How To Start an Online Store in 2023 (Step-by-Step Guide)

How to start an online store

1. Choose an e-commerce platform
2. Decide on an audience
3. Choose your products
4. Design your website
5. Connect a payment gateway
6. Choose a business structure
7. Make yours Shop ready to go
8. Open your shop
9. Promote your business

1. Choose an eCommerce Platform

An eCommerce platform allows you to build and launch an online store experience, make sales and fulfill orders. Most people think that an ecommerce platform is like a website builder: you just list new products and accept payments online. But they can do much more.

Your ecommerce platform acts as the control center for your entire business, managing everything from inventory to marketing and giving you all the tools you need to sell online and provide customer support.

Reading: How to create a online store website

Key features to look for in an ecommerce platform include:

• Ease of use. Your ecommerce software should be easy to use, especially if you make it yourself in the beginning. Are you looking for a tool that is intuitive and uses a drag-and-drop online store builder to easily create your online store. Schedule a demo or free trial if you want to find out for yourself.
• Accessible customer support. Look for a platform that offers support all along the way. For example, with Shopify you can get help launching your website or migrating from other software, as well as ongoing support. Support teams are available 24/7 via live chat, email or even phone whenever you need it, in 19 different languages.
• Hassle-free checkout. An optimized checkout is crucial for sales. Find an ecommerce platform that makes it easy for shoppers to purchase your products. If you use Shopify, Shop Pay streamlines online checkout and increases checkout speed by 4x. You can also use Shopify’s plugins with 100+ payment gateways to accommodate different payment methods and currencies.
• Web hosting. A web host stores information and content on your e-commerce website in a server database. You need web hosting for users to access your online store. Some ecommerce software comes with built-in web hosting, while others require you to use a third-party solution.

When choosing your ecommerce software, consider your current and future needs. Some platforms might be the best solution for today, but a powerful platform like Shopify can get you started quickly and support your future growth.

Start a free trial of Shopify and create your ecommerce store with one of our professionally designed templates. The trial should give you enough time to launch an online store that’s ready to launch if you follow this guide and remember that you can continue to add products and improve your store after it goes live.

2. Decide on an Audience

An audience is the group of people your marketing efforts will focus on. When starting an ecommerce business, knowing your ideal audience is crucial. It helps you find new customers more easily and attract interested buyers to your website, resulting in higher conversion rates and more sales.

You can create an audience of any size or type, depending on the products you want to sell. However, there are three main categories to consider as a new ecommerce entrepreneur:

• Demographics. Includes characteristics such as age, gender, occupation, education and income.
• Location. Groups that segment the market by geographic location so you can better serve a specific area.
• Interests. Based on psychographic data and encompasses your audience’s attitudes, personality, opinions and lifestyle.

If you already have a product, choosing an audience is easier. Ask yourself: Who is buying my product? how are you How old are you? Gather this information into a buyer persona and include it in your business plan. You will need it when copying your website and creating marketing campaigns.

If you don’t already have a product, think about the kind of people you know best. For example, maybe you love pets and understand other pet owners in your 40s and 50s very well. Chances are you have a good idea of ​​what they like and dislike, their needs and fears. This could be your target audience.

To sell online, you really need to know and appreciate your audience. For more help with finding, see Finding Your Ideal Customer: How to Define and Reach Your Target Audience.

3. Choose Your Products

One of the biggest challenges for entrepreneurs is finding profitable products to sell. Coming up with product ideas is a bit tricky, but if you have a target audience in mind, you’re one step ahead.Fortunately, there are many ways to find products to sell, whether you’re manufacturing, reselling, or dropshipping.

You can find profitable products to sell in a number of ways:

• Address enthusiastic hobbyists
• Pursue your personal passion
• Take advantage of trends quickly
• Take a look at what’s hot on online marketplaces

Resources:

• How to find products for your online store: top apps and tips
• Product ideas : 17 Places to Find Profitable Products
• Find a Product to Sell: 12 Strategies to Finding Your First Profitable Product
• 17 Trending Products to Sell Online in 2023

4. Design your website

Before we begin, you need to start a free trial of Shopify. If you follow this guide, the trial should give you more than enough time to create a ready-to-launch online store. Remember, you can continue to add products and improve your store after going live.

When you start your trial, you will be prompted to enter a store name, which will become your default URL ( B. Store Name .myshopify.com). You can’t change this, but you can buy a custom domain (e.g. yourstore.com) later, so don’t worry about picking the perfect name now.

After answering a few questions, you’ll find yourself in your own Shopify account.

Here’s a quick checklist of what you should have before you start and what I’m working on will with to start my store:

• A business idea. With so many hot sauce brands bragging about being “the hottest hot sauce ever”, I thought it would be fun to start a sample store called Kinda Hot Sauce that sells savory mild hot sauces for the semi-adventurous. If you don’t have a business idea yet, you can browse our list of business ideas for inspiration.
• A business name. I used Namechk to check if my business name ideas were available on social media and as a domain before committing to them. Since some .com urls are hard to get, I chose kindahotsauce.shop as the domain. Don’t know how to name your shop? Learn how to choose a domain name or try Shopify’s free domain name generator.
• A logo. I worked with a designer to create this logo for a To develop “Challenger Brand” smart, mischievous, bold and spicy (winking for a mild hot sauce society). I prepared a .png file with a transparent background for easier resizing without losing quality. You can follow our guide to create your own logo for free or by hiring a designer.
• Photos. Clean product photography helps you show your best side. I will be using mockups of my hot sauce bottles on a white background along with some stock photos for lifestyle images. If you’re on a budget, you can take your own product photos, even just with a smartphone camera, or use free stock photos until you’re ready to take your own custom lifestyle photos.

