How to Start a Shopify Store — Step-by-Step Tutorial

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In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to start a Shopify store from scratch. I’ll walk you through the steps involved in a simple, jargon-free way — and help you get your store live quickly and easily.

(Plus, at the end of the post, I’ll give you some bonus tips on how to ensure that your brand new ecommerce store becomes a successful one).

Ready? Let’s dive in.

1. Get everything you need for your Shopify store ready

Before building your Shopify store, it’s a good idea to have everything you need for it to hand — this will speed up the process and lead to a better-looking store. The key things you’ll usually need are:

2. Start a free trial

The next thing that you’ll need to do is start a free trial of Shopify. The free trial lets you try the product out for three days, after which you only pay $1 for the first month of your Shopify subscription.

It’s worth noting that there are actually two types of Shopify trial to consider, however: the regular one or a dropshipping trial. The latter gives you access to a wide range of dropshipping resources that are designed to help you start a dropshipping business more easily.

You can access both these trials using the links below:

You don’t need to enter any credit card details to create your Shopify account and start your trial — however, you will be asked a few onboarding questions about the type of business you are creating on Shopify.

Although you can skip these questions if you wish, it can be a good idea to provide as much information to Shopify as possible, because the platform tailors your store’s setup guide based on your answers.

Once you’ve answered Shopify’s questions, you’ll find yourself inside your brand new Shopify account! Now you can start adding products, pick a theme and configure your payment and shipping options.

Let’s start with the ‘adding products’ bit.

3. Add products to your Shopify store

Once you’ve signed up for your Shopify free trial, you might be tempted to start picking themes and playing around with your new store’s design.

(To be fair, this can be the most fun part of starting a Shopify store!).

However, it’s much better to add your products first.

This is because your product range will have a big impact on the look and feel of your store — and accordingly, it’s best to avoid spending a long time choosing and customizing a theme only to find that your product photos don’t work well with it.

So ideally, you should aim to design your store around your products and their imagery — not the other way round.

To add your first product, just go to Products > Add your products in your Shopify dashboard.

Then, it’s a case of adding in the key information about your product, namely:

Let’s go through these quickly now.

Product title

This is what your customers will see when they come across your product either in your store or in Google search results.

So, your title should be

Product description

This field gives you the opportunity to really sell your product!

However, it’s important not to write a long piece of blurb that goes on and on about how great your store is — you need to be strategic here. So, when writing your product descriptions…

Product media

The ‘media’ section of your product page gives you the option to add photos, videos and 3D models of your products.

There are a few key things to note when uploading media.

Pricing

Now it’s time to set your product price!

When setting a price for an item, you need to aim to strike a balance between:

Price things too high, and you won’t generate enough sales to turn a profit. But making things too cheap by comparison to similar goods may raise doubts in your customers’ minds about the quality of what you’re selling online (if something sounds too good to be true, it often is).

Pricing can be tricky — but the good news is there’s lots of room for trial and error with ecommerce. You can always test the market with one price, and change it later based on the results you’re getting in your store.

Once you’ve settled on your product price, it’s easy to add it to Shopify — you just enter it into the ‘price’ field on your product page.

If you like, you can also enter a value into the optional ‘compare at price’ field. This lets your visitors know what the ‘full’ price of an item is, with the ‘price’ appearing as a discounted rate.

For example, entering $3 into the ‘price’ field and $5 into the ‘compare at price’ field will show your store visitors something like this:

The ‘cost per item’ field is also optional — it simply lets you add the cost price of an item into Shopify, so that you can see what your actual profit per sale is.

(This is useful for reporting purposes.)

As for the ‘charge tax on this product’ option, whether or not you need to tick this box will depend very much on your product type, location and tax status. If you are planning to charge tax on your goods, just tick it for now — you can edit your tax settings later.

Inventory

As its name suggests, this section of the product page lets you keep tabs on your inventory — and lets Shopify know what to do if you run out of a particular product.

What you need to enter here will depend on your product type (physical, digital etc.) and your own requirements, but you can use the fields provided to add:

Of the above, the ‘quantity’ settings are probably the most important — if you sell physical products it makes sense to enter how many are currently available and, using the ‘continue selling when out of stock’ box, instruct Shopify what to do when you run out of goods.

If it doesn’t take you very long to make or source your products, it’s usually best to tick the ‘continue selling’ option — but if it’s going to take a while for you to get more stock, it’s better to leave it unticked (doing so will display a ‘sold out’ notice beside your products until you’ve let Shopify know that the item is back in stock).

If you are using multiple locations to store your products, you can use the location settings provided to let Shopify know how many products you are storing at each of them (you can learn more about inventory locations and Shopify here).

Product shipping

If you’re selling physical products, you can use the shipping section to enter weight and customs information.

The weight data is particularly important for calculating shipping rates (I discuss how to do that later on in this post).

Product variants

If your product comes in a variety of options — for example different sizes, colors or flavors — this is where you add them (along with the relevant prices, quantities and SKUs for each one).

You can create up to 3 options for each Shopify product (for example size, color, material); and up to 100 variants of these.

