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Shopify is a prominent ecommerce platform containing everything you need or would wish to have in order to run a successful online store.
Our friend at Shopify, Braveen Kumar, has created a comprehensive step-by-step guide on creating a Shopify store for any beginner to follow. Ecommerce Websites enable your business to have a great customer base. They offer an opportunity for the customers to conveniently work online with devices on hand. The old way of making ecommerce portals has been replaced with the modern cart generating software.
These online development applications come with various features, as well as many other positive qualities.
Reduced time, development effort, physical server cost, and staff cost are a few of their benefits. Among the several e-commerce platforms available, Shopify is the first name most enterprises think of when it comes to e-commerce.
Undeniably, Shopify is famous across the world, but here are the few important points that prove these words valid.
Shopify is a prominent ecommerce platform containing everything you need or look for your ecommerce store comprehensively. This secure ecommerce software serves as a complete bundle for your ecommerce website and allows you to easily create different pages with an inbuilt online editor, sell in multiple places through the integration of local language support and customize online stores. This platform powers over 500,000 businesses in 175 countries. It is a one-stop-shop for ecommerce merchants who willing to leverage their online store. There is a myriad of reasons why Shopify is the best ecommerce platform.
So lets get started! It's all to you now Braveen.
The first time I set up an online store, I remember staring at the blank canvas before me not knowing where to start.
I agonised over picking the perfect theme. I started building my homepage before adding any products. And I spent a lot of time trying to get the wrong things exactly right before I launched.
Looking back, the mistakes I made are not uncommon for first-timers. That’s why I wanted to create the kind of resource I wish I had when I started—a walkthrough of all the decisions that go into setting up a ready-to-launch online store on Shopify that anyone can follow along with.
The example I’ll be using in this guide on how to create an online store using Shopify is the simple hot sauce store pictured below. I’ll be peeling back the curtain to show you the thinking that went into the product listings, homepage design, copywriting, shipping settings, and the dozens of decisions involved in translating a business idea into an online store.
Before we begin, you’ll need to start a free trial of Shopify. The 14-day trial should give you more than enough time to build an online store that’s ready to launch if you follow this guide and keep in mind that you can continue to add products and improve your store after it goes live.
When you start your trial, you’ll be prompted to enter a store name, which will become your default URL (e.g., storename.myshopify.com). You won’t be able to change this, but you will be able to buy a custom domain (e.g., yourstore.com) later on, so don't worry about picking the perfect name right now.
After answering a few questions, you’ll find yourself inside your own Shopify account.
Here’s a quick checklist of what you should have before you begin and what I’ll be working with to build my store:
Why make an online store without anything to buy? Adding products should be one of the first things you do, because your products are what you'll design the look and feel of your website around.
In your new Shopify store, go to Products > Add product to create your first product listing.
There’s a number of decisions we’ll be making on this page, so let’s break them down into steps.
Product pages are where customers go to learn about a product and decide whether or not to buy it. Details matter, and sharing the right information in the right way, from pricing to sizing, through text or visuals, can make all the difference. If you're not sure what to include as you create your own online shopping website, you can look at others in your market for inspiration.
Your product title should make it clear what the product is. This is what customers will see as they browse your store and what will help them find what they’re looking for in your catalog. Try to keep it short and use your product description or variants (more on those later) to surface other specific information or product options, such as colors or sizes.
For our first product title, we’ll just use the name of our flagship hot sauce, Hot Enough Habanero.
Product descriptions describe and sell your product. They’re also a common source of writer’s block. The good news is you don’t need to be a professional copywriter to write a compelling product description. You just need to:
For a product like hot sauce, we can confidently assume customers care about the following details in particular when making a purchase: ingredients, flavour, quantity, how spicy it is, and what it pairs well with. So I've done my best to make all this information accessible at a glance for my store's visitors.
In the Media section of your product page, you can upload any visual media that helps you share richer details about your products: photos, GIFs, videos, or even 3D models.
Presentation makes all the difference. Help customers imagine owning your product. Help them see it in action or proudly displayed in their space. Here are a few points to remember:
I’ll be using a single photo of a hot sauce bottle on a white background. But for products where the customer might need more visual information, such as selling clothing or starting a jewellery business, using multiple photos that offer additional angles or details can help improve customer trust.