1 . Add your products

Why create an online store without buying anything? Adding products should be one of the first things you do as you will be designing the look and feel of your website around your products.

In your new Shopify store, go to Products > Product add to create your first product listing.

On this page we’re going to make a number of decisions, so we’ll break them down into steps.

Write your product title and description

On product pages, customers get information about a product and decide whether they want to buy it or not. Details matter, and sharing the right information in the right way, from pricing to size, through text or visuals, can make all the difference. If you’re not sure what to include when creating your own online shopping website, you can take inspiration from others in your market.

Your product title should make it clear what the product is. This is what customers will see when they browse your store and what will help them find what they are looking for in your catalogue. Try to keep it short and use your product description or variants (more on that later) to show other specific information or product options like colors or sizes.

For our first product title, we’ll just use the Names of our flagship hot sauce, Hot Enough Habanero.

Product Descriptions describe and sell your product. They are also a common cause of writer’s block. The good news is that you don’t have to be a professional copywriter to write a compelling product description. All you need to do is:

• Know who you’re talking to. Think about what your customer needs to know to make them feel confident about buying your product, and try to communicate this in your description.
• Highlight incentives. Do you offer a generous return policy or free shipping? Are your products environmentally friendly? Think about what features, benefits, and offers really matter—and avoid. Many stores mix text and icons to quickly communicate these selling points on their product pages.
• Understand common questions or objections. What could make a customer hesitant to make a purchase? Are you afraid of buying the wrong size? Do they need to know what your products are made of in case they have allergies? Do you need to know that your products are ethical?
• Make your text easy to scan. Make your descriptions easier to read with short paragraphs, bullet points, subheadings, bold text, etc. Then ask yourself how quickly a visitor can get the information they need.
• Help customers see how they use your product. Customers cannot taste, feel, touch or try on. Outside of product photos, you can bring your products to life by listing the materials you use, including a sizing chart, or share the story of how they’re made – it all depends on your product.

With a product like hot sauce, we can safely assume that customers pay particular attention to the following details when purchasing: ingredients, taste, quantity, spiciness and combination. That’s why I’ve done my best to make all this information available to my shop’s visitors at a glance.

Upload product photos or other media

In the Media section of your product page, you can upload any visual media that will help you share more in-depth details about your products: photos, GIFs, videos or even 3D models.

Presentation makes the difference. Help customers imagine owning your product. Help them see it in action or proudly display it in their space. Here are a few points to keep in mind:

• Use high-quality photos that show your products in the best possible light. Avoid blurry or low-resolution images.
• Try to keep the same aspect ratio (i.e. the ratio between width and height) in your product photos so that all of your photos appear the same size. This consistency provides a cleaner, more professional look as you build your online store.

• If you are on a budget, most modern smartphones can take high-quality photos and you can use free photo editing tools to enhance them (like removebg which allows you to remove background for free).
• Once you’ve uploaded an image, you can click on it to make basic edits like cropping and resizing. You can also edit the accessibility alt text to describe your photos to people who can’t see them. For example, I wrote “a 150ml bottle of Kinda Hot Sauce’s Hot Enough Habanero” to help anyone with a visual impairment shop from me.

I’ll use a bottle photo a bottle with hot sauce on a white background. But for products where the customer may need more visual information, such as For example, items such as clothing or jewelry, using multiple photos that offer additional angles or detail can help build customer trust.

Set your price

Now it’s time to set the listing price for your product. This is the amount customers pay to buy your product.

Optionally, you can use the Price Compare field to indicate what the product would normally cost, especially in the case of a sale. For example, if we wanted to show savings on our Hot Sauce three-pack, we could enter the original price of three bottles here. However, I caution against using this without good reason, especially if you’re selling premium products, as it may detract from their perceived quality.

The Cost per item field is also optional . If you want, you can use it to track your profit margin for a single product. On the Shopify plan or higher, you can use this to track profit in your profit report.

While there are some exceptions, businesses that sell goods and services must collect taxes every time someone orders from them, so we check this box and configure our tax settings later.

To keep it simple, let’s assume my cost per product, or the cost of making and packaging a bottle, is $5. Selling each bottle for $15 earns me a healthy margin, which leaves some room for discounts and marketing.

In reality, pricing is rarely that simple. Several variables can affect the pricing of your products, such as shipping costs, raw materials, overheads like rent, or employees , the cost of your time and, perhaps most importantly, the perceived quality of your products.

Inventory

If we dropship or use a print-on-demand service, we would Since Kinda Hot Sauces makes, sells, and ships its own hot sauce, we want to track inventory in Shopify to know how much we have left of each sauce and how much more we need to produce once the orders come in.

If this is your first time selling online, you might see some unfamiliar terms here, so let’s go through them quickly.

