This article is a response to and endorsement of an article my business partner, Monica Leonelle, wrote on her Substack. When she released her article we didn’t think there would be such a reaction to it. Since there has been a lot of conversation around the topic, I wanted to share my thoughts on Shopify in my own words. If you are a paid subscriber, then you can search the archives for my post on audience building and personalized marketing both of which complement this article nicely. If you are not a paid member, you can read everything with a 7-day free trial.

I’ll be honest, until and I started teaching our Direct Sales Accelerator last August, I hadn’t thought about Shopify in 3-5 years, despite the fact I’ve been making the majority of my money selling direct since 2012. I didn’t start tracking my book sales until 2016, but here is my direct sales income since then.

When you add in course sales and consulting from books, that number grows, but I have isolated just book sales so you can see I’ve had success over many years selling books directly to readers.

Combined with Monica’s experience selling direct since 2007, we have over 25 years of direct sales experience and have built two successful author businesses without using Shopify.

Now, it’s not that I have anything against Shopify. I have many friends that use it successfully and love it. I have friends that teach it as part of their programs. I have friends that swear by it and am thrilled for them…

…but it doesn’t work for all authors. It certainly doesn’t work for me.

Now, I have built a website on Shopify in my life. I have also used Storenvy, Square, Teachable, WooCommerce, Squarespare, and about a dozen other solutions that I can’t think of right now.

This is a bit shameful to admit, but until we launched the course, I didn’t even have an official web store. I was just forwarding a link to the Backerkit preorder store for my last campaign.

Guess what? It worked just fine.

It wasn’t pretty or integrated or anything like that, but I made more from those Backerkit stores than I ever did with my fancy webstores…

…because the tools are not important if you have the right foundation in place. If you know how to use them, even a cheap solution can hum like a world-class violinist.

Currently, I use Gumroad and it outsells all my other attempts combined. I gladly pay them 10% of sales because if I don’t sell, they don’t make money. When I do sell, they are incentivized to push my books on their storefront.

The difference between my Gumroad store and previous efforts wasn’t in the platform. It was all in the messaging. The messaging is what separates successful and unsuccessful web stores and 99% of authors have the wrong messaging for their web store. It doesn’t matter what fancy webstore you have if your messaging is flawed.

*** Please note that if you are reading this via email, Substack only sent out a partial version and the article will eventually stop without notice. If you want to read the whole 5,000-word article, then go to this webpage.***

Shopify is a great choice for your web store if you want to start with the Rolls Royce of solutions and grow into it. There are several good reasons to use Shopify, but none of them moved the needle for me. Monica already wrote in detail about why it doesn’t work for her, either. 

It has nothing to do with the fact that we are new to direct sales or that we aren’t good at direct sales or that we don’t know what we’re doing. It has everything to do that we have both tried Shopify and don’t like it. There’s nothing wrong with not liking something or deciding it’s not for you.

In fact, one of the biggest problems in self-publishing is that people try to fit everyone into one box. I’ve talked about this problem in depth in a previous post, but here’s the relevant section.

No matter how you feel about Shopify, authors need options. We shouldn’t attempt to vilify people who state their reasons a popular solution doesn’t work for them and telling others why it might not work for them, either. 

Monica and I have worked with a lot of authors and found that no direct sales solution is perfect for every author…just like KU doesn’t work for most authors. Shopify works for some people, though, and we think that’s great.

I cannot overstate that despite making hundreds of thousands of dollars in direct sales, I didn’t ever think about Shopify until a lot of our authors already enrolled in our course started asking questions about it. I thought my demonstrations of a half dozen different solutions would be enough because the foundational principles we teach about how to set up a web store are what’s most important to learn.

I’m a big believer that the foundations we teach are the essential component of what makes Writer MBA special, and that the knowledge students learn can be ported to just about any other program, including Shopify.

Even though I don’t use it, some of our authors use and love Shopify so I owed it to them to check it out. Let me tell you, I hated every minute of my experience with Shopify.

