereactions with their staff.

They are effing on top of things at Shopify. It is power. They are a force to be reckoned with even if no, not everything they do is perfect. They get it though. They get the tech. They get the customer service. Frankly, I don’t see how they can lose.

But it’s not a magic bullet if you don’t do your due diligence. You have to keep plugging away and not get frustrated at the little setbacks.

This is me. Trying. Reboot. Let’s do this.

So it is impossible to resist somehow integrating Shopify with this site.

I don’t frankly, have the time to run a whole new store.

But there is a way, I think, that I can combine the best of both worlds and add a few products here via Shopify without over-stretching and yet learning something new.

Shopify Lite. $9 and you can sell on a WordPress site like this or on Facebook. God forbid. I’m not ready to go through that hell again frankly.

For now, I’m going to satisfy the urge just to try to create a buy button. Which frankly you could do using Paypal for free if you signed up for a dropshipping account even outside Shopify.

But I digress.

I’m going to try to harness Shopify Power and see just what $9 of Shopify Power will get me.

First thing, they make it hella scary to delete the sales channel and go with the teeny tiny foot note to enable Shopify Lite. It’s kinda like knowing a secret to know to use it because it looks like you disable Shopify period when you go this route. There’s not even an option to choose it as a plan. It’s a non-plan.

This is a non-site. So that’s perfect.

Ok. Done. I’m then off to enable a drop shipper. Done.

Created a sticker. Cool. First product. Now where is that buy button? Where is the html?

Well, first, you have to go to sales channels and enable a point of sale sales channel. BUT you actually have to scroll down to find the specific sales channel simply called, wait for it, “Buy Button.”

Then, then you can find the means to set up the elusive Buy button.

Then you have to set up your Shopify Payments. Basically you have to give tax info. and banking info. so you can get paid.

I can’t help that I’m drawn to design. I created a fancy new logo.

You know if you’re gonna take a selfie, you might as well cast yourself in a good light.

Here’s Incognito Guy 2.0.

Whatcha think? Kinda like a new haircut. Almost imperceptible is good. Right? This is me.

Ps. See? Almost anything to be creative and avoid actual work on my Shopify account. And making more work for myself as I think about opening this little man’s own Shopify store. Swear to goodness. Can’t help it though. And the level of detail on this logo isn’t there so it will load fast…looks better in full resolution but this is a quick and dirty look at it. 🙂

So as it turns out, Shopify is public and has had an earnings gain of +121.73% Year-to-Date as of today. That customer service I was talking about? The golden ticket. I am not surprised.

And whether you think she’s self-made or not – that Kylie Jenner brand? Yeah, it’s on Shopify.

She’s a huge anomaly though, having sold out her first lipstick in 20 seconds. But still, as with Tesla, they’re on this Shopify platform.

Because they clearly know what they’re doing at Shopify…even if there are technical glitches if you have your own store. That’s just life…if you do any kind of tech.

I’m not in the habit of making stock recommendations but I think this brand is like Apple, it’s only going to increase. They’re not going to backtrack. They’re doing e-commerce right and it’s not going away any time soon.

And frankly, if you look at her site… https://www.kyliecosmetics.com/ It’s pretty straight forward. A lot of her success is the branding she had even from day one because of name recognition.

I’ll jump in the fray and say that doesn’t mean she’s not self-made. She invested her own money in this. The idea is hers. She made it happen.

She’ll admit she had an easier time because of her fame going into it but it’s not like just any reality star can pull this kind of success off and I do believe a lot of it had to do with the fact she had a good tech foundation.

So, I took a breather from developing my site. Trying to think of ways to differentiate my brand before I start to market it so that I don’t confuse anyone and shift gears.

But my brain has been going. I think I’m ready to start pushing forward again. I sincerely hope the next tech things are not so difficult.

I can tell you this much. No matter how well thought out anything I do is? It’s guaranteed Not to sell out in 20 seconds. This I know for sure. Sad, but true. That is completely unrealistic for an unknown entity.

But it’s not going to stop me before I even start. You have to start somewhere. Even if you’ve got zero brand name recognition.

Customer service is where you make it or break it. That? That is a million percent true no matter what platform you sell on or where your retail location is online or offline.

You need both a good product and excellent customer service if you want to make a dent in the universe and you have to get it in front of the right people that it can help. It’s a moving target, all these pieces but if it were easy? Everyone would do it. It’s not so easy. But it’s not impossible either.

