How Direct Sidekick Shops Work

Direct Sidekick Shops allow you to sell your on-hand inventory OR collect customer pre-orders.

In addition to their standard inventory shop, some of our customers use shops to run special Christmas in July sales, black Friday sales, and bridal/baby registries.

Once you share your shop link, your customers can add items to their cart and checkout on their own.

Once your customers checkout, you will receive an email showing who shopped, what they purchased, if they are interested in booking a party and what their payment method was.

After that, you can coordinate local pickup or ship their order to them.

Bonus: you can use Direct Sidekick Messages to schedule drip email and task campaigns to automatically send to your customers.

How to set up your first shop

First, you need products in Direct Sidekick to add them to your shop.

There are a few ways to enter your product list into Direct Sidekick.

• If a team member or Direct Sidekick has a product list for your company, you can copy the full list by clicking on the Share URL they share with you. Or, if you have a team, you can share your list with them with the click of a button!
• You can use the Product List file importer
• if you have a product list in a CSV file.
• Lastly, you can click the + New Product button from your product list and enter your items one by one.

Bonus: with any of the above methods, you can send your product list to Square by clicking on the “Sync with Square” or “Add as new items in Square” checkbox when adding your items.

Next, set up your shop.

You can set up your shop after you have products in your product list.

Click on Shops in the menu.

Click the + New Shop button.

Next, fill out the Shop setting form:

• Enter the date you’d like your shop to be “live” in the Published field.
• Enter your Shop name.
• Your shop slug is part of the link you’ll share with your customers. For example, if I choose the-best-shop as the slug, I will share this link: app.directsidekick.com/shop/the-best-shop.
• Enter your shop description. This is the section above your items for sale. You can format this any way you’d like it. Things to add to the description:
  1. Your name and contact information so your shoppers know how to get ahold of you if they have any questions.
  2. Links to your socials.
  3. Upcoming event list.
• Upload your header image. This shows up at the top of your page. For the clearest image, use a high-quality image with a size of 1200 px wide by 384 px tall.
• Optional: enter a password for your shop. Many companies have compliance rules that do not allow sales to be made on the web unless they are in private groups. Adding a password to your shop will keep you in compliance. You will then share this password when you share your shop.
• If your Square account is connected, you can accept payments with Square OR invoice your customers after they place their order where you schedule payment. You can choose which payment options you’d like to offer your customers.
• You can set a tax rate or keep it as a tax-exempt purchase. If you haven’t set your tax rates yet, you can do that in the Finance Settings.
• If you’d like to offer free local pickup, check the checkbox. After your customer purchases from your shop, you will coordinate with them to pick up their order.
• If you’d like to add a flat rate shipping option, check the checkbox and enter the dollar value you’d like to charge them for shipping.
• The direct shipping setting is for when you’d like your customers to be able to order any product from your shop WITHOUT IT COMING OUT OF YOUR ON-HAND INVENTORY. This is used for pre-orders or sales where you don’t have the products in inventory, and you will place the order from your company’s back office.
• If you’d like to offer a discount on your products, enter it in the Discounts field.
• Check the Defer Processing Fees if you’d like to charge your customers for your payment processing fees (Square fees). If this is checked, your customer will see a 2.9% + $0.30 fee on their order.
• If you’d like to ask your customers if they’d like to book a party with you, check the Enable Bookings checkbox.
• Then, enter your booking sales pitch in the Booking Text field. For example, “Would you like to book an in-home or online party and earn free products? Plus, I’ll bring a free gift to the party just for booking!”
• If you subscribe to Direct Sidekick Messages, you can select a Drip to have an automated series of emails sent to your shopper after checkout.
• Now, select the products that you’d like to add to your shop. All of the fields are searchable and most are sortable. For example, you can sort by the In Stock field to show the items you have most at the top of the table.
• Click the save button, and you’re done!

Back on the Shops page, you will see a list of your shops. You can click on the shop Name to edit it or click on the view link on the right to view it.

Now, from your shop, you can share your shop or the individual items on Facebook, Pinterest, X (formerly Twitter), or anywhere else you can post your link.

Boom. Done.