Shopify is one of the easiest ways to start your own online business. It is quick to set up and you don’t have to learn how to code.
In this blog post, you will learn how to build a Shopify store step-by-step.
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Table of Contents
- What is Shopify?
- Why Choose Shopify To Build An Online Store?
- Shopify Disadvantages
- 12 Steps to Set up a Shopify Store From Scratch
- Step 1: Signing up for Shopify Account
- Step 2: Explore The Shopify Dashboard
- Step 3: Customize your store’s appearance with themes
- Step 4: Add products to your Shopify store
- Step 5: Organize your products in collections.
- Step 6: Create store pages.
- Step 7: Create a navigation menu
- Step 8: Connect a custom domain to Shopify:
- Step 9: Configure payment methods
- Step 10: Set up shipping options
- Step 11: Setting up Taxes and duties rates
- Step 12: Launch your e-commerce store
What is Shopify?
Shopify is an e-commerce platform that helps businesses build and manage online stores where they can sell products both online and in person.
Why Choose Shopify To Build An Online Store?
Shopify is a complete commerce platform that lets anyone start, manage, and grow a business. It is easy to get your online store started, built, and managed.
Shopify Disadvantages
Like many other platforms out there, there are some downsides to your Shopify store. It could be a little expensive compared to other platforms out there.
12 Steps to Set up a Shopify Store From Scratch
In this Shopify guide, we will walk you through each step that will help you start and launch your Shopify store in 12 steps.
Step 1: Signing up for Shopify Account
Go to Shopify and click: Start a free trial You can get started with Shopify for free then after your free trial, you can choose any plan that suits you.
You’ll be asked to add your business name and email. Shopify also needs your address so they can help you to accurately collect sales tax later.
You’ll be asked some basic questions about your business. If you are just starting or you have been selling online or in person.
Step 2: Explore The Shopify Dashboard
Once you log into your Shopify store, you’ll see a dashboard where you will see your daily sales and some analytics. Shopify will also show you activity cards reflecting anything important you need to take off.
On the left menu you’ll find a section where we have:
Home, orders, products, customers, content, analytics, marketing, discounts,
Then you have another section on the left that shows your sales channels: Like your online store, Amazon, point of sale, and other sales channels that you may have.
Then another section displays apps. For now, let’s focus on the first part of the left menu section.
Orders:
You can look up your orders here. You can see order details, add draft orders, and see abandoned checkouts.
Products:
View your products under the All Products tab. You can manage incoming inventory under transfers. Via the inventory tab, you can see and manage your inventory across locations. You can create collections, which are groups of products. With an advanced Shopify plan, you can also offer gift cards.
Customers:
Look up and edit your customers’ information. You can see details like their name, addresses, email, phone and recent orders.
Analytics:
This is where all your data makes sense. In the analytics tab, you can see how your store is doing and generate several performance reports. Reports such as revenue over the period, products that have been sold, website visitors, and many other critical data will help you oversee your store’s performance.
Marketing:
Shopify makes it easy to launch marketing campaigns, such as email marketing and advertising campaigns, on different platforms, such as Google, Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook.
Discounts:
In this section, you can offer and create various types of discounts for your store.
Apps:
Once you have your store set up, you will need various app interactions that will help you to run your store smoother and grow your business faster. In this section, you can browse the Shopify app store and see if any apps can help you grow your business.
Sales Channels:
In this section, you will access all the sales channels on which your products could be live. At first, you could have only one sales channel, that is your website. When you click on sales channels, you can see and add additional platforms like Amazon, POS – point of sale (Selling your product in-person), and many more.
Blog idea – What Are Sales Channels on Shopify?
Settings:
Here you can find your overall store settings. You can edit things like your payment providers, staff accounts, billing, invoices, shipping, and taxes.
Step 3: Customize your store’s appearance with themes
The next step is about what your shop should look like, this is done by adding a theme.
From your home, navigate to the Online Store and click Themes. Scroll down to explore free themes or visit the Shopify theme store. I think it’s best to search for a theme that already looks close to what you’d imagine your store to look like. That way you don’t have to do too many edits. Check the reviews to make sure the theme works as advertised. You can get the theme from Shopify
From the themes page, navigate to the top and click on Customize. You’ll see the theme editor page. On the left side menu, you can choose the different design elements that you can edit. If you’re happy with your changes, make sure to click save.
Each theme has different layouts, functions, and elements that can be edited. For most themes, you can edit the menu, logo, what sections are visible or hidden, fonts, colors, images, the product page, and how many items are shown on the front and collection pages.
If you want to change parts of the design that can’t be edited via the editor pager, you still have the option to change the theme’s HTML and CSS directly.