At least that is what I keep telling myself.

Soon, soon I will get the courage up to really feel ready to tell the world I exist.

Wholesale? Yes wholesale. Did you know you can offer wholesale pricing on your Shopify store? Yes you can. I didn’t know that.

I found out because I was looking at pricing for a Shopify store. I bet you thought the cheapest Shopify store is $29. There’s actually a $9 a month Shopify Lite plan.

Looking at that lead me to wholesale pricing. I swear. There’s always something new to learn. Shopify is so powerful.

It’s a good thing and a bad thing because the more powerful something is, the more features there are, the more it sucks you in and you can lose site of the basics.

You still have to do the basics without worrying about what all you can do. Different if you have a team of employees, but when it’s just you? You have to stay focused. Not easy. Everything looks tempting. Everything seems like an awesome idea.

See now I’m wondering if you could tweak wholesale to be some sort of club membership. I don’t know. There is so much you could try to do. So much to research.

They should teach this stuff in school. I bet if they taught elementary kids this stuff, they could pay their way through college. They’re smarter than us.

Instead of an allowance try setting up your kids with a Shopify site. It’s better than mowing the grass these days. Heck people have rock gardens for yards instead of grass in half the country these days anyway. I mean yes, technically it would have to be your site and you’d have to monitor it but if your child has any entrepreneurial aspirations, empower them. Who knows what the workforce will look like by the time they graduate? I’m just sayin’. Give them a head start. Sure, teaching them to code is awesome. But teach them to be their own boss? Priceless.

Ps. Oh, and that wholesale option is available for Shopify Plus evidently. If you have a retail store you can use this thing to streamline and merge inventory for all of your locations. Just a thought. And yeah, you have to be huge to do the wholesale thing. That Shopify Plus plan is currently $2K/month plus 2.15% and 3o cents a transaction so it’s for the big guns. Not something you can set up out of the box. But it’s good to know it exists. Aspiration and all. But it’s almost better that you can’t do it too fast. Because you gotta focus. Knowledge is power though.

It was about 10:15 p.m. when I finally got both Facebook and Instagram working with my Shopify store after a final 5 calls, multiple emails and 3 hours and 15 minutes on the phone just in the last day.

Who has time for that? Evidently I do. I’m like a dog with a bone. I wasn’t going to quit until I figured it out.

And now I want to share what got me hung up and how you can avoid the same serious frustrations.

Again, I want to commend the Shopify employees, as every single one of them gets a gold star. I mean one yesterday personally liked my Facebook page to try to help me out. I’m pretty sure that’s not only going above and beyond her job but also I’d bet there’s probably some stupid corporate policy that would have said no don’t do that. Small businesses let you personally help like that but big business usually frowns on that.

So when someone does that, it just gives you the idea of the high caliber of employees Shopify retains. They’re all trying. They’re all brilliant and caring. They just work for Shopify and not Facebook or Instagram. This is just one tiny albeit important part of their job.

At least one person told me a large part of their job is troubleshooting Facebook issues. I can see why.

Okay. So what exactly was the golden ticket yesterday?

First off, in Facebook I discovered that even though Shopify says that yes my store was ready in Facebook and approved, I still needed to go into Facebook and change a setting. That was clear as mud.

From my previous research, I saw repeatedly that you had to set your store to “shopping.” In the general tab, I did that when I set up profile.

However, there’s a whole new ball of wax to deal with once Facebook approved that shop and enabled it with Shopify. It’s not just a one click integration in Shopify.

Once Facebook has given you their blessing, you have to manually go into Facebook to Settings and Templates and Tabs and select Shopping. For no reason and in fact arbitrarily and wrongly, as I’d never touched this setting or seen it, Facebook had randomly decided my page is about “Movies.” Um hello. No. No, it’s not. Instead of leaving that selection blank, that seems to be the default setting according to a very high level tech person at Shopify who was also thinking that is crazy.

So I was mistakenly thinking I had addressed the whole “make sure you set your page to shopping” when I edited it under the general tab. No, this is a duplicate or different place to select the word “shopping” and you can only access it once your page has been approved by Facebook in Shopify. You then navigate back to Facebook and choose shopping.

