This article contains affiliate links for GrooveFunnels. I may get a commissions for purchases made after click the links.
If you are just starting out in building your online business, you are likely looking for an easy, and preferably free, way to get up and running.
Whether you have a great product or service, you need a way to be able to sell your offering online. If you aren’t tech savvy this may pose a problem.
Even if you have heard of non-techy solutions such as ClickFunnels, you likely don’t have the capital to invest in such a program right away.
That’s why I wanted to put this guide together.
To help the people who were just starting out to be able to build their online store from scratch.
I’ll do you one better and show you how to do it for free!
AND in UNDER AN HOUR!
Intrigued?
Let’s get started.
Full Video Walkthrough of Online Store Build
The article below is a step-by-step walkthrough of what is shown in this video.
Get Started Now!
Step 1: Sign Up for GrooveSell
GrooveSell is a robust online sales system that allows you to connect a payment gateway into a sales system that will work on any website builder. WordPress. GroovePages. You name it.
As long as you have a URL, you can make a funnel or a single point of sale page.
To get started, go to GrooveSell and signup for a free account.
If the system is so robust, it’s weird that it’s free, right?
GrooveFunnels is looking to help people during the COVID-19 crisis and is offering GrooveSell and GrooveAffiliate to you for free, for life, if you sign up right now. This offer may be pulled once things begin to settle down, so now is the time to jump on this deal and get your store up and running.
Once you sign up, you will then be offered a free account on GroovePages Lite. If you don’t already have a website, please sign up for this as well. This is the system that we will be building our online store from scratch on in this tutorial.
With GroovePages Lite you get 3 free websites that they will host for you, for free. Since no hosting charges is super rare, if not unheard of, this alone is a good reason to build your site on this platform.
Now that you are all signed up with your 3 free programs, it’s time to get into the build!
Step 2: Setting Up Your GroovePages Site
As stated above, you can build 3 free sites for free using GroovePages Lite, and if you choose to upgrade to pro, you can have unlimited sites. This would be a great deal if you were building websites for others.
They have a lifetime deal going on right now with a one-time price and free hosting for life. You can access the secret backdoor to this deal if you want in.
Once you click the button to Create New Site, you will be taken to a page where you can start with a blank template, or choose one of the 5 ready-made templates that are included with your free account.
Templates are great if you are in a hurry to get something up quick, but if you want something a little more custom, it doesn’t take much more time to build a shop from a blank page.
For this tutorial we will start with a blank template so you can see how easy it is to build out in a quick way.
Now you will see your blank canvas appear.
Step 3: Creating Your Landing Page and Adding a Logo
In this tutorial we will be building out a quick tech shop that sells phones, laptops, and tablets. Since we will be building out a sales funnel on this site, we will be building out a few pages to accommodate.
By selecting “Pages” on the left hand rail you can access the different pages on your website.
Right at the start you will only have the “Home” page.
While you are here you should create an Upsell page and a Thank You page as well. You can leave them blank for now, we will be building them out later.
For right now, just drag these pages down to the “hide from site’s primary navigation” section. These pages need to exist, but they won’t be on our main navigation.
Now that we have the pages we want for our one page shop, we need to add a navigation at the top. This can hold other pages that you have on your website, but for our quick shop build we are just going to have a simple navigation element with a centered logo.
Be sure to save the navigation section as we will need to use this on our Thank You page.
Adding a logo is as simple as clicking on the place where the placeholder is, navigating to the “Configure” tab, and choosing your logo image.
Step 4: Adding Your Hero Section
This section will be the big section that has your welcome message for your visitors. Try and write a greeting that will be geared towards your target market and use language they will relate to.
This first impression will help them know whether your store is a site they want to dig deeper into and maybe make a purchase.
Make sure to use a background image that relates to your product or service, and again draw them in.
Just like the other sections of the site, the “Covers” section provides easy drag-and-drop implementation into your website.