Step 4: Add products to your Shopify store
Now that you have a setup of how your store looks. The next step is to add your products. From your Shopify home, navigate to the Products tab. Click Add Product. You’ll see the product input page.
Title:
Enter your product’s title. This would be your product’s name. Make sure it is clear for the customer what you’re selling or interesting enough so visitors want to learn more.
Description:
Think of this as your mini sales pitch for your product. Now, remember your customers can’t touch or feel your products. A product description will help them understand more about your product and what it does, or why they need it, or what they’re buying. Here you can mention more details about your products such as the product’s ingredients, materials, other specifications, features and benefits, or even how it’s made. The more details you can add the better as this will also help you with the SEO of your website.
Media
This section is where you can display what and how your product looks like. You can add your product in the form of images, videos, 3D models, and files. You can upload more than one to show different product angles and details.
Category:
This section is where you describe your product categories from the given options. Product categories are labels that are assigned to products or to the collection of products. Product categories are used to indicate the tax obligations and exemptions that apply to a purchase. They also help add meta fields to improve search, filters, and cross-channel sales. Product categories are selected from Shopify’s Standard Product Taxonomy, which is a predefined and standardized list.
Pricing:
In this section, we can see we have: Price, Compare-at-price, Charge tax, Cost per item, Profit, and Margin
Price:
This is the sale price, the price you want to sell your products for.
Compare-at price:
This is the maximum retail price of your product. If you want to show that the product was more expensive before, enter the higher price of the product here.
Example: I am selling candles that have an MRP of say $20 but I have a sale price of $14.99
Note: You can have Compare-at-price could be the same as your Sale price.
Cost Per Item:
Here you can enter the actual cost of your product and your profit margin is automatically populated using your sale price.
Taxes:
When you’re selling a product you most likely have to collect sales tax. Depending on the nature of your products, your business model, and your country’s tax laws, you might need to check this box. To learn more about taxes, you can check this page from Shopify.
Please check with your legal consultancy and accountant in your respective country to make sure your taxes are set up correctly.
Inventory:
In this section, you have an option where you can let Shopify track your inventory. Just enter the quantity that you have of a particular product.
Continue selling when out of stock:
You can also allow customers to buy the product, even if you don’t have them in stock. If you want to offer this option, make sure to check this box.
SKU:
Stock Keeping Unit or SKU is a unique ID for each product. This can be used to track your inventory. This code is used to identify products in inventory management. SKUs are usually made up of 8 to 10 letters and numbers and can be printed on product labels as scannable bar codes.
The number is oftentimes provided by the manufacturer or supplier. If you don’t have one, you can leave it blank. You can also use an SKU number generator to create SKUs for your products.
Barcode:
Just like SKU, this is also made of numbers that are scannable using barcode scanners.
You can use apps like Retail Barcode Labels to create Barcodes and labels for your products.
Shipping:
If you’re selling a physical product, you need to check this box. In addition to that you might need to enter how much your product weighs. This is needed to calculate the shipping costs. You must mention your product weight as accurately as possible. Use Digital Weighing machines to determine the weight of your products.
Pro tip: Weigh your products including your packaging to access the complete weight of the product that would be while shipping.
Variants:
You can choose to offer more variants of your products. Such as different colors or sizes.
Search engine listing:
This is how your product will be displayed in the search engine results like Google. You can edit this section and add more info about your products with more important keywords and search terms.
Status:
You can keep the status of your product ‘Live’ or save it as a ‘Draft’.
Publishing:
Once you made your products live, here you can choose what sales channels you want to offer the product. You also have an option to schedule the availability of your products.
Product organization:
In this section, you can choose what type of product, add vendors, add your products to collections, and add tags.
Product Type:
Add what kind of product this is. Product types aren’t required, but they’re useful as a way to create a custom category. This helps to later organize your products and to sort them into collections.
Read more about this – Here
Vendor:
This is where you can mention where your product originates from. Vendors represent the origin or source of the products that you sell.
Collections:
You can use these later to sort your products. Add your products to collections. You will learn more about collections in the next step.
Tags:
Shopify tags are customizable labels. They are another way you can organize and sort your products. Like helps you organize your Shopify store’s data, such as products, customers, orders, and collections.
Step 5: Organize your products in collections.
Within the products option, you will find a section called ‘Collection.’
You can use this to organize and filter your products into various categories. This also helps your customers to find what they’re looking for instead of browning through all of your stores.
Go to Products, click Collections, and then click on ‘Create Collection.’
Title:
This is the name of the collection.
This could be named based on your product type, material, discount type, special occasion, offers, etc.
For example: Let’s say you are selling Wedding gowns. You can create a collection of different types of wedding gowns, such as A-line, mermaid, ball gown, etc.