• SKU. A stock keeping unit is used to keep track of your inventory for specific products and vari track and manage ants. Create a consistent system of numbers or letters that makes it easy to tell at a glance what exactly it is (e.g. MHS-HEH tells me it’s the medium hot sauce, Hot Enough Habanero).
• Barcode. Barcodes (UPC, GTIN, etc.) are typically used when you want to resell products or add scannable barcodes to your items for easier inventory management. We can leave this field blank for now as we manufacture and sell our own products.
• Quantity. This is the quantity of a specific product that you have on hand. If you have multiple locations with inventory and have set them up in Shopify, they will appear here. In my example, I start with a small batch of 10 bottles for each hot sauce and use my own space for storage.

Since it doesn’t take long to make more of my product, I can “Resell if not in stock”. However, you can disable this option and mark items as “Sold Out” if your stock is limited or it takes longer to restock.

Shipping

In the shipping section you can enter details , which automatically calculate shipping costs and print the appropriate shipping labels for each order.

For my Kinda Hot Sauce Shop, we check “This is a physical product” and enter the following information:

• Weight. The dead weight of a bottle. I will enter 0.5 pounds.
• Customs information. This is important if you plan to sell internationally. We’ll type “Canada” because Kinda Hot Sauce is manufactured in and shipped from Canada and use the search bar to find the Harmonized System of Spices code, which is 21309.

Setting The actual shipping costs and options you offer your customers are discussed later in this tutorial.

Options

I will not set up options for my products, but I still want to cover how to use Shopify for this – as many Shopify store owners do.

If your product comes with different variants, like sizes or colors, instead of adding each one as a separate product, you can just add them as variants of the same product. Each option can have its own image, price, tracked inventory and associated individual settings.

You can even break down your options further, for example offering multiple colors, each available in different sizes.

If you add variants to your product and click save to refresh the page, media, pricing, inventory and Shipping Sections discussed above must be specified for each specific variant.

Since our product comes in one size and has no variants, we leave this section alone. However, if you sell different variants of the same product, make sure you edit each variant with the appropriate product page information.

Organization and product availability

In the “Organization” section, you can label your products to group them together and make it easier to manage your store’s product catalogue, to group products together for customers to shop, and apply rules or discounts to specific products. Here is what each label means:

• Product availability: You can choose from a variety of sales channels, such as Facebook Shops or Amazon, to list your products that we offer will address that later. First, make sure your product is available in the online store or it will be hidden.
• Product type:This is a product category that allows you to identify specific products (eg e.g. a t-shirt). Each product can only have one product type.We simply use “hot sauce”.
• Supplier: This is the manufacturer, wholesaler, or third-party vendor of the product. You can filter your product listing by vendor, which can speed up inventory ordering. Kinda Hot Sauce is the manufacturer, so we list them as a vendor.
• Tags: Tags are keywords that you can associate with your product. You can add multiple tags to a product so customers can find it from your online store’s search bar. You can also use tags to automate actions in your shop, e.g. B. adding a product with a specific tag to a specific collection. I’ll leave this blank as I don’t have a reason to use tags yet.
• Collections: Collections are important. They allow you to organize and curate your products for specific purposes and audiences. For example, a clothing brand might create a collection based on products for women, products for men, a summer sale, or new arrivals. The same product can be included in several collections. We’ll set up our collections as we add more products.

Search engine listing preview

The search engine listing preview allows you to customize how a page is displayed in search engine results. Here you can also improve the findability of your products by search engines such as Google.

If you know what keywords your target customer is using to search for products like yours, you can incorporate them into this section to increase your chances of appearing in search engine results over time.

I used Ubersuggest, a free keyword research tool, to measure how often people search for keywords related to my products. I’ve discovered “habanero sauce” (5,400 searches per month) and “mild hot sauce” (590 searches per month) and “medium hot sauce” (50 searches per month) as keywords I might want to incorporate into my product page.

We’ll get into more SEO later, but here are some quick tips to optimize this section in the meantime:

• Page Title. Write your page title so that it includes your target keywords, but is still short and descriptive enough to get clicked. I will focus on “medium hot sauce” as it is most relevant to this product. Aim for less than 60 characters if possible, so that your title is not cut off in the search results. I use “Hot Enough Habanero | Medium Hot Sauce” as the page title.
• Description. Use this space to display any persuasive information that might make searchers click through when linking to your product see results in search or on social media. I try to keep it short and sweet while expanding on the information in my site title.
• URL and handle. Keep this simple, unique and meaningful to people using search engines to find your product. I’ll use /hot-enough-habanero.

Once we’re done, we can click save and preview our product page to see how it looks. We can change the small details like colors and fonts later when we start customizing our shop.

You can repeat this for each product you want to add to your store, keeping in mind that you don’t have to add all your products to start.

Organize Your products in collections

Now that we have at least a few individual products listed, we can start organizing them into collections in Shopify under Product > Collections.

Collections can be created to curate products for a specific audience (e.g. products for kids), a theme (e.g. best sellers), or a product category (e.g. accessories). You can decide whether to manually add products to specific collections or automate what is included/excluded based on price, tags, or other conditions.

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Collections serve a variety of purposes, such as:

• Drag specific products that you want to display in a section on your homepage
• Link to collections of products in your navigation or on your homepage to help different audiences quickly in your catalog to navigate
• Selecting items you want to offer for sale (you can apply discounts to certain product collections)

At the moment I will be creating a collection for our medium hot sauces . That’s because I only want to include my three individual hot sauce products while excluding the three-pack bundle. This way I can highlight the individual flavors and highlight the bundle separately.