Magically then, your “Shop” menu item appears on your Facebook page navigation panel on the left. What is misleading is the fact that they have this honking big “Shop Now” button at the top of the page which you can edit. It leads you to believe you actually have a shop enabled. Well, it’s technically enabled once approved according to the settings in Shopify. But if you don’t jump through this extra settings hoop in Settings’ “Templates and Tabs,” you don’t have a Facebook shop. Period. One click of that and everything worked. Instantly, all of my products appeared on my Facebook page.

Ok, great. I will say that it’s still like having a site on Mars because you can’t search my page name and find me yet in Facebook. You need at least 25 likes and who knows what all to even get an “@” name. You can’t verify your page with your cell phone. You need other fun things to do that like a utility bill or a sales tax number and you send that in. I haven’t jumped through those hoops yet as I wasn’t even sure I could get this thing up and running. For the meantime, I don’t have a vanity short URL, I have the Facebook page name from hell with about 20 random characters after my page name that looks more like a strong password than a page name.

But I’d read about all this talk of it being important that you’re the page administrator etc. and it taking a week to crawl your page etc., etc. and you know what. Didn’t seem to matter in this instance. I think that’s just one of the many rationalizations people make because nobody can make sense out of why things simply don’t just work.

So great, now if from within Shopify I choose the Facebook sales channel and click it, I no longer get an error message about the content not being available. The shop button at the top of the page masked the fact that the shop button on the left panel navigation was missing and had to be set up with that selection in Templates and Tabs. This is not intuitive at all people. It’s rather hidden.

So next I jump back on Instagram to see if I have now magically fixed what I perceived to be a problem.

Here’s the deal, in Shopify for the Instagram channel, they have a little drop down menu video of a phone running the Instagram app and what it looks like when you have connected and approved Instagram. There are little blue circles with white check marks for a catalog and a Kit app which integrates with Facebook. You choose between them I guess.

However, I just have one catalog that basically lists all of my products that was created just when I connected Facebook to Shopify and then Instagram to Shopify. So I’m looking at Instagram and I don’t have a check mark, I have a blue circle with a white dot and if I click on the catalog, nothing happens. It does not bring up a bunch of tags that are now enabled.

You’d think that’s how it would work right?

No. It’s not. It just is an un-clickable name of your catalog that appears there in your settings for your shop. It just says hey, here’s where we will pull from for your tags. It’s useless otherwise. No check mark is needed. The Shopify video of the Instagram app is misleading because it makes you think there’s an error if you don’t have a checkmark. The checkmark means nothing. The checkmark must appear when you have more than one business option for promoting within Instagram. I haven’t gotten that far. So if you have a blue circle with a white dot? You’re good. You do need to select it once as it starts off as like a grey color and you have to click it once to turn it blue, so you do have to navigate to it once your shop is approved by Instagram and Shopify lets you know. After that, you don’t need to touch it unless you add more things like the Kit app it seems as then you have to choose whatever it is you’re tagging from. I guess. As I say, I haven’t gotten that far. I’m assuming based on the Shopify video that that is the case.

So once you have got that little blue circle, you’re good to go.

Here’s what happens now. Every time you post to Instagram, you’re given a choice to tag an item from your shop, just as easily as you choose a filter. That is all you’ve been working so hard to enable. That is where you access your store items, in the actual post process. It has nothing to do with settings anymore after that last step of selecting the catalog. You don’t tag from the catalog. You tag from posts.

Seems simple right? Yeah it is if you have done it even once. But I hadn’t. And I’m a long time Instagram user for personal use. So let me tell you, I LOVE Instagram. It’s my favorite social media app. I love, love, love, love it.

But this experience? I feel like I need a breather. I should be doing the happy dance and celebrating that I finally got it all working. But I’m too drained to even want to touch it. I need a break.

The most I did was invite a few friends to like my Facebook page. I didn’t even go through my entire list of friends to invite everyone. I just don’t even want to think about Facebook or Instagram or Shopify for a bit.

But I’m relieved to know that when I get my mojo back, maybe I can finally start to get excited about my business again and focus on the important stuff that will make a difference in the world, not this behind the scenes API stuff that has just been dragging me down.

I can be technical if I have to be but it’s not my favorite thing. I have a bit of experience in coding. I’ve taken some courses. I’ve written a couple simple apps. I have a degree in ad/pr. I’m not an idiot. And if it has been this much of an ordeal for me, I can’t even imagine what it’s like for the average entrepreneur.

