A Guide to Setting Up And Customizing Your Shopify Store in 5 Easy Steps

Shopify has more than 1.7 million users and is one of the best and easiest to use ecommerce website builders in the world. Unlike other website building tools which can be used to build anything, Shopify focuses on ecommerce stores only. With a free 14-day trial, anyone can create an online store with it, add a product, and customize a theme to create a beautiful-looking eCommerce website. The entire process of building an eCommerce website with Shopify is straightforward and can be done in 5 simple steps. Let’s see how.

Step 1: Create a Shopify Account

The first step towards having your own online store is to create a Shopify account.

Go to Shopify.com, click the “start free trial” button, enter your email address in a new popup window, choose a password, and add your unique store name then click on the “create your store” button.

Fill in the details again, and click on the “create account” button and just after a few seconds your Shopify account will be created. This is followed by a small questionnaire that Shopify requests you to fill in. They are simply a few questions about your new website that will help Shopify to set up your account. You can also choose to skip the steps if you wish. Either way, you get access to the dashboard that holds all of the crucial elements to building your website.

Once you land on the dashboard, you will see a button to add a new product. Click on that and you will be taken to a neat-looking editor that allows you to enter details about your first product. Here you write the product title and descriptions, add media files, set pricing, add SKU and barcodes, and everything else. Once that’s done, go to the top right corner of the screen and change the product’s status from draft to active and your product is live. That’s it.

Step 2: Choose A Theme

The second step to setting up your eCommerce store is to customize it.

Click on “Customize Theme” on dashboard and choose a theme that fits your website well from the theme library. Free themes come with limited features, if you want elaborate options you may choose a theme from paid templates. Once you have finalized a theme, click on “add to the library” button that will load the template to your account so that you can start working on it.

Once that’s done, you may go to the editor and edit your selected theme’s elements. Modify your new site by moving through the menu and changing the header, images, text columns, collections, galleries, and so on until you make it to the footer.

Step 3: Get to Know the Dashboard

Your account’s dashboard is the main place where you can access all the tools Shopify offer. From adding your product, customizing themes, adding domains, and setting up payments you will find everything on your dashboard. Access your Shopify account settings from the top-right corner by clicking on your name and image. This takes you to managing your account, the help center, forums, hire a Shopify expert, or learn about keyboard shortcuts. Main menu is present on the lest-hand side. Here you will find all the essential pages and links to manage your orders, products, customers, see analytics and start working on your marketing efforts, handle discounts, and access the editor.

Step 4: Optimize the Site

Before you make your online store live, it’s important to optimize it for search engines and social media. Shopify is one of the very few online website builders that give you optimization options within the website. From the “Online Store” option from the left-hand side menu, you will find preferences that reveal several optimization options. Part of optimizing your website is to customize homepage titles, products meta descriptions and detailed descriptions for Google and other search engines to crawl. Alternatively, you may also share website pages to your social media accounts to increase reach and exposure.

Step 5: Publish Your Online Store

Now you are all ready to launch your online store. After you have successfully completed all the previous steps, your eCommerce store is ready to go live. However, if you are still on free trial version you will need to move to a paid version in order to go live with the website.

Conclusion

That’s it! Creating your eCommerce store with Shopify is really easy and anyone can achieve that with these 5 simple steps.