Reflection

What was the biggest challenge you faced in creating your store?

Overall I had fun building my store. But I also had two different types of challenge. One was coming up with the right content for my store. The other one was learning how to use Shopify platform because there are lots of different features and options available, which can be confusing when you are just staring. I would say towards the end I got better in both :). 

What worked really well when using our platform?

I could find lots of document which would guid me step by step towards what I needed to do. 

What could be improved when using our platform?

When I was customizing the theme I had to make sure I am saving my changes. I did lose my changes few times because I forgot. I think that happened to me because lots of different platforms that I use, such as Figma and Google Doc, does save my work automatically. 

Also the way I could access some of the features was not intuitive for me. For example when I was trying to add a page to write this, I was expecting to be able to do that within the theme customization area. So it took me a while to realize that I need to look for it under online store. 

How did this experience help you build empathy for our merchants?

I consider myself a tech savvy person but I still had to spend time and figure out what to do and where to look for things. I can imagine this could be very overwhelming for people that are not super tech savvy or don't have enough time to read through all the guides. 

What is your biggest takeaway from this experience?

I biggest takeaway is that as an entrepreneur there are many different things that you need to prepare and do, such as the product that you are going to sell as well as content for your website, ads, social media, etc. All of these tasks will take time and you need to gain/have different types of skills. So you need all the help that you can get in order to succeed. So if at Shopify we can make it easier for our merchants to complete at least some of these tasks that would be awesome!