Use the Shopify Buy Button to Sell on External Sites March 29, 2016 19:00

A Shopify store may not be your first or only presence online. Many people build a following on external sites or blogs before thinking of selling products online. Even after starting a Shopify store, some people may want to continue their presence on external sites or blogs. In such cases, you don’t always have to send people over to your Shopify store to purchase products. You can start selling your products on external sites by embedding the Shopify Buy Button on those sites.

In this post, we will go over how to set up the Buy Button for your Shopify products, and the advantages and limitations of using the button.

Shopify Buy Button: Setup

The Buy Button creates code that you can embed directly into most external site pages or blog posts, as long as they allow you to use an HTML or plain text editor. The Buy Button is available through Shopify’s Lite plan ($9/month), and through all higher plans.

To get started, go to Settings on your Shopify dashboard and click on Sales channels. Here, find the Buy Button and click on Add channel.

add channel shopify buy button

Add the Buy Button sales channel

Once the channel is added, it appears on the left sidebar of your Shopify dashboard. Click on Buy Button in the left sidebar and click Create a Buy Button to start creating code for your products.

create shopify buy button

Create a Buy Button for products or collections

Once you select a product or collection, you can customize aspects of the button and preview the appearance. You can customize:

  • whether to include variants where people can select from a dropdown, or to include a single variant of the product.
  • option to include product details like image and price, or just include a buy button.
  • colors for button, button text, and background.
  • what the button links to – you can link to Cart, Checkout or Product Modal.
  • the button text.
add product shopify buy button

Customize Buy Button for a product

You can link the Buy Button to Checkout if customers would typically only purchase one product at a time. If you are embedding multiple products or anticipate customers purchasing more than one product at a time, you can link to the Cart.

Once you’ve made your selections, click on the Generate embed code button.

embed code shopify buy button

Copy-paste the HTML code into your website

Copy the HTML code and paste it into your external site page or blog post. In this example, we linked the Buy Button to the Cart so that visitors can purchase multiple items at the same time.

external site shopify buy button

Buy Button on external site with Cart panel

The Cart option adds a panel overlay on the external site where customers can see and edit their cart selections. Once they are ready to Checkout, they are redirected to your Shopify store checkout page to complete the purchase.

Learn more about adding embed codes for specific platforms, and organizing multiple Buy Buttons on the same page through CSS.

Shopify Buy Button: Advantages

The Buy Button opens up new ways to sell your Shopify products. If you have an external site or blog that gets a lot of traffic, you don’t have to redirect people to your Shopify store to make a purchase. This can create a disconnected user experience. You can use the Buy Button to allow customers to directly purchase products on external sites without disrupting their experience.

This also takes away the need to migrate all your content over to your Shopify store so that you don’t lose your search ranking, presence, or traffic.

In addition, you can measure the success of your Buy Buttons as Shopify provides you analytics specific to the Buy Button sales channel.

analytics shopify buy button

Track Buy Button sales on Shopify

By default, you can see your total sales, the average order value, and top selling products for your Buy Buttons.

Shopify Buy Button: Limitations

One limitation of the Buy Button is that it doesn’t integrate with Shopify apps. If you have products modified by other apps (like our Product Customizer app), these modifications won’t carry over to the Buy Button. Buy Button can only show data that’s been added directly into your Shopify dashboard.

The Buy Button typically works only with the default Shopify product details and customizations. In cases where other apps are modifying your products, make sure to test the Buy Button, or it may be easier to redirect visitors to your Shopify store.

Shopify Buy Button: Summary

The Shopify Buy Button allows you to easily embed your Shopify products on external sites. This can be really useful if you already have an established website or blog that gets a lot of traffic. If you want to add an eCommerce component to your external website or blog, you don’t need to shift everything over to a Shopify store site. You can simply create products on a Shopify store, and then include them on your external site by copy-pasting HTML code.

You can add Shopify Buy Buttons to simple HTML websites, or platforms like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Tumblr, Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, Blogger, and more. However, one limitation of the Buy Button is that it doesn’t always carry over modifications to your products by other Shopify apps.

Have you used the Shopify Buy Button for your products? What has your experience been like? Share with us in the comments.

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