What is Shopify? – A Comprehensive Guide 101
From the invention of the Printing Press, the first big break, to the invention of the Internet, the golden age, Sales and Marketing have come a long way. With the stores moving online, you have a constant environment where you can observe, adjust and improve your business in such a way that the needs of your customers are met accordingly. Are you in search of an ideal platform to sell your products? Well, you’ve come to the right place.
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Shopify is a Cloud-Based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Shopping Cart solution that allows businesses to set up an Online Store with little to no hassle. Simply put, Shopify makes it easy for you to sell goods online. You can go to the website and build your ECommerce Store, and Shopify will host it for you. But if this is your first time selling on Shopify, there is a learning curve. In this Shopify tutorial, you’ll be guided step-by-step on how to launch your ECommerce Store on Shopify. But beforehand, let’s discuss this robust platform and its salient features in brief.
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What is Shopify?
Shopify is an E-Commerce Platform that allows you to set up your own Online Store with just the click of a button. If you don’t want to go through the hassle of building your own website, setting up a Shopify Store is the best thing you can do for your business.
It hosts your business and helps it to grow by allowing you to customize your website as per your liking. Its easy-to-use Design Templates let you customize your website without writing any code in real-time. Shopify is giving you an online platform to market your products and conduct secure transactions.
Worried about your website crashing during peak hours or hackers breaking into your network? Shopify has got you covered. It offers reliable and secure hosting of your website including Secure Payment Gateways. You can literally sell anything on Shopify, as long as it’s legal of course, from Handcrafted Artifacts to Online Classes, it offers great versatility.
It also gives you the ability to study and analyze customer behavior to get valuable insights into your business. With the in-built Analytics and Reports functionalities, you can learn about your Sales and Customers in great detail. It also allows integrations with plenty of third-party services to help your business grow.
Shopify provides users with multiple plans and pricing to choose from, making it a suitable option for Start-Ups and even Enterprises. The Shopify plans offered are Shopify Lite, Basic Shopify, Shopify, Advanced Shopify, and Shopify Plus. These plans range from $9 per month to $2000 per month. You can have a detailed look at the plan features on the official website.
Key Features of Shopify
Shopify is an all-in-one ECommerce solution for millions of users worldwide. The following features are responsible for its immense popularity:
- Security and Reliability: It ensures secure hosting of your website with Secure Payment Gateways and SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificates to encrypt data.
- App Integrations: It also allows integrations with plenty of third-party services to enhance users’ Sales, Marketing, and Workflow.
- Analytics and Reporting: The Shopify App store allows access to a wide variety of Marketing Tools, including Email Marketing, Analytics, and Reporting functionalities. You can have an in-depth look at your customer’s behavior and optimize your Return of Investment (ROI) in the best possible way.
- Shopify Templates: It comes with visually stunning and well-designed themes and templates. You can easily customize your website and make it user-friendly with features such as Product Filters, Live Search, and Drop-Down Menus.
- 24/7 Customer Support: It has an exceptional Customer Support system that is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You can reach Shopify’s Customer Support via Phone, Email, or Webchat. A multitude of Community Forums and Documentation in the Shopify Help Centre also come in handy.
Now that you have a basic understanding, let’s discuss how you can set up your Shopify Shop.
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- Live Support: Hevo team is available round the clock to extend exceptional support to its customers through chat, email, and support calls.
How to set up a Shopify Store?
It’s time to learn how you can create your Shopify website. By the end of this article, you will be able to create a Shopify website where you can add your own products, and the customers visiting your site will be able to add your products to their cart, and purchase them from your website. The following steps to set up a Shopify Shop are listed below.
- Step 1: Create an Account on Shopify
- Step 2: Customize your Home Page
- Step 3: Add your Products
- Step 4: Choose a Shopify Plan
- Step 5: Set-Up Payment Method
- Step 6: Make your Shopify Shop Visible to Customers
- Step 7: Get a Custom Domain Name
Step 1: Create an Account on Shopify
To start with, you need an account on Shopify.
- To create an account, head over to the Sign-Up page and enter your Email address.
- Click on “Start free trial” and enter the required details. You’ll be required to enter the name of your store, along with your address.
- After filling in the details, click on “Enter my store” and it will take you to the Admin Page of your store.
You have now successfully created your Account, and your Shopify Website is also created.
Step 2: Customize your Home Page
There is already default content on your website. Now, instead of this default content, you can add your customized content to the home page.
- To do that, just click on “Edit home page”. Here, you have the provision to edit all the sections available on your page.