Now it's time to set the listing price for your product. This is what customers will pay to buy your product.
Optionally, you can use the Compare at price field to communicate what the product would typically cost, especially in the case of a sale. For example, if we wanted to show savings on buying our hot sauce three-pack, we could enter the original price of three bottles here. However, I caution against using this without good reason, especially if you're selling premium products as it could cheapen their perceived quality.
The Cost per item field is also optional. If you like, you can use it to track your profit margin for an individual product. On the Shopify plan or higher, this lets you track profit in your profit report.
While there are some exceptions, businesses that sell goods and services have to collect taxes each time someone orders from them, so we’ll check that box and configure our tax settings later.
To keep it simple, we’ll assume that my per-product cost, or the cost to produce and package one bottle, is $5. If I sell each bottle for $15, I’ll be making a healthy margin that leaves some room for discounts and marketing.
In reality, pricing is rarely so straightforward. Several variables can influence how you price your products, such as shipping costs, raw materials, overhead like rent or employees, the cost of your time, and, perhaps most important, the perceived quality of your products.
You can always revisit and adjust your prices based on what you learn after you start marketing. You may discover that customers are actually willing to pay more for your products or you may find creative ways to cut costs and increase the average value of every order you get.
If we were dropshipping or using a print-on-demand service, we wouldn’t need to track inventory. But since Kinda Hot Sauces makes, sells, and ships its own hot sauce, we want to keep track of inventory in Shopify to know how much we have left of each sauce and how much more we need to produce as orders start coming in.
If it’s your first time selling online, you might see a few unfamiliar terms here, so we’ll quickly run through them.
Since it doesn’t take long to make more of my product, I can turn on “Continue selling when out of stock.” But you can turn this option off and mark items as “Sold out” if your inventory is limited or it takes longer to replenish your supply.
In the shipping section, you’ll enter details that will automatically calculate shipping rates and print the appropriate shipping labels for each order.
For my Kinda Hot Sauce store, we’ll check “This a physical product” and enter the following information:
Setting the actual shipping costs and options that you’ll offer to your customers will come later on in this tutorial.
I'm not going to be setting up variants for my products, but I still want to cover how to use Shopify to do this—since many Shopify store owners do. If your product comes with different options, like sizes or colors, instead of adding each one as its own product, you can simply add them as variants of the same product. Each variant can have its own image, price, tracked inventory, and individual settings associated with it.
With variants, you can even add additional product options, for example, offering multiple colors that come in different sizes.
When you add variants to your product and hit save to refresh the page, the Media, Pricing, Inventory, and Shipping sections we covered above will need to be set for each specific variant.
Since our product comes in one size and doesn’t have any variants, we’ll leave this section alone. If you’re selling distinct variants of the same product, however, be sure to edit each variant with the appropriate product page information. For example, a photo of an orange t-shirt for the orange variant if you offer different colors.
In the Organization section, you can label your products to help group them together and make it easier to manage your store’s product catalog, curate products for customers to shop, and apply rules or discounts to specific products. Here’s what each label means:
The search engine listing preview is where you can customize how a page appears in search engine results. It's also where you can improve the discoverability of your products through search engines like Google.
If you know what keywords your target customer is using to search for products like yours, you can work them into this section to increase your odds of showing up in search engine results over time.
I used Ubersuggest, a free keyword research tool, to gauge how often people search for keywords related to my products. I spotted “habanero sauce” (5,400 searches a month) and “mild hot sauce” (590 searches a month) and "medium hot sauce" (50 searches a month) as keywords I may want to work into my product page.
We'll go into more depth about SEO later, but here are some quick tips for optimizing this section in the meantime:
Once we’re done, we can hit Save and preview our product page to see what it looks like. We can change the little details, like colors and fonts, later on when we start customising our store.
You can repeat this for each product you want to add to your store, while keeping in mind that you don't need to add all your products in order to launch.
Now that we have at least a few individual products listed, we can start organising them into collections under Product > Collections in Shopify.
Collections can be created to curate products to target a specific audience (e.g., products for children), a theme (e.g., bestsellers), or product category (e.g., accessories). You can decide if you want to manually add products to certain collections or automate what gets included/excluded based on price, Tags, or other conditions.
