How To Create a General/Niche Store | Shopify Dropshipping 2023

a few months ago I made a step-by-step video guide creating and finishing a Shopify store from scratch you all loved it and it did really well so I want to start this video off by saying thank you I truly appreciate all the Love on that video and it brings me a lot of Joy reading all the positive comments that you all left for me that being said in that video I created a one product store I understand that not everybody wants to create a one product store when starting out and quite a few of you commented asking for a guide on a general or Niche store so here we are in this video I will create a brand new fresh Shopify store that by the end will be up and running ready to make sales this will be a complete step-by-step guide so feel free to follow along if you please that being said if you have any questions throughout this video please comment them down below I try my best to read every single comment and reply to them so if you do leave a comment chances are I will see that and I'll give you a response now if you want even more help I have a free Discord to join the link for that is the first link in the description below you just need to have a Shopify store I'm in there pretty much all day answering questions so like I said that'll be the first link in the description all right well I hope you are as excited as I am to do this together yet come comfortable clear your tabs and stick around because we have plenty to cover okay step number one we're gonna start off by making a Shopify account you definitely can't have a store without a Shopify account so it is the best thing to start off with now the Shopify plan is not free it's going to cost you about 30 a month but if you want to save some money you can use my link down in the description below that's going to give you a free trial and then it's only one dollar a month for three months so you're saving like 97 all right so the first thing I'm going to do is enter my email and officially begin all right and now it's going to ask you a couple questions just beginner level questions just to get an understanding of who you are I like to skip them all you don't really need to answer them because it doesn't really help you out in any way now the same thing goes for your store name if you don't know what store you're going to create or what products you're going to sell what Niche you're going to get into then don't worry about creating a name for your store right away it's not that big of a deal and because we are creating a general or Niche store I'm going to teach you guys how to do both we don't necessarily need to find a product to name our business around so for this question I'm going to skip it again because I don't really know what I'm going to name my business right now and I'll figure that out later let's skip that now this is the question we do need to answer wherever you're located you're gonna have to tell Shopify I'm in the United States so that's a pre-selected right there I'm going to click next all right now it's going to ask you to create a Shopify ID so because I'm using a brand new email I do not have a Shopify ID yet I can either continue with email and create an account that way or you can just click continue with Google if you have the Google account already logged into that you're making your store with so I'm going to continue with Google because I'm already logged in I'm going to select the account I'm going to head back to Shopify and it is going to start building our store so it's building the template right now just the foundation of everything and then a couple of seconds it'll be done and we'll have our Shopify store dashboard right in front of us all right here we go this is our dashboard this is our brand new Shopify store before I show you guys all these different tabs over here on the left hand side what I like to do when I make a new Shopify account is to select my plan so I can remove all these different pop-ups because eventually you're going to need to select a plan might as well just do it right now so let's go over here and select a plan now like I said this is all only one dollar a month for every single plan either the basic regular Shopify plan or the advanced plan they're all one dollar a month I I still always like to do the basic plan just because especially if you're just getting started you really only want the basic plan and then you can always upgrade after that so let's go over here and choose basic I'm just going to select the monthly plan and then I'm going to confirm billing cycle right here and then I'm going to put in my sensitive billing information that you guys unfortunately cannot see and I'll show you guys when I'm done now that we have a store in plan selected let's go over the tabs here on the left hand side really quickly so you know what it all means alright so this is your home page this is your dashboard once we've checked off everything on this list this home page will show our dashboard of the sales for the days visitors all that kind of stuff but right now because we're just getting started it shows the setup guide now it's almost time to customize our store but before we do that I always like to start by adding a product just so we have a template and we can edit the product page without having to go back and then add a product just makes it a lot easier for you all this is where you need to figure out what kind of store you want this video is kind of like a two-in-one guide for Niche stores and General Stores so if you want a general store you can literally just add any product Under the Sun just so you have that product and you can start editing your website if you want to go the niche store then find a product in your Niche it doesn't have to be the one product that you want to promote you just need to add something to your site so you have the product tab available to edit so just go on AliExpress and find whatever product you want to add to your website just to begin with you can always add more you can always take it away this is just so you can edit your product page now I don't recommend using AliExpress for long only to test products and then once you find a product that's working and getting you steady sales switch over to a sourcing agent supplier and get your product sourced as fast as you can I have a sourcing agency I've had it for about four and a half years now it's called Dropship agents we can get you much faster 7 to 14 day shipping worldwide lower prices on your products better quality of your products we do