We help our authors the best we can, so I really tried with Shopify, but even the little experience I have figuring out how to make Shopify work was exhausting, especially because the solutions I already use work great with much less hassle. Their platform is way way way too wonky for me, and I don’t like getting caught up in the weeds.

Shopify is all weeds. Before you even get to a functional website you have to chop down so many weeds just to find the halfway serviceable path and even then it will only work if the messaging is right. Web stores work very differently from retailers and most authors treat them the same. If you treat them like retailers, then no solution will work. If you come at them with the correct methodology, though, then almost any solution can work.

That doesn’t mean it will work, but any solution can work. It’s a bit like Ego’s final narration in Ratatouille.

In the same way, not everything will be the perfect direct sales solution for you, but the perfect solution can come from anywhere. Setting up a web store is a deeply personal experience that is different for every single author.

For me, I wanted something I could set up in an hour and allowed me to use a free subdomain. Those are literally the only two reasons I went with Gumroad. If some other solution gave me that first, I would have used them.

I don’t love Gumroad. It was my tenth choice, but it worked for me because it was easy and had the functionality I needed. I made my decision based on the reasons above, but everyone has to make their own choices about what works for them. There are plenty of problems with Gumroad, but it works for me.

If somebody came along and said Gumroad didn’t work for them, I would simply nod and agree that it probably wasn’t a good fit. Every platform has flaws and benefits. The right solution aligns the benefits of their platform with your need at the time and mitigates any negatives. Over time, your needs might change, and then so can your solution. I’m not married to Gumroad and I don’t own a financial stake in it. They are a tool, like a hammer or a screwdriver. If you try to hammer a nail with a screwdriver, you are going to have a bad time.

I only care that it works for me right now. The negatives of Gumroad are either things I don’t care about, ones that exist on many other platforms, or ones I can overlook for the moment. That might change tomorrow, and then I will find another solution because I have no stake in whether anyone uses it except me.

Before finding Gumroad, I thought I would have to dump hundreds of dollars and dozens of hours into solution which kept me locked up and unable to make a decision for years. More than decision fatigue, setting up a web store filled me with decision paralysis.

Finding Gumroad was the first time I thought “I can do this”, and that is the most important part of this whole equation. If a solution is so complicated, expensive, or time consuming that it prevents you from moving forward, it probably isn’t right for you.

The reason Monica and I even started working on the Author Ecosystem in the first place was because we saw people using sales and marketing systems that didn’t work for them. We saw them failing because people told them everyone should do it one way, and they listened over and over again without getting anywhere. Before they knew it years passed and they had very little to show for it.

If you are happy with Shopify, that’s awesome and I’m so psyched for you. However, if you are struggling to figure it out, or you don’t think it’s worth the cost…then maybe something I say below will resonate with you.

Either way, just know there are lots of systems and you can find one that works for your unique set of circumstances.

So, why don’t I use Shopify? Here are my three main reasons.

1. My business doesn’t rely on a web store to make direct sales

The #1 most important reason that Shopify doesn’t work for me is that I don’t rely on a web store to do the bulk of my selling. Instead, I rely on landing pages with special offers that convert exponentially better than sending people to my web store.

When somebody signs up for my list, I have a very complex system of automations that sends subscribers through a series of emails and gives them one-time special offers. Since I implemented these landing pages like we teach in the Direct Sales Accelerator, I make 10x more with them than I ever did with my web store alone.

Additionally, I present my existing audience with different offers throughout the year, either through Kickstarter or my own website, each once tailored specifically to delight them in new and interesting ways. Yes, I have a web store, but these landing pages work better for my business than anything else ever has by a wide margin. Here’s my best converting one.

I do 95% of my selling through email sequences and automation, which are critical to making any of this work. I have been building mailing lists for authors since 2016 and built my own list up to 75,000 readers at one point before trimming it down to 20,000 hyper-engaged readers.

