Shopify: The Beginner’s Guide
Working with thousands of Shopify stores, what I’ve learned from 90% of them is that they all started small from scratch, with little knowledge about how to build an online store without coding skills, or how to get the first buyers and how to optimize the so-called conversion rates in eCommerce.
Shopify is one of the easiest e-commerce builders to help you run your online store for the first time, making the process straightforward and painless. In this article, we’re going to look at the Shopify platform, from decision to launch. And if you’ve already decided that it’s the best e-commerce platform for your business, then you might like to get your 14-DAY FREE TRIAL for Shopify from this link > Get 14-day Free Trail !
Before start, let’s go over some quick basics so you can decide whether Shopify is the right choice for you.
What is Shopify?
Shopify is an online store builder that provides you with anything from hosting, domain,… so that anyone can sell online. With Shopify, you won’t have to worry about server, security or any other technical issues. You just need to sign up an account to open a store, then take care of the content of your store. Currently there are over 400,000 stores using Shopify to sell online.
With that being said, Shopify is great for, but not limited to, small and medium business owners, especially who have little to no coding skills. Though, many coders/developers still come to Shopify as the best choice because they are free from technical issues and can invest all resources into products, marketing and selling.
What You Can Sell on Shopify?
First of all, let’s start with what you can sell on Shopify. Overall, if it’s a physical product, drop ship product, digital product or service that isn’t illegal to sell online, you can sell it on Shopify. If you visit their sitemap and look under “Ecommerce by Industry”, you’ll find a listing of the most popular verticals using their platform, ranging from art to coffee, e-books to guitars, shoes to homeware – it’s hard to find something you can’t sell!
If you already have an offline physical retail store, you are also able to merge and manage your entire sales and inventory system in one location with Shopify’s Point of Sale (POS) System.
Shopify Pricing
What may bother you is Shopify pricing. Shopify is a premium service, which means you cannot find any free plan, only a free of charge trial for 14 days, and then you are certain to buy one of the plans. Also, for Basic Shopify stores, you are billed 2% for every single transaction.
You will find 4 main pricing divisions based on increased features and extra e-commerce features and tools you can use to help expand your store, with an extra enterprise-grade solution available for larger businesses. These plans are:
- Lite – $9 per month
- Basic – $29 per month
- Shopify – $79 per month
- Advanced Shopify – $299 per month
- Shopify Plus – starts at $2000 per month
With each plan you are able to add website templates and apps from the Shopify store, with extensive selections of both free and paid options to choose from.
All Shopify plans are month to month (unless you sign up for an annual or biennial plan) so you are able to upgrade, downgrade or cancel Shopify at any time.
None of the plans include domain or email hosting and you should compare prices with an external domain registrars, such as Namecheap and GoDaddy.
Setting Up Online Store
You can start your Shopify store with a free, 14-day trial that you can sign up for on the main homepage or using the Free Trial button in the menu bar. The first thing you will do is enter your preferred email, password and create a store name.
The first thing you will do is enter your preferred email.
In popup or at next page enter password and create a store name.
Note that your store name will be included in your store’s URL. Even though you can change this later, it’s best to think of something simple like you.myshopify.com. If you go with multiple words, you’ll end up with your-business-name.myshopify.com. If you’re not planning to redirect a URL from your main domain (such as store.yourdomain.com to you.myshopify.com), then you’ll definitely want to keep your store name/URL in mind. Once Shopify creates your account, you will enter your basic details – name, address and phone number, then what you are selling and revenue (if you have any yet). Then, you will be taken to the admin dashboard to begin creating your online store, here are 10 steps to help you guide you through the process.
1. Add products.
First, you will want to add products to your store. For physical products, you can enter them manually, bulk upload them from a CSV file. For Documentation you can read > Product manual
- For manual addition of product, filling in all details: product name, product description, product images, type of product, the vendor, price, variants (size, color…).
- Bulk upload products by importing CSV file. You can have a look at Shopify’s Product Manual for more details on this method.
- For Shipping, In Shopify admin dashboard, choose Settings >> Shipping.
