Build a Shopify Store From Scratch: Full Setup Guide (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: If you've ever wanted to start your own online store or build a business that works for you 24-7, Shopify is one of the easiest ways to make that happen. I'm Elizabeth, and in this video, I'll show you step-by-step how to create your own Shopify store from scratch. To get started, the first thing you'll need to do is create a Shopify account. Use the link in the video description below or the pinned comment to start your free trial. Shopify will then ask you a few questions about your business. If you're just getting started, don't worry if you don't have everything figured out yet. You can choose options like other, just starting, or press the skip button. Once you create your account, you'll arrive at the Shopify admin dashboard. Think of this dashboard as the control center for your entire online store. This is where you'll manage products, orders, customers, marketing, and everything else related to your business. We'll be working through most of these sections throughout this tutorial. Today, I'm going to be creating an online store called Scout & Stitch that sells dog accessories. Before we customize our storefront, let's begin adding our products. There's two ways to do this, and the first option is to import your products, either by uploading a spreadsheet, and Shopify has a template that you can use, or you can import your products from another platform. This is a great option if you're already selling your products elsewhere, or if you have a large inventory and you don't want to add your products individually. Today, I'm going to be adding my products manually. At the top, I'll start by adding my product title. Below that, you'll see the product description area. This is where you'll explain the benefits and features of your product. One of the new AI features in Shopify helps you with your writing. Although I've already added some text to my description, I want to add even more language speaking as to why someone should purchase this product. So I'll ask the AI assistant for some help in adding language that explains why someone should purchase this product. Perfect. And that just took seconds for the AI assistant to create. Next, I can add my product images. High quality images are one of the biggest factors in online sales, so try to upload multiple images showing different angles. You can upload videos as well, and also you can re-sort your images to display however you like. You'll see that Shopify used the information that we've already provided to select the product category, but if this is incorrect, you can always manually select a new one. Now, scrolling down, we're going to enter our selling price. I'll enter the price that I want customers to see that the item is listed for. There's a bunch of other settings here, and we're not going to go into all of the detail, but one thing I want to call out is the compare at price. If you want to show customers that they're receiving a discount, you can enter a higher compare at price. For example, I'll add that the compare at price is $22.99. Shopify will automatically display the savings to the customer. Scrolling down, we now have our inventory settings. Tracking inventory is completely optional, so if you don't want to keep track of inventory, just go ahead and toggle this off. But if you want to, then make sure that the toggle is on. Then put in your quantity for this product. So if I have 50 of these bandanas available, I'll put in 50, and the only way that this number would change is if someone makes a purchase from your shop or you go back in and adjust the quantity manually. If you want, you can add a specific SKU or barcode to this product as well. And if you're going to be selling a product that perhaps you can produce more of quickly, you can continue to sell when the product is out of stock. But if it's not something you can produce quickly, I suggest making sure that this is toggled to off. I suggest creating as many different packages as possible early in the process and then naming them based on your product type. This will help save you a lot of time as you continue to build out your store. Now let's talk about variance. If you're selling a product that has multiple sizes or colors or other options, this would be where you add them. If you don't, then just ignore this category. In my particular case, I do offer multiple sizes for this bandana. So let's go ahead and add those here. I have a small, a medium, and a large size, depending on the size of the dog. That's all I need to do. And then I click on Done. Now you'll notice here that they've added 50 as the available inventory for size small. However, even though I have 50 total available, they're spread out across these three sizes. So this is where I would adjust my inventory based on that variant. I have 25 available in small, I have 15 available in medium, and I have 10 available in large. If I was selling a product that perhaps had different colors, you could add particular images assigned to each one of these variants as well. Next, we have our category MetaFields. MetaFields help Shopify better understand your products and can be used for things like improving product filtering on your storefront and creating more structured product data for search engine optimization. Shopify is going to pre-populate a lot of these fields based on the information you've already added to your product listing, but it's always a good idea to go back and check. For example, they're