Additionally, I run viral builders for Booksweeps after years doing them myself and wrote a huge article on the subject for Nick Stephenson’s blog, so if there’s one thing I know in this business, it’s mailing lists.

I know mailing lists even better than I know Kickstarter, and if you’re reading this article it’s likely either though our wildly successful book, Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter, or wildly successful Kickstarter Accelerator course, or from backing one of my Kickstarters. I’m known in several publishing circles as the Kickstarter guy, so if I say I know mailing lists even better than Kickstarter, hopefully it carries some weight.  

One of the worst things an author can offer a new subscriber to their mailing list, or any new reader that enters their ecosystem, is too many options. If you offer too many options, then buyers get overwhelmed and flee instead of making a choice to purchase.

Overwhelm is the exact reason I don’t focus on web stores. They are great for existing readers well versed in your ecosystem, but most authors are focused on getting new readers, and a web store gives potential reader too many options to consider.

With the landing pages I built for my business, I create one killer offer per series that is hyper focused on my perfect readers. Remember how we talked about my decision paralysis when it came to building a web store, well your readers deal with the same thing, and it’s probably costing authors lots of sales.

However, there is no decision paralysis if you provide them one killer offer. Either they take that offer or they don’t. Additionally, adding things like countdown timers allows me to create a limited time offer which helps close even more sales.

This doesn’t mean the web store doesn’t have value. Quite the opposite. I get a lot of sales on my web store from people who didn’t take the original offer and now want to buy from me after getting to know my work, but sending traffic to a web store generally doesn’t convert well for most authors because readers get overwhelmed with choice. Additionally, I use web stores to offer exclusive books readers can’t get anywhere else, and bundles they can only find on my web store. Instead of mimicking retailers, I use my web store to do something wholly different than they can find elsewhere so I’m never in competition with Amazon for sales.

When we teach people to use landing pages as their first point of contact with readers, students often see their direct sales drastically improve within one offer. We’ve had students who matched their Amazon sales the first month they implemented our system.  

Do you know the worst part about Shopify? Their landing pages.

I don’t like them at all, and I haven’t found any that I like more than the solution I already use without having to pay for them.

What do I use? A combination of Themify ($297 for lifetime access), Optimize Press ($197/yr), and Elementor (free when you use it as a plugin). In each case, their landing pages are killer without paying an additional cost on top of the cost to host on their platform.

While I’m sure Klaviyo is an amazing email platform, I am doing just fine with Flodesk ($38/mo), Substack (10% of sales), and Convertkit.

I will be the first to admit I’ve cobbled together a Frankenstein system over the years, and maybe if I was starting from scratch I would have a different opinion. If Monica wasn’t already using Elementor, or I wasn’t already using Optimize Press, or I hadn’t just invested in Themify, then maybe I would have a different opinion on Shopify…

…but as is, I had these systems laying around and we used them last year to double my previous sales without touching Shopify once, and they all make better landing pages than Shopify right out of the gate without a ton of tedious customizations.

On top of that, I pay Bluehost ($150/yr) to host 10 websites, including my author website, Writer MBA, Action Fantasy Book Club, and others. My hosting fee is inclusive of all those websites, and I still have some left to spare for upcoming projects.

The systems I use can be implemented quickly with little guidance, compared to Shopify which seems to create two questions for every one it answers. It’s very techy, but despite the fact I own a conference called The Future of Publishing and work extensively with tech, I am not techy.

I want things that work, and Shopify was not the right solution for me. More importantly, I want to be able to share a solution with an author and have it work for them without extensive research…and in that case Shopify isn’t the right solution to share with them, either.

If you like Shopify, if it’s working for you, and if you’re making money, then more power to you. However, if you’re just trying it because everyone else is using it and it’s making your head ache, then there are lots of other possible solutions that might work for you. 

So much of this business is people thinking that some magic tool with come along to fix their author business, but it’s almost never a tool. It’s almost always the foundational concepts of sales and marketing that cause authors issues.