- Design your home page by adding custom texts and images.
You can also use free Themes to achieve a distinctive look for your website and make a lasting impact on the visitors.
- To do so, go to the Online Store → Free Theme.
- You’ll find a lot of options to choose from, click on the “Add” button to add a theme to your store.
- You can further customize the themes by clicking on the “Customize” button.
Step 3: Add your Products
Once you’ve got your website, you can now start building it. To set up your store, you need to add your own products to your site, so that your visitors will be able to purchase them.
- From the Admin Page of your site, go to Products → All Products → Add Products.
- It will take you to the page where you need to add the details about your product. All information related to your products (Pricing, Quantity, etc) that you want to share with your customers goes in here.
- You can also upload images of the product to describe it better.
- Once you’re done adding the details of the product, click on “Save“.
You have now successfully added the product to your website! Similarly, you can add any number of products you want to your website. You can also add multiple tags to your products under the “Organization” section to help your customers find products easily.
Step 4: Choose a Shopify Plan
To let customers buy products from your site, you first need to choose a plan for your Account.
- From the dashboard, go to Home → Select a plan.
- Now, you will be able to see different Shopify plans as discussed in the introduction section. You can take a look at the offered features and select a plan as per your requirements.
- Enter your payment details and click on “Confirm“.
You have now successfully chosen your plan, and your card will be charged if you continue using Shopify after 14 days.
Step 5: Set-Up Payment Method
In order to allow customers to pay for your products, you need to set up a Payment Method. Shopify allows you to enable a number of Payment Methods for your customers’ convenience.
- From the dashboard, go to Settings → Payments.
- For Credit Card payments, you can activate “Shopify Payments”. If the Shopify Payments option is not available in your country, you can just scroll down and choose from a list of 100+ third-party providers.
- Click on any popular Payment Method and enter the business details.
- Once you’ve entered all the details, click on “Authorize access to this account”.
The payment setup is now complete, and you’ve successfully added a Payment Method to your Shopify website. Now, when someone buys a product from your site, the money will be credited to the bank account associated with your Payment Method.
You can also add payment options like PayPal, Amazon Pay, or Apple Pay for Non-Credit Card transactions.
Step 6: Make your Shopify Shop Visible to Customers
The final step of setting up your Store is to make it available to your visitors.
- To do so, go back to the dashboard and click on “Online Store”. You can now see that your website is password protected by default, which means your customers can’t see it right now.
- To make your site visible to your visitors, click on “Disable password”.
- Uncheck the “Enable password” box under the “Password protection” tab.
- Save your settings.
Your Shopify Shop/Store is now live and visible to your customers. This means anyone who is visiting your site will now be able to buy your products.
Step 7: Get a Custom Domain Name
Shopify assigns a default domain – www.your-store-name.myshopify.com to your store. But you may want a more customized URL for better brand recall in your customers’ minds. You can do this by getting a “.com” domain name.
- To do so, go to Online Store → Domains → Buy new domain.
- Enter your desired domain name, check the price and click on “Buy”.
It also allows you to connect a third-party purchased domain name with your store.
- To do so, click on “Connect existing domain”.
- Enter your domain name in the space provided and click on “Next”.
- Click on “Connect automatically” to successfully connect your domain name with the store.
- To complete adding this domain to your website, just click on “Change primary domain” and select the new domain you purchased.
- Save your changes.
Your Shopify website is now live with the new domain name, and you are all set to sell your Products.
Conclusion
With quick and easy ways to set up your own Store, it’s no wonder that Shopify is the world’s top-rated ECommerce Platform. You now have our Home Page and Products Page ready, your customers can buy any product they want from your site.
This article introduced you to Shopify and its salient features. You were later provided with a detailed guide on how to set up your Shopify Shop. It is quite easy to set up your Online Store on Shopify. But when it comes to tracking and analyzing Customer’s Information especially when your Customer Base becomes large, it becomes a daunting task. This is where Hevo saves your efforts and simplifies the process.
visit our website to explore hevoHevo Data with its strong integration with 100+ Sources & BI tools such as Shopify (a Free Data Source), allows you to not only export data from sources & load data in the destinations, but also transform & enrich your data, & make it analysis-ready so that you can focus only on your key business needs and perform insightful analysis using BI tools.
Give Hevo Data a try by sign up for a 14-day free trial today. Hevo offers plans & pricing for different use cases and business needs, check them out!
Do you use Shopify? Share your experience of setting up your own Store in the comments section below.
