Shopify is one of the most well-known and powerful e-commerce solutions on the web.
Shopify is ideal if you don’t want to worry about technology, and instead, you want to focus on the products that you’re selling and how you’re selling them.
You can imagine Shopify like an apartment.
Whenever the water main breaks or the roof needs a repair, you can call someone, and by the time you get home from work, someone has already come in and fixed the problem, and they left you a note saying that it’s taken care of.
This can be a pretty amazing experience for a store owner, especially if you contrast this with other e-commerce platforms.
They’re more like owning a house. If something breaks, you have to fix it yourself or pay a contractor to fix it.
Design
Shopify has a huge Theme marketplace so you can pick exactly the theme that works for you. They have tons of free themes and some premium themes as well. You can filter by different industries as well as sort by popularity, price, and most recent.
Any store owner can get one of these themes and install them on their site without worrying about breaking something.
Functionality
Shopify also has an App marketplace where they have thousands of apps.
These apps allow you to do simple things on your own, like edit image alt tags, which is good for SEO, or very complex things, like managing an entire customer rewards program.
As you’ll see going through this article, Shopify focuses on making their interface as easy to use as possible.
They don’t overwhelm you with options. Shopify lets you use your own domain, create pages, create blog posts, and of course, products, as well as categories and tags.
They help you determine shipping costs, including giving you the option to integrate with shipping providers like USPS, UPS, and FedEx, and they help you with payments.
There’s the default Shopify Payments gateway, which is great for someone just getting started, or you can connect to other gateways if you know what you’re doing and you have a strong preference.
Once you start getting orders, you’ll see how easy it is to manage and fulfil those orders.
In short, Shopify has everything you need to create your own online store, and they do a lot of the technical maintenance for you.
Create an account
Shopify offers three-tiered subscription plans – see their Plans.
If you are building a store for yourself, we’d recommend starting with the Basic plan.
If you are a Developer and you build stores for clients, you’ll want to get a partner account on this page. Your account would be the equivalent of the Advanced Shopify plan, which will include all of the available features. This allows you to test-run certain App’s or features, before advising Clients on their functionality or future costs.
Let’s go back to the pricing page.
To follow along, you can create an account with a 14-day free trial, which we’ll show you how to set up right now.
Let’s click Start your free trial.
Go ahead and enter your email address and password and enter the name of your store.
Then click Create your store.
Shopify’s going to ask you a couple questions. These will determine what sorts of tips you’ll see in the back end. So, it’s worth taking a few seconds to answer them.
In this case, we’re going to say we’re not selling products yet and we are just getting started.
On this page, you can enter your business address and contact details, which will be used for tax as well as shipping purposes. And finally, click Enter my store.
Once your store is successfully created, you should see a dashboard full of menu items to click on.
We hope this helps demonstrate how easy it is, to get started with Shopify. From this point you can explore the options, Themes, Apps and start populating your products!
If you’re thinking of moving to Shopify, check out our page on Website Migrations.
If you already have a shop on Shopify and you’re looking to make updates or changes, read more about our Shopify Web Design & Development services.