I’m still sticking to keeping this blog simple, so I’m not writing a bunch of tutorials here with pretty screen shot pictures because this is my stress relief. I’m not trying to turn this into another job. But I am trying to help. You are not alone in these frustrations.

These are tiny little things that make a difference. It’s not unlike when I’ve spent hours looking over code to find a typo. I know you can make this stuff work. You can. It just takes patience.

When I let go of caring but still tried to do the work is when it finally came together. I started the new name and the new Facebook and Instagram pages on Sunday. I got the thing set up finally on Thursday night.

But it feels like a lifetime. It was not fun. But it’s done. I really want to feel the excitement about my business again, so I think I’m just gonna leave it here for now but I wanted to document exactly what happened and what confused me or where I got hung up before I forgot to tell you. I hope this helps. I mean maybe I am an idiot. But I’m not the only one. This much I know from perusing Reddit, Google, Shopify etc. as there are tons of people suffering with these technical issues.

I’d gladly pay Facebook for customer service to help with e-commerce. I don’t want to trade my data. It’s not worth it being free. At all. But we don’t really have a choice in the matter because we have supported this business model to the point it’s a multi-billion dollar company. Now we are all paying the price. There’s no free lunch.

Okay people, this whole e-commerce thing is not for the faint of heart. I logged 5 calls to Shopify today over the whole technical aspect of the Instagram and Facebook setup and 3 hours and 15 minutes later after all was said and done…I finally…finally think I have a Facebook shop enabled and ability to tag posts on Instagram.

I still don’t have a Facebook page you can search for and find on Facebook. It’s not enabled for a short url nor can I get a username for it.

But baby steps. The shop is working. I think I can get that other stuff working once I let people know I exist and am important enough.

Progress has been made. I’ll detail the particulars tomorrow. I’m worn out.

It should not be this hard. At all. Just sayin’.

I guess they’re trying to keep everyone from doing it. I don’t know.

Call me crazy but I’m still trying to figure out the technical reason why things are supposedly approved by Facebook and Instagram and yet not working with Shopify.

The kind people at Shopify are doing their level best. No kidding. They have the patience of a saint. Every single one of them.

I may get frustrated but their customer service is top notch. I don’t know who does the hiring but they need a raise. And if Shopify goes public? Buy their stock. Oh, wait. They already are. Buy their stock. They know what they’re doing.

And what they’re doing is trying to pick up the slack for the lack of customer service at Facebook and Instagram. (Sorry “Slack”…no relation.)

I thought maybe I figured it out. A little bit of knowledge is dangerous. So I called Shopify again.

This kind soul thinks that the entire glitch may just resolve itself within a week when the Facebook bots crawl around and figure out I’m the admin.

I’m like they don’t know I’m the admin? I created the page as admin under my user name? How do they not know.

So the technical people at the higher level of Shopify are taking a peek. I supposedly should hear something within 3 business days.

If they can’t find anything wrong on Shopify’s end, then the game plan, is wait for it…

Completely disconnect my page from Shopify for Facebook and Instagram (which I already did once).

But the step I did not do was to go into Facebook and manually delete 3 different business tool apps that connect with Shopify. So I’m to go into facebook.com/settings?tab=business_tools and from there manually delete the API stuff that may be talking apples and oranges to Shopify regarding my old page name.

It could be that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.

It may magically right itself. It may not.

If it doesn’t, I go in delete everything from Shopify and Facebook’s side both and then reconnect them and pray that they get approved again.

I say pray because there is no rhyme or reason for approval despite the lengthy terms and conditions.

I was not eligible for tagging and then magically I was eligible for tagging in Instagram. But guess what? If the tagging doesn’t function, it’s as if I am still not eligible. So it’s possible that I have to roll the dice again and hope for the best.

It feels like every single person at Shopify has their little tiny bit of experience and knowledge that may help. The guy that had me disconnect and reconnect my pages did not tell me to go manually delete everything in Facebook as well. That’s new information.

And I’ve not read that in all my troubleshooting and Googling of these issues either. Maybe that’s the magic. Maybe the magic is just time. Maybe I’ll just wake up and it will be fixed. Ha!

Stranger things have happened. I’m trying to stay positive here.

And you know what? If this isn’t meant to be, then I’m going to have to try to do something else because this is getting ridiculous.

