Shopify is a great choice if you are looking to create or build an online store for your company. Shopify is an eCommerce website builder with incredible power that can be used to create an online store.
However, building a Shopify shop requires you to move a few pieces around. This can make it a bit tricky if your business hasn’t built one yet.
This Shopify tutorial is a step-by-step guide that’s easy to follow. It’s perfect for beginners.
What is Shopify?
Shopify, a cloud-based eCommerce platform that you can use to create an online store for any business, is once again a great option. Shopify is a top-selling product because you can easily add products to your store and manage it from the hub.
Shopify gives you complete control over your inventory, products, and shipping.
Take a look at Shopify’s competitors, and compare stats. Check out our list of top eCommerce platforms.
What does Shopify do?
Shopify acts as a smart intermediary between you and your customers. They act as a wise real estate agent, giving you the inside scoop on how to live comfortably, manage space, and save money.
Shopify is your foundation and your shopfront. It allows you to interact with customers, accept payment and make financial transactions, manage your product inventory and organize it.
Shopify’s POS (Point of Sales) allows you to do transactions online and offline. This allows you to take your business anywhere there is a customer and make sales!
Shopify Dropshipping is an option if you don’t have products to sell or have no cash to invest.
Dropshipping is a way to sell products from a manufacturer directly through your online store. You receive a portion of the sale, while the manufacturer fulfills and delivers those products.
Shopify: Can you make money?
Shopify can help you make money. There are many ways that Shopify can make money. You can sell products directly from your Shopify store, start a dropshipping company, join Shopify Affiliates, or monetize social media.
The amount of work that you put into your shop will determine how much money you make on the platform. If you play your cards well, you could easily make thousands of dollars per month.
Shopify is a great tool for learning about Shopify and its assets.
Shopify Tutorial: How to use it for Beginners
This Shopify tutorial is for beginners. We will walk you through every step of setting up Shopify, so that you can start your eCommerce dillyings immediately.
This tutorial is long so take your time and grab your serious reading glasses. You can find the steps you missed and continue building your eCommerce store with Shopify if you are already at the beginning.
Shopify Sign up
Shopify allows you to start building your eCommerce store immediately. You don’t have to pay anything upfront and you can build your eCommerce store right away. We’ll first need to sign up on Shopify for a trial.
Follow this link to Shopify’s landing pages. Enter your email address and click on the button to begin your free trial. The login password and the name of your store will be required. If you have not already, this is a good place to start a free trial.
Final step: Create your store.
Pro tip: You don’t need to worry about the pre-selected domain name. Shopify can purchase a domain name that is more professional for your website.
Answer a few questions and you can choose to continue with the setup. This tutorial will cover each step of creating a Shopify store.
Next, fill in some personal information such as your name and address (the normal biz). Click Enter my Store to be taken into your Shopify dashboard.
You’ll see a sidebar to the left. The Shopify sidebar is your main menu. This will allow you to manage your customers and orders, create new products and improve your marketing. But, we’ll get to that later.
Shopify Store Customization
Next, we will be customizing Shopify’s store. This is the most exciting part of our Shopify tutorial. This is where we will be creating the storefront’s look and feel. It covers the most important aspects of building an online shop.
When customizing almost any item, the best first step is to pick a theme. The Online Store sidebar should bring up the ‘Themes’ page. Click on Themes in the dropdown menu if it doesn’t.
Scroll down to the Theme Library, where you will find a variety of free themes. Shopify also offers some great themes, but we’ll stick with the basics.
We are going to create our own theme (more or less) so let’s click the customize button beside the Debut theme section.
We are now at our Shopify store. It should look pretty basic right now. Let’s make things a little more interesting – let’s start with the header.
The header tab is located in the left sidebar, under sections. To access the header customization tools, click on the tab. The site header can be customized with a logo. This is a great way to make your page stand out and brand your image.
You can drop your logo from your storage anywhere you might find it if you have one. Logomakr, which is simple and easy to use, can help you get one for free.
Search for logos that represent your business by using Logomakr’s search tool. After you have chosen the one that you like, you will be able to edit its size, color, saturation and add text.
Save your logo by using the save option at the top-right. Instead of paying to download high resolution files, you can choose to save your logo for free.
Tip: Create an all-white copy of your logo after you have edited it to perfection. Follow the steps above to download the new logo. This will be very useful later in building our online shop.
Once that’s done, you can go back to Shopify and upload your new logo into the header. Click on Select an image and upload the standard logo (not the all white) into the header.
Here you can adjust the width of the logo. We chose the smaller and more subtle logo. However, the option is entirely yours. Clicking the Show Announcement box further down will allow you to post announcements at top of your landing pages.
You might link the announcement to another page of your website, such as the collections or blog post pages, depending on the announcement. This will be discussed in more detail.
Save all header work so far. Don’t forget about saving! Let’s now move to the main home screen or hero image.
Click on Image and text overlay in the sidebar. Select an image from your hard drive to upload onto the site. After your image has been uploaded, adjust the parameters to make it fit like a glove.
You can toggle image alignment as well as height and style of overlaying text.
Pro Tip – Large images can slow down your site and increase load times. This is not a good idea. This can be avoided by making sure your hero images are no wider than 1300px (pixels), before uploading. Fotor allows you to crop, resize and edit images.
The overlaying text in this section will be the first time your visitors encounter your brand, so make sure you say something meaningful. This text can also be edited to change the font or typography.
You can also create a button linking to any page in our store by simply writing the text and selecting where to link it.
