How to Start an Online Store: A Step-by-Step Guide for 2022
The good news is that setting up an online store is easier than you might think.
The time is now if you’ve been daydreaming about opening an online store.
Online shopping statistics predict that it will top 5.4 trillion US dollars in 2022. By 2024, the figure is expected to grow further and reach 21.8% of total retail sales worldwide- according to Statista.
Online shopping has been expanding steadily and doesn’t appear to be slowing down.
You should not either, either!
In this article, we’re going to look at the essential steps you need to take to have your e-commerce store up and running with the least amount of time and effort. The good news is that setting up an online store is easier than you might think.
Let’s look at the steps we’ll cover before we get started.
How to Open an Online Store Step by Step
Make Sure your selling product
Before starting your own Shopify Store, choosing a profitable and promising product is necessary. The right product serves as an entry ticket to success, and it ensures you to accumulate your first customers and a great deal.
But how to find products? SimplyTrends can do you a favor.
It offers you various ways to look for your idealistic products effectively. If you know exactly about your product, just input the title like “bucket hat”, and the best-selling products across 2 million stores will be displayed on your screen. Besides, if you forget its title, a segment of description can also find your products.
Create a Shopify Account
After making sure which products you want to sell, the next step is to register your own Shopify account. Sign up for a free 14-day Shopify trial today to get all the features you need to create a usable store, and when you’re ready, you can upgrade to a paid account and launch your store.
You’ll need to provide some information during the short registration process, including your name, address, and some details about your store’s goals and products.
Additionally, you’ll need to think of an original, never-before-used store name for your domain, such as www.your-store-name.myshopify.com.
If all of your brilliant ideas have already been used, don’t worry; once you connect a custom domain (which we’ll discuss later in step 6), this will only survive in the backend of your store.
Take some time to familiarize yourself with your brand-new account once you’ve logged in by clicking all the tabs and seeing what you discover.
Build Your Product Pages
The next step in creating an online store is to add your products. To do this, click the Add product button, which can be found directly on your dashboard or in the left navigation panel under Products.
A quick guide to what makes a good product page is provided below:
You can use some creativity to come up with a unique name for your product, but make sure it makes sense to people who are looking for this kind of thing.
Be thorough: provide all the information your customers need to know so they have no unanswered questions. A thoughtful product description can make or break your store’s performance.
If you have no ideas for your products’ descriptions, turning to your competitors’ stores for inspiration sounds good. Competitors Finder can grab all similar Shopify stores immediately in one place.
Just enter a Shopify URL, and SimplyTrends will search and find similar stores across 2 million Shopify stores. What’s more, if you would like to narrow your targeted domain, Filter helps you find competitors of your interest with country, traffic volume, monthly revenue, and active stores.
Analyzing some best-selling stores and you may find out that they have something in common, which is colorful photos. Colorful pictures activate customers’ visual sense and raise their desire to purchase. Therefore, if you can take your own product photos (you can even do this with a smartphone! ), make sure that your store’s aesthetics and “feel” are maintained throughout all of its products.
To help your customers imagine what it would be like to own it, include a variety of photos from various perspectives and with varying degrees of detail.
Add More Key Pages
You’ll need the “extras” found on other websites in addition to your primary product pages, such as:
- About. Bring your brand story to life. Show them who you are and what you’re all about. More importantly: show them that you understand their needs and wants, you align with them, and you’re ready to fill those shoes.
- Contact. Nobody likes a mystery brand that goes silent when you need help. Make it easy for them to reach you by providing a customer service email at the very least. Show this prominently so they don’t have to dig.
- FAQ. Not necessary, but a nice-to-have. Help answer any questions before they even ask them. As time passes, take nof the questions your customers often ask, then add them here. It will save everyone time in the long run — and it will save you on customer service resources.
- Legal and policy pages. It’s critical for you to have these — for your customers’ sake and your own. Be sure to create separate pages for your Privacy Policy, Shipping Policy, Refund Policy, and Terms and Conditions. Include these clearly in your website’s footer.
Check out Shopify’s fantastic tools here, which include a ton of others that can help you create your legal and policy pages.
Navigate to Online Store > Pages to create these pages.
Include each page’s title, content, and search engine listing preview.
Go to Online Store > Navigation, select which menu you want to edit (Main menu or Footer menu), and then add these important pages to both the main navigation and footer of your website.
You can add everything (including your collections) by clicking the Add menu item button, typing the name of the page you want to link to in the Link section, clicking it when it appears, and repeating the process.
Choose a Theme and Start Designing
Even if you lack coding or design skills, Shopify makes it simple to create an online store; there are a ton of pre-designed themes to choose from in the theme store, and they are all reasonably priced. Free themes, did someone say?