showing that the color of this bandana is white when in actuality the color is blue. So I'm going to go ahead and add that. I could also add flowers as one of the colors or pattern types by adding that here as well. Likewise, you can add additional information like hair instructions, fabric type, or any specific features that you want to be used for your metadata. We'll talk more about marketing later on, but you will be able to see a brief preview of what your search engine listing for this particular product may look like, and you can choose to make edits now, but again we'll touch base more on this later. And then when everything looks good for your product, make sure to click on save. Congratulations on setting up your first product. Once you've done that, you can preview what your product listing will look like in your store, even though we haven't officially set up the theme for our storefront. I've now added additional products to my inventory. Remember that you can add products both manually or you can import more products at any time to your catalog. As your store grows, you may want to organize products into categories. Shopify calls these collections. Here I created a collection called bandanas, and once you add a collection type, you can either add future products manually or set it to smart. Smart then provides parameters that you can give to Shopify for adding products to this collection in the future. In this case, I chose that anytime the title contains the word bandana, that those products should be listed within this collection. Now that we've begun to add some products and collections to our store, let's build out our storefront by going back home. Start by selecting customize theme on your dashboard. One of the reasons I like to add products and collections to Shopify before customizing my online store is because Shopify will identify potential themes based off of the images and words that were used in my product catalog. In this case, they got the idea that I have kind of a more foresty nature feel for my products, and they suggested this horizon theme, which is a bit more wilderness and outdoors, as my default store theme. Now I can choose to use their suggestion, or I can discover additional themes that I might want to use for my store. You can also explore more themes in the theme store. In the theme store, you can filter by themes. You can see here that there's 33 different templates under the category of pets, but all of these require me to pay in order to use the theme. So another option is to not filter by theme and instead just filter based off of the price. In this case, I can view all of the different free themes that are offered to me. Now if you skipped ahead and moved on to designing your online store without first adding any products or collections, that's fine. But in order for Shopify to provide a customized template for you, they'll need some more information. But the good news is you can easily add that at any point down here in the prompt to describe in more detail the type of storefront that you have. Once you're happy with the template, you can begin to customize it even more by selecting edit theme. We've now entered Shopify's visual website editor. And one of my favorite things about Shopify is they make the process of customizing your storefront relatively intuitive. So we're going to walk through all of these different sections on the left-hand side, starting with our announcement bar. The announcement bar is a great place to welcome customers to your store or to advertise specific features. For instance, I'm going to update welcome to our store to free shipping on orders over $50. And if you decide that you don't want an announcement at the top of your page, that's fine. You can just delete this section. You can also update the font type, whether it's bold, adjust the weight of it, letter spacing, etc. And that's the same for each one of these subsections. The next thing Shopify is going to recommend is updating our logo. And again, completely optional. I'm going to edit my logo in the theme settings, which will then bring me right back to this page. Now that I've updated my logo, it's time to adjust our header. This is where you can find your menu or your navigation bar. This is how viewers, when they come to your website, are able to navigate between pages. Now, one of the funny things about Shopify is you can't actually make edits to this menu within the website editor. Instead, you'll need to go back to your dashboard and click on content. And then once you're in menus, you can make those changes. So I'll select main menu. And instead of contact, I want to instead call this about us. Then I can save it. And I can also reorder this if I want. So I can drag about us right there. And then once I click save, you'll see that the header bar has automatically updated to remove contact and replace it with about us. Next, we have what's called the hero, which is really the main focal point that a viewer will see when they come to your store. It's suggested that you have an image here, but of course, you don't have to. You can either explore free images or video from Shopify, or you can add your own. Once you've uploaded your image, you can make additional edits to it within the design tool. Now, in this case, I don't want any other texts to be on my image. So I'm just going to remove this. Likewise, I don't want this button here. So I'm going to remove that as well. But again, if you want to keep those things there, you're able to make adjustments within the text