Since i don’t rely on a web store to drive revenue for my business, I’m not willing to invest hundreds or thousands into a solution that doesn’t generate a significant percentage of my business.

2. Everything is an add-on

I will admit that I have found a lot of cool plugins on Shopify, and each of them cost additional money to use them on my website. By the time I was done building out my website, it would have cost me hundreds more a month to use Shopify on top of what I was already paying.

When your web store isn’t raking in money, paying for additional plugins is even more costly and time consuming. Plus, the right plugins were a pain to find. Instead of working out of the box I had to go searching for hours to find something that worked for what I wanted to do. It’s not even the money as much as just constantly having to search for a thing that worked for me.

3. Direct sales doesn’t have to be complicated to be worth it

Yes, Tesla uses Shopify. Lots of big stores use Shopify. It is a platform built to scale into the billions of dollars. I’m never going to get to that level nor do I want to get there.

I am not Tesla. I am an author. Even with Writer MBA scaling like crazy, Shopify was overkill. For me, it was like bringing a rocket launcher to a knife fight. It was so much overkill it actually paralyzed me from starting my webstore.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who saw Shopify’s customizations and made a big nope to ever moving forward on anything related to a web store. I’m an expert on these types of things and Shopify scared me away. What do you think it would do the average author who isn’t steeped in tech every day? Meanwhile, the day I found Gumroad I was already set up and making money.

I think even successful Shopify stores will admit that it’s too much to figure out before you are successful. Many of them didn’t even start their Shopify until they were already making tens of thousands every month…

…and that’s mainly what I think as well. Shopify is arguably the most comprehensible solution on the market, but I don’t have the time or energy to make it work at peak efficiency, which is where Shopify shines.

I’m not personally willing to spend the time and money to make Shopify worth it, especially when I’ve been so successful with direct sales without it.

If you are, that’s awesome. I’m not in that camp, and I’ve been doing direct sales successfully for a long time.

One more thing I want to point out is that web store is only one type of direct sales, but I’ve seen many, many authors equating web stores with the totality of direct sales, and that is simply not the case. It’s a piece of the pie for sure, but not the whole thing by any stretch of the imagination.

Nowhere is that definition, or any definition I’ve ever read, are web stores cited as the only type of legitimate direct sales. Web stores can be an important part of direct sales, but so could crowdfunding, setting up a booth at conventions, memberships, or a couple thousand other ways to set up your business.

In fact, while we do cover web stores in the Direct Sales Accelerator, it is only one part of a direct sales ecosystem. We spend much more time talking about writing landing pages and messaging than setting up a web store because it’s a fractional part of the direct sales experience.

Many authors who struggle with direct sales are really only struggling with making a web store work for them when they should be spending time on building out a different piece of their direct sales ecosystem.

In our course, we don’t focus on any one component of direct sales. Instead, we show you how to integrate a direct sales business into your existing workflow to expand your current offerings. Web stores will certainly be a component of that, but they are likely not the most important part, and might not even be in your personal top five.

By focusing so much attention on web stores like Shopify, we are doing a disservice to the entire direct sales ecosystem and authors at large. For my business, web stores are easily the least important part of the direct sales process.

That’s not to say other people don’t crush it with web stores, but they are insignificant to my overall business, despite the fact I have made a lot of money with direct sales in my career.

So, let’s get down to brass tacks. Why don’t I recommend it for most authors? Because it’s too much car for too much money and the majority of author would be better off focusing on setting up direct sales landing page offers and driving traffic to them instead of setting up a complex web store that burdens them with a high monthly premium.

If you’re having problems with your business, this is what I have found generally works to fix it, usually in this order.  

1. Getting their book packaging up to snuff. Often authors are driving readers to janky looking books that only a family member could love.

2. Finding their ideal customer. Most authors have no idea who reads their book, how to find those readers, or why they are excited to read their work.

