How to Sell Services on Shopify

Have you been wondering how to sell services on Shopify? You have reached the right place.

Selling services online is pretty similar to selling products online. You can open up your own online store to showcase your services, book appointments online with clients, and manage your payments as well as client reviews. 

But building your own online store from scratch can be an expensive and rather time-consuming affair. Instead, you can build your own Shopify website with all of its in-built customization features and available apps in the marketplace to get your website up and running as quickly as possible.

While some people assume Shopify is just a product-based ecommerce platform made for selling physical and digital products, it can also readily support selling services online as well.  

Table of Contents

In this article, we’ll discuss everything you need to know about how to sell services with Shopify

Before you do anything, you need to decide on the type of services that you want to sell and the nature of these services. That is because the type of services you sell online will ultimately impact your website layout, prices, appointment duration, and other details. 

There are numerous types of services you can offer online, including: 

• Sessions for services like salons, spa, exercise and yoga
• Consultations for services like law, medical, marketing, accountancy, and more
• Training or education based courses
• Home services like maintenance, cleaning, and gardening
  

The next step is to sign up on Shopify and set up your online store where you can start selling your services. As one of the most popular online store builders, Shopify offers a wide range of fully editable templates that you can quickly customize to set up your website. Keep in mind to ensure your theme aligns with your brand and the kind of services that you offer. 

The simplest way to start selling services on your Shopify store is by adding your services as products. 

To do that, go to the Products tab on your Shopify dashboard, click on Add products.

Now add the appropriate title, descriptions, and images for your services just like you would for a physical product. 

Next add the base price of your service and check mark the ‘charge tax’ box if you are liable to charge taxes.

Then scroll down to the Inventory section and keep the ‘Track quantity’ option unchecked. Since you are selling services, there would be no inventory at all. 

Going further down to the shipping section, you should uncheck the ‘This is a physical product’ option as well. Variants is the section where you can add upsells for your services like a longer session or extra perks.  

Shopify does not have the in-built feature that allows users to create appointment bookings directly on their website, but you can install an appointment booking app from the Shopify marketplace to start taking appointments.

Appointo is an appointment booking tool that aims to save time by streamlining your entire service booking process. It offers group appointments, event notifications, rescheduling and canceling options, and most importantly, seamless integration with both Google Calendar and Calendly.

To start using Appointo, go to Shopify marketplace. You can search for ‘Appointo’ or directly get it from here. To install it, click on the ‘Add App’ button 

Once it is added, you will be able to access Appointo under the ‘Apps’ tab in your Shopify dashboard

Click on it to get started. The first step you need to take is to select your timezone.

With that done, the next step is to select the services for which you want to start taking appointments. You will get the entire list of products added to your Shopify account here and you can checkmark the ones you want to start taking appointments for.

Once that is done, select the duration, buffer time, and other meeting details for your appointments. If you are integrating Appointo with your Google Calendar, you can also directly send your invitees Google Meets links for quick virtual appointments. 

Appointo lets you customize your entire appointment schedule according to your availability. You can block off certain days and completely customize your availability for everyday.

Now, you just need to click on next and you are done. You will be able to see your created appointments and manage them in the next window. It's also possible to view/modify any bookings that have been done by customers. 

In order to integrate your appointments with Google Calendar or Calendly, go to the Integrations tab and connect your respective accounts. You can also let different team members manage the bookings by giving them access.

Note: When customers choose a booking time for the appointment they will be automatically redirected to the checkout page and the appointment will only be confirmed after the payment is done 

The next and the most important step is to market your services so that more people can visit your online store and book your services. There are many ways that you can drive conversions:

• Tighten up your online store’s SEO
• Share your service details on your social media pages
• Publish paid social media ads on Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, and Instagram
• Post Google ads to drive paid website traffic
• Create an email campaign to stay connected with past customers 
• Offer discounts and encourage satisfied customers to share reviews
  

Ready to sell services on Shopify?

It can be quite daunting and overwhelming to start selling services online for the first time. But the entire process can get smoother and more streamlined with the right tools by your side. The idea is to automate the extra work through tools as much as possible so that you can put all of your focus on providing great services to your customers. 

Appointo, the appointment booking app, is available for free on Shopify. Take on a spin today to see how it can help your business grow and flourish.