Use Shopify to Create Your Online Store

 

 

Ready to start selling products online? Whether you are selling products or services, Shopify is one e-commerce solution to consider. Setting up your online store for the first time is relatively quick depending on how many products you have and how long it takes you to decide on your design from their many themes.
Shopify makes it easy to open an online store by providing all the tools and help you need.

How Shopify works ?

Shopify lets you create impeccable looking online stores for your e-commerece. Whatever e-commerce niche you may be in – cameras, clothing lines, mobile phones, technical gadgets, micro-controllers or microprocessors, it lets you create about any type of online store that you can imagine.
Shopify has some great themes for your store and it comes with some great features as well. If you have some experience with HTML and CSS, you yourself would be able to edit and create new templates for your store. Even if you don’t know about web designing, you can easily call a Shopify expert and you can work together to create a custom template for your store.
Apart from these, you can also choose from among 100+ themes for your store. Everyone of them are unique in their own way and you’ll simply love them.

 

What You Can Sell on Shopify

First of all, let’s start with what you can sell on Shopify. Overall, if it’s a digital product, physical product, drop ship 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. These range from art to wine.

 

Shopify Pricing

Shopify’s pricing plans are mostly based on the number of products you carry and the space you need on the server for images and files. Shopify has a great pricing structure according to your needs. If you would just like to see what Shopify is about, you can get a 14 day free trial. Apart from these, there are different pricing options according your needs. The lowest pricing starts from $29/month and the highest pricing can go up to $179/month.
 There is even a starter plan for up to 25 products and 1 GB of file storage for $14 per month. Assuming you don’t need to edit the theme you choose or to offer customers discount codes, this is a great plan for those just starting in the world of e-commerce.
Shopify also allows users to refer their friends. When you refer five people, you will get a Shopify plan for free.
 

Setting Up Your 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 create a store name and enter your preferred email and password.



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, phone number, and what you’re selling. Then, you will be taken to the admin dashboard for your store.


Here, you will find the six steps you need to create your store.

1. Add your 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, or import them from other platforms like Magento and eBay. For digital products, you will need to first install an app for digital product delivery, then add your products using that app. You can learn more about selling digital products from Shopify’s online manual. If you’re selling services, you may want to consider an app like Product Options to allow you to customize your service offerings.
You can have up to 100 variations per product in your Shopify store that fall into three options such as size, color, and finish. Options are product specific, so you can have one product with a set of options, and another product with a different set of options.
Keep in mind that options don’t have to be limited to physical products. You can create options for anything. For example, instead of just selling a digital e-book, you could sell three options for your e-book: one option that is just the e-book, another that is the e-book and additional supporting materials, and a third that includes everything and access to a private member forum.
You can learn more about setting up products in the Shopify Documentation.

 

2. Customize your 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.



 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.

If you want to use a custom domain for your store as mentioned earlier (yourdomain.com or store.yourdomain.com instead of you.myshopify.com), you will set it up in this step. The Shopify online manual has all of the documentation you need to set up your custom domain, from purchasing one from Shopify to using one you already have.

 

4. Set up shipping and tax rates.

Here, you will 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.

In this section, perhaps the most important after adding your products, you will set up how customers will pay you. Shopify has their payments system, Paypal, and many other options to choose from. You can see their list of over 50 third-party processors in the FAQ.

 

6. 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. As with all things, be sure to do lots of testing so that customers aren’t the first ones to find mistakes and glitches.