One Year In: What Running a Shopify Store Actually Taught Me

When I launched the Shopify store for Pearl Spark Pages back in May of 2025, I made a list of ambitious goals (typical), and one year later I have learned so much along the way. 

TLDR: there was definitely a gap between expectations and reality.

Here are Shopify tips for the first year in business. Five of the real life lessons that I have learned in the last 12 months, plus the advice I’d offer up to a female founder who wants to launch her own ecommerce store. 

Lesson 1: Data Over Feelings

One of my toxic traits is that I pull ambitious numbers out of the sky. It's very typical for me to get onto a call with my assistant and start with "Let's double our email list this month!" without necessarily paying attention to the trends and data from the previous months. 

A lot of the time, going through our analytics from month to month, I would actually feel like a failure because I am all about 10X is Easier Than 2X, and I want to have exponential growth. What ended up backfiring from that strategy though is that despite making real progress, I would feel like a failure. I was setting myself up against near impossible goals.

When I started listening to the Ecommerce Roadmap podcast with Susan Bradley, there was one episode that immediately hooked me. The title was: Here’s Why You’re Probably Doing Better Than You Think. During that episode she talked about how store owners often assume their numbers aren’t that great, when they actually don’t understand what numbers are normal, and how that can be negative for mental health. And as she talked through each stage and what normal looks like I realized that I was actually right on track and in some cases, above average!

Something I've started doing now is printing out my monthly Shopify goals, tracking where I was the previous month, my goal for the current month, and the gap I need to fill. I pay attention to my audience, traffic, conversion rate, AOV, CAC, and a bunch of other acronyms I didn’t know before. I know specifically what numbers I need to aim for on a weekly, even a daily, basis to be able to hit my goals and set expectations against those benchmarks. 

Learning to pay attention to the data versus making up random numbers is something that I'm still learning from month-to-month. And while I still set ambitious goals, I understand the difference between a realistic goal and a stretch goal and give myself grace when I miss the moon but land on the stars instead. 

Lesson 2: Shopify Bot & Claude Connector 

The Shopify Bot has been on my radar since last fall, but the Claude Connector is a new development over the last few weeks. I’ve been obsessed with learning all things AI, and Claude Co-Work is my new BFF. 

There are so many connectors that I've added specifically into the platform but the one that was always missing for me was a Shopify connector. Then that changed at the beginning of May. Now that both Shopify and Klaviyo, my email marketing system, are both connected through Claude it is SO much easier to analyze and diagnose what’s going on in the backend. Troubleshooting that would have taken hours is done in just a few minutes so I can spend my energy on creative fixes. 

Lesson 3: Find Your Mentors

I'm not new to having a website, having been an entrepreneur for 10 years, but that was largely in the service space where primarily the CTA was for people to book a call with me, then the sale would come from there. I did have a few online courses that you could add-to-cart, but it certainly wasn't an ecommerce platform.

The truth is, you don’t know what you don’t know so books, courses, podcasts, YouTube, and IRL events became my teachers to learn all things ecomm. 

Courses

Having left the coaching industry a few years back, today I have a running story that in the age of AI, now is the worst time ever to release a course. You can ask anything to AI or ask it to coach you like your favourite online guru, so why bother with the big spend? I’ve totally proven myself wrong. I’ve invested in four high-ticket courses (so far!) and absolutely had great learnings from all of them, each getting me a little further along the way. 

Here are the courses with ecommerce tips (great for female founders!) I’ve learned from so far: 

1. The One Percent with Ryan Daniel Moran. He offered a three-month sampler of his one year program which was enough to get me rolling. A lot of his content is more Amazon-focused than Shopify, so I didn’t stay for the long haul, but two of my top takeaways from his program were creating Risk Reversal as well as leveraging the three types of proof.

2. POP Academy with Carlyn Bushman. I met Carlyn through the Entreprenista League where she has a reputation as the go-to gal for all things ecomm. I kid you not while I was in her program, here are some of the results we saw:

• • Website traffic increased by 70%
  • Conversion rate tripled
  • Cart additions nearly tripled

Plus some other great metrics too! If you need to grow a Shopify store from scratch, get into POP Academy!

