Falk Jewelry Designs on Shopify

Start here

The shop is built. It is behind a password for now, so nobody can reach it yet, and falkjewelrydesigns.com still shows your Squarespace site. That stays true until the day you decide to switch it.

Your first week

The rest of this page is a reference. This is the order to do things in, and it is shorter than it looks: most of it is reading a screen once so that you know it exists.

1. Sign in and look around. Products, Orders, Settings. Do not change anything. The map.
2. Put the two apps on your phone. Two minutes, one camera. The codes.
3. Open one product and change something small. A word in a description. Save it, look at it on the shop. That is the whole loop, and once you have done it once the rest is the same loop. How.
4. Buy something from yourself. The test gateway is on, so it costs nothing and proves everything. Card number 1. Then cancel the order. How.
5. Read the nine decisions and answer the three about returns. They are the only things genuinely blocking the shop. The list.
6. Walk through Settings once, top to bottom. What to look at.
7. Brand the checkout. Ten minutes, four colours, two typefaces. How.
8. Export your email list from Squarespace. Before anything else happens to that account. Why this one is urgent.

Everything above has a checkbox in its own section, so tick it there and the counter in the margin moves. There is deliberately no second set of boxes here: one list to keep, not two.

Shopify vs Squarespace

One idea explains most of the difference. In Squarespace, the page is the thing: you lay out a page and type into it. In Shopify, the product is the thing, and the theme is a set of rules for displaying it.

You will not lay out a product page. You will fill in a product, and it appears correctly everywhere at once: in its collection, in search, in the cart, on the receipt, in the shop's own reports. Change the price in one place and it is changed everywhere.

A price is in the product, not the theme. A heading above a row of necklaces is in the theme, not the product. When something will not change where you are looking, you are almost always in the wrong drawer.

Where everything lives

Your admin is at admin.shopify.com. Seven places, and you will use three of them.

All of it is on your phone too. Two apps to install.

The two themes, and where changes happen

Under Online Store › Themes you will see two. Shopify does not require this. Max set it up so there is always somewhere to try something before anyone else sees it.

Moving a change from Staging to Main

When you are happy with something on Staging, tell Claude or ChatGPT “merge to main”. That is the whole instruction. Everything on Staging moves across to the live shop, and it gets checked afterwards that it really arrived.

There is a GitHub project behind the theme that keeps the two in step. It is hidden from you on purpose for now, not to gatekeep it: Max will hand it over whenever you want it.

Shopify on themes and managing them.

On your phone

Two apps, both free, both worth having before you go live. Point your camera at a code.

Editing a piece

Products, click one. Every field explained, top to bottom.

1. Title is the name shown everywhere. Changing it does not change the web address, which is good: old links keep working.
2. Description is your copy. The little toolbar does bold, italics, lists and links. Keep it in your voice, the way you already write.
3. Media is the photographs. Drag to reorder; the first one is the one people see in the grid. Shopify's guide.
4. Pricing. "Compare at price" is what puts a struck-through original next to a sale price. Leave it empty otherwise.
5. Inventory. Most of your pieces are untracked, which means made to order and always buyable. If you ever want a one-off to sell once and stop, tick "Track quantity" and set it to 1. More.
6. Variants, on the pieces that have them. Drop Earrings is one piece in eight stones: one product, eight variants, each with its own price and photograph. Eight near-identical products would have been the other way to do it, and a worse one. More.
7. Metafields, at the very bottom. This is the part that is specific to your shop, so it has its own section below.
8. Status, top right. Active means it can be seen. Draft hides it while you work. Archived is for pieces you are done with; it keeps the record without showing it.

Shopify on adding and updating products.

Material, stone and theme

Scroll to the bottom of any product and you will find three extra fields: Material, Stone and Theme. Shopify calls these metafields, which just means fields somebody added rather than ones Shopify ships with. They are how a shopper will one day narrow 75 pieces down to the four they want. Every piece is either filled in from something you wrote, or deliberately blank.

Each field offers a fixed list to pick from, so nobody ends up with "gold fill", "Gold Fill" and "14k gf" as three different things. You can add a value to that list yourself: Settings › Custom data › Products, open the field, and add it to the accepted list. Or just ask ChatGPT to add it, which is faster once it is connected.

These are not switched on as filters on the storefront yet. That is one setting in the Search & Discovery app and it is on the list. How filters work.

Photographs, and what would help most

The photography is the single biggest lever left. Everything else on the site is finished; the pictures are what will decide whether it feels like a shop worth buying from.

Shopify on product media.

Words

Your writing is the best thing about the old site. It is specific, it is warm, and it says where a shell came from. That is not a common thing and it is worth spending time on.

Decisions still open

These are yours because they are claims about your business, and guessing at them would put words in your mouth. None takes more than a minute to answer.

Your plan

Right now this is a transfer store: a shop built for someone else to take over. It costs nothing while it sits like this, and it cannot take money. The moment it is handed to you, you pick a plan.

1. Set your billing country to a cheaper dollar-billed one. Brazil is the usual choice.
2. Start the Basic plan there, at that price.
3. Set the billing country back to the United States. You were in dollars the whole way, so the contract keeps the price you signed up at.

Look at the number Shopify actually shows you before you subscribe rather than taking this on trust. It is a workaround rather than a policy, so Shopify could close it, and if the currency itself ever changes the price is re-rated. Worth ten minutes; not worth worrying about if it does not work.