Variants are combinations of product options — i.e., a large, blue shoe would be one variant; a small, red one would be another and so on.

Search engine listing preview

This section lets you tell search engines more about your products.

There are three fields to complete here:

Here’s how all this translates into a Google search result:

For a detailed guide to how you should approach filling in these fields, you might like to check out our Shopify SEO guide or watch our video about Shopify SEO (below).

But for now, here are some key pointers:

Product organization

On the right hand side of the product page you’ll find a ‘Product Organization’ section.

This lets you add information about your products that make it easier to set up collections and discounts.

The fields you need to fill in are:

Product status

Once you’re happy with all the information you’ve entered on your product page, you can activate your product.

This is done by setting the product status option box (at the top right corner of the page) to ‘active.’

As you can see, there’s also an option in the ‘Publishing’ section to manage your product’s availability on various ‘sales channels’.

By default you will be activating the product on your standard Shopify online store sales channel, but if you are using Shopify to list your product on other platforms, you can click the ‘manage’ link to activate them on those channels too (you can learn more about Shopify sales channels here).

4. Create product collections for your store

Once you’ve added a few products to your new Shopify store, you can organize them into ‘collections.’

Collections are groups of similar types of products — for example, if you ran an online greetings card store, you might create a birthday card collection, a Christmas card collection and so on.

There are three main reasons why you might want to do this:

To create a collection, just go to Products > Collections in your Shopify store and click ‘Create collection.’

Once you’ve accessed the collection editor, you can enter a title, description, collection image, SEO information and so on — this involves a similar process to creating a product.

What you have to pay particular attention to here is the ‘Collection type’ box. This gives you the option to either create a collection manually, or via automation.

If you choose the ‘manual’ option, you’ll then be given the opportunity to search for products from your catalog and add them to the collection, one by one.

If you choose the ‘automated’ option, you will be asked to set up some simple rules that populate your collection:

In the above example, we’re creating a Christmas card collection based on product tag. Every time a product is tagged with ‘Christmas Card,’ it will automatically be added to that collection.

You aren’t restricted to using product tags as the basis of these rules, however — you can use several other product attributes to create collections, including product title, type, vendor and price:

In my view this ‘automated collection’ option is one of Shopify’s best features — key competing platforms typically restrict you to creating manual collections only.

Automated collections can save you hours of time, especially if you’re dealing with a large product inventory — so make the most of them!

5. Create your store pages

By now, you’re probably itching to browse the Shopify theme store and pick a glamorous template for your store!

But actually, the best thing to do next is create your store’s pages.

As with products, if you have your key site content in place before applying a theme, you’ll get a much better sense of which templates work best for your store.

The key pages you will usually need to create are:

(You’ll note here that I’ve omitted the home page from this list. This is because this is one page that’s better to add after you’ve picked a theme, as it involves more design work using your theme’s home page customizer. More on this in a moment).

With the exception of the blog, all these pages can be created in the same way. You simply go to Online Store > Pages and click ‘Add page.’

It’s then a case of filling in the blanks — your page title, content, SEO info etc.

One thing to watch out for when creating your contact pages is the ‘theme template’ option. You will need to set this to ‘contact’ for these.

As for blog posts, to create these you go to Online Store > Blog Posts and click ‘Create blog post’.

For now, it’s probably best just to create one post — a ‘welcome to our new store’ article or similar; you can always add more content to your blog as your store develops.

6. Create your navigation menus

Once you’ve got your products and pages in place, it’s time to create your navigation menus.

To add your navigation to a Shopify store, you go to Online Store > Navigation. You’ll then usually find the option to edit two menus: a ‘main menu’ and a ‘footer menu.’

Of these, the ‘main menu’ is the most important for now. Click on that link and you will get the option to add the pages / collections you’ve just created to it.

When you’re done, just click the ‘Save menu’ option.

(If you like, you can use this section to create other types of menus too — like footer or sidebar ones, or more complex ‘nested’ menus. For more detailed information about menu creation, see Shopify’s help resource on navigation).

7. Choose a theme

At this point in proceedings you’ve got your products, collections, pages and main navigation all sorted — so it’s finally a great time to pick your Shopify theme! To do this, you can just visit the Shopify theme store, where you’ll find a very wide selection of themes available.

The Shopify theme store is set up in a way that makes it easy to find the right template for your online store: you can browse using a wide range of filters, including price, industry, catalog size and features.

When choosing a theme, there are some key things to bear in mind:

8. Create your home page

When you’ve settled on your Shopify theme, it’s time to create your store’s home page.

To do this, go to Online Store > Themes and click the ‘Customize’ button. This will take you to a drag-and-drop editor for your home page.

The default layout and the options available to you here will vary a bit by theme, but all Shopify themes typically let you add sections like:

In terms of what you should add to this page, the key thing to remember is to keep things simple — don’t overwhelm your visitors with information. Highlight your best products, avoid clutter and make it super easy for your potential customers to find what they’re looking for.

9. Apply your brand

Now it’s time to customize your store so that it makes use of your own logo, typefaces and colors — the key elements of your business’ brand.