editor. Next, the template has included our featured collection of products. But let's say that this is not what I want a viewer to see. Let's go ahead and see what other sections are available to me. Now, here you have a lot of different options. I'm going to scroll through, and I would actually really love to see a collection list here, since we took the time to add products to a collection earlier in this tutorial. So I went ahead and selected that, and now it's going to give me the opportunity to select which collections I want added. So I want to actually go ahead and add all of these here. So I've clicked into that, and now you can see here that it has added this carousel that viewers can scroll through of the different product categories that I have. Now, you'll notice here that one of these images looks a little off compared to the other ones, and that's not a problem. I can go back into this product, make updates to that image, and then as soon as I come back to the editor, you'll be able to preview the resized image. And that goes for all of your products. If you ever need to make a change, whether it's to the text, the price, the image, etc., update that in your product catalog, and then the changes will be made across your entire site. Next, I have the products. I kind of like having all of the products on the main page, so I'm going to leave this as is. But again, if you want to make any changes to it, simply click in, and on the left-hand side, it will walk you through everything. Now, let's talk a little bit about the page settings before we move on, because you'll notice that this template had a plain white background and a standard font that they used, but maybe you want to make changes to that. So here on the left-hand side, you're going to click on theme settings, and here you're going to be given some additional options. The first one is colors. Here you can change your color scheme to be applied through specific sections or throughout your entire online store. Likewise, typography, you can adjust the different type of font and size used across your store, and this is also where you can make changes to things like buttons on your page. So again, if you have a very specific type of style that you want used on your page, you can change all of that here under settings, and then it will be applied automatically to your storefront. Likewise, you can see how your store views on a mobile device as well and make changes accordingly. So here I can see that I have a very similar setup on the mobile device as I do on a computer, and I think I like the look of that. But again, if I wanted to make changes, I would click into each one of these sections, and you'll see that there's an area for mobile media. Here is when where you can make edits specifically for a mobile device. So now let's take a look at what I've built so far. In just a few minutes, I've been able to put together a really good-looking store, and if someone were to come to my website, they would be able to easily navigate through what I've built. But there's one problem. When I click here on About Us, it's taking us to the old contact form. If you remember, we updated this navigation bar to About Us instead of Contact, so now we need to go back and actually make an edit to that page. You'll see the template for the Contact Us form that Shopify provided as part of the default template. Your first step could be to delete all of this, but in my case, I want to keep the contact form and just add some additional information about my company above the Contact Us form. So I'm going to add a section to the template. You could preview what some of the different design options are here. In my case, I want to add an image before I enter some information underneath, which will be text. First thing here, I'm going to change New Arrivals to be About Us. And as far as the text here, I don't need this, so I'm just going to remove it. Likewise, I don't need this button, so I'll remove this as well. Now, one thing about Shopify is you can't easily move things like text around the page, but what you can do is adjust the placement. So in this case, I want to actually move this text up on the image, so I can do this here by adding some padding to it, which will bring the text up slightly. And now I can double click into the image and select what I want for my computer. But now that I have my image, I actually don't like the text over it, so I'm going to remove this. And instead, I want to create a header similar to this contact section. So instead of adding a new section, I just want to copy this, so I'll right-click, press Duplicate, and now I can change the text of this to About Us. Now that I have this new section in, I'm going to want to create some text. So once again, in here, I'll select a new section, and I'm going to add text. I'm going to remove the text here and add my own. Remember, you can also use Shopify's AI Assistant to help you generate text. Now, I have all of this text here, but I really don't like the layout. So similar to everything else, you can go ahead and make changes to that. I'm going to set the width at fill, and then I'm going to remove the max width, and I'm going to adjust the alignment. This makes it a lot more pleasing to the eye. And I still have the Contact Us form below. Now, I would like to add a little section break in here in order to make it a bit more stylistically pleasing. So to add a divider, I'll click here to generate a new block, and all I need to do here is search for the divider.

[00:17:01] Speaker 2: Perfect.

