Welcome to Shopify Entrepreneurs. Please read before posting!

Thanks for joining us! Launched in February 2015, Shopify entrepreneurs has grown to be the largest, most active, unofficial Shopify seller community online. The community has inspired thousands of Shopify entrepreneurs around the world.

Posted 3 years ago by Jonathan Kennedy

This is the spirit of our community.

‘’Give more than you receive’’ — The Entrepreneurs Imperative.

Read on if you really want to 10x your business and get the most from our vibrant community of entrepreneurs.

We’re an inclusive group that fosters entrepreneurship, positive discussion, progress, growth, and discovery. To continue to grow the value of our community for our members, we’ve written out a few guidelines to help you get the most from this free resource.

Jonathan Kennedy (me): Founder/Builder at Carson

Tavis William Joron: Shopify Guru (Moderating in his personal time)

Adi Bittan: CEO/Co-founder at Ownerlistens.com (makers of the Message Mate Shopify app)

Darleen Witmer: Owner at TechAgent99.com 

The community isn’t officially affiliated with Shopify. It is a private community for Shopify sellers with live Shopify stores and especially customers at Carson – HeyCarson.com, https://experts.shopify.com/carson.

If you work at Shopify (at any level) and have an idea, email me – – [email protected] From Gurus to the CEO, I always make time for Shopify staff. For partnerships, please visit https://heycarson.com/pages/partner-with-us

Note: Not all posts get approved. To increase your chances of your post getting approved, don’t be average and follow these guidelines. Please do not message us before reading our guidelines. 

1. Please put some time, thought and detail into your questions and post topics. If you can Google it, if it’s poorly written, if it’s negative, if Google can answer, or doesn’t include enough detail to provide value for members, it won’t be approved. We get over 100 posts a day, we approve less than 20 of these.
2. If you would like to promote your service/app, please start by being an active member in the community. The best thing you can do to start gaining recognition as an authority is by answering merchant questions or posting good ideas/inspiring messages or strategies, without linking to your website/service/app.

Our goals are:

1. To deliver value to our audience through shared knowledge and the network effect
2. Drive customers to our services. We’re happy to work with you and share the platform, but there are a few conditions. More on this at the bottom.
3. Need store feedback? Want an app/service recommendations? These are common questions and a great way to get value from the community. To get your request approved, you should:
   • Provide details about your business. Why you’re in business, what you sell, who you sell it to, which theme you’re using, which apps, where you’re located, what your team looks like, etc. 
   • Share your goals. Be specific. 
   • What you’ve tried. What is working and what isn’t
   • What you think might work based on your research.
4. Provide context to get the best replies from experienced members and to make your post valuable for all. Do not PM us asking why your post wasn’t approved, or make a new post asking why your post wasn’t approved, we can’t answer based on FB group feature limitations and the sheer amount of people that post.
5. Give and take: Share strategies with other store owners. If it worked for you maybe it will work for others in the community. This is the best way to get involved. Provide value first and always be thinking of how the community can benefit.
6. Shopify experts, app developers and other service providers. Never PM or solicit other members or ask them to PM you for help, or leave your email address in comments.
7. Please craft unique posts for this community. Cross-posting over many Shopify Facebook groups sucks.
8. Please don’t share a post from your Facebook page or your FB group link in a post or comments, and don’t ask people to join another FB group or community in a post or reply.
9. Be kind, constructive, polite, friendly, apolitical, on-topic (or lightly off-topic) with a bias toward awesome. Help us build a thriving eCommerce community.
10. Please use a personal profile with a real picture and name. We immediately remove accounts that don’t follow this guideline.
11. If you want to post your store for sale, send $500 to [email protected] $500 gets you one post, no support, we don’t guarantee a sale and you must reply to comments and questions quickly. If you do not moderate your post and answer questions fast, we will delete it without a refund. Posts that promote stores that sell unlicensed products are not allowed. If you post your store for sale without contacting us or making a payment, you will be automatically removed from the group.
12. Please do not send me or moderators PM’s. It’s not manageable. You can email me for questions, suggestions or ideas, but not to ask why your post wasn’t approved. I will usually reply within 5–7 days.

Promo post guidelines:

We get many requests from experts/app developers and service companies to share beta offers, exclusive/launch discounts to apps, blog posts, merchant polls and various promotional posts. The community is foremost to support Shopify merchants and our service business. Align your offer and value with our goals so we can work together.

We are always eager to work with and help companies with great products/services that are intended to support Shopify merchants. We do not want companies to treat the community as free acquisition channel.

If you want to post to the group, and you’re not a Shopify merchant:

• As a subject matter expert, partner or app developer, please engage in the community for a few weeks. Once you’ve built up some credibility on a few threads, feel free to email us about what you’re trying to build, promote and your purpose. Do not post links or offers, or email us for permission to post.

• The 10:1 ration. In general, non-merchants should be thinking about offering value first, getting value after. A good way to do this is to jump into merchant questions and answer generously. 10 help comments to 1 self-promotional post has proven to be a great strategy.

• If you’re registered and an active partner/affiliate of Carson, you may post offers/updates/blog posts without permission, as long as they are relevant and in good taste. Email [email protected] to explore opportunities for partnering up.

• If our Carson partnership program is not a fit for your business, we have an option available for paid sponsored posts — send a relevant request to [email protected] for more details on this.

• We don’t allow any solicitations or link to service offers that compete directly with our services at Carson. We built this community over years as an extension of our support service. It’s not meant to be a customer acquisition channel for direct competitors. Thanks for your understanding. 

If you want to discuss a strategic partnership, email: [email protected] or book a call, I love chatting/meeting with Shopify partners about new opportunities and I’ve set aside times for this purpose. https://calendly.com/heycarson/30/ — please be very specific with the purpose of your call.

I look forward to your engagement in the community and to hearing your success story.