How to up a Direct Sales Store in 2 hrs

Cross-posted from AI Marketing for Storytellers.

Look, okay, I showed this off two weeks ago in Novae and I’s weekly Friday meetings — the zoom link for this week’s behind the paywall at the bottom of this one — and I’m having Argus, my instance of Dispatch, make an .md explainer file for EVERYONE that I’ll share down there for EVERYONE, but honestly, you don’t even need that to do this.

You don’t even need me to do this.

You just need someone to tell you that it can be done, yes?

So here we go — I’ll tell you and show you and you’ll make your own damn fine store.

You’ll need a Shopify store — it’s like $1 for three months right now, just get the deal, yo? Don’t fuck around with cheaper places if you can help it, ppl are used to shopping on Shopify, plus Shopify plays super nicely with AI — so just get the store.

Then, get your API key. API keys are how AIs talk to other AIs basically — this is a little bit of a hassle. Have an AI of your choosing talk you through it. This will be a learning experience for you. Don’t stop till your done. I’m not telling you the easy way on purpose, partially because there’s no easy way, but also because you need to learn to work with your AI so get over yourself and go yell at it until things shake out.

Then, once you have that API key, you’re gonna want to hit up your AI of choice — I HIGHLY recommend you use Claude Code for this, because it’s incredibly powerful and totally gets the assignment.

You give it your API key, and then you go peruse the internet for 3-5 other websites that sell the thing you want to sell, and give it to him, tell him your hopes and dreams, and have him code it up for you.

Voila.

Seriously.

Voila.

If you’re an author, you’ll need some graphics and a theme — otherwise he can guess, but everything’s fine, he can help you choose what works for your genre — you can use your book covers or portions thereof for your hero images etc (don’t know what that is? Ask an AI!) — and you’re going to want to wire the back end in with your Bookfunnel account.

This is not a big deal — it’s just easier to have bookfunnel deliver books because they do customer service for you, have your AI talk you through that, Bookfunnel makes creating webhooks from your books (that you likely already host there for your advanced reading campaigns) easy.

You can decide that you want it to have hearts for Valentines day.

You just go to Code — which still has your API key, and thus, total access to your site — and say, “Hey, let’s put hearts up everywhere. Oh, and also, take them down on Feb 20th, thanks!”

And it can do that, and remember to do it for you.

You can see someone else doing a really awesome countdown clock at the top of their store — you can ask for that and get it in 3 mins or less.

Popups that link up to your newsletter? That too.

You can ask it — and should! — to make your whole site ADA compliant.

You can ask it to use best practices, and make your site as sales-forward as possible.

You can ask it to go and consider the purpose of every store app in Shopify’s store app store and see if there’s any functionality that any of them are doing that you can re-create that might serve you.

Oh, and — make sure you ask it to back your new store up, too!

Will this entire process be error free?

Probably not!

You’ll bump down some dead ends and cul de sacs, but it’ll be good for you to learn how to work with AI, and in the end it will it be a damn sight faster than doing it yourself — and maintaining it yourself until the end of time, like your likely current (shitty) plan is.

Seriously, working with Code on my store has felt like the Holodeck from Star Trek and the ‘Enhance!’ moment from Minority Report all rolled into one.

It’s. So. Easy.

And that’s what the ppl who dislike AI don’t get — see all the people still waiting around to ‘be chosen!’ from my last post, who’re too scared to just get out there and do things without permission.

Me, and other ppl like me, are gonna lap y’all three times to Sunday, not even because we want to, but just because we can?

Like not in a haterade way!

But just because it’ll be so much easier for us to do literally anything here in the future coming up.

And this is why, for the millionth time, if you are taking a class from anyone, and the first thing out of their mouth is not, “I’m going to show you how to do this with AI” you should ask for a refund.

While I’ve been typing over here, Argus has been off using my machine at home to write you your helpful md below, and working on Edge Forge, an earlier vs of which I shared here awhile back — but now we’re working on scalloping the edges and making everything pretty with test images — I’ll be posting the code for this here for substack members soon (and prolly share it on the call tomorrow.)

But all I had to do was ask Code to help me do this, and it did, and now I can do it for forever and ever, for all of my books, easy-peasy….

Okay, so — here’s the MD file:

Shopify for Authors explainer MD File, read this, and then give it to your AI of choice to explain

and behind this paywall is the link for Novae and I’s class tomorrow, where we’re gonna show off even more stuff that’ll knock your socks off!

See you there!

xo!

Cassie