I will fill in the collection title and description based on how I want to greet visitors when they land on this collection page. The search engine preview can be populated using the same best practices we followed for the product pages.You can also specify a collection image that will be dragged to represent your collection when we start customizing the look and feel step of creating an online store.

2. Create key online shopping pages for your store

So far we have focused on products. But you need more than just products when creating your own online shopping website. It needs to help buyers understand your business, give them reasons to trust you, and provide other important details to customers who are looking for you.

You can visit most of these pages at Create Online Store > Pages.

You don’t need to have all your pages ready to start, but some of the most helpful ones to create are:

• Contact page. This page provides customers with clear ways to reach you if they have questions, or directs them to a place to find answers, e.g. a FAQ page.
• About us. An About page connects personally with customers, explains your business model, and/or shares the reason you started your business. A compelling About page can go a long way in gaining trust for new brands – keep this in mind when creating your online store.
• FAQ page. A FAQ page helps answer some of the most common customer support requests.
• Policy pages. There are certain legal sides that customers expect and can protect you in the event of a dispute, such as: B. Your return and privacy policy, which you can set up under Settings > Legal.

To create our online store and for the purposes of this tutorial, we will go over how to set up a ” About Me page (called “Our Story”), a contact page, and important policy pages (Privacy Policy, Shipping Policy, and Terms of Service), but you can create any pages that you feel will help you earn your customers’ trust .

About Page

About Pages are a great way to showcase the “little ones” in small businesses and gain confidence as a new merchant while building your online store.

You can have a video introducing yourself as a founder, links to awards and press mentions, images explaining your supply chain, or anything that will help this site tell your customers who you are and what you stand for.

For Kinda Hot Sauce we create an online store with a simple info page, written like a letter to the customer, explaining our philosophy and why we started the company.

When someone visits my shop and isn’t entirely thrilled with a purchase, I want them to be greeted with a lovely and warm message if they decide to visit my About Us page, to learn more.

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Since we’re mostly relying on text, I’ll use the formatting options available in the toolbar to make the copy more noticeable.

Just like you did For your products, you should also customize the Search Engine Listing Preview section of your pages depending on what you want the URL to look like and how you want the page to appear in search engine results.

Contact page

Your contact page is what customers look for when they ask a question or get support.

For most Shopify themes, you can easily add a create s. Just create a new page, go to the Template section on the right and select the contact template. This should add a form to your page. You can then write some instructions to help customers contact you, or even link to other pages, like .shopify.com/s/files/1/0070/7032/files/contact-us-page_cb63a922-b448-4165 -9507-5387579416c2.png” alt=”Example contact page” />

There are also live chat apps you can install to make support even more accessible to buyers.

Policy Pages

Policy pages are standard operating procedures for online businesses. They give your customers a place to understand how you do business and what to expect from you. They also help protect you in the In the event of a customer dispute.

Shopify Settings > Legal allows you to generate templates that you can customize to suit your business and local laws:

• Return Policy. What is your return and exchange policy How long have customer n Time to initiate a return? What condition does the product need to be in? A generous return policy can help customers buy from you with confidence.
• Privacy Policy. A privacy policy describes how you collect information about your customers.
• Terms of Service. Your Terms of Service is an agreement between you and your customers that sets out how you work and what rights you reserve.
• Shipping Policy. A shipping policy helps you set customer expectations in terms of shipping costs, manufacturing times and delivery speeds for the regions you ship to.

(Please note that these templates are not legal advice and when will be adjusted you should create your online store.)

3. Create an online store that is fully customized

Now that we have some products in our store and some pages ready, it’s time to go to Online store > themes</ go to Shopify and start thinking about how we want our website to look.

Choose a theme

The first step is to choose a theme: a template that we use in our shop install and that we can use Use it as a design starting point when building your own online store. The Shopify Theme Store houses both free and paid themes, each with their own styles and features.

Some themes were created for larger product catalogues, while others are intended for single product companies. Others are intended for specific industries or types of business, such as Take the Express theme for restaurants, for example.

Here are some key points to consider when choosing the perfect theme for building your own business:

• Each Design has multiple styles, so make sure you shop around for a design and style based on how extensive your product catalog will be and what type of aesthetic you want for your store. You want to create the online shopping you envisioned.
• Consider whether the theme you’re looking at has built-in features you need, like a search bar that auto-completes queries, or an equivalent section displays press mentions. Remember that you can also find free and paid Shopify apps that add extra functionality when you create your store website.
• Don’t choose a theme based on colors or fonts. These are all things that you can customize later. You can even make your theme truly unique by hiring a Shopify expert to customize it for you.
• You can try a paid theme for a one-time fee before you buy it.
• Above all, remember that you are not attached to the topic you choose. If you change your mind later, you can preview other themes, install them in your current store, and customize them without having to rebuild your product pages.

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After playing around with a few free themes like Debut and Narrative I narrowed it down to Brooklyn (play style) because Kinda Hot Sauce has a small product line and doesn’t need many features, to start on the right foot. I like the modern layout of the product grid, the simplicity of the navigation menu, and the emphasis Brooklyn places on visual branding.

