How to Build an E-Store on Substack?
Of Monetization Paths, Integration and Flexibility.
Have you considered selling on Substack? Whether you're selling books, art, digital products, or offering coaching services, creating an estore on Substack can help you monetize your audience effectively.
In this guide, I'll show you step-by-step how to set up a branded estore similar to mine, where your readers can easily browse and purchase your offerings.
Doing this in Substack enables you to:
Have a branded storefront.
Corral all your existing products on one page for easier access.
Easily change your offers over time.
Gauge interest without investing in expensive offline resources.
I also used the following tools in designing the e-store to illustrate to you the flexibility you have in setting this up:
Notion for Catalog and Customer Testimonials.
ConvertKit for signups.
Setmore for calendar booking and payments.
Canva for design visuals.
Substack Custom Buttons for re-directing users to external appointment booking engines and stores.
Create Awareness
To maximize visibility and engagement for your new estore:
Include a Link: Add a link to your new store page in the footer of your publication's posts.
Announce on Notes: Use your Substack Notes to announce the launch of your estore and gather initial interest.
Review and Update: Regularly review customer interest and feedback. Tweak your offerings, test different approaches, and update your estore accordingly.
Add Customer Testimonials
It is useful to pull together your reader feedback to support your product catalogs on the same page to help your readers make a decision. Typically, these may be spread across your other sites.
Pro-tip: Consider adding a short summary of your expertise and background. This helps establish credibility and informs readers about what to expect from your estore.
See the example below for TechMadeSimple estore, or visit the live store page here and consider the offers! :-)
Steps to Build Your Own Storefront
Below, I share the steps to build your own store. The steps as outlined are shown in the example at the end of this post. I hope you find this guide useful in setting up your own estore on Substack!
Define Your Catalog: List out the products and services you want to sell. Whether it's digital prints, books, or coaching sessions, clarity here is key.
Design Your Storefront Logo: Create a simple logo that distinguishes your estore from your newsletter. This helps in branding and recognition.
Set Up Your Estore Page: Host your estore on a separate page within Substack. Navigate to Dashboard → Website → Pages, and add it to your navigation bar under Dashboard → Website → Navigation for visibility.
Link External Product Catalogs: If you already have products listed on platforms like Gumroad or Amazon, gather those links to direct users straight to purchase. For example, the ebook image below is linked to a preorder sign up landing page on Convertkit. Here is an example link to a Gumroad product.
Pre-order and Notification Setup: Use Substack to announce upcoming releases. Set up a subscriber notification page and link it in your estore for pre-order signups. For example, set up a landing page on ConvertKit to receive signups.
Visual and Format Experimentation: Have fun with visuals and formats on your estore page. Test different layouts and designs to find what works best for your products and audience.
Booking Appointments: Choose a tool like Calendly or Setmore (which also allows payments) for booking coaching appointments. Integrate this seamlessly into your estore page.
Launch.
Caveats
Remember, Substack isn't a traditional storefront platform, so customization options are limited. You have to be creative and apply visual design elements to your page to showcase your catalog with purchase links and customer testimonials. For instance:
Carousel: If you have 10 digital books, you cannot showcase them in a carousel fashion. The best you can do is use the gallery feature to show 9 book cover images and add the link to purchase in the caption. The individual images cannot be hyperlinked in the gallery but can be if you embed them separately.
Payments: The biggest drawback is that Substack does not allow inline payments for products and appointments, so you are still relying on other portals to enable payments.
Alternative Solutions:
For example, if your digital products are on Gumroad, use the 'page' feature in Substack to present your catalog or highlight your best products, and link them back to the Gumroad page to take payments.
For coaching or consulting appointments, you need to link to a digital booking engine that offers payments.
Pro-tip: Search for SaaS products that offer a payment feature as part of their free plan. For instance, Setmore includes paid appointments, whereas Calendly does not. Acuity Scheduling, which was acquired by Squarespace, used to have a free plan, but unfortunately, this was discontinued after their acquisition by Squarespace.
Underlying Platforms: Depending on whether your main focus is on e-books or courses, you still need to decide which platform to use to host your main catalog.
Gumroad: A lighter and straightforward platform suited for digital products that is free to use but takes a 10% cut on sales.
Payhip is a reader recommended platform that serves as a one-place stop for courses, and ebooks. It takes 5% of sales on a free plan, and 0% if you take on a monthly premium payment plan.
Amazon: With its vast marketplace, Amazon makes selling easier though highly competitive for capturing attention.
Shopify: is a premium platform and marketplace that offers a personalized and comprehensive online store experience. It has evolved to support digital products and services but only offers paid plans. It requires heavy-lifting and is best suited for physical product stores, rather than diverse digital products as you still need other platforms to deliver courses and coaching.
Do you have a favorite e-store?
Welcome to TechMadeSimple’s E-Store!
Hello Everyone!
I am excited to open an e-store on this platform to offer you even more value through digital products such as e-books and e-courses. Additionally, I provide consulting services for digital platforms, startup advisory, generative AI integration insights, business challenges, and tech strategies. If you need hands-on support with setting up, troubleshooting, or resolving issues on Substack, I am here to help!
E-Books
Sign up to be notified when my e-book, “The Definitive Guide to Substack,” priced at $24.99, becomes available. Your purchase includes a bonus of 3 months of a paid subscription to TechMadeSimple, valued at $30, with access to over 60 articles and how-to videos on maximizing your digital success, with new posts added frequently. See what readers are saying about this publication. More titles in the offing!
5-day E-Course on Writing
I am often asked how I consistently write quality posts on diverse topics, including leadership, business, opinion, technology, motivation, culture, travel, and trending topics. My portfolio contains nearly 200,000 words written in 8 months.
I decided to host an email course to share how to create disciplined approaches to writing, discover ideas, conduct research, and incorporate daily writing practices into your working life.
My practical tips on writing posts have garnered over 8,900 views from 1,120 readers and 296 comments on Medium.
With more than 5,000 followers and subscribers across Medium, Substack, and LinkedIn, I share practical and simple steps to succeed on digital platforms.
Interested?
Please sign up here to receive the upcoming 5-day course free!
“Hello, Jayshree! I was eager to tell you why this is a well-written, helpful feature. Your methods help writers find an idea/subject/situation with PERSONAL MEANING. Without that perspective, you might as well write Wikipedia entries. Personal beats boring, every time.”
Tom Owens, Author of 50+ Children’s Books.
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Book a 30-minute Zoom appointment for an ‘Ask Me Anything’ on topics in business, technology, digital life, or career growth. Some suggested topics are below.
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I'm thinking of expanding my Etsy store to share here on Substack. I'm not sure how that will work, but it is an idea. Great read, thank you for such detailed tech information. You are doing a valuable service for some of us who are what I might lightly refer to as tech challenged.
This is a really neat idea… thanks for sharing!