Now you have come to the right website, on this website we will give some important information about Shopify. If you read this article you will know the “Best way to create an eCommerce site with Shopify?”
Shopify is an e-commerce platform that allows businesses of all sizes to create and manage an online store. Unlike self-hosted platforms, which require you to purchase a domain and download as well as install software to use, Shopify allows retailers to create their own e-commerce sites directly on the online platform. This makes it very easy to open e-commerce and allows you to reach this goal in a few clicks even for those who are completely code-starved.
How to Create An eCommerce Site With Shopify?
Shopify today is one of the most popular eCommerce solutions for getting an online store. Today this e-commerce platform is used by more than 1.7 million online shops, from the e-commerce of large companies to those founded by small entrepreneurs who have decided to digitize their businesses.
The platform allows you direct access to all the useful features to manage your online business. Your e-commerce site will look professional thanks to the ready-to-use graphic templates you can choose from. Payment processing, marketing, secure checkout, monitoring the behavior of your visitors: you can manage everything within Shopify.
Is Shopify free or is it paid? You can try it for 14 days thanks to a free trial period, without having to enter your credit card details.
What is Shopify and how it work
Shopify is an e-commerce platform based on SaaS (Software as a service) that allows you to create online stores without having to buy a domain, as this is hosted directly on the platform, and without the need to know how to program.
What features does Shopify offer? Let’s look at the main features of this platform so that you can decide if they are suitable for your needs.
Professional, ready-to-use themes
Shopify offers hundreds of free and premium themes to use for your store design. Once you’ve selected a theme, you also have the option to edit and customize it.
Mobile friendly e-commerce
Whichever theme you choose, it will be completely mobile-friendly. Your online store will be 100% usable from any device. As e-commerce purchases are increasingly happening on mobile, this is a big plus.
Domain
To build an online store with Shopify you will not need to buy a domain, because the shop will be hosted directly on the platform. Shopify provides you with a free subdomain (for example paolorossi.myshopify.com). However, there is nothing to stop you from registering a domain name for your store anyway, if your e-commerce marketing plan so provides it, and you can do it through Shopify.
Hosting
All Shopify plans offer unlimited bandwidth for your e-commerce for free. Shopify’s servers are among the fastest around thanks to the use of a CDN (Content Delivery Network or CDN, or “content distribution network”), so visitors will never have to wait for your site to load.
Reporting
You can track and analyze your orders, sales and payments, so you understand your customers’ trends and behavior.
Free SSL Certification
Shopify provides your store with a free 128-bit SSL certification to secure the connection to your store.
Store content management
Shopify also functions as a content management system (CMS), as does WordPress. You can control and organize with a few clicks all the content that customers will see on your site, from pages to product descriptions, from the blog to the navigation menu.
Blog
Shopify gives you the ability to add and manage articles and blog posts on your online store right from the platform.
SEO optimization
In Shopify, you can manage most of the SEO best practices. That is, you can customize the page titles and URLs by including keywords that are useful to make your products easily indexable and reloadable and you can add metadata to pages, products and images.
Advanced features in the Shopify App Store
Shopify apps give you the ability to enhance your online store by adding new features. You can add new marketing features, advanced tracking and reporting to your store, synchronization services for third-party applications such as retargeting campaigns and much more.
Why Shopify is so successful as a platform for building eCommerce
In the past, opening a retail store had to overcome strict barriers to entry: renting or buying physical space, hiring employees, applying for and obtaining financing.
Even after the birth of e-commerce, not all companies could afford the costs of large web development agencies. In fact, building a web shop has required complex technology for a long time.
Today these obstacles no longer exist, thanks to platforms such as Shopify. In fact, anyone, without any technical knowledge or familiarity with HTML or CSS, can open an online store: a few euros are enough for a monthly subscription, a computer with which to connect to the e-commerce platform and a few minutes to orient themselves in the dashboard.
Pros and cons of selling on Shopify
Shopify is a great solution for your eCommerce business. You should still carefully consider the pros and cons before deciding if it is right for your needs.