- For Tax, In Shopify admin dashboard, choose Settings >> Taxes.
- Use email marketing (the best marketing channel ever!) to sell!
- Promote your business by running advertising services: Facebook Ads & Google Ads
- Leverage social media : use Pinterest for e-Commerce, optimize Instagram to grow sales, build perfect Facebook business page,…
- Run discount offers to welcome visitors on your site, and at the same time collecting email subscriptions or social followers in exchange for discount code.
2. Customize design.
Next, you will want to add a custom design to your Shopify store by choosing a theme. The Shopify theme store has a great variety of designs to choose from free to paid and sorted by industry. You can also choose our themes on best price.
If you want an unique design for your store goto Our services section and order for a shopify theme. We will build a theme or set your theme as per your requirement.
Assuming you do not have the starter plan, you can edit your chosen theme by using the theme settings editor or template editor to modify the coding (HTML, CSS, and JS). On most themes, you will definitely want to go into the settings to modify the footer, as that is where you will add your social links, payment methods, and other details.
3. Set up your domain name.
In Shopify admin dashboard, choose Online Store >> Domains to set up a domain for your store. For detail check the shopify manual.
If you have not already had a domain address, you can stick with the basic domain for Shopify Stores (yourstore.myshopify.com), or go to domain providers such as Namecheap or Godaddy to buy the address that you like, suits your business’ industry, or is good for SEO purpose.
4. Set up shipping and tax rates.
You will need to choose to add additional shipping costs and taxes to your items or to let Shopify know you have included them in your item price. Shopify includes some basic rates to get you started, but depending on what you sell, you may need to customize more options.
5. Set up payments.
Perhaps the most important step after adding your products is setting up how customers will pay you. In Shopify admin dashboard, choose Settings >> Payments. If you are in the USA, Canada or the UK you can accept payments with Shopify Payments that accept credit cards without needing to set up a third-pasty payment gateway or merchant account. Shopify also integrates with many different payments processing services including Paypal, Amazon Payments and Google Wallet.
You can see their list of over 90 third-party processors in the FAQ.
6. Settings.
You will want to go through your Shopify settings thoroughly. Most of these will be filled out while you complete the above steps, but a few things like the place where you add your Google Analytics code, store title, and store description are awaiting configuration in the general settings section.
7. Open your store to the world.
Once you are ready, you can make your Shopify store public. Until you do, it will be password protected so you can do some testing to make sure things look and function the way they should. In Shopify admin dashboard, choose Online Store >> Preferences and uncheck "Enable password page". As with all things, be sure to do lots of testing so that customers aren’t the first ones to find mistakes and glitches.
8. Install suitable apps
Shopify has hundreds of free and premium apps that you can use to enhance the functionality of your online store.
You need apps to start selling effectively on Shopify, that’s for sure. There are hundreds of Shopify apps on Shopify Appstore, in different categories: Marketing, Sales, Customer Support, Shipping, Reporting, Inventory…
Most starters will go with the top free apps on each category, with a big number of reviews, to test on their store before being willing to paying for charged apps.
9. Get your first customers.
One of the head-scratchings for rookie online sellers is how to do marketing, promote Shopify stores and boost sales. There are a wide range of things you can do to sell online, however, the most popular and effective ways to get traffic in the begining are:
10. Social Selling
What if you want to sell products on your blog? That’s not a problem. Shopify offers widgets/plugins for WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal users. These allow you to add products to your pages, posts, and sidebar. This means that if you are creating content that your target customer base would enjoy, you have a good chance to monetize your site’s traffic by directing your readers to your products. Another way you can integrate sales into your social strategy is by creating a store on your Facebook page. Shopify offers dozens of Facebook integrations that allow you to turn your Facebook page into an extension of your e-commerce store, helping fans discover your products and ultimately buy from you.
Are you ready to start your own business now?
This basic tutorial should be enough to help you get started, but you will probably have more questions while setting it up yourself. Don’t worry then, we are always here for you you can ask your question in contact us form. and also can order us to set your store. We will be happy to work for your website.
Thanks for reading...