Description:
Use this section to describe your collection. This usually shows on the top or bottom of the page. Although this is an optional step, it is better to add a description for your collection as this will help you with your SEO.
Collection Image:
This will be your collection image. Add a nice image that represents the collection.
Collection type:
This is where you choose what products to include in a collection. Here you have two options: Either add products manually or add them automatically based on product characteristics.
For example, You can add products manually one by one by going through each of your products on your website. The other method is more automatic. You can add products that are of the same product type or have the same tag. You can even filter out products based on pricing or discounts. You can add products that match one or more conditions. This process is done automatically.
Search Engine Listing:
This is how your collection will be displayed in the search engine results like Google. You can edit this section and add more info about your collection with more important keywords and search terms.
Step 6: Create store pages.
No matter the size of your Shopify store, you’ll need to create some pages.
Pages are permanent elements in your store. Some examples would be – the “Contact”, “About Us”, “Home”, and “Policy” pages.
Here is how you can create your pages.
Click on the Online Store and Pages then click on Add Page
Title:
This is the name of your page.
Content:
This will be content that you need to add which will be associated with the page. You can style the text and add images.
Search Engine Listing Preview
This is where you can edit how your page looks in the Search Engine results. For example, let’s say someone searches for a specific keyword. This is a preview of how your page comes up for their search query.
Step 7: Create a navigation menu
Within sales channels, under ‘online store’ you will find a section called ‘Navigation.’
It has two menus, ‘Main Menu’ and ‘Footer Menu’ you can add more if you want. Think of this as putting a map for your online store. This will help your customers navigate through your store.
Click on your menus and edit the pages you wish to include.
Here’s how you can edit your menu. Choose the menu you wish to edit and click on ‘Add menu item.’
Enter the name of your menu item and choose the link. Here you can also choose the pages that you have already created. Check Step 6.
For example, if you’d like to add your ‘About us’ page, as you start typing “About” in the link section your ‘About us’ page should show as a link option.
How to Add Your Shopify Collection to Your Navigation
Now that you created a collection, how do you add it to your shop’s navigation so customers can see it? Navigate to the Online Store and click Navigation.
Choose the menu to which you’d like to add the collection. Add a menu item name and choose where it should link to. In this case, it would be the collection.
Some of the important pages you can include in your ‘Footer Menu’ are
- Legal pages
- Contact
- About us
- Shipping Policy, etc.
Shopify Policy Templates
About creating legal pages, you should be transparent about your policies to protect yourself and your customers. Shopify provides templates for Refund Policy, Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, and Shipping Policy.
Go to ‘Settings,’ click on Policies, and choose Written Policies, and then Insert Template.
These are automatically generated, you can use these templates and make them your own. To make sure you are set up correctly, you should take them to a lawyer.
Step 8: Connect a custom domain to Shopify:
If you already have a domain that you have purchased. You can click ‘Connect existing domain.’ and enter your URL.
Once your domain URL is detected, you will be instructed to connect your domain via a third-party platform.
If you don’t have a domain, you can purchase a domain directly using Shopify. Find and Register your Domain using Shopify.
Step 9: Configure payment methods
To start selling, you need to be able to accept payments. This is a crucial step. This is very easy to do with Shopify. Navigate to Settings and click on Payment, Then under Payment Providers, click ‘Choose a provider.’
Through Shopify payments, your customers can pay with credit cards. Shopify charges a 2.9% + $0.3 transaction fee. There’s also a 2% transaction fee for payments that aren’t Shopify payments.
Click Complete Account Setup and enter your bank account info. In addition to the Shopify payments, I recommend setting up PayPal.
Step 10: Set up shipping options
Setting up shipping is important so you and your customers are charged the right shipping fee.
Navigate to Settings and click Shipping and Delivery.
The first thing you need to set up is the shipping rates customers are charged at check out. Click on New Profile.
Tell Shopify where you ship from and if all products should be included in this shipping profile. Choose how much you want to charge based on weight, cart amount, or shipment speed.
If you have an Advanced Shopify plan, you can also offer calculated shipping rates from USPS, Canada Post, FedEx, and UPS. This means the customer gets charged whatever you get charged.
You can also create new profiles for other countries and decide how much you want to charge for these destinations.
Step 11: Setting up Taxes and duties rates
From the Shopify admin, go to Settings, then click on Taxes and Duties. ****
Then find the region in this list and select it to manage its tax settings. After you set up your tax regions, then you can manage your tax settings including your registrations, tax overrides and exemptions, and tax calculations. If you’re unsure about where you’re liable, check with a tax professional.
Step 12: Launch your e-commerce store
