Shopify Tutorial: A Detailed Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners

Looking to launch an online store? In this Shopify tutorial, we’ll guide you step-by-step through the process of launching a working ecommerce store powered by Shopify.

Shopify offers one of the simplest, most comprehensive ways to start selling online. Whether you’re a tech pro or a casual user, you’ll be able to use Shopify to get online and start selling. 💰

What’s more, Shopify offers a three day free trial followed by a killer deal where you only pay $1 for your first three months. Said another way, it means you’ll be able to follow this Shopify tutorial without spending a penny! Read on for your detailed step-by-step guide.

Shopify tutorial: Step-by-step to create an online store

In this Shopify tutorial, we’ll guide you through the steps to becoming the proud owner of an online store.

1. Create an account with Shopify 💻

To get started, head to Shopify to sign up for the three days free, followed by three months for $1 deal.

Once you begin the process, you’ll be required to fill in some details about yourself:

…and more details:

The startup wizard isn’t terribly long, but if you don’t want to complete it, Shopify lets you get out of it at any point in the process.

This includes all the way up to the last screen after you choose a plan and you’re asked to provide payment information. You can simply tap on I’ll do this later:

2. Explore the Shopify admin screen 👑

After you either fill in your details or skip through the startup process, you’ll be redirected to the admin screen of your store. Much of the action in this Shopify tutorial takes place on this screen and here’s what it looks like:

As you see, on this page you can add products, set up payments, configure shipping and analytics, choose your theme, and customize your store. That’s a lot of things to take care of, but once you get them right, your store should run smoothly moving forward.

3. Choose and customize your theme 🎨

Not all Shopify stores look alike, and Shopify themes are what help you achieve a distinctive look for your store and add a wow 😲 factor.

To access the Themes section of your Shopify account, click on Online Store on the lefthand side menu. You’ll see Themes directly below:

You’ll also notice that there’s a default theme in place, but you can change it by clicking on Import theme on the top right, followed by Visit Theme Store. In addition, you can tweak the existing theme by tapping on the three dots to the left of the Customize button.

For our walk through, let’s visit the theme store. Here you can browse through hundreds of themes and use filters to narrow down your search:

Before you make a hard decision, take a few moments to check out demos, previews and what other users have to say about the themes you’re interested in. When you feel that you’ve found one that you’d like to work with, click the Try theme button:

This will automatically add the theme to your store and redirect you back to the Themes section of your admin page. Tap on Customize theme to begin editing it:

If you’ve ever used any kind of other CMS or website builder before, then the Shopify theme editing interface will feel familiar in many ways. You can add sections, swap out images, tweak your header and footer, and more:

It’s all very intuitive and ultra beginner-friendly. They even set you up with a whole library of free images, categorized by various online store needs. Just tap on any placeholder image and then click Explore free images on the lefthand side menu to access the feature:

Using that same side menu, if you click on the gear icon, it will open up the theme settings:

This is where you can adjust your typography (font), color scheme, and every other design element of your Shopify store.

On the top right, you’ll also find a menu that lets you toggle between desktop and mobile view – useful for ensuring that any changes you make look good on any size screen or device.

Once you’re happy with how everything looks, you can click on Save (also on the top right) to save your changes. Then head over to the top far left and tap on Exit to return to the main admin screen.

4. Add your products 🛍️

The next step in this Shopify tutorial is to add the products that you intend to sell on your online store. To do this, go to Products → Add Product:

All information relating to any product that you want to share with your customers goes in here. You can upload images of the product and fill in many details to describe it:

Add information that’ll help your viewers find the products easily, keeping SEO in mind. Under the Search Engine Listing section (at the very bottom), enter a descriptive title that will display as a link in the search engine results. You’ll be able to also add a description using keywords and modify the URL.

That’s not all you can do when it comes to Products – you can duplicate the product pages, add options to create variants, and edit them further to change product details. You can also edit products in bulk via the bulk editor:

In the Publishing section, you can choose the channels to sell the products by clicking on the three dots and selecting Manage Sales Channels:

To help your customers find products easily, you can add tags to them under the Organization section. It’s possible to add up to 250 tags to each product, all separated by commas.