The pros of selling on Shopify
Fully hosted platform
With Shopify, you don’t have to pay to buy a domain and hosting and server maintenance.
Ease of use
Shopify’s interface is simple and clear and doesn’t waste your precious time dealing with technical problems or other boring tasks, allowing you to spend more time on what you do best: selling on your e-commerce, monitoring the kpi of your online store and achieving the goals you set in the business plan.
24/7 Support
There is a dedicated team that provides 24/7 support and will be able to answer most of your questions via email or live chat.
Ready-to-Use Professional Themes
Shopify offers beautiful themes that make your e-commerce look very professional. The themes are divided by sector: art and photography, jewelry and accessories, food and drink, furniture and so on.
Shopify App Store Shopify
apps are one of its strengths. Shopify has over 1,200 different apps that can help you automate your inventory, shipping, or accounting tasks. Some Shopify apps are free, and many for a fee. A simple alternative? Webrito, provides you with many of these features and collects them in a single control panel, integrated with Shopify as well as with the main e-commerce platforms.
Diverse Accounts for Team Members
You can give your team members different levels of authorization so that your store data is safe.
Marketing tools
In addition to giving you the ability to generate keywords to make your online shop SEO-friendly, Shopify allows you to create discount codes, link your products on different social media platforms to, and analyze the results of your pages.
The cons of selling on Shopify
Little Control Over Themes
If you’re looking for more features for your store, you might want to consider some of Shopify’s self-hosted competitors, which are more difficult to set up but give you more flexibility in customizing themes and managing larger stores. However, with Shopify, you can still edit theme files by adding code, as we’ll see later.
Few free themes
There are only about ten free themes. If you want to use another one, you will need to purchase it.
Paid apps
The Shopify store apps are paid. If you do not want to use them you will have to manually enter the data on the inventory, the customers, the shipments. Or try Webrito, which manages all of these features for you so you can focus on what’s really important to running your online store.
How Shopify Works
Have you decided to try opening an online store on Shopify? Good choice! You can start building it right away and in no time you will start selling your products on your site. Before getting to work, it will be good for you to get an idea about Shopify’s subscription plans and the costs to support e-commerce you will face.
Remember that one of the most important rules that will lead your online sales business to success is to make a good business plan for your e-commerce and therefore the planning of costs and the definition of KPIs will be of primary importance.
Shopify pricing plans
Shopify offers a 14-day free trial, so you can try building a store right away. You are not required to enter your credit card information. In this way, if you decide not to subscribe, after the trial you will not find automatic debits on your account.
You can choose from the following Shopify subscription plans:
Basic Shopify
The Shopify Basic plan costs $ 29 per month + 2.9% and 30 ¢ per transaction.
This plan gives you everything you need to open a new online store and includes 2 personal accounts, 24/7 support, an unlimited number of products, customer behavior reports and a marketing report. You will also get the blog and the free SSL certificate.
Shopify plan
The Shopify subscription plan costs $ 79 per month + 2.6% and 30 ¢ per transaction.
To the functionalities of the basic plan, this option adds professional reports on sales trends: purchasing trends also according to the different periods of the year, taxes and in-depth reports on customers.
Advanced Shopify
The Advanced Shopify plan costs $ 299 per month + 2.4% and 30 ¢ per transaction. Transaction fees are lower to encourage growing businesses. In addition, custom reports are added to the professional reports of the Shopify plan, which you can set up yourself to grow your e-commerce marketing business and customer reporting even more in-depth. With this plan, Shopify also calculates the number of courier shipments and allows customers to choose between standard, express or one-day delivery options.
Lite Shopify
The Shopify Lite tool starts at $ 9 per month and allows you to sell on your existing website or social media pages simply by embedding a Buy Button. With this option, you can also sell your products in person, using the Shopify Pos app – welcome to the world of omnichannel sales!
Even with Lite, you will have a dashboard with an overview of your sales and financial reports.
Shopify Plus
It is a business plan that starts at $ 2,000 per month. The plan automates order management and processes, allows custom checkout, integrates AR solutions, allows you to migrate from another platform to Shopify in a short time and much more.
