Sell From Your Own Shop and Keep the Whole Price

There is a moment at the end of every gig, every workshop, every market stall, where somebody asks the best question you will hear all day: "where can I buy that?"

And a lot of small businesses answer it badly. They point at an Etsy shop. They say "message me on Instagram and I'll sort you out." They take a name on a piece of paper. Every one of those answers works some of the time, and every one of them loses the sale the rest of the time, because the person asking is at their most willing right now and slightly less willing every hour after that.

The cut is not the expensive part

Most people think about selling on a marketplace as a fee problem. It takes a slice of every sale, and the slice is annoying, and that is where the thinking stops.

The fee is the cheap part. The expensive part is that the person who bought from you is not your customer. They are the marketplace's customer, who happened to buy your thing. You do not get their email. You cannot email them when the new batch lands. You cannot see that they have bought from you four times and treat them like somebody who has bought from you four times.

You spent years building an audience, and at the exact moment somebody in that audience puts their hand in their pocket, you hand the relationship to a website you do not own. Then you rent it back every time you want to reach them.

Your shop, your Stripe, your buyer

The Store in ClientBranch is a hosted shop for everything in your Products catalogue. Shoppers add to a cart and pay by card, exactly as they would anywhere else. Two things are different, and they are the two that matter.

The money goes straight to your own connected Stripe account. Not into a balance somebody else holds and pays out on their schedule, after their cut. Your account, your payout, the whole price.

And every buyer is saved to your Contacts automatically at checkout, with the purchase on their timeline. Click the customer name on any order and you are looking at a real contact record. Which means the hundred people who bought from you this year are a list you can email about the new thing, rather than a hundred rows in somebody else's dashboard.

Turning it on takes about ten minutes

There are four steps and none of them are hard.

First, connect Stripe under Payments, because that is what lets you take card payments at all. If you have already taken a deposit on a booking, this is done.

Second, go to Payments, then Products, and tick Show in my online store on each thing you want to sell. This is deliberate. Turning the store on does not push your whole catalogue live, so the private packages and the one off prices you quoted somebody last year stay where they are. Only what you tick shows up. Add a photo to each one while you are there, because a shop with no pictures does not sell.

Third, open Sites, then Store. Give it a name and a link, pick your currency, turn it on, save.

Fourth, hit View store and look at it. That is your shop, live on the internet.

Make it look like a shop rather than a list

A bare product grid on a white page reads as a spreadsheet, and people do not get their card out for a spreadsheet. The Design card gives you the frame around the products.

Add a hero image and you get a full width banner behind your headline, which is the single biggest difference between looking like a business and looking like a test page. Use a photo of the actual thing, or of you doing the thing.

Add header links across the top so a shopper can get back to your website, or over to your booking page. Somebody who came to buy a t-shirt and leaves having booked a session is a much better outcome than a t-shirt.

Add footer text and links for the bottom of every page. Refund terms, contact, socials. Every field is optional, and an empty field simply does not appear, so you are never fighting to remove something you did not want.

Collections, for when a list gets long

Once you are past about eight products, one flat list stops working. Collections group products into named sections: Apparel, Sessions, Gift cards, whatever your shop is made of.

Create the collection, then file each product into one from the dropdown next to it. The storefront renders each collection as its own titled section, in the order you created them, and anything you have not filed lists first with no title above it. That last detail is useful: leave your best seller uncollected and it sits at the top of the shop.

Deleting a collection never deletes the products in it. They go back to being uncollected. So you can reorganize the shop for Christmas and take it apart in January without touching a single product.

Packages, so people buy the bigger thing

Packages are bundles you build in Products, and they sell on the store like any other item. The storefront lists everything the package includes, so a buyer sees the whole value in one block rather than doing arithmetic across three separate products.

This is the quiet money in most small businesses. Somebody who was going to buy one session will often buy a block of four if the block is sitting there priced and explained. They will almost never assemble that block themselves.

What happens after somebody buys

Every paid order lands under Sites, then Store, with the customer, the items and the total. Tick Fulfilled once you have shipped or handed it over, so you always know what is outstanding.

Selling physical things? Turn on collect a shipping address at checkout and the address comes in with the order, rather than in a follow up email you have to remember to send.

The buyer gets an order confirmation automatically, and you get a heads up on every sale. Orders where somebody started checkout and never paid can be cleared out, and so can canceled ones. Paid and refunded orders cannot be deleted, because those are financial records and you will want them at the end of the year.

Then put the link everywhere

A shop nobody can find sells nothing, and this is the part people skip.

Put it in your Instagram bio. Link it from the menu of your website. Put it in your email signature. Print a QR code that opens it and stand it on the merch table, so the answer to "where can I buy that" is you pointing at a thing on the table instead of a conversation about Instagram handles.

Because that is what this is for. Not to compete with Amazon. To make sure that when somebody in front of you wants to give you money, the distance between that feeling and the money arriving in your account is one tap, and the person on the other end of it becomes somebody you can talk to again.

Start your free trial of ClientBranch and have your shop open before the end of the day.