What is Shopify, and How Can You Start Your eCommerce Business with Shopify?

Businesses are always looking for ways to create a stable source of income by owning a professional online sales website. Some companies want to expand their sales channels, and e who only sell their products through social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook likely want to create their website to boost their brand. Shopify is quite popular and is the top-rated e-commerce website platform that lets you have an online store. Since e-commerce websites have gained popularity in recent years, it has been quite challenging to sell goods online. Shopify is the best option for you if you want to start an online international business.

Introduction About Shopify

Shopify is among the most popular e-commerce platforms that let you set up online shopping stores and integrate them with social networking, payment, shopping cart features, post products, and order processing with Shopify. Shopify had around 1 million active users in 2019 because of its professional design, ease of use, and user-friendly interface.

Shopify was founded by Scott Lake, Daniel Weinand, and Tobias Lutke in 2006. Initially, they had launched a website called Snowdevil to sell snowboarding equipment. However, Tobias decided to improve the e-commerce sector and built Shopify. Shopify is straightforward to use and was created specifically for beginners.

How to start an E-commerce business with Shopify

Register for a Shopify account

Shopify has become popular and mainstream because it is highly accessible to create discounts, process orders, and add products. The first step for starting an eCommerce business with Shopify is to set up an account. You can easily find a link for registration online. Beginners get a 14-day free trial which enables you to play around and test the tool thoroughly before you decide if you want to spend some money on it. After the 14 days is over, your account will be canceled automatically. If you wish to continue using your Spotify account, you can easily activate your account by purchasing a plan that suits your needs. You must fill in the necessary information after clicking on the “Create your store” option.

After you fill up all the required information, the Shopify website asks if you have already been selling your products or not. It would help if you answered this prompt accordingly. If you say yes, you must tell the website your current revenue. These queries will lead to several prompts you need to answer before proceeding further. You can skip some of the questions if you don’t wish to answer them or if they are confusing; however, it is recommended that you respond to as many questions as you can accurately so that Shopify’s algorithm can guide you to the suitable action to take.

After answering all the queries, you must fill in all the required details about yourself and your store. After you are done filling in your personal and your store’s information, you need to click on the “Enter my store” option. You will see an admin panel which means you have successfully set up an account for your store in Shopify.

Choose a theme

Shopify has its official interface store. You can use them as they are guaranteed full support from the designer. You can tweak the design and customize it to your liking. You can find these themes by clicking on the “Visit theme store” button. It will redirect you to a link that has all the paid, industry, and free themes available. It is easy to sort through hundreds of themes because of the filters available on the website. You can try new themes directly or view its demo to judge if you like it. If you decide to go with your favorite theme, you can click on it to find more details about it.

Start setting up your products

The product page is the most crucial part of your online store. You need to showcase your product’s value to your potential customers. You can convey the value of your products to your customers by providing a brief description containing the necessary information about the product and its title. In this way, you can convey to the customers the benefits and features of the product quickly. Keywords are crucial. It would be best if you had keywords in your description to optimize the search engines, and potential customers would find your products quite easily.

You need to click on “Products” and “All Products.” You can fill in all the necessary information here. It is essential to add a picture of your product. The image size needs to be less than 20 MB. After uploading the image, you can edit the Alt text, also used in search engines. It is advisable to keep your description brief and less than 125 characters. You should add the prices of each product so that the customers know how much everything would cost.

Make a collection

A collection is a perfect way to organize the products in your store in a structured manner. It would be best if you had an automated collection and a manual collection. Manual collections take more effort but are advisable for making specialized and curated collections.

However, if you have a large inventory, you can use automated collections. It would help if you put specific criteria, and you will automatically get the collections.

Payment process

There are two methods of payment: online and offline. You can choose your payment settings by going to the settings and clicking on “Payment providers.” There are numerous options for the online method of payment, such as Third-party providers, PayPal, etc. On the other hand, the manual payment option includes Cash on Delivery, Money order, and Bank Deposit.

Conclusion

Shopify has slowly become the best e-commerce platform available today. They have a wide range of tools and a large community of theme designers; Shopify is the best choice for any company. Even though Shopify is not the cheapest e-commerce solution, it is still the best option for shop owners looking to invest in their stores seriously for its growth. Shopify has all the necessary features available for shop owners.