Settings

Go through the whole list once, in one sitting, before the shop goes live. Most of it is already right and the point is that you have seen it, so that later you know where things are. Open Settings.

After that you will be back in here every so often. Not weekly, but more than once: a shipping rate to change, a new policy line, a bank detail, a notification email to reword. It is the drawer you visit least and need most when you do.

Everything not on this list can stay as it comes. Shopify's defaults are sensible, and most of the screens in here exist for shops much larger than yours. If a setting means nothing to you, that is usually a good sign it is not for you.

Shopify's own setup checklist covers the same ground in their words.

The test gateway, and why it matters twice

A test payment gateway is switched on for you, which means you can walk through your own checkout right now and see exactly what a customer sees, without a card and without a charge.

Checkout design

The checkout is the one part of the shop that is not the theme. Shopify runs it, which is why it is fast and trusted, and why it currently looks like Shopify rather than like you. You cannot rebuild it, but you can brand it, and it takes about ten minutes.

Shopify on customizing checkout.

Faire

Faire is the wholesale side: shops browse there and order from you at wholesale prices, the way kloTH and Crush already do. The app is installed on your store but not set up, so it is doing nothing yet.

You have said Faire is a large part of why you wanted Shopify, so this is not a decision to make, it is a thing to finish. Thirty-six of your pieces already carry a wholesale tag from the old site, which is the tedious part done.

And the other one worth trying

Shopify Collective does a similar job from inside Shopify: other Shopify shops list your pieces and sell them, and the order comes to you to make and post. No separate account, no separate catalogue, and it costs nothing to be listed.

The two reach different buyers, so the sensible thing is to run both for a season and keep whichever brings orders. You are the supplier in Collective's language, not the retailer. How the supplier side works.

Open either from Apps in your admin. Shopify on apps generally.

Analytics and Search Console

Shopify's own Analytics already tells you what sold, what people looked at and what they searched for in your shop. That is enough for most days. Two Google tools sit alongside it and answer a different question: how people found you in the first place.

Both get set up for you. Nothing to do here except know they exist and that neither will show anything useful until the shop is live and Google has had a few weeks to look at it.

Shopify on reports and analytics and on store preferences, which is where a Google verification tag goes.

Running the shop from ChatGPT

You already pay for ChatGPT. Shopify has an official connector, so you can ask it to look something up or change something in your shop without opening the admin.

It is more capable than it sounds. It reads and it writes: it can create a whole product from a photograph and a paragraph you dictate, generate an image for one that needs another angle, rewrite a description, fix twenty prices at once, add a value to one of your metafield lists, build a collection, pull a sales report, and change the theme.

Going live

In this order, and none of it is a surprise on the day.

1. Max hands the store over. His job, not yours. It becomes your login, your billing, your name on the account.
2. You choose a plan. Basic. A transfer store cannot take money until somebody subscribes, and only you can, because it is your card. Plan details.
3. Turn off the test gateway and switch on Shopify Payments properly. Where.
4. Optionally, one real order with a real card. The test gateway has already proved the checkout, the emails and the receipts, so this is belt and braces rather than the moment of truth it used to be. It does prove one last thing the test cannot: that the money actually reaches your bank.
5. Lift the password so the shop is reachable.
6. Point the domain at Shopify. The step below, in detail.
7. Watch for a day. Every old Squarespace address redirects to its new home, and we check the ones that matter actually land.
8. Then, and only then, close Squarespace.

The domain

Do this Shopify's way, not this page's way. Open Settings › Domains and click Connect existing domain. Shopify asks for falkjewelrydesigns.com and then tells you exactly what to change, checks it for you, and says when it has worked. Follow that, and use what is below only if you get stuck or want to know in advance what you are agreeing to. Shopify's guide.

What it will ask you to do

Your domain is registered at GoDaddy, and GoDaddy also answers for it: the name servers are ns07 and ns08.domaincontrol.com, which are GoDaddy's own. Right now it points at Squarespace's servers.

That is the easy version. Everything happens in one place, at GoDaddy, and you never touch Squarespace at all. Three records change.

Then back in Shopify to connect it. Up to 48 hours to settle, though it is usually minutes.

Shopify's exact instructions: connecting a third-party domain manually, and domains generally.

Later, deliberately

Real work, but none of it belongs before launch, and doing it now would slow down the things that matter.

• Local search. "Handmade jewelry Hingham", "jewelry South Shore", and the like. There is a real opportunity there and it needs proper keyword work rather than guessing. Deliberately not started.
• Instagram on the site. Your on-body photography is on Instagram and not on the shop. Worth connecting once the photographs above exist.
• Discount codes. Shopify does them well and you can make one in a minute. Worth saying plainly though: discounting is a poor fit for one-of-a-kind work, because a piece that was $185 last week is worth $185 this week. If you want one, make it for a show or for the list rather than a sale banner on the shop. How they work.

Your email list, which you already have

You have been collecting addresses on Squarespace, and they do not come across with the products. They have to be exported from there and imported here, and they are worth more than anything else on this page: they are people who already said yes once.

Start with Messaging. Moving to Klaviyo later is easy; paying for it for a year first is just paying for it for a year. Shopify on marketing.

Shopify on search engine optimisation and on where keywords go.

Learning Shopify

You do not need a course to run this shop. But if you want to go from following instructions to knowing why, these are the four worth your time, in the order I would use them.

There is also Shopify's blog and a YouTube channel. Both are aimed at people starting a shop rather than running one, so they are further down the list than they look.