[00:17:03] Speaker 1: And now when I click on About Us, I'm able to see the new page with my graphics, all of the text, and I still have the Contact Us form down below. Now, where does this contact form go? Let's explore some of the additional features of your Shopify store. Your account settings can be found in the bottom left-hand corner, and that's what we're going to explore next. Let's start with notifications. When a customer fills out a Contact Us form, it's going to be sent to the email address that you have on file under Settings. Now, you'll note here that Shopify is letting us know that when a customer receives an email, it's not going to be from this address because it's not a custom domain. We'll talk about domains in a little bit, but this is important to recognize. If I were to continue without connecting a custom domain, customers, instead of seeing my Scout & Stitch email, will instead see the generic Shopify email that's listed here in the announcement. Now, let's talk about the types of emails that customers are going to get. Let's click into Customer Notifications. You can customize all of these email templates, but let's take a look at what the default is for order confirmation. Here's the preview of what the default order confirmation email will look like when a customer places an order on your site. If this all looks good to you, then don't worry about customizing the emails. But again, if you want to create any sort of customization, you can do that on the previous screen. Now, let's talk about something very important, and that's payments. Shopify Payments is usually the easiest option because it's built directly into Shopify. You'll just need to follow the prompts to connect your business information and all of your banking details. And this way, clients can purchase directly on your shop, and all of your payments go directly to the bank account that you enter into your account information. Now, let's talk about shipping and delivery. Here under the Shipping tab, you'll define how much customers pay for shipping and where you're willing to ship your products. Most stores choose from one of three common options, free shipping, flat rate shipping, or carrier calculated rates. So, let's walk through all of this together. The first thing that you're going to want to decide is what carriers you want to utilize for your shipping needs. And you can manage that here under Preferred Carriers. The next thing you're going to want to do is ensure that all of the different size packages are set up in here under Settings. Now, I created all of my different package sizes when I set up my product catalog. But if you skip that, this is where you would add all of that package information. And don't forget to add packing materials to the weight of those packages. Next, you're going to determine what some of those shipping costs look like. Now, it's important to note that Shopify does provide discounting shipping labels. In order to find out how much a shipping label may cost, you can go here and put in some test data to determine what that might look like. For example, I could use one of these packages as a sample and see what the rate would be using Shopify's discounted rates to ship a dog leash from Seattle, Washington to New York City. The default settings that Shopify is giving us is a flat rate of $15 for express delivery and free standard delivery for orders $70 and up. Now, let's go ahead and make some changes to this because I advertised on the main page that I will offer free shipping for all orders over $50. So, I can make that edit here. Now, when I looked at some of those rates for the discounted shipping labels, shipping is actually more expensive than what Shopify is giving us here as a default. So, I'm going to go ahead and adjust this flat rate for ground shipping to be $10. Shipping is going to default to domestic shipping, but if you want to ship international, you can always add that as a market. Here, you can create international markets and then you can create shipping zones to charge different rates for different regions, such as domestic versus international orders. Once you've configured your rates, be sure to test the checkout process in order to verify that customers are seeing the correct shipping charges before launching your store. And now a topic that's not so much fun, taxes. Shopify will automatically handle much of the tax calculation process for you, but it is a good idea to review all of the settings for your particular country or region. Depending on where you operate, you may need additional tax registration or permits and it's always a good idea to consult a tax professional if you're unsure. Right now, if someone wanted to visit my store, they would need to go to this website address, which isn't probably going to drive that much traffic. So, you have a few options. The first thing I'm going to do is change my myshopify.com domain. Another option is to connect an existing domain or to purchase a new one from Shopify. This way, instead of having scoutandstitch.myshopify.com, I could purchase a domain, if it's available, called scoutandstitch.com, driving more traffic to my website. And a custom domain often increases credibility and makes your business easier to remember. Before we check out a preview of our finished store, let's talk about policies. These can include shipping policies, privacy policies, and your return and refund policy. The first thing you'll want to do is click on and select what your return window is and what your return shipping cost is. You'll also need to mark whether you're going to charge a restocking fee or if any items are final sale. You can also adjust the language of your return and refund policy, as well as any other policy. So, you could use just the default template and the return rule summary, or you can enter your own legal language here. And once you've done that, you can click on publish. So, now I've built out this great store and I can begin driving traffic to my website. I don't have any data yet since I just built this website, but under marketing, you can begin to track the website traffic that you're receiving and attribute those to sales. You can also create specific campaigns to determine how specific marketing initiatives are driving your business goals. You can also connect your Shopify account to popular third-party apps that can assist you in the advertising and marketing of your new Shopify store. Before launching your store, let's take a quick look at Shopify's pricing plans. Shopify offers several plans designed for businesses at different stages of growth, and definitely take advantage of the free trial to test things out. The link to sign up is in the video description and pinned comment. The basic plan is the most popular option for new store owners. It includes everything you need to build an online store, process payments, manage inventory, and start selling online. And as your business grows, you can always upgrade. Now, one thing to keep in mind is that Shopify charges both a monthly subscription fee or a yearly subscription free, as well as payment processing fees on each sale. The exact amount depends on your plan and payment provider. Thanks for watching, and don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter for more videos like this.