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Shopify is proud to empower ecommerce entrepreneurs. We’re always happy to read about how entrepreneurs have found success selling online.

That’s why we’ve put up a page dedicated to featuring ecommerce success stories. And sometimes we get submissions so good that we have to feature it on this blog. So we reached out to one merchant to tell us more of her story.

Meet Raw Generation, a raw juice company based in Middletown, New Jersey. The entrepreneur behind it is 30-year-old Jessica Geier, a certified health coach.

Jessica started Raw Generation in 2012 with her dad, Bill. After initial struggles, she experimented with new sales channels – and took revenues from $8,000 in May, 2013 to $96,000 in July, 2013.

Here’s how she did it.

Most of us fear failure more than we fear almost anything else in the world.

Failure is painful; we all know that. But failure is also useful. Failing is the best way for people to grow, because failing is the only way we really learn. It lets us know when we should change course, and gives us experience to do something the next time around.

That’s the theme of a recent book by Megan McArdle, a former staff journalist at The Economist and The Atlantic who currently writes for Bloomberg View. The book is called The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success.

The book is an essential reminder to embrace failure as a way to learn and re-invent. That’s a useful lesson for everyone, especially entrepreneurs, to grasp. The book is filled with reporting and research. There are lots of interesting anecdotes, and we decided to share six of the most valuable ones for entrepreneurs.

Get ready for some fun stories to learn from.

Most of us fear failure more than we fear almost anything else in the world.

Failure is painful; we all know that. But failure is also useful. Failing is the best way for people to grow, because failing is the only way we really learn. It lets us know when we should change course, and gives us experience to do something the next time around.

That’s the theme of a recent book by Megan McArdle, a former staff journalist at The Economist and The Atlantic who currently writes for Bloomberg View. The book is called The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success.

The book is an essential reminder to embrace failure as a way to learn and re-invent. That’s a useful lesson for everyone, especially entrepreneurs, to grasp. The book is filled with reporting and research. There are lots of interesting anecdotes, and we decided to share six of the most valuable ones for entrepreneurs.

Get ready for some fun stories to learn from.

Today we crossed a major milestone: 100,000 businesses now use Shopify to power their stores.

The first Shopify store was actually my own. Almost a decade ago, I wanted to sell snowboards online. The options for shopping carts were either extremely expensive, or painfully complicated. Eventually this frustration was channeled into creating Shopify. We set out on a mission: to make ecommerce easier and more affordable, so that anyone could start their own online store.

When it comes to building a highly profitable ecommerce business, choosing the right product is without a doubt the most important piece of the puzzle.

A critical first step in making sure you’ve picked a winner is evaluating the market demand, competition and viability of the product itself.

Get this step wrong and you run the risk of wasting your time and energy, or worse, sinking a bunch of money into inventory you can’t move.

Get it right and you set yourself up for sales and success.

To help you determine if you’ve got a viable and profitable product idea on your hands, we’ve put together this comprehensive guide that shows you exactly how to take a look “under the hood” of your market and your product to make sure you’re building your business on a strong foundation.

Good product photography is important. It increases the perceived value of your products and makes your website appear more trustworthy.

But taking your products to a professional photographer can be expensive if you're just starting out. That’s why we put together the ultimate DIY guide to beautiful product photography, so that you too can shoot some gorgeous pictures that sell.

As a follow-up, we’ve compiled 40 tools and resources to help you take your own product photos.

Here they are.

Do you follow the r/entrepreneur subreddit? We here at Shopify love that space, and regularly look through it for inspiration.

Last week we picked up a super helpful post by an entrepreneur who has built an amazing store. In less than a year Mr. Eric Bandholz built a business with $120,000 in monthly sales.

The company is Beardbrand. And Eric spells out exactly what he did to generate revenue of this scale.

His secret? Building a brand. It’s a “high priority” especially as a consumer business. And the results?

With Eric’s kind permission, we excerpt parts of his post (the original is found in gray) while adding bits and pieces to supplement his advice to help make sure that merchants see the value of building a great brand.

We recently shared the most effective ways to use Youtube marketing to increase sales.

Today we want to feature the stores that are doing video marketing right. These are the online stores and small businesses that mastered these tactics to build a real following around their products.

Business owners often wonder about the "ROI of social media". Is my Facebook page actually driving sales? Is all this tweeting really doing anything for my bottom line? Should I be on Pinterest and Instagram?

Well it turns out, when it comes to ecommerce, being social matters.

To better understand how social media is impacting the ecommerce industry, we analyzed data from 37 million social media visits that led to 529,000 orders.

When exploring new opportunities, marketers tend to land on sweepstakes, giveaways, or contests as tactics to quickly help grow their audience. In doing so, many set their expectations too high assuming that giving something away for free will generate amazing results for their company.

This isn’t always the case though. Many businesses run sweepstakes and contests with high hopes, but their promotions end up falling short of the expected outcome. In turn, this leaves them with a bad taste in their mouth and they avoid running them again.

Here are 11 ways your marketing campaign may fail, and what you can do to increase your chances of running a successful promotion.

The average shopping cart abandonment rate sits between 60% and 80%. That’s a lot of revenue left unrealized. Fortunately, you can win a few of those potential customers back. Typically, abandoned cart emails can recover between 5% and 11% of otherwise lost sales. Here's are a few examples to inspire your next abandoned cart sequence.

Have you built a loyal following around your products? Have you been gaining followers steadily on social media? Already consistently putting out great content on your blog?

Then maybe it's time to move on to video marketing.

Video adds a whole new dimension to your marketing mix. Done properly, you can use video to add depth to your product’s features and stories, tell the history of how your company has come to be, or explain how your product might be used in ways that can’t be captured in web copy or in print. And that translates to more sales. According to MultiVisionDigital, a video production company, consumers are 64% more likely to purchase a product after watching a product video.

When your product is just too cool, or you want to make sure that people really get the best use out of it, it’s time to grab a camera.

Before we get too deep into the specifics of video and YouTube marketing, it’s important to understand that you don’t need a viral hit to see results. You’re telling a story about yourself or your products, not producing a viral hit for personal fame. Focus on engagement, not on simply getting a huge number of views.

In a future post we’ll share some common traits of compelling videos produced by ecommerce businesses. In the meantime, here are YouTube strategies that get views.