You can modify theme fonts and colors based on your distinctive branding elements by going to Sales Channels > Themes > Customize. All you need to do is pop in your products, pages, and store branding.
Scroll down to the left side panel’s bottom and select Theme settings once you are in the theme customization dashboard.
You can change the font or color of all of your headings here to, for instance, #0CA224 green, which will permanently customize your theme.
Additionally, elements like product recommendations, social media icons, and a checkout banner are editable.
You can either click through to each of your pages and customize as necessary, or you can edit the Home page directly from the top dropdown menu.
You can type in text, upload logos and images, change fonts and colors for each page separately, and make other customizations by clicking the elements on the left side panel of each page.
The cool thing is that you’ll be able to work while you learn how to set up an online store because you’ll be able to see all of your changes in real-time.
Set up Shipping Taxes, and Payments
Starting an online store means you’ll also need to have a well-oiled machine on the backend, with three major considerations for this being shipping, taxes, and payments.
Taking a quick look at each of them.
For an e-commerce business, shipping is a major factor that must be balanced with your profit margins. You must take into account the weight of your products, customer destinations, packaging costs, and shipping carrier rates.
Under Settings > Shipping and delivery, you can modify your shipping preferences.
For instance, new value-added tax (VAT) regulations may apply to any packages you send to the EU. Make sure you are familiar with the tax laws and regulations in your home country and region as well as in the locations where you’ll be shipping your products as this is another important factor to take into account.
Under Settings > Taxes, modify your tax preferences.
Consider consulting with or hiring an expert who can ensure you’re taking the right steps if you’re uncertain about your tax obligations and requirements.
You’ll also need to set up payments as you create your online store because, after all, you can’t run a successful business without getting paid, right?
There are several ways you can get payments from your clients, including:
- Shopify Payments (which accepts major credit cards and other methods like Apple Pay and Google Pay)
- PayPal express checkout
- Amazon Pay
- Various third-party providers like Braintree, QuickBooks, and Windcave
- Alternative payment providers like Alipay, BitPay, and Klarna
- Manual payment options like bank deposits, money orders, and cash on delivery (COD)
Navigate to Settings > Payments to configure payments.
Make the Final Considerations
The best advice is to start with the bare minimum and then keep learning and building as you go as you learn how to open an online store, as you could add final touches for days to even months. (If not, you might never launch!)
The following steps aren’t absolutely necessary, but they’ll add some nice finishing touches that will give your store that extra boost of professionalism, engagement, and trustworthiness.
First, checkout and email notifications can both be customized, so let’s look at some examples.
You can modify the customer experience in a few different ways under Settings > Checkout, such as by allowing them to checkout using their phone or email or by allowing them to register for an account on your website.
Additionally, you can offer customers the chance to sign up for your marketing communications during the checkout process. This can greatly enhance brand loyalty and customer retention.
Shopify has a ton of features that make it simple to create an online store, one of which is pre-loaded automated email notifications (and SMS notifications as well) that alert customers to significant events like order confirmations and status updates.
You can also customize the text as another opportunity to inject your brand’s personality and keep your customers engaged by adding your brand’s logo, colors, and fonts to these.
Click on each notification type to edit the text, then go to Settings > Notifications > Customize to change the themes.
A great way to recover a lost sale is to set up abandoned cart emails, which are automatically sent to customers who add items to their shopping cart but never complete the checkout process.
Launch Your Masterpiece!
Your creation is now prepared to be released into the world.
Here’s a quick checklist to help you make sure you’ve covered all your bases:
- Do a test order to make sure checkout and payments work
- Check tax, shipping, and payment settings
- Make sure confirmation, order update, and abandoned cart email notifications are set up and customized
- Click every single link to make sure they work
- Make sure your store works smoothly on desktop and mobile
- Make sure your policy and legal pages are accessible from the website footer
- Show your social media icons prominently
It’s time to buy your Shopify membership and remove your store password once you have everything in order.
Select your plan by going to Settings > Plan. If you’re new to e-commerce, start with the basic plan, which costs just $26 per month.
As soon as you’ve upgraded, disable password protection under Online Store > Preferences > Password Protection.
Afterward, my friend, you are prepared to go!
Opening an Online Store Is Easier Than You Might Think!
Even though the idea of learning how to create an online store intimidates many new business owners, it’s not that bad once you break it down into steps.
The fundamentals of creating a real-world money-making machine from your ideas have been covered in this article; all that is left is for you to master the art of marketing to drive traffic, close sales, and keep customers coming back for more.
You’ll always have room to improve and expand when you approach it with a learning mindset.