Collections serve a variety of purposes, such as:
For now, I’ll be creating a collection for our medium hot sauces. That’s because I want to only include my three individual hot sauce products while excluding the three-pack bundle. This way, I can show off the individual flavours and highlight the bundle separately.
I'm going to fill out the Collection title and description based on how I want to greet visitors when they land on this Collection page. The Search Engine Preview can be filled out using the same best practices we followed for the product pages. You can also set a Collection image, which will be pulled to represent your Collection when we get into customising the look and feel step of making an online store.
So far, we’ve focused on products. But you need more than just products when you create your own online shopping website. It needs to help shoppers understand your business, give them reasons to trust you, and make other essential details available to customers who are looking for them.
You can create most of these pages under Online Store > Pages.
You don’t need to have all your pages ready for launch, but some of the most helpful ones to create include:
To create our online shop, and for the purposes of this tutorial, we’ll go over how to create an About page (called “Our Story”) a Contact page, and essential policy pages (Privacy Policy, Shipping Policy, and Terms of Service), but you can create whatever pages you think will help you earn your customer’s trust.
About pages are a great way to embrace the "small" in small business and earn trust as a new merchant as you create your online shop.
You can have a video introducing yourself as a founder, links to awards and press mentions, images that explain your supply chain, or include anything that helps this page tell your customers who you are and what you’re about.
For Kinda Hot Sauce, we’ll make an online store with a simple About page, written like a letter to the customer that explains our philosophy and our reason for starting the business.
When someone visits my store and they're not quite sold on making a purchase, I want them to be met with an endearing and heart-felt message if they choose to visit my About page to learn more.
Since we’ll be relying mostly on text, I’ll use the formatting options available in the toolbar to make the copy more eye-catching.
Just like you did for your products, you should also customize the Search engine listing preview section of your pages based on what you want the URL to be and how you want the page to appear in search engine results.
Your Contact page is what customers will look for to ask a question or get support.
Most Shopify themes let you create one easily. Simply create a new page, go to the Template section on the right side, and choose the Contact template. This should add a form to your page. You can then write some instructions to help customers get in touch or even link out to other pages, like an FAQ, to help shoppers troubleshoot their own problems first.
There are also live chat apps you can install to make support even more accessible to shoppers.
Policy pages are standard practice for online businesses. They give your customers a place to understand how you conduct your business and what to expect from you. They also help protect you in case of a customer dispute.
Under Settings > Legal in Shopify, you’ll be able to generate templates that you can customize according to your business and local laws:
(Please note that these templates aren’t legal advice and should be adapted when you create your online shop.)
Now that we’ve got some products in our store and some pages ready to go, it’s time to head over to Online Store > Themes in Shopify and start thinking about what we want our website to look like.
The first step is to choose a theme: a template we install in our store that we can use as a starting point for design as you build your own online store. The Shopify Theme Store is home to both free and paid themes, each with its own set of styles and features.
Some themes were made for larger product catalogs, while others are for single-product businesses. Others are made for certain industries or types of businesses, such as the Express theme for restaurants.
Here are some key points to consider when choosing the perfect theme when you build your own store:
After playing around with a few free themes like Debut and Narrative, I narrowed it down to Brooklyn (Playful style), because Kinda Hot Sauce has a small product line and doesn’t require many features to launch on the right foot. I like the modern layout of the product grid, the simplicity of the navigation menu, and the emphasis Brooklyn puts on visual branding.
Each theme is made up of sections that you can rearrange, add, remove, or temporarily hide. Sections can help you decide on the presentation of your store's homepage and try out different layouts.
When determining your homepage design, think about the goals a homepage needs to accomplish and determine how they apply to your specific business:
You will revisit and rework your homepage over time. Don’t let the pursuit of perfection keep you from moving forward with your launch.
For Kinda Hot Sauce, I'm going to use these Sections to do the following:
In the future, however, I could expand my homepage to include a Section that explains exactly how hot “hot enough” is, or a blog post gallery sharing recipes that involve my hot sauces. I won't know for sure if the decisions I make on my homepage are the right ones until I start marketing, but I feel good about this layout.
