A lot of people think that setting up an e-commerce store requires a lot of technical knowledge, but they are wrong. With today’s technology and platform such as Shopify, anyone can easily set up their e-commerce store and start selling almost immediately. Shopify works just like WordPress and Blogger, it is a hands-down and an easy way to set up your online store.
When it comes to selling on the internet, regardless of whether you are trying to sell digital products or a physical one, Shopify can be a great choice. And setting it up can be easy and the entire process may take less than 30 minutes.
Here are the step-by-step tutorials how you can set up your Shopify store and start selling online.
1. Sign Up with Shopify
The first step you need to do is to head over to Shopify website and register an account using your email address. The registration can be easy and you do not have to pay anything until you make your store live. They charge a certain monthly fee, but the cost is minimal and anyone can afford it. In this process, you will also need to choose a name for your store. Get a good name for your store to represent your business.
2. Choose Your Themes and Layout
Next, once you have signed up with Shopify, you will get into the dashboard of your store. What you need to do then is to choose the theme and layout that you want. There are many options for you to choose from, and you do not need to use any paid themes for now, just try out and choose the one that you think is suitable for your store.
Start by browsing the theme store at Shopify, choose the functionality you want and preview the theme. Once confirmed, you can install the theme and publish as your store’s theme. Do not worry about other detail as you can edit it from your store. The common details you should look into are to upload your store logos, upload the slides for your homepage carousel, edit the product page, amend the color schemes, edit the font, and also change the layout such as the number of products to appear on the homepage.
If you are new here, just spend some time to understand and play around with the settings of your store. You can always make the changes and preview it without making any real change to your store. Make sure you familiarize yourself here.
3. Add Products to Your Store
Next, it is time for you to upload products to your store. Adding a product to your store is as easy as creating a post for blogs. First, enter the title of your product and then create the description of the products. You may want to make your product description as interesting as possible so that visitors will want to buy from you.
And make sure you upload stunning images for your products. You can use a video to present your product too. Please understand that when you are selling online, the product images can make or break your sales. Choose high-definition images with good quality to represent your products. After that, you may go to the bottom of the product page to enter the price, inventory, weight, and variants such as sizes, colors, etc.
Once you have everything ready, click the “Publish” button and your product will automatically be added to your online store. You can repeat this process to add as many products as possible. Plus, you can use the collection feature to categorize your products.
4. Get a Domain Name
Before you publish your store and make it goes live, you need to get a domain name for your store. You can buy your domain name through Shopify or elsewhere according to your own preferences. Choose a domain name that is easy to remember and able to represent your store. Please take note that you do not need to buy a hosting because Shopify can host your website for you.
After you have linked your domain name with your Shopify account, you can make your store live. And if you are using the trial version, this is where you need to tell Shopify to charge you the monthly fee.
5. Set Up the Payment Processor
Once you have set up your domain name, it is time for you to set up another important feature in your store, the payment processor. Shopify has made this process as smooth and easy as possible. Just head over to the payment setting and choose your preferred method.
If you are based in the United States, you can use credit cards and Stripe to receive your payment. If you are outside of United States, just use PayPal. PayPal is very powerful and almost everyone in the world knows about PayPal. Thus, you will have no problem using PayPal to collect payments from buyers.
6. Test Purchase
Once everything is ready, before you market and get your first buyer, there is one final step you need to do, which is to make a test purchase from your store. You want to make sure everything is good and you are able to collect payment from your customers, so make a test purchase to make sure everything is alright.
Now, Shopify and PayPal do not like fraud purchase, what you can do is to make the payment for real and just buy the product yourself to test out the system. Just put yourself in your customer’s shoe and experience the process of buying from your own store. If you are doing dropshipping, you can even experience the entire process by ordering the product from your supplies and use the product yourself.
This is how you set up an online store with Shopify. Do not worry about the technicalities, just take action and follow the step-by-step process to set your store. And if you are having problems with your store, you can contact Shopify support team anytime you want. They provide great support and you can chat with the support team any time of the day.
References
- bitcatcha.com/blog/2016/set-up-shopify-online-store/
- websitesetup.org/build-online-store-shopify/
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