Adding a logo to your Shopify store

To add a logo to a Shopify store, just go to Online Store > Themes > Customize and click the ‘Header’ option.

Click on ‘edit your logo in theme settings’ to add your Shopify logo to your store header.

Customizing typefaces and colors

To customize typefaces and colors, you go to Online Store > Themes > Customize and click the ‘Theme Settings’ cog icon in the top left hand corner of the screen.

Then, click on the colors and typography options to change colors and fonts respectively.

Editing these elements is very straightforward — you click on what you want to change and are given the controls to do so.

Here are a few things worth bearing in mind when selecting colors and fonts:

10. Set up your shipping rates

With your products, content and design all in place, it’s time now to turn to the operational side of things and think about:

Let’s start with the first of these, shipping.

To access your shipping settings, you need to go to Settings > Shipping and Delivery in your Shopify dashboard.

There, you’ll be able to set up various different types of shipping rates:

Which option is for you will really depend on the type of products you’re selling, packaging costs and your customers’ typical shipping destinations.

But as with your pricing strategy, if you don’t get shipping zones and rates right first time, there is always the option to revisit it, and refine your shipping rules at a later stage.

11. Set up your tax rates

Many merchants will need to charge sales tax or VAT (value added tax) on purchases of their products. Rules vary considerably by country, so it’s worth asking a tax professional how you should configure these for your store.

Shopify facilitates automatic tax calculation for certain jurisdictions (and can in fact even cater for the EU’s complex rules on VAT for digital products, VAT MOSS); using this feature will speed the tax setup process up for some merchants.

Others will have to set tax rates in a more manual way.

Either way, the tax settings in Shopify can be located in the Shopify dashboard by going to Settings > Taxes and Duties.

Once you’re in the tax settings section, you’ll get the option to create tax regions (rules for individual countries or areas) and specify how you want to charge tax (for example, you can specify that product prices should be inclusive or exclusive of tax; or whether tax should be applied to shipping rates etc.).

As mentioned above, it’s best to get advice from a tax professional or accountant when setting these rules up; it’s also worth taking a good look at Shopify’s official documentation on tax rates too.

12. Choose a payment gateway for your store

In order to accept payment for your products, you need to choose a payment gateway. This is basically the software that processes credit card purchases made on your store.

Shopify works with a lot of payment gateways (over 100), and has its own one too: Shopify Payments. For many merchants, Shopify Payments will be the quickest payment processor to get started with — and it’s the only one can use without incurring transaction fees.

Shopify Payments is only available in certain countries, however — if you live in an unsupported location, you’ll definitely need to use a third-party payment gateway.

To enable a payment gateway, just go to Settings > Payments in your Shopify dashboard, and follow the instructions provided.

13. Connect your domain

At this point, you’ve essentially completed all the key steps needed to get your Shopify store live — and in fact, if you want, you could simply publish it right now using the ‘myshopify’ URL that was created for you when starting your free trial.

However, it’s generally preferable to use a custom domain for your store — i.e., yoursitename.com. Your own domain will work much better from a branding point of view, and will help your site visitors trust your store more too.

You may already have registered a custom domain already — but if not, there are two ways to buy one:

If you choose the first option, try to buy a domain from a reputable registrar. In particular, it’s worth choosing one that facilitates two factor authentication.

This helps keep your domain — one of the most important business assets you’ll ever have! — secure.

Using Shopify to buy a domain will make the process of connecting it to your store much easier — doing so will be a simple case of clicking a button in your Shopify interface (and if you buy a domain from Shopify, you get customer support for it too).

The drawback of this approach is that you will be putting all your eggs in one basket — i.e., your content management system, hosting AND your domain will all be associated with one account. This could be a problem if you ever lost access to it, so some users prefer to keep their domain name and Shopify accounts separate.

Whichever approach you decide on, you start the process of domain connection in the same place: under Settings > Domains in your Shopify dashboard.

If you’re buying a new domain via Shopify, simply click the ‘buy new domain’ button and follow the instructions provided.

If you’re connecting an existing domain you will need to click the ‘connect existing domain’ option, let Shopify know what the domain name is and again, follow the instructions provided.

If you’re connecting a third-party domain, you’ll need to log into your registrar’s dashboard and change some domain name settings (DNS) so that they point to your Shopify store.

For more information on all this, it’s advisable to read Shopify’s guide to connecting domains.

14. Prepare your store for launch

Once your domain is connected, you could just unleash your store on the world right away!

But it’s much better to check that all aspects of your store are working as expected first — and that’s where a Shopify launch checklist comes in.

Going through a Shopify launch checklist typically involves ensuring that:

When you’re done with your pre-launch checks, you can publish your store by removing your password. Go to Online Store > Preferences and scroll down to the ‘password protection’ section to do this.

And that’s it! Your new Shopify store is live and you’re ready to start selling.

But how do you turn your lovely new store into a successful one?

15. Develop your Shopify store further

Once your Shopify store is live, it’s tempting to think that your ecommerce journey is over. However, it’s only just beginning! There are a variety of things you can do to ensure that going forward, your brand new Shopify store makes new customers and becomes a profitable one.