5. Configure nitty-gritty settings (shipping, payments, etc.) ⚙️

Before you can go live with your store, there’s more to select and enable. Stay with this Shopify tutorial to get you through. You can access all these options from your store’s Settings area.

a) Store details – here, you’ll need to fill in some general information about your business.

b) Locations – Locations help you manage the inventory, fulfill orders and sell products. Locations for your store can be retail outlets, warehouses, dropshippers, or any other place that has anything to do with inventory, including apps that manage inventory. The number of locations you can set up is linked to the plan you choose.

c) Shipping – Before you make a sale, you’ve got to decide which delivery methods are best suited for your business. Thereafter, you can allow your customers to choose any one of these methods at checkout. The shipping zone and rates relevant to the regions and the countries you ship to will display on the Shipping page of your Shopify Admin.

Shopify also offers a Shipping service from locations based in the USA and Canada. This allows you to purchase shipping labels that display rates to your customers and speeds up delivery. You can simply drop off the packages at any post office.

Your decision on shipping rates should take into consideration actual shipping costs, product weight, and packaging. If you purchase shipping labels of popular carriers in the USA and Canada through Shopify, you can cut shipping costs by nearly half compared to retail rates.

Often, many customers abandon their cart at checkout on account of shipping rates that come as a surprise. To tackle this, you have the option to offer free shipping based on price, weight, or discount codes. The higher plans allow you to display calculated rates from the carriers at checkout.

d) Checkout – The checkout page is where you accept orders via the secure Shopify checkout. The appearance and layout of the checkout page can be modified in theme settings.

Here you can also adjust how customers can create customer accounts with you. And you can install apps like BeSure Checkout Rules for advanced customer flows.

e) Receiving Payments – With Shopify, you can enable a number of payment options for your customers’ convenience.

While choosing payment gateways, you should keep both your location and that of your customers in mind. Not only that, you should consider transaction fees, types of cards accepted, and offsite/onsite checkout before selecting your payment provider.

As for credit card payments, you can go with Shopify Payments or choose from a list of third-party providers, including authorize.net and Airwallex.

For non-credit card transactions, there are options like PayPal, Amazon Pay or Apple Pay, with PayPal as the default payment provider. To help returning shoppers check out faster, accelerated checkout buttons are also available from some payment providers.

To choose the currency for your store, visit Settings → Markets. Then select your market and click on Products and pricing:

f) Taxes – Laws of most countries require you to collect tax on sales of products and remit them to the government. Shopify makes this easy for you by handling most common tax calculations in many tax jurisdictions. Shopify uses default rates that you need to confirm or modify. Several reports are available that help you compile information submission to your accountant or to file returns with the government.

6. Test your store 🛒

If you’ve made it this far in the tutorial, it’s time to test your store before you start to take orders. That’s why you have the Bogus gateway – you can make sure that your checkout process and settings for order processing, inventory, shipping, notifications, and taxes are all working as you intended.

Go to Settings → Payments, and deactivate any payment provider that you have enabled. Then click through See all other providers (under Shopify Payments setup)→ Bogus Gateway → Activate the gateway.

Thereafter, visit your store just like any ordinary customer. Place an order, and you’ll know if you’ve done everything correctly.

You can also test the system with a genuine transaction by using actual credit card numbers. Then check if the funds transfer successfully. Make sure to cancel the order immediately to avoid transaction fees and get a refund, though.

7. Add a custom domain name 📢

Now, you’re one step away from going live with your store – adding your domain to Shopify. Just as with any website, you’ll need a domain name (e.g., yourstore.com) by which visitors and search engines can find you. Here too, you’ll find a ready solution from Shopify.

To help you set up a store, Shopify assigns a default domain – www.your-store-name.myshopify.com. But you may want a more customized URL such as www.your-store-name.com for better brand recall in your customers’ minds or to rank better in a search. In that case, you can choose between buying a domain from Shopify or using a custom domain that you purchase elsewhere or already own.

Custom domains from Shopify start at $9 per year (for a .store TLD), and Shopify automatically configures it for you. What’s more, you get to keep the domain name, even if you quit the Shopify platform. And though there are no email accounts in the domains package, Shopify will forward unlimited mails to your email address.

If you already own a custom domain, you can choose to either transfer it to Shopify or connect it to Shopify by following these instructions.

Shopify tutorial: Recap 🦸

👉 To recap, here are the basic steps to creating an online store with Shopify:

And once you’re live, you can check out the best Shopify apps to take things even further.

Do you have any questions about how to get started with Shopify? Ask away in the comments and we’ll try to help!