Good thing I still have shiny ball syndrome because it may be what keeps me sane. If I only ever had one idea? If I could be so lucky. Then I’d have the focus I’m supposed to have but I feel pretty well focused right now. Right now I feel like I am a dog with a bone and I’m doing all I can to run with it. Let’s see.

If you’re having your own Shopify and Facebook and Instagram integration and approval problems are you feeling better now? You’re not alone. And this is ridiculous. But you didn’t hear it from me.

Ps. I read a guy worked on this for a month to get it working for his wife. I think I told you that. A month. I hope one that it doesn’t take that long. And two that I still have hair on my head by the time this over. Why do you think I’m wearing a hat?

It’s funny because we think when we click a simple button to connect something, we are used to things just working. When it’s pitched that it’s so easy to do e-commerce and such, we imagine blissfully selling products in our sleep.

If only it were that easy.

Funny thing is that we hear in the news that there’s all this fake news we can’t seem to control on social media. So it’s an amazing contrast that Facebook makes the time to approve not just an online store, but painstakingly and tediously approves or rejects EVERY single product of the online store item by item.

However, run into a glitch with the approval of a shop or a product? You can’t talk to a human at Facebook. I personally wish there was a way to even pay to talk to a human instead of their platform being run off other financial incentives, like our personal data or simply advertising. They’re just too big and there’s not enough manpower for all the people that want to do business on these social media behemoths.

I was told by Shopify today that he’s had his own personal issues with Facebook. And one of ten times he tried on his personal time, he was able to try to chat online/text with a Facebook person if he got lucky for his personal e-commerce reasons.

For whatever reason, no matter how big Shopify is, they don’t seem to be able to pick up the phone and talk to Facebook either.

Another rep told me: “I have seen multiple instances that are all so different (regarding issues with Facebook and Instagram connectivity and approvals) and hopefully with time we will have more information on our end for what their needs are on their end.”

It is like the Wild West of e-commerce when it comes to connecting Shopify, Facebook, and Instagram. You have to have extreme patience and it leaves some of my entrepreneurial friends “aghast” as it’s pitched as being so easy to do online business.

Really if there’s a glitch, you’re just directed to the policy pages by Facebook and Instagram which if you’re worth your salt, you already read before you tried to connect them. I know I felt like I was walking on eggshells to try to do everything right.

Sometimes, as I say, Shopify reps have their own side business and even they are not immune to the pitfalls of trying to work with Instagram and Facebook, telling me: “I can completely understand the frustration that you were feeling, I went through the same thing with my personal online store.”

For what it’s worth in that case, the rep said, ” I was quite upset. I did write to Instagram on the “Report a problem” section of the app. Then I removed and re-added it and was approved 24 hours later.

We definitely work hard to offer support for any social media integrations, and we are knowledgable on Shopify’s end of the integration, though we are not experts in each of the social media platforms, which is why we always do suggest to reach out to them directly.”

I was also told: “I do understand that it can be very difficult to reach these platforms. Therefore we do our best to help, based on what we can see, though we do see a mix of how Instagram approves shops and it is on a very case to case basis. So there is no way for us to give you exact information.”

When I was not approved, I was told by Shopify: “Unfortunately there is no way we can see for sure on this end or any way to appeal the decision on our end.”

So basically a lot seems to be luck of the draw. There are innumerable ways it seems to screw things up. And I seem to have found plenty of them. Lol.

But they’re honest mistakes and some are completely out of my control because they’re back end issues with Shopify.

I really don’t know if I’ll ever have smooth sailing because I keep running into so many sad stories of multiple people left scratching their head as to what is wrong and being left with crickets for answers.

Technology is great when it works. When it doesn’t forget it.

I mean if you go to a store half the time if there is any wifi interruption, they can’t even sell you what you’re there to buy even if you have cash in hand. Nobody has backup manual old-time registers.

We are at the mercy of computers. I don’t know if this is an improvement sometimes because we are so reliant on tech that the whole world grinds to a halt and it’s major news if cloud services are down or the like. Certainly it’s saved us incomprehensible man hours of work to do everything with tech but sometimes, wouldn’t it be nice to just hear a bell of an old fashioned cash register and sit down with a nice cold glass of lemonade in front of a cafe? Just sayin’.

I don’t make the rules in the world. I just live by them.