Adding Products, Analytics, Custom Reports & Sales

When products are created with cost per item, then the financial reports will calculate various reports using this information. Please note that these reports DO NOT include the banking fees.

Shopify has a wide array of methods to see orders, sales and financial information. It is of course only as good as the data provided so when setting up products ensure that you include selling price, cost of item, taxes (for OCSB SEP - no taxes are required) as shown. 

Adding Digital Products

When adding digital products like e-books or digital files, you should consider adding the Shopify free app called Digital Downloads... see this link and/or this video.

Tips: 

Local pickup setup & Enabling cart note box: 

Local pickup at your school has been the overwhelming preferred method of delivery of products. 

It is strongly advised that you enable the Note box field within the shopping cart (Themes> Customize> Theme settings> Cart> tick box for the "Enable cart note") to allow the buyer to enter the name of a student at the school who can bring the purchased products home. 

You also have the option of adding instructions by editing the Note Label as shown.

Customer instructions or custom text:

The Notes box can also be added if you want the customer to add any specific information to their order - for example any custom text to be printed on a laser etched ornament.

To create your own message modify the Note Label as follows. Go to Themes> click the "..." beside the Customize> Edit Languages> type "Note" in Filter items section Cart> type your custom message in Note box

Add Custom Message to Order Status Page

Go to Settings>Checkout>scroll to end and enter text or hypertext into Order status page text box.

NOTE: To simplify HTML coding, simply create a new page, create custom message with inserted images using the page tools, then click “convert to HTML” button, copy the contents and paste into Order status text box.

Image uploads from Google Chromebooks

Shopify allows you to upload media files based on their URL so the method to use is to find the image on the internet you want to use then copy& paste the image address from the paste buffer:

Copy image address (copy to paste buffer)>>Add media from URL (on Shopify)>>Add image>>Paste image URL (copies image address from paste buffer) 

Sold Out Settings:

Once you have sold out - or want to shut down sales on Shopify, you have several options.  I find that the cleanest method is to continue to show your products - but show them as “Sold Out”.  This can be easily accomplished by leaving the product in “active” state, setting the available inventory to 0 and making sure the “Continue selling when out of stock” is not active for the specific product you want to stop selling.

Local pickup to a school of the buyer’s choice: 

You might also want to consider adding multiple locations around the city for local pickup the customer can select from.  The OCSB does have regular courier between schools and we can arrange to use this courier to have a local pickup to any of up to 20 other OCSB schools.  You can enable this by adding the other school locations (up to 20) and enabling local pickup. Configure this via the Settings>Locations.

You of course can enable shipping to the purchaser’s home address, but this is expensive and involves your students in the packaging and delivery to Canada Post, Fed Ex or other. If you do not wish to use shipping (because you are instead using local pickup), then please make sure to turn off shipping via Settings>Shipping and delivery.

You might also consider using Trexity (it is an app within Shopify) for home delivery.

SchoolCashOnline Payments:

I don't advise using SchoolCashOnline, however, if you want to enable SchoolCashOnline payment types (or other manual payment methods like e-transfer or COD) then here is how I'd suggest they be configured.  

1) create a new manual payment method called SchoolCashOnline with information as shown (student's name associated with the SchoolCashOnline will need to be manually debited with the amount of the purchase - who does this??)

2) Enable Note field to Shopping Cart with instructions to add the student's name if selecting SchoolCashOnline

3) SEP Shopify administrator will need to inform whoever adds the debit to the SchoolCashOnline to make an entry into the students account.

This method has the burden that someone will need to enter the purchases into the SchoolCashOnline student account - and the school selling then needs to figure out how to transfer that money to the charity...and track down any unpaid purchases - so it’s pretty messy. There are also still e-commerce fees for any credit card or PayPal type payments - these are unavoidable with SchoolCashOnline and Shopify.

Cash On Delivery (COD) or Bank Deposit (ie Interac e-transfer) are probably better solutions to avoid the banking fees and both or either can also be setup as manual payment options, however, once again these payments will need some kind of manual tracking for purchases since they occur outside of Shopify.