Shopify’s plans offer you a platform to create an online website and utilize their shopping cart features to sell, deliver, and operate your products. If you want to start an online store and feel intimidated, you have come to the right place. 

Below is a step-by-step process on how to use Shopify

1.Sign up on Shopify

Visit the Shopify website and sign up for a free trial. Shopify offers you a 14-day free trial with no bank details required so you can test its features and decide for yourself if it’s meant for you. After which you can choose to pick any of the three pricing plans, depending on your requirements.

2.Add your products

After you log in, you will be redirected to the home dashboard where you can add your products. Once you click on that option you can feed in details about your products like pictures, pricing, inventory, shipping details, and variants.

A notable feature is the SEO preview option which allows you to customize your page and view how it appears in search engine results. This option gives you the ability to enhance the findability of your products on search engine platforms like Google.

If you are aware of the keywords that are top-performing among your target customer group, you can add them and increase the chances of it being displayed on top in search engines over time.

3.Collections

Now that you have a few products ready, you can organize them under Collections (Products->Collections).

You can use this feature to categorize your products based on utility, popularity, children, women, and items on sale and so on.

This helps your customers navigate through your homepage catalog easily and find what they are looking for faster. You can add your products to these groups manually or use the automated feature available that can when it matches the conditions you set it will automatically be added to its respective collection.

4.Create key pages

All this while we have spoken about features related to selling and purchasing of products. What you also need is to help customers understand what your business is all about so that they can believe in your brand. For this, you need to add other details like the following pages to your website.

(Online store -> Pages)

·Contact us page

·About Us page

·FAQ

·Policy pages

5.Customize your website

Market research shows that site design has a long-lasting effect on user impressions, navigability, and even the credibility of an online store. So, it is important to have a good website design to retain your customers. Shopify offers you many features to do the same. You can customize the following components:

Theme – Shopify offers both free and paid themes to choose from for your website. You can customize the theme further with different styles and features. (Online store-> Themes)

Homepage- Every theme contains sections that you can reorganize, add, delete, or briefly hide. Sections can help you decide on the design of your store’s homepage and try out various layouts.

Shipping can be an exceedingly difficult decision to make as there are lots of factors involved in running a business. Between the weights of your products, the cost of packaging, shipping locations, carrier rates, and your profit per order, there is a lot to manage. (Settings -> Shipping) 

7.Taxes

Selling products and services online, you will have to collect taxes for them depending on the tax policies of your country. Shopify can help you with this problem by automatically calculating and managing the tax by using a default sales tax rate for the world. (Settings -> Taxes)

Now we have almost reached the end of setting up your online store. Next is the payment gateways, you as a business owner get to decide on how your customers would make the payments and how you would receive them.

Shopify has its own payment integration ‘Shopify payments’, other third-party integrations are also available however, they have a small transaction fee applied on it depending upon your payment plan. (Settings > Payments)

Now you are ready to go live. Go to Online store->Preferences and disable the password. This is the final step to opening your online store and letting customers purchase your products.

Before you go live here are a few steps you can take in order to improve your chances of customers visiting your site:

• Adding a custom domain.
• Installing relevant sales channels.
• Customizing your email and SMS notifications.
• Set up your store for marketing – by using the analytics tools.

Assistance from Alchemist Advanced Technologies

As a leading partner of Shopify, we can assist you with setting up and maintaining your store.

Reach us: connect@alchemisttechme.com