Design Your Home Page

Each theme is made up of sections that you you can rearrange, add, remove, or temporarily hide them. Sections can help you decide how to present your store’s home page and experiment with different layouts.

When deciding on your home page design, think about and determine the goals that a home page must meet See how they apply to your specific business:

• Prioritize first-time visitors and help them quickly understand what your business is and what you’re selling.
• Go Attract returning visitors and make it easier for them to navigate to the products and pages they are looking for.
• Try to inspire interest in your products and inspire trust in your company with every scroll.

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• Create clear paths your visitors can take based on their intent to purchase. You can feature an “About Us” page for people who want to learn more about your company or your different collections, so visitors can choose the products they’re interested in.
• Create yours Homepage with the assumption that many of your visitors will browse it on their mobile devices.

You will visit and revise your homepage over and over again. Don’t let the pursuit of perfection stop you from pushing your startup.

For Kinda Hot Sauce, I will use these sections to do the following:

1. Slideshow (using a single slide) to grab instant interest with clever copy explaining why this isn’t your typical hot sauce brand. “Not the World’s Hottest Hot Sauce” breaks expectations and communicates what my brand is about with the slogan “Spice that’s nice”. I also added an overlay and increased the opacity of the overlay to ensure my text is readable when displayed over my image.
2. Recommended Collection to see the three to showcase different hot sauces in Medium Hot Sauce Collection I used to make.I complement the impression of the slide show with a bold statement about my products: “Delicious hot sauce doesn’t have to be deadly.”
3. Image with text Summarize and clarify the positioning of my brand the reason my shop exists with a link to its about page. I’ll use my logo as the image for now, but you could use a photo of you, the founder, or an image that represents your brand well.
4. Newsletter to get people to do this bring me to join my email list. Not everyone who visits my store will be ready to buy. By offering them a reason to sign up for my email list (in this case, slightly spicy recipes), I can build my email list as I start driving traffic to my business.
5. Featured Product

strong> to introduce unsure customers to my hot sauce three-pack (and the savings that come with it). I included this last to offer a last-ditch purchase route to customers who scroll to the bottom of my homepage without clicking anything.

In the future, however, I might expand my homepage with a section explaining exactly how hot is “hot enough” or a blog post gallery sharing recipes using my hot sauces become. I won’t be sure the decisions I’m making on my homepage are the right ones until I start marketing, but I’m comfortable with this layout.

Prioritize information ruthlessly when design your own homepage. Less is usually more. Rather than trying to cram as much onto your home page as possible, redirect visitors to supporting pages that help them sell your business or explain non-essential information.

Customize your navigation menus

The Header section is where you make changes to the top area of ​​your online store, which includes your navigation menu, shopping cart, and logo.

We’re focused focus on creating a clear navigation menu as this is how people find their way around your site.

There are three main forms of navigation you can set up in the header area:

• Main navigation. This is the top menu where you can prioritize the main navigation paths you want to offer customers.
• Footer Navigation. This is where you keep links to non-essential pages that may distract new visitors but still need to be available to those who need to find them. Most online shoppers know that this is where they need to look for information like your return policy or contact page.
• Search. You can enable the search bar in the header to let visitors navigate straight to what they’re looking for. This is especially useful if you have a large product catalog and many pages on your site.

You don’t want to overwhelm people with too many options right from the start. Instead, you can organize your navigation to prioritize the actions you want visitors to take—with a focus on shopping, of course.

For Kinda Hot Sauce, I’m going to create a simple navigation structure where I :

• Check out my medium hot sauce collection and three pack bundle under the home page with a Featured Collections section.
• Nest my Ours page Story”. with an Image with text section.
• Add a bestselling product with a Featured product section.

I will also create another menu for my footer to display my non-essential policy pages at the bottom of my site.

Set your colors, typography and other themes On Settings

Colors and typography play a big role in your brand’s visual identity and should play an important role when you build your own online store. Under the Theme Settings tab in the online store editor, you can customize the look and feel of your entire online store, including colors and typography.

Even if you’re not a designer, you can still build your own store and Choose fonts and color combinations that are good for you using the following tips:

For colors

• Consider the psychology of colors and how different colors make people feel (e.g. red makes people hungry, yellow suggests safety and purple can have a royal quality).
• Use contrast to emphasize important features of your homepage, eg buttons.
• Use a tool like Coolors to browse through different color palettes to find colors you like and their associated hex code.
• Don’t be afraid to use your gut to follow or keep it simple when in doubt l have (even if it’s just a simple black and white color scheme).

I came up with the following color palette for Kinda Hot Sauce because I want it to look bold and colorful.I probably won’t use them all, but I have enough to mix and match to find a combination I like:

• #392B58
• #FF0035
• #F7EE7F
• #654597
• #574AE2

Typography

• Try to choose two fonts (maximum three) that you want to use in your store.
• Choose a font that is easy to read (sans serif fonts like Helvetica are generally easier to scan on a screen).
• Use a tool like FontJoy to come up with different font pairs to experiment .

For our shop we keep it simple with two fonts:

• Headings: Lora
• Accent text: Roboto
• Body text: Roboto

Customize your checkout

Under Theme settings you can also customize the look of your checkout. At the very least, it’s a good idea to add your logo to your checkout to give it a branded feel.

