So now that you're at the point that your customers can buy any of your products from your store, the
next thing we want to make sure they can do is to actually track their orders once they've made them.
Because, as I'm sure you're aware, when you've made purchases online, being able to track your order
really is a great feature.
And so to make that happen, no surprise, we're going to be using an app.
So come down to apps and type in Aftership and then click on search Aftership in the Shopify App Store.
And this is the app you're looking for Aftership order tracking.
So clicking on this, it brings me to the home page for the app where you can see there's a fantastic
rating.
And then scrolling on down here a bit further, you can see that this app has been around for a very
long time.
And in addition to all of that, there is a completely free version which gives you up to 50 shipments
per month, which is absolutely fantastic when getting started.
But just before we actually go ahead and install this, what actually is this app going to do for us?
Well, as you might imagine, in the world of shipping, there are literally thousands of different
carriers, and the vast majority of those carriers will have their own tracking system.
Now, while that might sound great if you imagine that with your store, you start working with ten
different carriers, that would mean that you're also working with ten different tracking systems.
And as you can imagine, that could get pretty confusing and pretty overwhelming.
And so in order to avoid all of that, Aftership brings all of the different tracking systems from all
of the different carriers into one place.
And that means it's not only far easier for us as a store owner, but also for your customers.
They will only need to go to one place to find where that product is, and that place is going to be
a branded tracking page directly on your store.
And so I hope you can clearly see why we want to use Aftership and the enormous benefits that it brings.
Okay.
So let's actually go ahead and install this app.
So clicking on Install and install once again it brings me to the welcome dialog where you can see that
it says ready to improve your efficiency and reduce a Wizmo tickets.
Now if you don't know what Wizmo is, it's an acronym for where is my order?
Okay, so let me click on Let's Get Started, where you can see straight away that my store is connected,
meaning that Aftership will be automatically aware of any orders on my site and therefore be able to
track them.
Now, as ever, with these apps there is tons of functionality, but we are only looking to use two
key features, the first of which is to provide a tracking page on our site so that our customers can
easily track their order at any time.
And secondly, we want Aftership to send out a series of emails to notify our customers at key stages
in the order process.
So let's actually start with those emails.
And to do that we come over here where it says notifications.
And when I click on notifications, here are the seven notifications already set up and ready to go
out at the appropriate time.
Now these notifications, which it also refers to as flows, are effectively a combination of both email
and SMS.
And to make sure all of that actually happens, all we need to do is to activate them.
So coming over here to the right hand side you see this little slider.
Click on this.
And in the first instance it's going to ask you to set up SMS.
So I click on Set Up now.
And because we're using the free service I'll simply click on United States.
Click on next.
Put in my name and my last name.
My company website is already pre-filled in and my contact email address of course is going to be info
at BestBuy bargains.com.
Scrolling on down a bit further, I need to put in my contact phone number and my address.
Now.
At this stage, if you don't have a company, don't worry.
Simply put in your own personal address.
You can always change it at any time later on.
Okay, so I filled all that in.
I click on next, where we then need to ensure that we are simply compliant with various rules and regulations.
Now, to do this, it's pretty straightforward.
All you need to do is to go back to Shopify admin, where you can see that I'm already on settings and
checkout, and then if I scroll down a bit until I see this, my marketing options, because I'm potentially
going to contact people via SMS, I need to check this box.
It then brings up this little warning here.
It says you need to set up your Terms of Service and Privacy policy in your legal settings.
And if you followed my guidelines several lectures ago when we were actually setting up these pages,
you should be absolutely fine.
But of course, it's always well worth a check.
So let me save this.
I'll then go back to Aftership and then check this box where it says I've already set it up, and then
I can click on confirm and then on save.
I'll then enable the flow itself.
And you can see now that the slider has been switched on.
Now I know that was a little bit fiddly in setting up the SMS, and to be honest, that's not really
one of the key features that you want to use.
You want to maximise the use of emails because it's completely free.
However, Aftership does slightly force us to go through that process.
But good news, you only needed to do it that one time because when I activate the next flow, it simply
asked me whether I want to enable it.
And of course I do.
And so now what I'm going to do is enable all of the.
