As a seller or retailer, selling products online can help you to reach a wider audience and target a global market. Not to mention, the e-commerce industry has opened a pool of opportunities for retailers.
Different marketplaces like Amazon enable merchants to showcase and sell products to their prospective customers. Where many retailers choose to have their own website. Additionally, an e-commerce website allows you to build a strong online reputation for your business. It helps merchants to drive huge revenue and growth to their businesses. In short, creating your own website gives you ample opportunities and profit margins.
But you may be wondering how to create your own website? Well, there are many e-commerce platforms available that allow merchants to easily set up a website. And Shopify is one of them. Using this powerful platform, you can easily set up and build your own eCommerce website.
In this article, we’ll share a detailed tutorial that can help you to build a functionality enriched site using Shopify.
Table of Contents
What is Shopify?
Before starting out, you must know exactly what Shopify is. It is a subscription-based SaaS platform that allows merchants to create and customize an e-commerce store. By building a Shopify site, retailers can sell multiple products on multiple locations through multiple channels.
It offers a wide range of advanced features including reporting and analytics. Moreover, through multiple Shopify apps, you can increase the functionality of your store. Whether you are tech-savvy or a beginner, you can easily set up your Shopify store. However, if you want to build your store from scratch you may need the help of a Shopify development agency. The right agency has an expert team of developers and designers who can cater to your specific business needs.
How Much Does it Cost to Build an E-commerce Website with Shopify?
Well, as we mentioned above, Shopify is a subscription-based self-hosted solution. So, it comes with some cost. However, it offers different pricing plans starting from $9 where each plan has its own feature set. So depending on your business requirements, you can choose a plan that suits your needs. Here we will discuss building an eCommerce website from scratch.
Step by Step Guide to create Shopify E-commerce Website
– Sign up to your Account
To get started with Shopify, you need to create your account. So, the first step is to sign up. To do so, visit Shopify’s official site and click to Get started. In the next step, you need to provide personal details like Name, Address, Password, and store name.
On clicking next, you need to provide some information like how many products are you going to sell online. Once done, you need to choose whether you are going to sell in in-person or online stores. And last, to set up inventory, currencies, and tax rates, you need to provide some additional information.
– Start adding your products
Products are a crucial element of an e-commerce website. After setup, you need to add products on your Shopify store.
After setup, you’ll be redirected to the admin panel of your store. Click “Add Products” and start adding attractive and quality photos of your products to showcase them to your customers. Moreover, you also need to update the product details like title, description, and price on the store. Once you are done, click on “Save Changes”.
– Choose your Theme and Start Customizing the Appearance
Like products, Theme is also an important element of your Shopify store. An attractive and visually appealing theme can attract visitors to your store.
Furthermore, responsive themes also give a competitive advantage to rank higher on search results and you should choose the best screen builders too. It not only controls your user-interface appearance but also the functionality. So, it’s important to choose a theme that compliments your brand identity.
Shopify allows you to customize the appearance of your website according to your needs. Navigate to “Customize Theme” from the main admin dashboard. It allows you to change and customize everything from colors, logo to product visualization.
But, first, you need to select a theme. Shopify has its own theme store and offers a wide range of free and paid themes to merchants. Depending on your budget and requirements, you can select themes for your store.
Moreover, you can get the most out of it if you have some basic coding knowledge. What if not? Don’t worry, you can also hire expert developers from any reliable Shopify development agency for your business.
– Select and Set up Domain
Bang! You are all done with customizing the appearance – Now it’s time to give your store a domain name. To do so, go to the admin panel > “Add a Domain” and register a domain for your business.
Basically, a domain is a web address that allows your visitors to find your business online. Depending on your business name, you can choose a domain name. Moreover, to purchase it you need to select a payment method accordingly.
Buy a domain and woah you can access your store on the internet.
– Activate Payment Processor
The next step is to activate and select a payment gateway for your Shopify store. Shopify offers multiple payment options to choose from. It includes Stripe, Amazon Pay, PayPal, and Authorize.net. Additionally, it also has its own payment gateway.
To choose your payment option, click “payments” from your Admin panel and select the processor for your business. It will help you to receive payments from your customers.
– It’s time to Go Live…
Once you have done all the steps, it’s time to make your e-commerce website available to customers. Click on “Launch Website”, follow the steps to make your store live, and yes you are ready to start selling products on Shopify.
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Benefits of using Shopify to build an E-commerce website
– Ease of Use
You can see, it’s quite easy to set up your Shopify store even when you have no basic coding knowledge. Moreover, it is a self-hosted solution that comes with a highly interactive and appealing interface.
– Marketing Opportunities
It has a wide range of powerful marketing tools that can help you in your marketing efforts. You can easily promote your products whereas through analytics you can track the sales.
– Multiple Apps Integration
There are a lot of apps available in the Shopify app store. You can easily integrate any application with your e-commerce website to enhance its functionality. For example, you can run marketing campaigns through these apps.
– Customer Support
Not to mention, Shopify is known for its excellent customer support. It offers round-the-clock phone, chat, and even lives support to customers.
– Secure and Reliable
In addition to all these features, it is a PCI-compliant e-commerce platform that is highly secure and reliable. So, all of your customers’ information like credit cards are completely secure with your website.
Conclusion
We hope the article has helped you in building your perfect e-commerce website with Shopify. However, are you still thinking about whether you should choose Shopify as an e-commerce platform or not? Then great news, it also offers a 14-day trial to merchants. You can explore the features and functionalities of Shopify before making your final decision.
So, what are you waiting for – let your skills outshine and give it a try.
Moreover, if you have any suggestions or questions, let us know in the comment section.