If you’d like, you can also customize how your checkout works by going to your checkout settings (or go to Settings > Checkout).

Here is a quick overview of the choices you can make regarding your checkout:

• Customer Accounts . You can choose if you want customers to create an account at checkout. This can be useful if you run a wholesale or members-only store. We will disable it for our shop as we don’t want to disturb our checkout experience unnecessarily.
• Customer contact. You can let customers choose how they want after ordering from you be contacted (e-mail or SMS). I’m choosing “Customers can only check out via email” for now to keep it simple and focus on building an email list to market to.
• Form Options . Here you can decide whether additional information such as a first name or company name is hidden, optional or required at checkout. Since we don’t need all of this information to fulfill every order for Kinda Hot Sauce, I’ll make most of it optional.
• Order processing. You can find options to streamline the checkout process or add an extra confirmation step. By default, to save customers some time, we use the customer’s shipping address as the billing address and enable autocomplete for addresses.
• Consent for marketing purposes. Allow your customers to subscribe to your marketing emails and SMS at checkout. Since we like to engage with customers after their purchase, it’s a good idea to turn this on.
• Tips. You can let customers add a tip to their online purchase to show their support for your business.
• Abandoned Checkouts. When a customer When your checkout arrives and decides not to complete their purchase (this can be for a variety of reasons), you can set up an automated reminder email for those buyers. We set up our automated email to go out 10 hours after someone abandons their checkout, while our shop’s memory is still fresh and they may have more time to reconsider their purchase.

When in doubt, favor choices that reduce checkout friction for the majority of your customers.

Ask for feedback

Feedback is important a gift, especially when you’ve spent so much time creating your own online shopping website. New eyes can often spot areas that need improvement that you don’t, and provide valuable insights that you can use to make optimizations to your store.

Your store is password protected by default, but you can give others the password check it. You can find your password (or change it) under Online Store > Settings.

Some other great places to give feedback are:

• People in your area that you can rely on to provide honest, constructive feedback
• Subreddits that your target customers can subscribe to
• Facebook groups
• The Feedback from the Shopify community on my shop forum

When I asked Kinda Hot Sauce for feedback, the following areas were mentioned to focus on for improvement:

• The copywriting for my product pages could focus more on who my brand is for (hot sauce lovers).
• Some people mentioned how “charming” the ” About me page and how it led her to buy from this company. I might bring that charisma to the rest of my copy and campaigns when I start marketing.

Be careful with both the good and the bad when incorporating feedback into your store . The best form of feedback is when you start actively marketing your business.

4. Set up shipping

Shipping can be one of the most complex considerations when running an ecommerce business.Between product weights, packaging costs, shipping destinations, carrier rates, and your potential profit per order, there are many variables to juggle.

Fortunately, we can boil it down to a few main approaches, which you can even mix and match based on your company’s unique needs, to find a shipping strategy that works for you:

1. Offer free shipping. Free shipping can be an effective incentive for customers to buy from you, regardless whether it’s specific products, order amounts (e.g. if they spend more than $50), or regions of the world. Remember that if you plan on paying shipping costs on behalf of your customers, you need to factor this into the retail price of your products.
2. Calculate real-time carrier rates. Shopify integrates with various carriers like USPS and Canada Post in real-time to generate shipping options and live prices. This way, your customers can choose exactly the service and price they want. You can take advantage of discounted pricing through Shopify Shipping.
3. Calculate a flat rate. Flat rate shipping works best when your products are of similar sizes and weights, thereby lowering the actual shipping cost to predict.
4. Offer local pickup/delivery. You can also allow local customers to pick up their online order at one of your locations by setting specific notification preferences and pickup instructions , and other details for each location.

For more advice on creating a shipping strategy, see our Beginner’s Guide to Ecommerce Shipping and Fulfillment. Keep in mind that, like most of what we’ve done so far, you can revisit and adjust this over time.

Because Kinda Hot Sauce is based in Canada, we will be setting up our shipping as follows to illustrate some of the different approaches you can take:

• A flat fee of $8 for shipping to Canada and the US
• Free shipping to Canada / to the US when you spend $30 or more
• Real-time carrier rates for the rest of the world

Setting up our shipping zones

You can implement your shipping strategy in Shopify under Settings > Shipping and Delivery. Here you can create shipping zones where you can set your rates for shipping to customers in specific countries.

Set conditional shipping costs

Within From the shipping zone we just created, we can use the Add Rate button to create specific rates based on certain conditions. For example, we may offer free shipping when an order reaches a certain minimum value. Or we may increase the shipping cost if the order exceeds a certain weight.

See also: How To Create a Free Website with Google Sites [2023]

In general, by encouraging customers to add more items to their order, you can save time and money on shipping while earning more per sale. That’s why we use free shipping on orders over $30 (two bottles of hot sauce or the three pack) to encourage customers to spend more.

Set up real-time calculated shipping rates

Real-time shipping rates are based on the shipping details you entered when adding your products and package dimensions on the Settings > Shipping page. Customers can then select their preferred service and price at checkout.

You can also customize these rates to include a handling fee on top of the courier service rates to account for additional costs such as packaging or your time.

5. Set up taxes

As a business that sells goods or services, every time someone orders something from your store, you have to collect taxes, which you have to remit to the government (some exceptions apply, e.g e.g. for digital goods in many countries). .