Step 5: Adding Your Store Products or Services
By adding a feature section from the “Blocks” sidebar menu, we have an easy section to add our products to.
Replace the images on each feature with your product image, name each product, and type out a description.
Add a button element below each product. We will be linking these buttons to our payment pages.
If you have higher-priced items you will likely want to link these products to a full product or sales page with more information and specs so the customer has more knowledge before they buy.
In this simplified version of a shop we will just be linking directly to the cart functionality.
We are now done with building out the landing page.
Now we need to build the thank you page and the upsell page.
Step 6: Add Your Thank You and Upsell Pages and Publish
Now we have to make the other 2 pages that will be a part of our sales funnel.
The first page that we design will be the upsell page.
The Upsell Page
In the case of our sample shop, that will be a laptop that we are offering at a deep discount if someone is buying the phone.
Navigate to the upsell page we created early, and drag a “Call to Action” block to the top. We don’t need a navigation on this page because we want people to focus on making the next purchase.
Change out the headline to thank people for purchasing your first item, in this case the phone, and then let them know when they can expect their item to be shipped.
In this same box, we also want to introduce the new offer on the landing page.
It’s good to put a progress bar here to people know where they are at in the buying process, and you can even add a timer if you want them to hurry and get the deal. It puts pressure on the sale and makes them more likely to buy.
Next, we will add a call to action with a button on the bottom, or you can construct your own section from scratch.
The idea would be to have a photo of the upsell item, a title that explains the offer, a description that gives more detail about the item and why it’s a good deal, and a button to make a purchase.
Make sure you add a plain text link below the button as shown above so people still have the option to skip the upsell and make it to the thank you page.
The Thank You Page
The thank you page will be the page at the end of your funnel that people land on after they make all the purchases (or skip the purchases) you have to offer.
You can have different thank you pages based on upsells that people take within your funnel, or you can land them all on the same one.
In the case of our sample electronics shop we are just going to have one thank you page that all roads lead to.
The navigation that we saved earlier will be within the block category we saved it in step 3.
Now we have the same exact navigation that we saved on the home page.
For the thank you section, I also saved and duplicated the main section from the home page and just changed the title to thank the buyer for their purchase.
Thank you pages can be used to make more offers, give people next steps, or offer extra free value to keep them coming back for more.
Another option is to offer social sharing options where people can share your online shop with others.
A last option for your thank you page is that you can introduce your affiliate program.
All funnels within your free GrooveSell account also come with GrooveAffiliate.
Utilizing GrooveAffiliate will allow others to become your salespeople and work on commission selling your product, service, or course.
The thank you page would be an excellent place to introduce this offer.
Publishing Your Online Store
To publish your online store, hit the big pink publish button in the top right-hand corner of the screen.
Since we are going with the free method here, we will check the box that says “Host your site with us”.
Click the button that says “Set GroovePages Subdomain” and pick your shop’s subdomain. This is the phrase that will go before the groovepages.com portion of the URL.
Once you have selected your subdomain, it’s time to select your path.
When you are hosting with GroovePages you need to have what is basically a folder after the .com on the URL.
If you are selling items you may call this “shop”.
If you are selling a service you may call it “services”.
As long as you make it intuitive to the user, you can’t really go wrong here, especially if the hosting is free.
If you have your own domain you can also add that in this section.
You will need to follow the rules by pointing your DNS correctly so it knows where to find your site.
For our GroovePages hosted shop, hit the pink “Publish” button at the bottom of the sidebar and your site is now live on the internet!
Now it’s time to set up the payment functionality. Let’s head on over to GrooveSell!
Step 7: Setup the Product Funnel on GrooveSell
When we navigate to our GrooveSell account we want to go to the “Funnels” section of the sidebar and go to our “Product Funnels”. This is where we will create the buying functionality of our funnel from scratch.
Click the pink “New Product Funnel” button in the top right hand corner.
