For eCommerce businesses, especially Shopify has quickly become a valuable go-to solution. What exactly is Shopify? It's a monthly subscription service that lets you create a website and then use their online selling tools to run your shop. It gives you the capacity to create an online turnkey store.
So how does the process work? It's quite simple to use. And their tutorials help guide you through the steps.
First off, you need to create your Shopify account. They will ask for basic details to include your contact info. There is a free trial version of Shopify as well.
You will then be directed to the admin screen which allows you to start setting up your store. This is the fun part! You can upload the products, enter descriptions and input things such as payment and shipping information.
The next step involves choosing your store theme and layout. There is a Shopify theme store, but you can make adjustments to the themes in terms of colors and layout for instance. You can also preview all available themes before selecting yours. There are levels of themes from which to choose to range from basic to premium—which of course costs more.
After choosing your theme you can then go ahead and start editing and customizing it. Again their tutorials help walk you through this process. Plus, their service reps are also available should you need help.
Adding products to the actual store is easy. Products images and descriptions are so important, so take some time to see what competitors have done. Especially in terms of keywords. These can be critical when it comes to your product being found.
Choose your payment gateway. Whether it's taking payment on your site, or having customers redirected to an offsite checkout, you want to make sure you follow the steps precisely and understand how payments are going to work.
Set shipping rates. Shopify does have a function that will calculate these for you.
And now it's time to go live.
It is fairly easy to set up and launch your Shopify store. The Shopify customer service has gotten rave reviews, so should you encounter any issues, they'll be happy to work with you to iron out any wrinkles.
If your eCommerce business is in need of capital, this is where First Union Lending comes in. We would love to discuss your options!