3. Fixing their messaging so it conveys why people love their work in a simple concise way. You have ten words to get somebody hooked on your book, and then a few hundred more to get somebody committed to read more. Authors are very good at conveying what happens like a book report, but they are often terrible at getting people excited enough to buy it.

4. Cleaning up their email list and setting up great automations. Most authors either don’t have a mailing list, have a small list that isn’t big enough to support their businesses, or have lists filled with fluff readers that don’t actually convert to sales. Then, even if they have a lot of engaged readers, they treat new additions to their list like their long term subscribers.

5. Setting up a direct sales offer. Authors don’t understand how to use direct sales to offer unique and exciting offers to their readers. They have no clue how to craft an experience that will get people off the fence to pick up your books.

6. Driving traffic to their work profitably. Once you have a killer offer, then it’s about finding a price point where you can profitably drive cold traffic to it through marketing and advertising.

7. Building out your ecosystem. Once you have a profitable offer, then you need to integrate it into your ecosystem and then find ways to build upon it with each subsequent offer.

8. Finding new ways to collect customers directly on a continuous basis. Once you have the rest going, then it’s about finding new platforms and ways to engage/reengage readers.

I have found the most effective way to get from #1 to #8 is with highly targeted landing page offers. Can those direct sales offers be made in Shopify? Sure. However, they can just as easily be made somewhere that doesn’t cost as much and is more user-friendly.

Shopify feels very much like the type of thing a desert would love because it’s all about analyzing trends and optimizing a platform so it performs at peak efficiency. As a tundra, I don’t care about any of that stuff. I don’t need platforms to be at peak performance for them to work.

If you’re a forest, you’ll probably feel similar to me about the wonkiness of Shopify and an aquatic will be most likely to scale into a huge brand since they come at their universes from a hundred different directions.

Shopify probably works best for deserts and highly tech-centric grasslands. I know that for myself, too many bells and whistles makes me want to run for the hills.

Everyone wants to find the one platform that shoots unlimited money out of it like a cannon whenever we pull the trigger, but at the end of the day every platform has six, seven, and eight figure authors on it. Monica and I made six figures last year on Teachable, another six figures on Kickstarter, and thousands more selling direct at conventions, on our web store, through memberships, and through other means.

If you love Shopify, that’s awesome. My problem comes from saying Shopify is the be-all end-all of selling direct, or when you condemn people who have a different opinion than you and lash out like a wounded animal when somebody says the platform doesn’t work for them.

Shopify doesn’t work for me, and it doesn’t work for Monica. Whether you believe we are incompetent or not, which I assure you we are not, those are incontrovertible facts. We both tried it and both found it wasn’t for us. Lots of people have told me that it’s easier than I make it out to be, but if that is true then it shouldn’t be so hard to find out how to make it easy.

We are both six-figure authors who have sold direct to authors before selling direct to authors was the cool thing to teach.

I was roundly mocked for daring to suggest that authors should move away from Amazon and set up their own web stores back in the day. I have been insulted and berated to my face for telling people to use Kickstarter back in 2015, and been the butt of many jokes for suggesting that retailers would eventually lose their effectiveness.

I have tried everything when it comes to direct sales and I can say unequivocally that it’s not the platform that makes sales…it’s the process.

Whatever you choose, just know that you do not need to spend tons of money to make direct sales work. You do not need a PHD in computer programming to build a successful web store. You don’t need to obsess about data to make this business work for you.

Shopify is not good for most authors because it’s difficult to master and hard to use for the average author. I know direct sales works without Shopify because I done it and taught others to do it.

Yes, Shopify can work, but it’s exhausting work for me. It doesn’t fill me up or help me advance my career in a meaningful way. So, I have instead decided on the things that do work for me.

If you liked this article, make sure to check out Monica Leonelle's Shopify post on her Substack. If you are a paid subscriber, then you can search the archives for my post on audience building and personalized marketing both of which complement this article nicely. If you are not a paid member, you can read everything with a 7-day free trial.