Give your funnel and internal name so you know what product that is being referenced. In the second field you will give the product a name that will appear on the purchase page of your funnel. The description you add here will appear on this page as well, so make sure you give them names that make sense to your customers.
Click “Create Product Funnel” and not only will this give you the start to your funnel, but this will automatically create the first product in your funnel.
You will see this when you are redirected to your products page and your first product is already listed there.
Click the yellow pencil on this item and you will be taken into the setup.
Info
Here you are able to rename your product if you didn’t like the name you gave it before. You can also change the description.
We will choose to make this the frontend product, since this will be the main product in our funnel that people are clicking to from the main storefront.
Pricing
On the pricing tab there are several options for pricing your product.
You can make the product a one-time payment. You can make it a recurring payment. You can also make payment available in installments if you have a higher-priced item.
This tab is also where you can set a Trial period if you are offering software or services.
Lastly you will set the dollar amount for your product.
You aren’t limited to sticking with one pricing option here. Just click the pink “+Add New Price Point” button and you can provide multiple payment options for the same product.
Gateways
For the Payment Gateways tab you will get the opportunity to setup and choose where you want the money from your online shop to go.
Navigate to the “Setup Gateways” section.
Click the pink button that says “Add New Payment Gateway”.
You will have the choice to setup Stripe, Authorize.net, or Paypal Standard Payments.
For this example we will set up a Stripe account.
Name the Stripe account that you are trying to connect, and then find your Publishable Key and Secret Key in your Stripe Account (Stripe account created separately, and outside the confines of this tutorial).
Once your gateway has been added, navigate back to the “Payment Gateway” subtab and choose “Credit Card”.
Choose the pink button on the right and “Add Card Gateway”.
Select the Stripe account we just added, and then fill in what percent of each payment you want to go into that account.
If you only add 1 account, it will be 100%.
If you add more than 1 Stripe account, you can split the percentages, as long as they equal 100%.
You would want to split the percentage for a few reasons.
If you make too much money in a short amount of time in one account, your merchant account may be frozen until Stripe determines you aren’t committing fraud.
You may also want to add other accounts if you are working with partners on your product, service, course, or whatever you are selling in your shop or funnel. This way you can just split the sales up front and no one can complain they didn’t get their cut. It’s already set up that they do.
Contents
The contents section is where we glue our funnel together.
This is why it doesn’t matter if you are building your shop in GroovePages, WordPress, or elsewhere.
All you need is a URL for your Main Sales Page, and then a Thank You page URL. GrooveSell will make all the redirects happen so buyers have a smooth transition between points in your funnel.
In the case of our shop, people are buying from our landing page, so that will be the Sales Page URL.
We also have the link for our Thank You Page since our site is live, so we can navigate to that page, get the URL, and paste it here.
You can set whatever refund period you want, and then the buffer period is the waiting period after the refund period after which commissions are set to pending state for your affiliates.
Every funnel within GrooveSell has an affiliate program automatically attached that you may choose to promote or not.
Checkout
The only option for a checkout page as of now is to have a GrooveSell hosted checkout page.
Eventually you will be able to add a popup to your website, embed it within your own pages, or make your own custom design.
Now we will choose the Look & Feel of the checkout page.
At the very least make sure you upload a product image, but you should also pick the color of sidebar that you want.
Next you can choose which form fields people need to fill out during checkout.
If you are selling a physical product, but sure to ask for address.
If you are selling a digital product, you probably don’t want to ask for their address because asking for too much unnecessary information will turn potential buyers off.
Your next option is to choose Express Checkout or not.
By activating express checkout you are allowing 1-click upsells which may help remove friction on upsell conversions.
There are also options on this step to integrate an email marketing software and setup a cart abandonment automation, which will help recover lost sales.
Bumps
Order bumps aren’t available yet, but they will be a nice little way to give a little extra value on the checkout page, and get a little extra money as well.
Funnel
This is the step that directs where the customer goes after they make a purchase.
