Hi, I’m Lucas and in this video I’m going
to show you how to get your own, custom brandedecommerce website up and running on the shopify
platform in under 25 minutes, even if youhave no design or coding skills.For those of you who don’t know, Shopify
is a fully hosted, turnkey ecommerce solutionthat allows you to easily setup and run a
beautiful online store.I’ll take you through the process of starting
a store from scratch, including how to addproducts, how to customize the look and feel
of your site, how to set up your shippingoptions, how to add a custom domain and more.By the end of this tutorial, you’ll have
a fully functional ecommerce website readyto accept orders. And the cool thing about
it is; we can do all this while using shopifyon a free 14 day trial.Alright, let’s get started.We’ll want to type our email into the box
there and then create our password and thename of our store. Don’t worry if you haven’t
decided on the name of your store yet – youcan easily go back and change your store name
later. I’m going to be selling shopify t-shirts,so I’ll go with Shopify T-Shirt Co. and
click “create your store now”.And it will just take a few moments to create our storeSo Shopify wants to know where we would like
to sell – we have the option of an onlinestore and or a retail store or pop up location.
Again, we’ll focus on creating an onlinestore for this tutorial. We’ll want to add
our address so we can set up our shop’s currency.Again Shopify just wants to know a bit more
about our plans so they can better cater toour needs.
Do we have products to sell? I’ll be startingfrom scratch – so I’ve selected “I haven't
yet started selling products.” but of courseselect the one that best describes your situation.And “what will you sell?” I’ll be selling
t-shirts so I’ll select physical products.And then I’ll click “take me to my store”.Now that we’ve created our online store
we’ll find ourselves within the shopifyadmin dashboard. It’s best to think of the
dashboard as the control center for all theoperations we’ll perform on our shopify
store.If at anytime we want to see what your store
will look like, we can easily click on thishandy icon here.And also it’s worth noting that our store
will be password protected until we are readyto launch, at which point we can very easily
disable our password and make our store liveto the public.Alright, let’s get started.
So the first thing we want to do is add aproduct – even if we don’t have a product
to sell yet, we’ll want to add a test one,so we can start to visualize our store.To start, we’ll select the products tab
from the panel on the left.So on this page we can add all the details
of our product. The first thing we can dois name our product.Next up is product description and this information
will be displayed with our product images.If you’re carrying products that are not
your own, we suggest you avoid copying themanufacturer’s description, because you’ll
want your product pages to look unique toa search engine.The product type; in our case T-shirts.Vendor – this refers to the manufacturer or
the vendor who sold the product to us. ThisOkay, so next we have the inventory and variants
section. In this section we can set up thedifferent options for our product. The first
thing we can do is add the price of our t-shirt,let’s say $15 and if we had a price that
was higher before, or if we want our customersto see our product as on sale -we can add
a higher compare at price.If we have a SKU or bar code for our product
we can add it here.“Require shipping address”. If we’re
selling a digital product or service or reallyanything that’s not going in the mail we
can uncheck “require shipping address”but we’ll leave that checked off.If we are shipping our product we should add
the weight. It’s best to include the weightof the packaging as well. Let’s say 0.5kg.So Shopify gives us the option of whether
or not we want to track our inventory. Wecan easily add our quantity and when our quantity
reaches zero – subtracted once for every productsold – our product will be marked as sold
out and customers will no longer be able toorder that product. We actually have a few
variations of this T-shirt so we’ll revisitinventory in just a second.We also have the option to allow customers
to order our product even if it’s out ofstock – this creates a back order type of
situation.Okay, Product Options: This allows us to add
the different variables or different optionsof our product. Here we can add our sizes
– simply type them in and separate them witha comma.We plan to sell small, medium and large shirts
and we can also add other options like colour.And Shopify automatically create the variants
for this shirt, giving us 6 options.We can take a closer look by unclicking the
automatically creates 6 variants box and nowwe can add how much inventory we have of each
product. Let’s say we have 10 in each variationof this shirt.Next, we’re going to upload our product
image. Now, we already have our product photosbut if you need some tips on how to take great
product photos, we have some great resourceson our blog – which I’ve linked to in the
description of this video.Okay, so like I said, we’ve got a blue shirt
and a green one. Let’s add both these photos.So our product image has been added, and I'm going to go aheadand save our progress by scrolling up to the top and clicking the save button. Okay, let's head back down and we can decide which photo we want featuredby grabbing it with our mouse and moving it over.
