How To Start An Ecommerce Store With Shopify

Starting an ecommerce store might be scary if you are a beginner and you don’t know what it takes to start one.

Having an ecommerce store as one of your online business can help you make money online and also increase your brand awareness online.

Many people wish they could have a store of their own to sell their products but don’t know what type of niche store they want to build.

A store can be used for drop-shipping, ecommerce arbitrage, print on demand and also individual store creation. Any of these can be a profitable way to create a store and start making money online.

In this post, you will learn the steps to take to setup a store using Shopify.

How to Setup A Shopify Store

1. Choose an ecommerce platform

There are different platforms to choose to build an ecommerce store. The platform used to setup your store is very important because that is where all your details, sales process, applications and income will be handled.

You are to look for a platform that can handle customers support and purchase order with ease. One can use Woo commerce, Magneto, WordPress to setup a store for your ecommerce business.

A good platform should be a platform that has features to help your store succeed. Features like customer support, usability, hosting platform and check-out handling. These are major features a store should have.

The reason a store needs a good platform is because every inventory of the store will be handled by the platform, from the marketing to the checkout transaction.

A good platform that will be good to create a store will be Shopify.

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

2. Know your target audience

When it comes to starting an ecommerce business, the aspect of knowing who your customers are is very vital. The wrong audience can hinder a store from not getting website visits, conversions and even sales.

To start setting up what to sell you must first know the type of audience you want to sell to and satisfy what they want. Getting to know your customer avatar will definitely help you to know what type of customers you are seeking, whether they are going to buy from you and become consistent buyers that keeps coming back to your store.

One thing you need to know is what you sell determines the type of audience you are targeting.

When you are looking for the right audience here are attributes you need to watch out to get your ideal customers to your store.

• Demography: This is important. You need to know the demography of the audience you are looking for such as their age, gender, occupation, education, and income. With this you will be able to determine what type of people you are connecting with.
• Location: This helps you to know the very location your audience are coming from or where they are living. Once you are able to know these, you will be able to make choices based on their geographical location on how to sell to them.
• Interest: This is very vital. This shows the behavioral and physiological part of your audience. Their personality, attitude, opinions and lifestyle of your target customers based on their interest will help increase your sore visibility if you get this aspect right.

Once you have a product it is much easier to get the audience you are targeting. All you do is ask few questions on what you are selling to determine your audience.

3. Choose the right product

Here is where many will be confused. Many people take almost a week to look for what to sell in their store. There are so many products to sell online but picking a product and start selling is not the best idea.

This why it is important to do a market research on any product you want to sell.

How do you go about market research. First, you can lay a sample of your products you have chosen to sell, either on ebay to see how many people will buy from you. Another best way to do a market research is to go use google trend to see if the product is trending.

Google trend give you a detail report on how trending a particular product will do. The reports google trend gives will be from different years, months and even which particular country or states the product is trending.

Also, search the product you want to sell on amazon and get to see the reviews from verified customers. Look at the best selling rank of the product, this will help you know the type of product you want to focus on to start selling.

You can also check sites like Alibaba, and Aliexpress to see how your chosen products are doing in their market.

4. Create your site.

This is what you have been waiting for. Designing your site is of a paramount importance. This helps in the type of theme to use, type of fonts, the logo placement, the check out options to be used and the kid of photos of your product you want to put to make the site look pleasant and even simple to navigate.

Before we begin, you’ll need to start a free trial of Shopify. If you follow this guide, the 14-day trial should give you more than enough time to create an online store that’s ready to launch. Once your site is created you can continue adding products while is live.

To learn how to setup a Shopify store in less that 2 hours and start selling immediately, click here to register for a free video training course on how to setup a complete Shopify store and start making money from it.

Now here are what you need before you can setup your Shopify store.

• Business name: This is the name of your store. What type of store you want to setup will determine the name you want to give the store. Also, this will reflect in your domain name. Your domain will tell people what type of store you have. You can get a free domain name from Bluehost. Do a serious research on the name you want to give your store. You can do a check of names using Namecheap domain search bar..
• Business logo: This shows the uniqueness of your store. It makes your store standout and then people can feel safe when they come to your store knowing full well that it signifies a branded store. The logo shows that you have a brand.
• Photos: Get a lot of photos of your brand product. Sometime you can brand your product by pasting your brand on the product. This tells people that you are unique. This should only be a decision when you start making money from your store.

When designing your site this are the steps you need to take while you are designing your store.

• Add your products in your new Shopify store, go to Products > Add product to create your first product listing.
• Once you get to the add product box , write your product title, description, photos of your product, fix pricing, inventory and shipping information.
• Write a well detailed SEO details of your product. This helps the google search engine to bring out your product if anyone searches for it.
• Setup your menus such as your about pages, contact us page, terms and conditions, private policies, and other important pages.

5. Connect a gateway payment

Shopify has made it very possible for anyone to receive payments from their Shopify stores as long as you are operating from a supported country and not a prohibited business.

Setting up the gateway payment is the only way a Shopify owner can receive payments.

Important details will need to be put correctly inside Shopify setting dashboard. The right account details, business and banking information needs to be fix in to be able to complete setup of the store and also to receive payments from the store.

Under the gateway payment options, there are different options to select from. There is the credit card, one-click payment such as the ApplePay and the ShopPay and Paypal. Any which one of your choice you can use.

Setting up multiple currency options in your store will help a lot because you might have customer form different part of the world that wants to pay for your product. It is wise to fix in multiple payment currency.

Also, you will need to set your payout schedule options. This is when you want your payments to be sent to you when after you have made a sale. This options can be done in the setting option in Shopify.

6. Get your store ready for launch

Now your store is ready to go live.

Before going live, you have to check every detail you have put in place and set everything in order. The next step is for you to set-off the password protection, this will allow people to be able to view your products and can start making purchases.

This is what you need to take into cognizance before setting your store life.

1. Add your custom domain: You can get a free custom domain from Bluehost or get a paid domain from Namecheap.
2. Install your sales channel: This is the process which your customer takes to make purchase. The sales channel will take them from the product page to how many quantity needed, to the check out page, then to the gateway payment page and then to the successful order page. All this should be checked before launching.
3. Setup an email campaign: This can be optional. But if you decide to build an email list you can set this up and start collect emails. This is helpful when you want to refer to a new product in the market or you want them to come back to your store.
4. Setting up your tracking tool: This helps to track your store to determine where your customers are coming from, how many visitors to your site and which page they visited.

After all this now you can launch your store and start making money.

Click here for a 8-part video training on how to launch your own Shopify store.