Simple & Easy to create an online store on Shopify
The time has come to build your e-commerce store with Shopify! Here we will show you how to create and set up your first shop in a few simple steps. You will learn how to move in the administration panel to set up the store and make it operational immediately and all the secrets to managing content, orders and shipments and to customize your shop.
Shop creation
The first thing you need to do is open the Shopify website. At this point, you simply have to enter your email address in the box and create a password, with which from now on you will access the account. Finally, simply enter the name you have decided to give to your store, without www. or .com. You can change it later, however, this name will determine the Shopify store URL, which will be “yourstorename.myshopify.com”, unless you purchase a domain.
Click on ” create your shop ” and your shop will be almost ready. Still some quick information – optional – to provide: if you have already started selling, what is your current income and if you are creating a shop for a customer;
Fill in the last form, where you will enter your personal data and your address, and you can already enter the home of the Shopify administration panel.
How is the Shopify dashboard organized?
On the left is the main menu: the section you are in is highlighted in a different color. By clicking on the ” Online shop ” item below you will be able to see the preview of the shop as it will appear online.
The search panel at the top will be very useful once you have started your e-commerce when you want to search for anything in your store: customers, products, or orders.
The Shopify dashboard works like a car dashboard. Once the store is launched, from here you will be able to get an overview of the sales, the traffic received and the suggestions for the platform to improve your e-commerce.
Manage the catalog
You can start adding products to your store catalog right away. You can import them from a previous store, upload them from a CSV file (a spreadsheet), or enter them manually.
And you can add a product manually by clicking on the ” Add Product ” button located both on the Home page and in the ” Products ” menu item.
A window will open: it is the product sheet, which contains several fields.
Title
The name of your product. It must be simple and descriptive, with the brand, the type of product and all the keywords useful to find it if it is searched for by a user.
Description
It is a very important field, which in many cases determines the customer’s choice to buy the product. Use meaningful keywords and avoid typos and errors. Provide potential customers with information about the product’s benefits and what problems it solves, starting with the most important points.
Be careful not to copy and paste the manufacturer’s description, as duplicate texts on multiple sites are penalized by Google. To keep your site from slipping back in search results, write original descriptions.
Multimedia content (photos and videos)
For an online store, images, such as the description, are very important. They must be of high quality, of the right proportions, without distortions and possibly with a white background.
SKU
You should always enter an SKU (storage unit) number for each product. The SKU helps you stay organized, identify your products, add them to inventory and fulfill orders correctly. For products with different variations, you need to assign an SKU to each of them.
You can access the inventory whenever you want, by clicking on the appropriate item in the main menu, to check which of your products are available.
Collections
These are categories that you can set to your liking, inserting the products that meet those characteristics. They can be manual or intelligent, with rules based on brand, type, price, or whatever. Find this setting in the right sidebar.
Here there is also the status of the product, which can be “Active” or “Preliminary”, ie in the draft and not visible on the site.
Then there are other fields: among these the type of product and the manufacturer, the price and the comparison price (discounted and full), the tags to further group and organize the products.
Manage the contents of the store
With Shopify, you can manage all aspects of your store that are visible on the site. You can change the items in the navigation menu, or add static pages, for example, a call “About us”, with which to introduce you and your company, explain the terms and conditions of the service, make all contact details visible.
To create a static page click on “Online shop” and then on “Pages” in the menu and on the ” Add page “ button.
To change the menu items click on “Online shop” and then on ” Navigation “ in the menu. Click on “menu footer” or “Main menu” to modify or add items to these menus. You can also create a new menu by clicking on the “Add menu” button at the top right.
Shopify also offers you the option to create a blog linked to your online store, where you can post up-to-date information about your business that your customers may be interested in. For example, an article that shows a particular new product or something that has your market sector as its topic.
How do you write an article on your Shopify store’s blog? Simple: just click on “Online shop” and “Blog” in the left side menu of the dashboard and then on the “Create blog post” button.