As you design your own homepage, prioritize information ruthlessly. Less is usually more. Instead of trying to cram as much as you can onto your homepage, direct visitors to supporting pages that help sell them further on your business or explain non-essential information.
The Header section is where you’ll make changes to the topmost area of your online store, which includes your navigation menu, cart, and logo.
We’ll focus mostly on creating a clear navigation menu, as this is how people will find their way around your website.
There are three main forms of navigation you can set up in the header section:
You don’t want to overwhelm people with too many options from the get-go. Instead, you can organize your navigation to prioritize the actions you want visitors to take—with a focus on shopping, of course.
One menu item can have multiple dropdown levels to gradually feed visitors more options based on what they're looking for. For example, you can group multiple Collections under one menu item focused on products for women—that way you don’t immediately overwhelm men who shop with you with options that aren’t for them.
For Kinda Hot Sauce, I'm going to create a simple navigation structure where I:
I'll also be creating another menu for my Footer to surface my non-essential policy pages at the bottom section of my website.
Tip💡: You can create a dropdown menu without linking out to a page by entering a # under Link instead of a URL and dragging any submenu items you want to include under it.
Colors and typography play a big role in your brand’s visual identity and should be a top consideration when you build your own online store. Under the Theme Settings tab in the online store editor, you’ll be able to customize the look and feel of your overall online store, including colors and typography.
Even if you’re not a designer, you can still build your own store and pick font and color pairings you feel good about using the following tips.
I came up with the following color palette for Kinda Hot Sauce because I want it to look bold and colorful. I probably won’t end up using all of them, but I have enough to mix and match to find a combination I like:
Typography
For our store, we’ll be keeping it simple with two fonts:
Tip 💡: While you’re in your Theme Settings, you can set a Favicon (usually your logomark), which is the icon that will display in browser tabs, bookmarks, and other locations. If you look at the tab of this page, you’ll see the Shopify logo. That’s our favicon.
Under Theme Settings, you can also customize the look of your checkout. At the very least, it’s a good idea to add your logo to your checkout to give it a branded feel.
If you need to, you can also customize how your checkout works by clicking through to your checkout settings (or going to Settings > Checkout).
Here’s a quick rundown of the choices you can make regarding your checkout:
When in doubt, prioritize choices that reduce the friction of checking out for the majority of your customers.
Feedback is a gift, especially when you’ve been spending so much time working to create your own online shopping website. Fresh eyes can often spot areas to improve that you don’t and provide invaluable insights you can use to make tweaks to your store.
By default, your store is password-protected, but you can give people the password to check it out. You can find your password (or change it) under Online Store > Preferences.
Some other great places to go for feedback include:
When I shared Kinda Hot Sauce for feedback, the following areas were mentioned to focus on for improvement:
Take both the good and the bad with a grain of sale as you incorporate feedback into your store. The best form of feedback you’ll get is when you start actively marketing your business.
Shipping can be one of the most complex considerations involved in running an ecommerce business. Between product weights, packaging costs, shipping destinations, carrier rates, and your potential profit per order, there are a lot of variables to juggle.
Luckily, we can boil it down to a few main approaches, which you can even blend together depending on the unique needs of your business, to find a shipping strategy that works for you:
For more advice on creating a shipping strategy, you can read Shopify's Beginner’s Guide to Ecommerce Shipping and Fulfillment. Remember that, like most of what we've done so far, this is something you can revisit and adjust over time.
For Kinda Hot Sauce, since it’s located in Canada, we’re going to set up our shipping in the following way to illustrate some of the various approaches you can take:
Setting up our shipping zones
You can implement your shipping strategy under Settings > Shipping in Shopify. Here, you’ll be able to create shipping zones where you can set your rates for shipping to customers in certain countries.
Setting conditional shipping rates
Within the shipping zone we just created, we can use the Add rate button to create specific rates based on certain conditions. For example, we can offer free shipping based on the condition that an order reaches a certain value threshold. Or we can increase the shipping rate if the order exceeds a certain weight.
Generally, you can save time and money on shipping while making more per sale by encouraging customers to add more items to their order. So we’ll use free shipping on orders over $30 (two bottles of hot sauce or the three-pack bundle) as an incentive for customers to spend more.