This will be the only image that is shownbefore we click on this particular product.- so let’s head back to our inventory
and variants and let’s tell Shopify whichimages are the blue t-shirt and which are
the green ones.To do this, we’ll click the camera icon
here and you can see our variants pop up.I’ll click the appropriate one and hit save.Okay, Collections – collections are used to
organize our products into relevant groupsor products that have things in common. This
is our first product and we haven’t setup any collections yet but there is a default
“frontpage” collection – which will actuallyfeature this product on our home page – so
let’s add it to that for now.Tags. So product tags are used as any easy
way to organize products within our store.We’ll try to include a bunch of relevant
information – again enter each tag and separatethem with a comma.Okay, Search Engines – this section is for
Search Engine Optimization. Shopify automaticallygenerates a page title and page meta description
based on the information we’ve entered inthe product details sections – but of course
you customize it if you wish. These detailshelp determine how our products show up in
search engines like Google, or yahoo.Visibility. If this is a product we are working
on ahead of time and not ready to launch tothe public we can leave this hidden. But if
we want it to appear in our store, we’llselect visible.When we’re done we can click save and just
like that we’ve added our first product.Now,I’m going to quickly go through the process
a few more times and add 5 more products justso we can better visualize our store. I’d
encourage everyone to do the same.Okay so we’ve got 6 products now, let’s
take a peek at what our website is lookinglike.
Alright, so this our home page or front page- and we can see all the products here that
we’ve added to our “frontpage” collection.If we click on any of these products we will
be taken to their product page, where we cansee the different photos and our product description.Okay, so now that we’ve added a few products,
it’s time to customize the look of our store.To do this we’ll head over to our themes
section.So the theme of a shopify store controls all
aspects of the store’s appearance and layout.Now, Shopify actually automatically sets us
up with an introductory theme called “launchpad”,which you just saw.This is a great starter them and it might
suit all our needs but let’s quickly headover to the theme store and see if anything
else grabs our eye.Okay, so we’re now in the Shopify themes
store and scrolling down we can see that thereare 100s of themes. Personally, I’d like
a free theme, that is mobile responsive – solet’s narrow our results a little bit here.To do this, we’ll select free from the left
side and we’ll also filter by features andselect “responsive” and we’re selling
t-shirts so we’ll narrow it even more toour industry.Our list of themes have been narrowed down
significantly and I like the way the REACTtheme looks. This particular theme comes with
3 different styles and I’m kind of drawnto the OAK & CO theme and we’ll just quickly
view the demo here to get a better view.Cool, so I’m pretty satisfied with the overall
layout of this theme so let’s close thedemo and we’ll go ahead and click get theme.Okay, so it’s just letting us know that
we’re about to install this theme to ourstore and we’ll click to publish it. It’ll
just take a few moments to download the theme.Awesome, so it’s installed – let’s head
over to our theme manager.We can also access our themes manager from
the panel on the left hand side and from withinour themes manager we can easily customize
our theme.Okay let’s take a quick look atthe theme we just installed to see where we’re
at.Awesome- as you can see the home page is a
pretty blank slate, except for the productsthat we’ve added to our frontpage collection.
We’ll definitely want to add a nice bannerimage, and logo and maybe write some copy
to start giving our store some personalityand character. Let’s head back to our themes
manager and click on customize theme.So the cool thing about Shopify is that we
don’t need to know code, or necessarilyeven be very tech savvy to be able to tweak
and edit the design options of our store.We can see all the colours for our theme here,
and we can easily change those colours. Aswe scroll down we’ll see that we can customize
our typography our fonts and font sizes andthere are plenty of things we can play around
with.First things first, we’ll want to get our
logo in there and to do this, we’ll openup the “header” tab and this is where
we can upload a custom logo. Let’s clickoff that box there and select choose file.