Manage orders
Managing orders with Shopify is very simple. The order management page is under ” Orders ” in the menu on the left sidebar of the dashboard. Here you will find the list of all orders, from those that have just arrived to those that have already been processed. To open an order card just click on the order number. In the order form you will find these items:
- Order details: all products purchased through that order, with their price, shipping cost and return options
- Customer: name and email address of the customer and all his history relating to orders.
- Shipping address, with the possibility of changing it.
- Billing address
- Timeline: Here you can view your order history, from purchase to shipping.
- Abandoned carts: by clicking on “Orders” and then on “Abandoned Check-out” you can identify orders that have been so close to being concluded that it may be worth contacting the customer to encourage them to complete the purchase.
Manage shipments
Once an order has been paid for, it’s time to arrange packaging and shipping. On the Shopify dashboard, you have all the details for completing an order, ready to consult when you need them. The platform also allows you to automatically send an email with order tracking.
You can mark an order as shipped by clicking on “ Fulfill items ” and manually filling in all the useful data, such as the tracking number and the type of courier you have chosen for the shipment. Beware of possible compilation errors and in particular the quantities and variants of the products, because it is easy to make mistakes.
Do you use Shopify to ship online? Find out how to automatically manage shipments and send transactional notifications that will make your customers fall in love
Shop and page customization options
You can easily customize the look of the whole site and all the pages of the store by choosing from a hundred available themes, both free and paid.
Find all the customization options by clicking on the menu item ” Online shop “ and then on “Themes”. You will come to a page where you can already choose from some free themes. In correspondence with each theme click on ” Actions “ and in the drop-down menu click on the preview to get a preview of how your shop would look with that theme. To make it active, click on ” Publish “.
Below the preset themes are two buttons: “ Explore Free Themes ” and “ Visit Theme Store ” to choose from numerous other free or paid themes. Read to know “How to choose Shopify theme?”
Once you have chosen and published a theme, click on ” Customize “. The page you will land on is divided into two parts: on the left, there is a menu with the parts of the page to customize. Click on a menu item: on the right, you will see the preview of the portion of the page you are editing. Add text and images to your liking: the operation is very easy and will give you a lot of satisfaction!
And if you are familiar with HTML and CSS, you can change the code of the theme files from the “Theme” item, the “Customize” button, the ” Theme Actions “ menu item, the last one at the bottom left.
From the “Online Shop” menu item you can also customize the navigation menu items and add or delete new menus.
The checklist to follow when opening an online store on Shopify from scratch
Before putting your shop online, check this list of tasks. If you follow the entire checklist, your e-commerce business will have all the cards to be successful: word of Shopify!
Focus on omnichannel
The future and also the present of e-commerce is multi-channel. Synchronize the Shopify store with other sales channels like Instagram, Facebook, Amazon, Google Shopping, and Pinterest.
Create a custom domain
Choose a domain name and your shop will take on an edge. A custom domain gives you many benefits, including making it easier for customers to remember your store name and making your brand recognizable.
Do proof of purchase tests
On your site Does the purchase on your site work well? Before putting it online, give it a try, putting yourself in the shoes of a customer.
Create static store pages
A homepage and product catalog are not enough to make a good online store. In fact, some information pages are also needed, useful for the customer to get to know your company better and that with Shopify you can create easily and with a few clicks. Add at least these pages to your site:
- Contacts, where you will enter all the ways to communicate with you and a contact form
- Who we are, where you will tell your company
- Faq, with the most likely questions about shipments or returns
- Shop, on a separate page from the home page.
Set up email marketing campaigns
Newsletters are a powerful tool for generating sales.
You can set up automatic emails from your shop that are generated when certain events occur, such as an order. Or you can use the Shopify Email tool or an email marketing app.
Check that there are no errors in the content
Check spelling, grammar or links that don’t work.
Control the weight and SEO of the images
Optimize the weight of the images so that they load quickly and make them searchable by setting ad hoc titles and alt tags.
Install an analytics tool.