Setting up real-time calculated shipping rates
Real-time shipping rates are based on the shipping details you entered when adding your products and package dimensions on the Settings > Shipping page. Customers can then choose their preferred service and rate at checkout.
You can also adjust these rates to include a handling fee to account for extra costs, like packaging or your time, on top of the courier service’s rates.
As a business that sells goods or services, you have to collect taxes to send to the government each time someone orders from your store (some exceptions apply, such as for digital goods in many jurisdictions).
Shopify will help you automatically handle most tax calculations using default sales tax rates around the world. Even so, it’s a good idea to conduct some research or ask a tax professional to ensure you’re charging the correct amount of sales tax.
You can override the default tax settings if there are specific requirements for your region, such as taxes for specific products or for shipping.
Go to Settings > Taxes in Shopify to set up your tax regions. Here you can edit the default rates if you like, or apply overrides if specific conditions apply in your region or to your products.
Since Kinda Hot Sauce operates in Canada, we’ll set up our default tax rates for Canada. If you have a tax number you can enter it here or you can do so later. You’ll be able to see how much tax you’ve collected under Analytics > Reports.
We’re in the final stretch! Next up is deciding how your store will accept payments and how you as a store owner will get paid.
Go to Settings > Payments to set up your payment provider. Shopify has made it easy to start accepting all major forms of payment with Shopify Payments. As long as you operate your business in one of the supported countries and aren’t considered a prohibited business, you can activate Shopify Payments in just one click and pay 0% in extra transaction fees. You can also choose from over 100 third-party payment providers here or offer your customers additional payment options, such as PayPal.
In my case, I’ll Complete Account Setup for Shopify Payments by entering my business and banking information. I can also Manage my settings for Shopify Payments and do things like:
The currency you sell your products in can be set under Settings > General. I'm going to be selling in US dollars since it will be familiar for both US and Canadian customers.
With all the work we’ve done so far, we could actually launch our store now if we wanted to. We would just disable the password protection under Online Store > Preferences, which is the final step to flip the open sign and let people in to start buying our products.
In fact, if you’re in a rush to go live, you could skip some or all the following steps and revisit them later when you have time.
But in this tutorial, I'm going to ensure that my store not only makes a strong first impression and offers a smooth customer experience at launch, but is also in a good place for me to start marketing.
That said, here are the final steps we’ll be going over:
Buying a domain is like claiming land on the internet. That’s why it’s called a “web address.”
A custom domain is a fully branded URL that replaces the default URL that was created based on the store name you chose at setup (e.g., you could buy yourstore.com to replace yourstore.myshopify.com as your public URL).
Under Online Store > Domains, you can buy your domain directly through Shopify in a matter of seconds, or you can transfer your domain from another registrar and connect it to your store.
Since the .com is taken, I’ll be buying the .shop extension for KindaHotSauce through Shopify. KindaHotSauce.shop is now my store's URL.
One of the advantages of learning how to use Shopify to power your business is that your online store is just one of many sales channels you can use to sell your products. You can create online shopping in a variety of places, selling your products to additional sales channels to meet your customers where they are. All while keeping track of your products, inventory, and reporting in the same Shopify account so you always know what’s going on in your business.
While you don’t need to connect all of them right away to create your online store, it’s good to have them in mind when you’re ready to explore new ways to get your products in front of the right shoppers.
Not every sales channel will be relevant for your unique business, but here are some that are worth highlighting:
You can quickly add sales channels by clicking the + button next to Sales channels or view our full list of sales channels in the Shopify App Store. Then, on your Product pages under Product Availability, you can choose which products are available on which sales channels.
I’ll be considering the Facebook and Instagram channels for sure since a brand like Kinda Hot Sauce will rely heavily on social media marketing.
Shopify comes with a series of ready-to-use automated email and SMS notifications to let customers know about order confirmations, status updates, and more.
I’ll be leaving them alone for now, but if you need to customize these for any reason—to communicate specific information or simply reflect your brand better—you can edit these notifications under Settings > Notifications.
Marketing is different for every business, but regardless of your strategy, it’s important to set up the right foundation as soon as you can so you can get the most out of your efforts as you drive traffic to your store.
In particular, I want to cover the fundamentals of nearly every ecommerce marketing strategy that are important to know for new store owners.