For this particular theme, it’s suggestedthat our logo be no more than 700 pixels in
width. I’ve already got my logo createdso i’ll select it now.Okay, let’s publish changes and take a look.And as you can see our logo has been added
to our store. Next let’s add a photo tothat big banner image to give our store some
personality. Again, it’s important to notethe pixel ratio that our theme is suggesting
– in this case we want the width to be 966pixels wide and we’ll want to keep the height
of our images consistent if we plan on addingmultiple images.Let’s head back to our theme’s editor
and for this we’ll open up the “homepage” section. Okay let's locate slideshow image oneAnd choose file – I’ve already
optimized our images so I’ll just locateI've already optimized our images so I'll just locate it here.let’s publish that and take a peek.Great – as you can see our image has been
added and that really spices up our storea bit. We can also add additional photos to
our slideshow here if we like but I’m prettyhappy with having just one image for now,
so what I’m going to do is head back toour theme settings and let it know I only
want to display one image.For this we'll open up the “homepage” tab andLet’s locate “slideshow image 2” and
uncheck the display option.We’ll click publish changes and make sure
that’s working.Awesome, looks good. So our store is starting
to look pretty good and I think it’s a goodtime to add some copy to our store to give
it a bit more personality and character. Let’sstart with an “about us” page.To do this we’ll click on the pages tab
on our left panel. As you can see there’salready an “About Us” page setup and ready
for us to customize.As shopify points out, a great “About Us”
page helps you build trust between you andyour customers so you’ll want to take the
time to craft a really solid write up.Try to include who you are, why you sell the
items you sell, and all other relevant information.The “about us” page is a real opportunity
to share your story with your potential customersso try to focus on what makes you and your
products unique.So Shopify makes it very easy to format our
posts. We can bold and italicize words andeven add photos and videos to our post by
using these icons.I'll just add a “team photo” to give our
about us page as an example. We’ll select upload file – and choose our
photo. Now we’ll want to select our photoand choose the size. And Shopify wants to
know what size we want the photo to insertas. I’ve already cropped mine to the size
I want – so I’ll select the “originalsize” option.Awesome – we can see our photo has been added
and I personally think it would look betterif it was in the center so, I’m going to
click on the image and select alignment fromour toolbar and click “center align”.Let’s hit save and take a look.and I'm just going to refresh -Cool, so we'll just click on the “About Us” section. Awesome, so we can see its been customized – our photo is right there in the middle and it looks greatLet's head back to our admin – Okay, let’s head back to our pages. As we
can see there’s also a “frontpage” sectionset up in addition to our “about us” page.
This is the text that will show up on ourfront page. Right here – and this text offers
us a chance to welcome customers to our storeor communicate our message or mission to our
customers as soon as they land on our website.Now, we’ll probably want to change the title
– let’s go with “Welcome” and we’lljust add a quick message.Cool, let’s save and take a look. And there
is our welcome message – I’m happy withthat.So, just below our welcome message there is
a “contact us” section. I’ll quicklyshow you how to update that.For this we’ll head back to our theme’s
manager and customize theme. We’ll openup the footer section and we can see the contact
information is here. If we have a physicaladdress we can add it or any other information
we might think is relevant. The bracket brslash bracket is used to put a break in between
lines so Shopify store, space attention onlineHere – I'll show you. So Shopify store – space – attention departement space etc.We strongly suggest that you do display your
contact information somewhere on your website,just so customers can easily reach you if
they have a question. But if you don’t wantthis information, we can also very easily
just turn that off if we don’t want to displayour contact information on the front page.
Also, you have may have noticed these sociallinks on bottom of our store. To facebook,
twitter and all the others. So, Shopify hasmade this very easy to link these to our social
channels.Again, we’re in the footer section of our
theme’s editor and all we have to do ispaste the appropriate link in the corresponding
section.If we don’t use a certain social channel,
we’ll simply leave the field blank and theicon will be removed from our page. Let’s
say we don’t have a vimeo account – we’lljust delete the link here. And right now these
links have defaulted to link to Shopify’schannels – so let’s change the twitter link
so it links to my account. And we’ll publishthe changes and have a look.So the vimeo icon is now gone – and the twitter
icon now links to where we want.Okay so, our store is looking pretty good
– we’ve added products to our catalog, we’veadded an “about us” section. What we can
now do is add our first blog post.To do this, we’ll head over to the left
hand panel and select “blog posts”. Toadd new blog posts we can simply select the
add a blog post button from the top rightcorner – but much like the about us section,
there is a template setup for our first blogOkay – so like the other pages our title is
the first thing we can add.Again, we can very easily format our text,
add photos, videos – we can add links.Then we have an excerpt section – which is
really great, especially if we have more thanone blog post on our page. This section is
the preview or teaser for our blog post thatwill be displayed on our main blog page.Let’s add a bit of text.Beneath this area we can determine the author
of the blog post. We can choose which blogit’s in and even create a new blog for it.