User behavior reports are vital to your site. The most used tool is Google Analytics. But there are also SE Ranking, Piwik and Adobe Analytics. And then there is the webrito Business Intelligence.
Prepare a marketing plan to promote the store launch
For your e-commerce business to be successful, opening an online store is just the beginning: you also need to promote it. Prepare all the steps first so that everything is ready for launch.
Insert your phone and a live chat for customer support
Making it easy to contact you will increase cart and order size and customer satisfaction.
Install only the most important apps
When your store launches, you only need to have the essential Shopify apps installed, nothing more.
Enter your billing information
Remember to enter this information if you want to avoid hitches once the shop is online.
What does it take to open a shop on Shopify?
Opening an e-commerce store does not just mean creating an online shop and starting to sell. Entering the business of online commerce, as in all activities, also involves compliance with some administrative, fiscal and legal requirements.
First of all, you have to decide which legal form to adopt for the company that owns the site: you will choose between a limited liability company or joint stock company (the most frequent option in the world of e-commerce), sole proprietorship, simplified limited liability company or innovative start-up.
You will then have to register in the business register of the Chamber of Commerce, open a VAT number and activate a certified e-mail box or PEC.
At this point, you will submit an SCIA (Certified Start of Activity Report) to the competent Municipality.
On the site you will have to indicate the General Conditions of Sale or GCS, which will give information on delivery methods, right of withdrawal, return policies and more. Finally, the site will contain the Privacy Policy and the Cookie Policy.
Open a Shopify store without a VAT number
Is a VAT number mandatory to open an e-commerce store? The answer, in general, is yes. There are only two exceptions :
- Occasional online sale: generally handcrafted objects, sold on a non-continuous basis, but on condition that an e-commerce site is not opened to sell them and that an annual income of 5000 dollars is not exceeded, income that must, in any case, be declared to the tax authorities.
- Selling as a private individual: Usually, it concerns goods that are no longer used, sold one-time through an advertisement on a marketplace, such as Etsy.
You can also read this: Is it mandatory to enter the VAT number on Shopify?
How much do you earn with Shopify?
How much money can you realistically make with Shopify? It is undoubtedly one of the best e-commerce platforms, as well as being one of the most popular. However, you have to keep in mind that opening a shop on Shopify is not enough to make money. After you open it, you will also need to launch your store and make it work at its best for customers to be satisfied and remain loyal to you.
A research firm calculated the average revenue per shopper in Shopify, valuing it $ 72.
Statistically, therefore, the average revenue for Shopify stores is around $ 1000 – $ 1500 per month, but it increases if you venture into a drop shipping strategy. In any case, you will have to carefully evaluate the type of product to sell and focus on a niche.
3 Shopify stores to inspire you for your online shop design
The first impression is often what matters. Also online. A customer will get an idea of your site in the blink of an eye – don’t underestimate the design to catch the customer’s attention. In any case, keep in mind that, beyond the appearance, the functionality and design of the user experience are also important to generate conversions.
We have chosen 3 Shopify stores to inspire you for your site, exploring which you can also understand the actual potential of this platform.
The Modern Shop, a minimalist but impactful design
Pop Chart Lab inserts nice animation effects on mouseover on its brightly colored and fun products.
The minimalism of Happiness Abscissa leaves room for expressive graphic elements and product photos.
Shop Factory 43 displays great detailed photos and illustrations from its products to make its site memorable.
Webrito’s help to grow your e-commerce
For your online sales business to be successful, it won’t be enough for you to create an e-commerce store. You will also need to promote it and better manage all sales activities. Satisfied customers will return to you and spread good reviews on your e-commerce.
How to grow your Shopify e-commerce with the help of Webrito? Automating shipping and sales flow. The platform manages orders, prints waybills, notifies tracking and manages all sales channels.
Webrito can also support you at 360 ° in the launch of your startup and help you set up the e-commerce strategy and lead your business to success: in this case, the solution for you is Webrito.
Now you know “Best way to create an eCommerce site with Shopify?” Do you like this article? If, yes! please share this post with your friends on social media. Please leave a comment below.
