The Internet has taken us into the era of democratization. Google has democratized data and made everyone wiser. Facebook has democratized the media and turned everyone into movie stars. WordPress has democratized journalism and turned everyone into writers.
And Shopify has democratized e-commerce and turned it into a merchant.
You have completed the registration of a company and have gone through an extensive process of product progression. Now it’s time to start promoting your product, so you want to be informed about how to start an online store and ecommerce platform.
This Shopify how-to instruction will tell you the seven steps that will take you from the single test to the first visitor.
You probably have an idea for the name of a store. Maybe he even wrote a description of the company and designed a logo. If you have images and photographs illustrating your activity, keep them convenient as well. You’ll want all of this in the process.
The more you have ready for the first time, the faster you’ll be able to connect, but even if you don’t already have everything under control, you can get started with Shopify. One thing in particular that sets it apart is the Shopify Exchange marketplace.
If you’re in a position to start doing business but are sure if you need to go through the full setup procedure yourself, you can purchase an existing Shopify store on the Exchange marketplace instead.
More importantly, however, you have your products ready. If they come from a structured product progression process, you probably already have titles, descriptions, images, and costs available to them.
If it’s physical products, chances are you have one or more places where they’re going to be stored, and you probably have a fulfillment and delivery solution in mind.
The first step with Shopify is to set up your free trial. All you need is an email address and a store name. Set up a password now to log in to your account in the future. Once you’ve finished the initial registration and quiz, go to the dashboard page in Shopify. Your account is open.
On the Shopify homepage, the link to the loose test can be found at the top right. Image source: author
During the sign-up process, Shopify will send you an email to make sure the address you entered is yours. Saving a password and verifying your email address are important steps to securely access your permanent Shopify store.
After you verify the email, Shopify will provide a questionnaire about you and your project, and the dashboard will be built based on the data you provide. Select your type of activity carefully.
After setting up your account, quickly access the Shopify interface. You’ll be taken to the Dashboard page, where you’ll see a summary of your activity once you’ve entered your ecommerce store.
However, at this initial point, everything you see on the dashboard will be similar to your store launch. In the menu on the left, you will see all the features to set up and manage your store.
This is Shopify’s navigation menu. Image source: author
It’s a good idea to go through all the elements of the navigation bar to make sure you perceive what each of them is. However, many of them, such as orders, customers, and analytics, may not make sense until you make your first sales.
The way to start setting up your store is to upload a product right away. This makes the total procedure more fluid, understandable and tangible. An empty store will be difficult to manage.
If you don’t have your own products to sell, you can locate them through others that ArrayShopify has incorporated, such as Oberlo, Printify, Drippipper, and many others.
It’s easy to upload a product to your Shopify store – just fill in categories, such as title, description, and price. Image source: author
For each product, you want to decide on a title, upload a description, upload at least one symbol or photo, and set the price. You can also upload a stock control unit (SKU) number if you want. You can then enter the available stock through the garage location, as well as shipping data and fulfillment details.
Now that you have something to work with and have an idea of what it takes to sell your products, let’s get into the store setup. You can press the Settings button at the bottom left of your screen, below the navigation bar.
First, about the general settings: payment settings, shipping, taxes and legal information.
Also, set the languages, if they apply to your store. These settings can be a bit complex, but once they’re in place, you may not have to revisit them unless your store undergoes major changes.
In the Settings section, under General, Payment, Shipping, Taxes, Locations, and Legal for now. Image source: author
You can save Check-out, Gift Cards, Notifications, Files, Sales Channels and Plan and Permissions for later, feel free to familiarize yourself with them at this time.
If you plan to sell a physical product, shipping will be a component of the setup. Detail where your stock is in the places and set up the main points for execution in the Shipping section. It’s also a smart time to set up your taxes.
The general data is always that your commercial registration is in force.
The same applies to the implementation of the payment system. As with the details of your product, if one or more pieces are missing for your store, write them down so that you can process them later and stay completing the rest.
Entering the settings, you may have discovered some apps that you want were missing. Maybe you’re promoting a virtual product and want a solution to provide the download for an intangible sale. Or maybe you want a flexible billing formula. to use with your store.
If so, it’s time for the Shopify app store to identify other apps you want to make your ecommerce business fully functional.
Search for any other apps you want in the Shopify app store. Image source: author
As in any other app store, some apps are loose and others come at a cost. Identify and verify the apps you want to launch, but don’t get lost in marketing or sales apps just yet.
At this point, you’ll be done with some of the more complex tasks. You may want more time to fully develop the store setup, but during this time you can start designing the store itself.
You can do this through Shopify’s online page builder, which is necessarily an explicit service for building your online page from scratch.
Some Shopify alternatives, such as WooCommerce, rely almost exclusively on the WordPress format. While Shopify uses the same notions of themes, pages, and posts to create a store, the easy-to-use interface is intuitive for users in the background, allowing you to drag and drop pieces and rearrange them visually.
You’ll want a theme that is in line with your logo positioning, as well as the type of products you sell. You’ll also want to write text for your site and locate wonderful photographs for illustrations and backgrounds.
In the navigation menu, click “Online Store”. Start with domains. Shopify will already have your store set up on a subdomain (yourshop. shopify. com), but you may need to move it to your own domain. If you don’t already have one, you can also book it through Shopify.
Then proceed with the theme selection. Once your domain is active and your theme selected, it’s time to write the content and organize your site. You can also upload things like newsletter subscriptions and ad bars at this point.
Finally, don’t set up multiple metrics trackers for your store in Preferences.
Before you can launch, you’ll want to have entered all of your products; completed payment, legal, shipping and tax procedures; Set up your domain name. and designed his store with a theme and descriptive texts.
Now it’s time to check the user experience, ask other people on the site (always password protected) to give you their opinion and check the checkout process.
Feel free to remove the password as soon as you are satisfied with your store. He can still improve it. When you’re in a position to get started, it’ll be time to think about your ecommerce marketing strategies.
Visit the Marketing tab of Shopify’s navigation menu and use Google or Facebook to market your site. Think about email marketing for your ecommerce site as well – you can start collecting email addresses through a newsletter right from the start.
Shopify provides a discount code feature that you can use to give a sense of urgency or privilege to the users you contact. You’ll get the most productive effects imaginable if you employ a built-in marketing strategy, where you use multiple channels and tactics to attract and convert visitors.
Shopify has done a wonderful job of democratizing ecommerce by simplifying or even maximizing the demanding technical situations of building an online store. As you may have noticed, this does not eliminate vital responsibilities such as business registration, bank accounts, legal compliance, or stock and shipping management.
One might believe that ecommerce is infinitely complex, but Shopify removes all possible technical barriers between you and a successful online store, reducing them to simpler steps that deserve to seem manageable even to ecommerce newbies.
And with our step-by-step guide, you can focus on your products and marketing and the successful entrepreneur you wanted to be.