I Can't Manage Comments Here...

I chose Shopify based on recommendations from some rather large trusted business that use it, the expandability, and the robust back end system. It also has a blog section built in for the $40 a month.

Writing is very important to me, for many reasons. One is to better explore and develop thoughts and ideas. Another is to share experiences and knowledge with anyone interested or in need. Another, and one of the more important, is to get people involved in discussions about things they feel are important or just interesting. So when I found out a few minutes ago that there is no native system for getting comment alerts and such, I was fairly annoyed. In a bit of a kerfuffle, even. I'm used to my old WordPress blog, where it will annoy the crap out of you with alerts for comment related stuff. 

There are Shopify plugins that will help me manage comments, and even reply to them directly from the email alert. They all cost money though. To be clear, I'm HAPPY to pay people for their work. They put in the time and effort to make a working system to fill a huge gap, so they should be rewarded and supported. My problem is that I pay for all of this out of pocket and am losing money on it. It's hard to justify spending even more money here. 

The plugins have free trials, so I might go for it, depending on the price and whether it's a subscription model or not. If it's a reasonable one time price, that's easier to justify. Hopefully it's reasonable. Themes can easily cost $350 on Shopify. It's why I'm using the free one for now. This stuff can get very expensive, very quickly. Losing money on this site is a method I use to motivate myself to use and develop it. The financial pain is a good motivator.

It can also get very complicated. Go look at www.lttstore.com for an example of a Shopify site that has custom moving graphics, promotions, and all sorts of cool stuff. It's a powerful system which is why I was confused by the lack of comment management.

For anyone who may have posted comments and never got a reply, I'm sorry. I was never made aware of the comments until someone told me they left a comment. I still need to reply to those...

I'm curious as to what else I'll find as I learn Shopify. I do enjoy it more than WordPress, which is saying something for me. The online shop part is just way more straight forward here. I've still got to get my business checking account opened so I can accept money and list stuff for sale, but that can wait. I'm still deep in the product development stage, so no rush. This just needs done before I buy desert land and start building an off grid homestead. That's the end game, by the way. I've been researching and working towards it since 2017. Starting to pull it all together. 

I'll manually check blog posts for comments. 

Cheers.

Dustin