Photo Credit: Carlyn Bushman

3. Reliable Revenue with Susan Bradley. I’d been listening to the Ecommerce Roadmap podcast for months, and I’d even taken two of Susan’s free challenges. So when she did her once-a-year launch for her program Reliable Revenue, I wanted in. The main focus of this program is dialing in your email flows so that 30% of your Shopify revenue comes from email, and we’re definitely at that number now! The purpose of the program is to get those flows dialled in so by the time you send higher volumes of traffic to your site, you can create (you guessed it) reliable revenue in your business. I got so much value from the program that now I’m in her monthly membership, the Inner Circle. 

One year in, now I have metrics that I'm tracking on a week-by-week and a month-by-month basis, and I have real benchmarks that I can compare my progress to. 

Podcasts

Before I invested money, I invested time. And a lot of that time went to listening to podcasts. So much so that I even have an entire blog post dedicated to the top five podcasts for female founders with product based businesses, but I’ll flag two of them here: 

1. The Shopify Masters podcast brings on guests who are founders and ecomm experts who have launched, grown and scaled their businesses. I always find myself going deep into the archives with their episodes that have pretty good evergreen relevancy.

2. I’ve already raved about Susan Bradley and I’ll pop another highlight for her podcast, The Ecommerce Roadmap. She really does share actionable strategies and insights, while sharing the behind-the-scenes of her students inside of her programs, Reliable Revenue and the Inner Circle. She’s sold multiple seven-figure businesses so she’s got the expertise, and her data-over-feelings approach absolutely keeps me sane.

Want a full list of my favourite resources for women in business? Podcasts, events, books, communities, newsletters and more? Download my Top 100 Female Founder Resource List!

Events

Admittedly, I’ve only been to a handful of ecomm specific events so far, but hands down the one that made the biggest difference for me was going to the Ecomm North Toronto Summit last September. It was so good that I’ve already secured tickets for both me and my husband because he needs to attend this year too! 

I’m in a group chat with a bunch of female founders, and a lot of us attended Ecomm North; you should have seen how on FIRE the group chat was that day! We were all in different rooms for breakout sessions and keynotes. And they were all so good people would be hopping rooms to get into the best sessions.

Some of my big takeaways were learning from Scott Cunningham at Merchant Mastery and getting access to his Storyselling AI custom GPT (SO good!), and getting my AI relevancy score, which I was told was pretty impressive for a newbie like me doing her own AEO and GEO! And it was fun to see some of my friends on stage sharing their own founder stories, or leading sessions throughout the day.

Lesson 4: Set Incremental Goals

I've mentioned before how my toxic trait is pulling numbers out of the sky and setting unrealistic goals. I'd love being aspirational, and it also feels good to hit targets that I can be proud of, and celebrate those wins.

Now I’m fanatic about tracking my KPI playbook on a weekly basis. I’m measuring my audience, traffic, conversions and AOV (that’s average order value).

I’m regularly checking in on my month-to-month progress, and now I can measure current metrics to the same time as last year. I’m a total geek for the beginning of the month, when Claude Co-Work runs my monthly analytics. It's fantastic to have real numbers that can create realistic expectations and seeing the seasonal trends in the business.  

Lesson 5: Keep Your Site Fresh

I'll acknowledge that one of the things that has felt challenging is being a single-product store. We have our hero product, the Female Founders Journal, a business mindset journal for women entrepreneurs, but I'm itching to create some new products to share with you!

But also, being a single-product store that presents the unique challenge of keeping your website content fresh. Google isn't going to recommend your site if it’s stale, so we constantly have to be keeping fresh content here on the site. That was where blogging came into the funnel, hence you're reading this entry right now 🙂.

When I got the AI relevancy feedback from Ecomm North, part of the feedback that I received was to just keep doing more of what I was doing. Creating blog content, but also getting third-party endorsements through backlinks on other sites, which is something I’m still working on, especially getting reputable PR. It was a total win during the holidays to get featured in 10 different gift guides, which all created links back to our site. 

Fast-Forwarding into the Next Year

One of the reasons I created the Female Founders Journal is because I’m often looking at the gap instead of the gain. I needed a tool that would help me celebrate my wins, big or small. I'm definitely celebrating that at the end of one year of having our Shopify store, we mark the anniversary by celebrating our highest revenue month 🎉!

Moving into year two of the business, I also want to lean into something my friend Faith Morris says (she specializes in operations): Year One is orientation. Year Two is experimentation. Last year I got oriented with what it's like to have a store, design product pages, email flows, and all of that stuff. Now that we've got that dialled in, now we're moving in experimentation mode. This is where I get to play, test and optimize. 

Let's see what we learned this year and how we grow!