We’ll keep ours in “news” for now.Next, we can add some relevant tags – these
are similar to the product tags in that theyhelp with the organization of our blog and
below tags, we have the Search Engines section.Much like when we were adding a product, this
section is for Search Engine Optimization.The information helps determine how our blog
post will be displayed in search engines likeGoogle.And this section has automatically been created
from the information above but of course wecan customize it if we like.Next, we have the visibility section – which
lets us choose if our blog post is live onour site. It will default to “hidden”
and we can switch to visible if we’re readyto publish it. This really comes in handy
if we’re working on a post and we want torevisit it later. We also have the option
to schedule a post to be published on a specificdate.Okay let’s save and have a look.So here’s our first blog post – you can
see only the excerpt section is immediatelyvisible and once we select the post we can
read our whole blog post.Cool, so our store is looking pretty solid,
we’ve added products, we’ve added a theme,and we’ve customized it to give it some
personality and character.Let’s keep on moving and head back to our
admin and go over to our settings on the lefthand panel and select payments.So, one of the most important parts of running
a business is being able to take paymentssecurely and shopify makes this just as easy
as anything else. For merchants in the USand Canada our stores have automatically been
set up with Shopify Payments, which allowsus to start accepting payments from all major
credit cards instantly.All we have to do is click to “complete
shopify payments account set up” and fillout the relevant information.And for our merchants outside of the US, and
Canada, don’t worry – Shopify has integratedwith over 70 different payment partners so
there are plenty of hassle free options available.Additionally, as soon as we open our Shopify
store, we will be set up with a Paypal ExpressCheckout account with the email we used to
sign up for our Shopify Store. As soon aswe receive our first order through PayPal
Express Checkout, Paypal will send us an emailthat contains the link and instructions to
complete our Paypal account set-up and claimour funds.Okay, next up let’s quickly set up our shipping
options. To do this we’ll select the shippingtab on our left panel.Okay, within the Shipping page we can decide
which countries we want to ship to – Lookslike we’ve already been set up with some
basic shipping rates.We have a standard shipping option for Canada,
which is based on weight – so anything between0-5kg will cost $10 and for heavy goods shipping
it’s set up to charge $20 for anything between5kg and 20kg in weight.We can open each of these options here and
easily change the price per weight or evenif we want to base our shipping off purchase
price instead of weight. Let’s say we wantto make deliveries in Canada free with orders
over $75. We’ll change our price range to$75 and up and and make our shipping price
$0.We can also select what regions we want to
ship to. If we uncheck the box from a regionwe will no longer offer shipping to that area.Additionally, we can decide whether or not
we want to charge more money for certain areas.Nunavut for example is pretty remote so we’ll
add an additional $10 to our shipping rate.And then we’ll click save.We also have a basic International shipping
rate set up. We can easily tweak these ratesas well or perhaps lets say we want to ship
only to the united states and canada – wecan very easily remove shipping to the rest
of the world. Shopify just wants to confirmthis is what we wanted to do.And we’ll click add country search for the
united states – I’ll select to add the defaultfederal tax rates and the default tax rates
for the regions. And then select “add country”From there we can very easily edit and set
up our shipping rates much like we did withour Canadian rates.Okay, so we’ve added products, we’ve selected
and customized a theme, added an about uspage and set up shipping and payments. What
we can do now is register a custom web address.Let’s head over to the “domains” section.We have the option to register an existing
domain if we already have one or the optionto register a new one if we don’t.So we can choose from a bunch of domains – .com,
.info, .org and this really takes the hassleout of finding a domain name – you can search
to see if your domain name is available rightwithin shopify and the domains are even offered
at a discounted price – generally we can expectto pay about $15/year for a .com address.As you can see the domain shopifytshirtco.com
is available and we can easily purchase it.And there you go, just like that, you’re
all set up with your custom branded ecommercewebsite.If you’re looking for more information we’ve
linked to a bunch of great resources in thedescription of this video that might be useful
to you on your journey of running an ecommercewebsite. I’d also encourage you to take
a look through the Shopify App Store, whichhas 100s of apps that can extend the functionality
of your shopify store. There are a varietyof free and paid apps that offer powerful
features, and services in a number of differentcategories.If you have any questions please don’t hesitate
to leave a comment below – and if you foundthis video helpful, please let us know by
clicking the like button. Thanks for watching.Ready to put what you learned into action? Click to head over to Shopify.com and sign up for you free 14 day trial.
Source