You can change the colors of your primary buttons, including the one we created, or specific text and filter settings by going to the themesettingsbutton located in the sidebar. You’ll find all the colors that are currently available there. To change a color, click on it.
Make sure you choose colors that are both striking and complementing each other. You want your call-to action buttons to stand out and be attractive for your clients.
Next is social media. Go back to theme options and locate the tab for social media. Click on it. Scroll down to see all your social media accounts like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Facebook. This is all very straightforward.
You’ll find a place at the top of the column where you can add a photo for your social media. This image will be attached to your message whenever you post something on social media.
This section was completed with our logo (brand image). This is a solid branding strategy that makes it easy to recognize your business with enough exposure and time.
Let’s go back to theme setting and edit our favicon. A favicon is also known as a bookmark icon or shortcut icon. It’s a small icon that represents a business. This is the icon that you see in each tab of the internet.
Make new products
This is only for business owners selling their own products on their website. Dropshippers may use a third-party app to set up their entire products section.
Let’s first go to products on the sidebar and then click on Add product on the pop-out page.
You can add a title, description and an image to your product. Although this step is simple, be sure to go over each product description in detail, including all aspects, utility information, and other details. The better, the more detailed.
Next, we will need to price the item. This includes the price of the item, the “compare price”, which is the general price of the same item on other websites, and the “cost per Item”, which is the amount you paid to make your item accessible.
Although adding the “cost per article” is optional, you will want to include higher prices from the competition that gives your product or company an edge.
Let’s give the product an SKU. This is useful for inventory tracking and bookkeeping. Your SKU should be the product name.
Below is the shipping settings that you can fill in. You need to be exact with the weight of your order, as shipping costs will be affected by it.
If you wish to create variations of your item’s color, size or style, the next section will be helpful. Click on this option to edit each variant’s title, price, size, and quantity.
Make new collections
Shopify will allow us to create new collections just like our products. To do this, go to the sidebar and click on collections. By default, the Home Page collection will appear. This will look like the Featured collection under the hero image.
Let’s edit the under collections one-click. You can edit the collection name (we chose to call our featured products “featured products”) or add a description, but this is optional.
The products are the stars of this show. You can add products to any collection by browsing the section titled Product. Just browse and select the product you want and hit done.
The process of creating a new collection will be similar to the original, but with some minor differences. Let’s take a look at how it works. Click on to create a collection at the top right of the page in blue.
This could be any collection you want to sell online through Shopify, such as “Men’s shoes” or something else. You can create the title and description as you like, then select the collection type (manual or automatic).
The automated collection is a time-saver. You don’t have to go back and manually enter every detail for each product. Once new products are added, the AI will organize your collections by creating tags for your products.
You can create a tag by going to any of your products and looking at the tagsinput area on the right side of the page. You can also create multiple tags for any product.
An image can be added to your collections. It will appear at the top of the collection page as the header image. Your online store should now look absolutely gorgeous!
Get Discount Coupon Codes
Discount codes can be a great way for the uninformed to buy your product. Discounts are a great way to get people to buy your product. Go to our trusted sidebar and click on Discounts. Then, choose Create discount code.
You can offer discounts based on any criteria you like. Discounts can be based on price or percentage. You may also include additional items in your discounts.
We have created a WELCOME20 discount code that gives 20% off your first purchase.
You can set minimum requirements for discount activation, as well as choose which customers are eligible. You can also manage the discount’s usage limit and when it will expire.
Shopify will save your discount and create a sharable URL for you. This allows you to promote your products via email or social media. This is a great way to get things moving!
Manage orders, analytics, and apps
As important as any other aspect of building Shopify stores, logistics is equally important. The turn of this business means managing all backend bonuses. Let’s take a look at the POIs, starting with orders.
Click orders in the Shopify sidebar. If you have been working with us to build your site, there should not be anything here. However, this is where your order information will appear once your store goes live.
In the dropdown menu under Orders you’ll find a abandoned checkouts section. This is where you can see the misfortune of those who reached the checkout but did not make it through to purchase.
Analytics is next. The analytics tab is located in the sidebar. Here you can view all of the useful data regarding your store’s performance. This includes total sales, online conversion rate, returning customer rates and many other useful data.
We also have apps. Apps are third-party plugins that enhance the functionality of one thing, in this case your online store.
To see which apps you can use to grow your online store, click apps in our sidebar menu. Shopify also offers a multitude of additional apps that can be purchased.
A product review app is a great way for customers to share their experience with your products. Review apps are an important tool for assessing consumer value and can be a game changer.
A pop-in or email opt-in app that allows customers to join your mailing list is another great app.
This is a great application that can be found free of charge on the Shopify App Store called Privy.
Email marketing is an essential part of selling products because (a) most people check email daily before they do anything else and (b) it adds a personal touch and encourages customer engagement.
Choose a Shopify plan
We need to choose a Shopify plan in order to make your Shopify store live and start selling products. If you have enjoyed the trial and are ready for the full-fledged purchase, click select a Shopify plan at the bottom.
We recommend starting with the Basic Shopify plan or the cheapest plan unless you are certain you will be making a lot of money per month. The longer-term rates of the more expensive plans are better, so you can always upgrade if necessary.
You can also choose your billing rate. A higher commitment could save you up to $250, depending on the plan. Simply enter your payment details and credit card information before you can start your plan.
That’s it! Now our store is up and running. All the important components are in place. You can save your work by clicking the eyeball icon to see your Shopify store.