Shopify helps you do most tax calculations automatically using standard sales tax rates around the world. Still, it’s a good idea to do some research or consult a tax professional to make sure you’re calculating the correct amount of sales tax.

You can override the default tax settings if there are specific requirements for your region, such as: B. Taxes for certain products or for shipping.

In Shopify, go to Settings > Taxes and duties to set up your tax regions. Here you can edit the default rates if needed, or apply overrides if specific conditions apply to your region or products.

Because Kinda Hot Sauce operates in Canada, we establish our standard Canadian tax rates. If you have a tax number, you can enter it here or later.Go to Analytics > Reports to see how much tax you’ve collected.

None of this should should be taken as tax advice and you should consult a tax adviser if you are in any doubt about your tax situation. Shopify doesn’t file or remit your sales taxes for you.

5. Connect a Payment Gateway

We’re on the home stretch! Next, you decide your store’s payment methods and how you get paid as a store owner.

Go to Settings > Payments to set up your payment provider. Shopify has made it easy for you to accept all major forms of payment with Shopify Payments.

As long as you operate your business in one of the supported countries and are not considered a banned business, you can enable Shopify Payments with just one click and 0% additional transaction fees. You can also choose from over 100 third-party payment providers here, or offer your customers additional payment options like PayPal.

In my case, I will complete the account setup for Shopify Payments by entering my business ID and bank details. I can also manage my Shopify Payments settings and do things like:

• Choose the payment options I want to offer, like different credit cards (e.g. Visa) , and accelerated one-click payment options like Apple Pay and Shop Pay. Shop Pay is Shopify’s one-click payment option that allows any customer of any Shop Pay-enabled store to save their payment information for future purchases.
• Sell in multiple currencies, which automatically converts your prices to the Customer’s currency will be converted when you activate it. Since we primarily sell in Canada and the United States, we’re adding the US Dollar and Canadian Dollar to our enabled currencies.
• Set your payout schedule. You can receive your payout daily, weekly or monthly – it all depends on your cash flow preferences.
• Turn on additional fraud prevention measures like CVV and zip code verification to add an extra layer of security.
• Customize how you appear on your customers’ bank statements. We use KINDAHOTSAUCE to make our brand recognizable to customers.

The currency in which you sell your products can be set in Settings > General. I will be selling in US Dollars as this will be familiar to both US and Canadian customers.

6. Choose a business structure

Now you’ve done all the fun parts of opening an online store: choose your name, create your website, find products, write product descriptions. But before you start, you want to legalize your new business.

While it’s not the funnest part, getting your business involved is a must. A government-recognized legal entity also protects your private assets if something goes wrong. It also helps you:

• Possibly get a lower tax bill
• Secure business financing more easily
• Create retirement savings
• Separate Credit rating from your personal review

Common business structures for new business owners are:

• Sole Proprietorship. An unincorporated corporation with no legal distinction between the company and the person who runs it. It is considered a non-employer company and is the easiest to set up and manage. About 40% of small business owners have a non-employer business as their primary source of income.
• Partnership. A partnership is a single company with two or more owners. Each owner contributes to the company through financing, property, work or skills. Partners share responsibility and profits.
• Limited Liability Corporation (LLC). An LLC is a hybrid corporate structure that combines partnership with the liability protection of corporations.

Um To learn more about the best company structure for you, read Company Types: Which Legal Structure is Right for Your New Business?

7. Get your store ready

With all the work we’ve done so far, we could actually launch our store now if we wanted to. We would simply disable password protection in Online Store > Settings, which is the final step to flip the “Open” sign and let people in to start purchasing our products.

In fact, if you’re in a hurry to go live, you can skip some or all of the following steps and revisit them later when you have time.

But in this tutorial, I’m going to make sure that my store not only makes a strong first impression and offers a smooth customer experience on launch, but is also in a good place for me to start marketing.

That said, here are the final steps we’re going to go through:

1. Adding a custom domain
2. Installing relevant sales channels
3. Customize your email/SMS notifications (optional)
4. Set up your store for marketing (tracking and analysis)

Add a custom domain

Buying a domain is like claiming land on the web. For this reason, it’s called a “web address”.

A custom domain is a fully branded URL that replaces the default URL created based on the store name you chose during setup (eg. B. You could buy your store.com to replace yourstore.myshopify.com as your public URL).

Under Settings > Domains, you can add your domain in seconds directly via Shopify buy or transfer your domain from another registrar and connect it to your store.

Since .com is taken, I will purchase the .shop extension for KindaHotSauce through Shopify. KindaHotSauce.shop is now my store URL.

Install Relevant Sales Channels

One of the benefits of learning how to use Shopify to grow your business is that your Online store just one of them is many sales channels through which you can sell your products. You can create online shopping from a variety of places and sell your products to additional sales channels to meet your customers where they are while tracking your products, inventory and reports in the same Shopify account so you’ll always know what’s going on in your business.

While you don’t need to connect everyone right away to create your online store, it’s good to keep them in mind when you’re ready to explore new avenues to get your products in front of the right buyers.

