Last Chance to Enter Your Clients in the Shopify Build A Business Competition

The deadline for clients to enter Shopify’s annual Build A Business Competition is almost here! If you created a custom design for one of the six winning Shopify Merchants’ stores, you’ll take home $10,000 USD along with a handful of other prizes, including a listing in our Shopify Experts Marketplace. We’ve compiled everything you need to help you and your clients rise to the top in the final weeks of the competition.

The deadline for clients to enter Shopify’s annual Build A Business Competition is almost here! If you created a custom design for one of the six winning Shopify Merchants’ stores, you’ll take home $10,000 USD along with a handful of other prizes, including a listing in our Shopify Experts Marketplace.

There are two easy ways to enter your clients into the Build A Business Competition:

1. For existing eligible stores (signed up after June 1 2014), enter their myshopify URL here.

2. For new stores, click the opt-in checkbox on the “Create Dev Shop” form.

More ways to win

Now there’s even more ways for you and your clients to win! In addition to the top sellers in each category, Sir Richard Branson will choose one winner from a list of 20 business owners that ranked highest in their categories.

Unlike the main category prizes, the Richard Branson Choice Award is not based solely on having the highest sales; there is also a creativity component. Work with your client to brainstorm as many creative ways as possible to ramp up your sales and your online presence, and you could walk away with $10,000 USD!

For more information about the Richard Branson Choice award, read our announcement on the Ecommerce Blog.

Need some extra help?

We’ve compiled everything you need to help you and your clients rise to the top in the final weeks of the competition.

The Build A Business Toolkit

With marketing banners, logos, infographics, and more, our Build A Business toolkit for Partners has everything you need to get your clients excited about the competition. Download the kit for free here. 

Interview with FreakDesign

In this blog post, Build A Business winner Jason Bowman from FreakDesign shares his experience working on the CrossFit community website The WOD Life, which won last year’s Sports & Recreation category.

Care about the shop and the work you’re doing. If a shop owner is asking you for help, just remember that it’s about more than just making something look nice or adding a new feature... in reality the shop owners are trusting you with their business dreams. That’s one of the awesome things about being a designer.

Interview with Pixel Supply

We also touched base with Jose Davila at Pixel Supply, for his work on last year’s winning shop MVMT Watches. You can read the full interview here.

Our favorite part was the challenge that MVMT Watches brought to Pixel Supply. Right from the start they let us know that they were gunning for the winning place so it was always great motivation and helped us stay just as driven as they were to help them reach their goal.

How to encourage clients to enter the competition

The Build A Business Competition isn’t just a great opportunity for you, it’s also an amazing incentive for your clients. If they win, they'll receive mentorship from some of the world’s best entrepreneurs and enjoy an all-inclusive trip to Sir Richard Branson’s private retreat on Necker Island. For more information and competition rules, tell your clients to check out the Shopify Build A Business landing page. 

You can also share this video so they can learn from last year’s Build A Business winners:

And most importantly...

Don’t delay! You only have until March 31, 2015 to enter.