Choosing to build your eCommerce store on Shopify is a great idea. It will set you up with a highly customisable, scalable and manageable website that can grow with your business. If you’re on another eCommerce platform and are thinking about moving over to Shopify, or want to start your eCommerce store on Shopify, this
Choosing to build your eCommerce store on Shopify is a great idea. It will set you up with a highly customisable, scalable and manageable website that can grow with your business.
If you’re on another eCommerce platform and are thinking about moving over to Shopify, or want to start your eCommerce store on Shopify, this guide will tell you everything you need to know to create a Shopify website.
Whether you decide to build your Shopify store on your own, or use the help of an experienced Shopify development agency like us is your call, but after reading this guide you’ll be in a better position to make the decision.
You’ve probably already got this bit sorted, but the first step in setting up your Shopify store is to register your business and set up payments.
You can integrate your business’ bank account directly with Shopify Payments, which makes the process easier.
You should also make a list of the necessary pages you’ll need to stay compliant with privacy, these include pages like:
When it comes to tax and currency, Shopify has built-in tax features and a geolocation app to figure out where customers are and apply the right tax and shipping to their orders.
It’s a simple process to get started creating your Shopify account, but it’s worth working with a Shopify agency at this stage.
They can make sure you’re on the right plan based on your goals, and they can make sure your account is configured properly, which saves time and money later.
It’s a really easy process to get started creating your Shopify account.
You can create your new Shopify account by going to https://www.shopify.com/uk (you can start with a 3 day free trial and then get 3 month for £1 a month before committing to a Shopify plan)
Shopify has four plans to choose from Basic – Grow – Advanced – Plus each with their own pricing levels and features.
If you’re a small business or just starting out with Shopify you can usually start with Basic or Grow before moving to Advanced and Plus as you scale.
You can get your domain name directly in Shopify. You can even use their domain name generator to help with ideas for your eCommerce store’s domain name. Your other option is to get your domain from registrar like 123 Reg or GoDaddy and then connect your domain to Shopify in your account.
You’ll need to enter this information to complete your Shopify account registration. You’ll need this business information to complete this stage:
This is where you get to the good stuff. And it’s where a professional Shopify Agency could be worth an investment.
You have a couple of options with getting started with your Shopify theme:
Shopify has a number of free themes you can use to get started with your store:
Or you can start with a premium theme from the Shopify Theme Store.
If you want to make your eCommerce business stand out, put your brand personality into your store or create custom features or functionalities, then a custom Shopify theme could be the better way to go.
Shopify uses its own templating language (Liquid) to power the front end of your Shopify store. These themes use modular sections, blocks, templates and snippets to create your store and are highly customisable.
They’re also great for your Shopify SEO because they use features like lazy loading and schema markup.
Shopify has the highest converting checkout of any eCommerce platform, but still, this is part of your store build you’ll want to get right.
About 70% of buyers abandon purchases on eCommerce stores because of a poor checkout experience.
Shopify comes with a number of checkout features you can use to improve the experience and get more conversion:
This is only available if you have Shopify Plus. It provides custom functionality at different points of your checkout flow.
This is another Shopify Plus feature, it allows you to add form fields for delivery notes, age verification and gift messages
Install Facebook, TikTok and Google Ads pixels with Shopify’s Customer Events or Google Tag Manage so you can track purchases and conversion
Use Shopify Plus features or upsell apps like ReBuy to add offers after customers have purchased to encourage additional purchases
You can build your own apps to integrate into your Shopify store, or you can integrate third party apps. What we would say about integrations, is to only focus on integrations you need to run your business.
A bloated stack of applications can become difficult to manage and could end up harming your store.
Think about what you need to run your store and stick with these (you can always build integrations later if you need to.
Klaviyo or Omnisend
Judge.me or Loox
You can use a custom ERP integrations or something like Stocky could do the job
Shopify has a number of inbuilt SEO tools that help you optimise your store. Working with a Shopify SEO agency can help you get the most out of your search engine optimisation.
An eCommerce store needs to look great and make your products appealing to do its job of encouraging sales.
We’ve designed loads of websites over the years and you can see some examples on our site.
Our advice for your Shopify store would be:
Mobile now makes up about 68% of all retail orders globally, so you’ll need your Shopify store to work on mobile.
If customers are ready to make a purchase, sticky buttons make it easy for them to add items to their shopping cart and increase the chances of making a sale
Clearly organise categories and collections. Add breadcrumbs so users can find their way around pages as they narrow down paroduct and make it easy for customers to search for specific items they want.
Customer reviews, payment icons and brand badges all add trust for customers and increase the chance of them making a purchase.
The performance of your Shopify store can impact everything from rankings and SEO results, to puchases, revenue and profits.
Here’s some quick tips for improving the performance of your Shopify store:
Lazy loading stops images and multi media elements of your site from loading until they’re visible (as the user scrolls) which speeds up your site and improves performance
Large CSS and JavaScript files can prevent your site from loading quickly, increasing the chances a customer will abandon your site and go somewhere else.
Having lots of additional scripts of your site can increase page load times, impacting your site performance and making it more likely a customer will leave. Shopify comes with a number of features to help limit third party apps.
We’d recommend using this checklist before going live.
Before launching your site you should test it on multiple browsers and devices to make sure everything works as it should. You don’t want to launch your site only to find checkout buttons don’t render properly on mobile, for example.
Shopify has a “Bogus Gateway” feature that lets you simulate placing an order without actually placing one. Using this makes sure your processes work as they should.
Make sure all your tax and shipping information is correct and modified based on location to stay compliant.
Go through your checkout process step by step as a customer would experience it to make sure you haven’t missed anything at a crucial stage.
Once you’re site’s gone live, the testing isn’t over. You should pay close attention to your site analytics and purchase in the initial weeks and months to make sure all your tracking is properly in place.
Specifically, you should look at:
Review page views, bounce rates, conversion rates, add-to-cart rates and order values. All this information can provide valuable information for small improvements you can make going forward.
Once you’ve got enough data to set a benchmark, test your CTA and product copy to see which messages encourage the most customer action.
Once you know your Shopify site works, it’s time to start investing in marketing like Shopify SEO, PPC, paid social and emails to drive more traffic to your site, engage more customers, and win more sales.
Shopify is designed as a user friendly web platform that makes creating your eCommerce store easy and simple. But building an eCommerce business for your brand that ranks, converts and can scale shouldn’t be left to chance.
Working with a professional Shopify development agency you’ll be able to:
If you want to find out how a Shopify web agency can help you, get in touch.
Our experts developers and Shopify agency experts can give you a free consultation so you can understand how to make the best use of your Shopify investment, and how we’ll be able to help you achieve your goals.
Get in touch
Speak to a member of our team and start your project today!
Our experts will be more than happy to help you!
Speak to us today!1. Let’s Talk
Book a 30 minute consultation call with one of our team so we can understand your goals for digital marketing and what services you need within your budget.
2. Let’s get strategic
Once we know where you want to get to, we’ll put a plan in place to get you there. You’ll get a clear outline explaining all the costs and what results you can expect.
3. Let’s start growing your business
Once we’re all pointing in the right direction our expert team will get to work delivering what we’ve promised and getting you the best ROI possible.
