Shopify operations

Shopify: the store the seller actually owns

Amazon rents you a shelf under strict rules; Shopify is the seller's own building. That means more freedom and more surface area for a VA to run: orders, refunds, product pages, apps, email flows, and light theme work. Most growing brands run both — Amazon for volume, Shopify for margin and the customer relationship — and the VA who moves comfortably between the two covers the whole market.

Your home base is the Shopify admin: Orders, Products, Customers, Analytics, Marketing, Discounts, and Online Store (where themes live). Spend one hour clicking through a dev store and the map is yours — Shopify is genuinely the friendliest admin in e-commerce.

Orders and refunds: the daily bread

An order's life: placed → paid → fulfilled (tracking attached) → delivered. Your dailies: process unfulfilled orders (or verify the 3PL is picking them up), chase payment-pending anomalies, and handle the exceptions — address changes ("my order shipped to my old apartment"), cancellations, and refunds. On refunds, know the difference: a full refund reverses everything; a partial refund (say, 20% for a scuffed box the customer keeps) often saves the sale and the review. Check the restock box only if the item actually returns to sellable inventory — phantom restocks are how inventory counts rot.

Product pages and apps

Product page work mirrors lesson 2's listing logic with more freedom: benefit-led titles and descriptions, correct variants (size/color each with its own SKU, price, inventory), alt text on every image (accessibility + SEO), and clean collections so navigation makes sense. Duplicate an existing product as your template — consistency beats creativity in catalog work.

On apps, be the voice of restraint. Every app adds monthly cost and page-load weight. The core stack most stores need: a reviews app (Judge.me or Loox), email (Klaviyo), and maybe a bundle/upsell app. When the seller wants app #14, your job is to ask what it does that apps 1-13 don't — and to check its uninstall reviews first.

Theme edits without breaking things

You will be asked to "just change the banner" or "move the reviews section up." The customizer (Online Store → Customize) handles most of this with zero code — sections, blocks, colors, text. The professional ritual for anything beyond it:

Customer flows you switch on

Shopify's built-in abandoned checkout email is free revenue recovery — confirm it's on, then extend it into a proper 3-email sequence in Klaviyo (the lesson 2 flow logic from the Digital Marketing course applies verbatim: ~1 hour reminder, ~24 hour objection-handler with reviews, ~72 hour final nudge). Add order-confirmation and shipping-notification checks to your weekly QA: place a $1 test order monthly and watch every email arrive. Broken transactional emails generate support tickets that look like your fault.

Do this now

Twenty-five minutes. Write two SOPs in a doc titled Shopify Ops SOPs — [your name]. SOP 1, "Safe theme change": the four-step ritual above in your own words, as a checklist you could hand a junior. SOP 2, "Refund decision": a customer emails that their item arrived damaged with a photo — write the decision tree (verify order → assess damage → offer partial vs full per policy → process with/without restock → log it) and the exact customer reply you'd send at each branch.

Bonus: sign up for a free Shopify dev/trial store, add two dummy products with variants, and run one test order end to end. "I've processed orders and edited themes in Shopify" becomes literally true this afternoon — and these SOPs join your lesson 6 portfolio.