Analytics
Shopify Reports (under Analytics > Reports) not only helps you monitor traffic and sales generated by your store across all your sales channels but also serves as a treasure trove of great insight for improving your business over time.
You can learn where your traffic and sales are coming from, your overall online store conversion rate, traffic and sales over time, and more.
For more granular analytics and flexible reporting, you can set up Google Analytics for free.
Facebook pixel
Have you ever visited an online store, considered a product, but left without buying it, only to see an ad for it a few days later? Or have you ever seen an ad for a product from a business you’d never heard of that seemed like it was made for you?
That’s made possible through something called the Facebook pixel, an intelligent code that learns from how people interact with your brand and your website—from liking your social media posts to making a purchase—and makes it possible to personalize how you advertise to them over time.
The Facebook pixel learns from all the traffic you send to your online store, so if you plan on advertising on Facebook or Instagram at any point in the future, it’s important to have your Facebook pixel set up.
You can get clear instructions on how to set it up for your Shopify store by using our free Facebook Marketing app (note that this process will require you to also set up a Facebook page and ad account for your business).
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Many shoppers turn to Google and other search engines as part of their purchasing journey, whether it’s to find a product they saw or heard about through a friend or they’re conducting some comparison shopping for a purchase.
Helping your online store’s pages and your products appear in these search results can create passive streams of relevant traffic for free. However, it takes time to grow this source of traffic, especially if you’ve only just created your store website.
You can lay the right foundation through a practice called search engine optimization (SEO), which we were first introduced to when we set up our Products and Pages in our store.
Another area of your store where you’ll want to keep SEO in mind is the Title and meta description fields, which can be found under Settings > Preferences. For Kinda Hot Sauce, I want to make sure I include my brand name and a description of what my business is about, based on the keywords people might search for to find my business.
You can use a free keyword research tool like Ubersuggest or Keyword Surfer (Chrome extension) to estimate how many times people search a specific query in a month and what types of searches happen around that keyword. Estimated monthly search volumes aren’t always 100% accurate and the more popular a search is, the more competitive it usually is.
Always remember that the job of a search engine is to show the most relevant results to the user, so you should try to prioritize keywords that are directly relevant to your business.
Let’s take Kinda Hot Sauce as an example to illustrate some of the key findings that can come out of even the simplest keyword research:
While I'm here, I'm also going to add a Social sharing image to make sure that I create a strong first impression whenever a link to my store is shared on social media or in direct messages.
I'm finally ready to launch! Is my store perfect? No. But I feel good enough about it to bet time and money marketing it and learning from the feedback I get to make it even better over time.
I can remove my password page (under Settings > Preferences) and start telling the world I'm open for business.
The journey to create an online shop ends here for this demo store. But it's just beginning for you. Here are some next steps and resources to help you ramp up your business after launching:
Illustration by Marina Verdu
The lowest cost business models are dropshipping or print on demand but an online store is needed to sell products. You can get a Shopify subscription for as little as $1 a day. It is difficult to start a business with no money.
You can sell anything from handmade products, courses, graphic design services, custom printed t-shirts and other apparel, home-baked items and more.
Set up an online store on an ecommerce platform like Shopify, add the products you want to sell, create key pages for your store, pick a theme and customize your online store, customize your shipping settings, configure your tax settings, set up your payment gateway and payouts, prepare your store for launch, and then launch and start marketing your store.
Yes, it is profitable to be an online seller today. More than 50% of consumers today choose to purchase their day-to-day necessities online. Selling for a profit includes finding your niche, attracting ideal customers, and marketing products with a price tag customers are willing to pay that have a good profit margin.
You can create your online store as a dropshipper or print on demand seller which requires no inventory to get started. Check Shopify's Oberlo
WooCommerce? Learn how to quickly find and fix these common SEO errors. Beginner-friendly advice. Actionable guide. Get a free audit.
As you navigate the ever-evolving digital landscape, choosing between search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can feel like standing at a crossroads. Both strategies aim to drive more traffic to your website, but they do so in markedly different ways. With SEO, you're investing in the long game, focusing on building brand awareness and increasing website traffic organically. On the other hand, PPC offers a quicker path to visibility, allowing you to appear at the top of search results through paid ads.
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