Flows.
Okay, so that's all done.
You can see that they've all been switched on, meaning that my notifications are now ready to go.
And we can now turn our attention to creating our own tracking page on your site.
So to do that we go over here where it says tracking pages.
And that brings up a whole series of templates that we can choose from to create our tracking page.
Now, one of the things you might notice straight away is that it's not simply a tracking page.
As you can see down here for this Hess template, it says a clean, modern template that helps promote
your products and post-purchase services.
Because of course, while your visitors are regularly visiting this page in order to see where their
order is, it's also a perfect opportunity for you to promote any other products and services that you
might have on your site, but right now, I'm just going to keep it simple and select this Hess template.
So clicking on create page and then on select template, you can see that the first thing I need to
do is to give it a name.
So I will call it simply Best Bargains and click on create.
And that brings up this fantastic editor where you have a lot of incredible functionality to really
create a fantastic tracking page.
Now I would definitely encourage you to explore some of this functionality.
But right now and as I just said, I'm going to keep things simple.
And so I'm actually going to remove some of the features that I see by default.
And I'm going to start with the header, because what I want to do is to include my own logo.
And then also I'm going to remove this menu over here because at this stage it's really more than I
need.
And so to make that happen I come over here to header click on it.
And it's here that you see the menu items.
So I'm actually going to go ahead and delete each one.
And then having done that, I'm going to add my own logo.
So scrolling on down a bit further, you see this remove button here.
If I click on this I can now go ahead and select my image.
And now that that's selected you can see it's a little bit small.
So I'll come down here to image size and just go ahead and make it a bit bigger.
So let's leave it at let's say 130 looks pretty good okay.
And then lastly I'm just going to remove this banner here where it says check out our summer sale.
In order to do that I just click on it and it's here that you can see the header message.
So I'm just going to remove it.
Click on delete.
You can see that the banner has disappeared.
And therefore the only thing left to do is to come over here to the top right hand corner and click
on save.
Now of course there's an awful lot more that I could do there.
And as I said before, I would really encourage you to play with this because you really can create
an amazing tracking page.
But right now, I'm just going to come out of this because I now want to show you how to add this page
to your store.
And in order to do that, I draw your attention to this part here where it says URLs and domain, because
this URL here is actually your tracking page.
And so to add it to our store, the first thing we want to do is to copy it.
So I click on the copy URL button and then head back to admin and go to the online store and navigation.
And what we're going to do is to add it in as part of our customer service menu, because of course,
being able to track your order is a fantastic customer service feature.
So go ahead and click on main menu.
We'll collapse the our Fabulous products menu just for the moment.
Scroll down to the customer service because we're going to add in another menu item.
So clicking on Add Menu item I'm going to give it a name, which of course is going to be track Your
Order.
And then in this box here I'm now going to paste in that link that I just copied.
So I paste it in select it, and then simply go ahead and click on add.
We'll then save it and then go over to the store itself to see how my new tracking page actually looks.
So here I am I click on Customer service.
Here is my new menu item.
Track your order and clicking on this brings up my new fantastic page where my customers can now track
their orders, which I hope you would agree is absolutely fantastic.
Now we're not quite done yet, because there is still one small thing that I need to do, because now
that we have a tracking page, you might remember under the Shipping and handling page, we put in this
placeholder text link to tracking page.
Well now of course we can actually add in the link.
So let's go back to admin over to pages.
Click on Shipping and Handling.
And then down here in the text let's take out the parentheses.
Highlight the text itself and then come up here to these three little dots.
And click on the little insert link icon where I can.
Or once again paste in the aftership URL that I copied.
And then all I need to do is to click on insert link, save this, go back to the site and refresh.
And now we see the link link to tracking page.
And of course when I click on it, it takes me straight to my tracking page, which means that everything
is now perfectly set up to allow my customers to track their orders at any time.
And just to reiterate, I've done all of this for free.
Yes, there are paying versions for aftership, but I hope you can now see that the free version gives
you everything that you need to get started.
And then as your business grows, as you get more and more orders, it's at that point that you might
consider upgrading to the paying versions.
But given the amount of revenue that you'll be making at that point in time, they should be very affordable.