This is where we take them to the next step in our funnel.
In our case we take them from the online shop, to the sales page, and now they will go to the laptop upsell page.
For the type, select “Upsell” and then add the link to the laptop page we created earlier.
Fulfillment
This section will eventually allow you to supply a digital file directly to people when they buy.
Right now this isn’t an option.
What you can do is integrate your email marketing client and send an automatic email with your digital product link.
If you have a physical product you will be get an email that you got an order and you will be able to see the name and address in your reporting section on where to ship the item to.
Affiliates
For this step in setting up your funnel you will determine whether or not you will have an affiliate program attached to the funnel.
GrooveSell makes it easy to allow other people to sell your products as affiliates, so you can grow sales for your product or service exponentially faster than trying to be the only sales person pushing what you have to offer.
Finish
There is currently nothing in the proof tab, but assumably you would be able to preview you checkout page here.
Under the Finish tab you are given a tracking code. This goes in the <body> of your sales page.
If you are using GroovePages this will be within your page settings.
Step 8 – Making the Upsell Funnel
Now that we have the frontend product setup, we need to setup the portion for our upsell page.
I won’t go through every step in the funnel, as most of them are similar.
The first difference is that we will be checking that this is the upsell, and not a frontend product.
The other difference will be in step 7, the Funnel settings. Where before we chose to link to an upsell post-transaction, here we will be selecting Thank You Page.
Now that we have everything setup for our sales pages and checkouts, we can move on to linking everything together!
Step 9 – Linking It All Together
Now it’s time to make our funnels live!
On the Funnels page of GrooveSell, select the Actions dropdown and click Make Live.
Now when we go back to this dropdown and click on Manage Products, we will be taken to our products page once again.
This time you will notice that the shopping cart icon is no longer grayed out. It is pink which means we are live and ready to snag our links.
After you click on the cart icon for our frontend product, you will be given the choice to make it a Single Price or Multi Price checkout, as well as a Single Step or Multi Step checkout.
Select multi-price if you set up more than one pricing option within your funnel.
Select Single Price if you only have one pricing option.
If you want to be able to capture people’s information before they put in billing information, you will want to choose “Multi-Step” Checkout Steps.
You would do this because if people get cold feet with the billing info, or they realize they don’t have their card on them and bail, you can still collect an email address and follow up with them later as to why they didn’t buy.
Grab the link you generated for your frontend product, and add the link to the button in your shop.
You will also generate a checkout link for your upsell product, head over to your upsell page, and add that checkout link to the purchase button on that page.
Once you have everything linked and in place, feel free to add more products, more funnels, and more payment gateways using the same processes we went through in this tutorial.
Not everything needs a funnel behind it, but it can help with providing value to your customers, and making more money from the purchase.
Now that our funnel is all glued together with our checkout pages, it’s time to test.
Step 10 – Testing Your Funnel
Never, EVER release a funnel without first testing it out yourself first.
You can set up a test Stripe account and use their test payment methods if you don’t want to spend money testing your own product.
You can then switch to your real Stripe payment gateway when you are finished.
There is no excuse not to test your funnel.
Just because you think that you did everything right during the process, things can still go wrong.
You don’t want to drive traffic to your shop and then find out people are unable to purchase what you are offering. This is a very bad user experience and people may never come back to shop with you.
Plus you are leaving all that money on the table.
Start on your landing page and make sure everything works well.
Click through and test your payment gateway.
Make sure you are redirected to the upsell page.
On the upsell page make sure you are clicking both the purchase link and also the “no thanks” link to make sure you are going to the right places in both instances.
There is no worse feeling than putting in the work and not seeing the return because of a stupid mistake you made in not testing.
Enough said about that.
Now what are you waiting for?
Get started building out your FREE GrooveSell shop today.
Want to see this process done with your business type?
Let me know what your business is in the comments below and I will likely create a tutorial based around a similar product or service so you can see how this will work with your business.