Not every sales channel is relevant to your unique business, but here are a few worth highlighting:

• Shopify POS. Our point-of-sale solution for accepting in-person payments and easily syncing physical retail sales to your online Shopify store and inventory.
• Social Networks. You can share your products through a en Facebook Shop on your Facebook Page, product tags in your Instagram posts, Pinterest and more.
• Marketplaces. Many shoppers start their shopping journey on marketplaces like Rakuten or eBay.
• Google Channel. Google is the most popular search engine in the world. Google Channel allows you to run Google Shopping campaigns and get your products listed in the Shopping tab in Google search results for free.
• Buy Button. If you have an existing website or blog where you want to sell your products, you can install the Buy Button sales channel to sell your products on another Website embed customers to buy and check out there. You can even create checkout links to send directly to a customer and let them jump straight to checkout.

You can quickly add sales channels by by clicking the arrow next to Sales Channels and entering the channel you want to add. You can also see our full list of sales channels on the Shopify App Store. Then you can select which products are available on which sales channels under Product availability on your product pages.

I will definitely consider the Facebook and Instagram channels for a brand like Kinda Hot Sauce will rely heavily on social media marketing.

Customizing your email notifications (optional)

Shopify comes with a suite of ready-to-use automated emails and SMS Notifications to notify customers of order confirmations, status updates, and more.

I’m leaving them alone for now, but if for any reason you need to customize these – to communicate specific information or just better reflect your brand – you can edit these notifications in Settings > Notifications.

8. Start your shop 🚀

I’m finally ready to go! Is my shop perfect? No. But I feel good enough to put the time and money into marketing it and learning from the feedback I get to make it even better over time.

I can change my password page remove it (under Settings > Preferences) and tell the world I’m open to business.

The journey to creating an online store ends here for this demo store. But for you it’s just beginning. Here are some next steps and resources to help you boost your business after launch:

• Attract customers to the online store
• Increase traffic to get your first sales achieve
• Learn from your traffic
• Optimize your shop

9.Market Your Business

Marketing is different for every business, but no matter what your strategy, it’s important to get the right foundation in place as soon as possible so you can get the most out of your efforts while making the Increase traffic to your store.

In particular, I want to cover the basics of almost every ecommerce marketing strategy that is important to new store owners.

Analytics

Shopify reports (under Analytics > Reports) not only help you monitor traffic and sales generated by your store across all your sales channels, but also serve as a treasure trove of great insights for improvement of your business over time.

You can learn where your traffic and sales are coming from, your overall online store conversion rate, traffic and sales over time, and more.

For more detailed analysis and flexible reports, you can set up Google Analytics for free.

Facebook Pixel

Have you ever visited an online store, considered a product, but left without buying? only to see an ad for it a few days later? Or have you ever seen an ad for a product from a company you’ve never heard of that looked like it was made for you?

This is made possible by the so-called Facebook pixel, an intelligent code that learns from how people interact with your brand and your website – from liking your social media posts to making a purchase – and a Personalization enables how you promote them over time.

The Facebook pixel learns from all the traffic you send to your online store. So if you plan to advertise on Facebook or Instagram at a later date, it is important to get your Facebook pixel set up.

Our free Facebook marketing app gives you clear setup instructions for your Shopify store (note that this process also requires you to set up a Facebook pixel page and ad account for your business).

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Many shoppers turn to Google and other search engines as part of their shopping journey, whether to find a product they’ve seen or heard from a friend, or to communicate through shopping for a purchase.

By helping your online store pages and your products appear in these search results, you can generate passive streams of relevant traffic for free. However, it takes time to grow this traffic source, especially if you’re just building your store website.

You can lay the right foundation through a method called Search Engine Optimization, which we first introduced to our products and set up pages in our shop.

Other areas of your store where you should keep an eye on SEO are the title and meta description fields, which you can find under Online store > Settings. For Kinda Hot Sauce, I want to make sure I include my brand name and a description of my business based on the keywords people might search for to find my business.

You can use a free keyword research tool like Ubersuggest or Keyword Surfer (Chrome extension) to estimate how often people search for a specific search query in a month and what types of searches related to that keyword take place. Estimated monthly search volume is not always 100% accurate, and the more popular a search is, the more competitive it usually is.

Always remember that a search engine’s job is to show the most relevant results for the users, so you should try to prioritize keywords that are directly relevant to your business.

Let’s take Kinda Hot Sauce as an example to illustrate some of the key results that can come up from even the simplest keyword research:

• “Medium Hot Sauce” and ” Milde spicy sauce” come up with 480 and 40 estimated monthly searches respectively. Because they’re closely related to what my business is about, I can prioritize them in the title and description of my home page.
• Many people also search for a variety of recipes for spicy foods (eg. “how to make crispy hot wings”), which means I might start a blog later to create content around finding hot sauce recipes.

While I’m here I’ll also add a social sharing image to ensure I make a strong first impression when a link to my shop is shared on social media or direct messages.

Recommended: See our SEO checklist for additional steps you can take to ensure your shop appears in relevant search engine results becomes.

• Shopify App Store
• 26 free Shopify apps to help you build, manage and grow your store

Build a Successful Online Store store today

You can sell anything online today including handmade products, courses, graphic design services, custom printed t-shirts and other apparel, homemade items and more. As you can see, creating an online storefront is easy if you follow the simple steps above. It is inexpensive upfront and can help you start your own business in no time.

See also: How to add a co-host to a Facebook event in 3 simple steps

Illustration by Marina Verdu.

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