quality tracks on everything we send out and even custom packaging to Brand your store and to put your logo on all the products that you're selling so if you're interested in that the only sourcing requirement we have is five to ten orders per day if you're not getting that don't worry you'll get there soon if you are getting that the third link in the description below will be for dropshipasion.com where you can fill out a quick free quote request and then we'll get back to giving you a price on your product but for now we're going to use the app de-essers it's a great alternative if you're going to use AliExpress so I'm going to go over here to my website click on apps down here click on add apps and then I'm going to find this one app right here de-esser's AliExpress Drop Shipping and click add if it's not there you can just click down here Shopify App Store and look it up but it is right here in front of me so I'm just going to click add install the app don't worry about all these different 500 49.19 a month price tags we're gonna go with the free plan that's all you need you do not need anything it's premium plans so I'm gonna go over here to the right hand side and click on get started with the free plan and then I'm going to link AliExpress so you do need to have an AliExpress account if you don't it takes a couple of seconds to make an account it's really not hard just go to AliExpress create an account and then you're good to go all right now that I'm signing into my AliExpress account I can go back to the de-essers tab and then just click on this AliExpress button and that's going to link my AliExpress account to the de-esser's app and then we are good to go with the deacers app it's fully installed I'm going to click on let's start importing products because we don't have any products added and then I'm going to skip this I don't really need to pay attention to that there we go would you like to learn how to process the order no all right so this is our de-esser's account this is the app and this is where we add products from AliExpress so for this video I'm going to make a store that's in between a general store and a niche store I'm just gonna pick a really generic product that I know other people are selling on their Shopify stores all right this is a product that is definitely kind of saturated it's been around for a little while and I know that there are other stores selling this so it's a great product just for an example in this video not something I would recommend you sell I can get it for about seven or eight dollars a dollar twenty plus 662 shipping I'm gonna copy this link right here go back to my deacers tab all right and then I'm gonna go to the import list tab right here and then find this little import or search button click that and I'm going to paste my AliExpress URL and click search and here we have it right here you can push it to Shopify if you want right now but there are some variants in here that I don't want to add so I'm going to go over here and click on edit product now this is where you can edit your title variants description images all that kind of stuff I'm going to remove that just name it something really simple just LED nightlight for now my variance this next tab we have all these different variants that I don't want to add I just want this simple rectangle up here so I'm going to start deleting these variants all right and we are left with our one variant that we do want to keep now I don't know why it says 33 dollars because it does not cost thirty three dollars it costs six dollars this is where you want to price your product so it's costing me about eight dollars I want to sell it for 24.95 at least a 3X now the compare that price value this is where it's like fifty dollars half off get it for 24.99 so you can do that if you want I'll just do 50 or 49.99 let's go over here to the next tab description and this is the AliExpress description I'm not going to edit this here I'm going to edit it in the actual Shopify products tab so ignore that for now you only want this one image right here we don't want this or any of these other variants images of the variants that we deleted and then we have the images that we do want to keep selected so I'll keep those all right and then once we've done that we can just click over here save and then right here last thing we need to do is highlight this one product and click push to Shopify continue selling without a stock also publish the online store and then we're not going to select this first box because we changed the price we're not going to edit that so push the Shopify and then we are good to go on the DS series app we can delete this tab or exit out of this tab and move to Shopify so if I go over here to the products tab now you'll see that we have one product added and we are good to start editing this this is just the default description that AliExpress gives you we're going to delete all of it we don't need to pay attention to any of this stuff delete and then what we're going to do is we're going to go on Google and find other people selling this one product this one called Blue gear let's click that they're selling it for 29.99 it's the same exact product but the description is kind of lacking they have a really basic description I'm going to save this tab but I'm going to go back this one looks a lot better you can see they have a gif in here they've got images below that I'm going to copy these product details I'm going to go over to my Shopify store and I'm just going to paste it don't worry about writing your own product description word for word I like to take Snippets from other websites that I like and add those new it's to my product description so I'll go to three or four different Shopify stores take the little pieces that I like and then I'm left with a complete product description so I'm gonna go here and delete some of these images just because they had too many images in the description delete that delete that delete that have the specifications down below clean this up a little bit we have a price that we selected down here already if you want to change the price this is where you do it your price and your compare that price I don't track quantity just remove some of this spacing so there's no empty space and I'll click save now this is what our product looks like and here we go so one thing I noticed right away is they have these different logos in the product photos so I need to change that yeah every single product photo has that but this other website that we went to it looks like they removed it so I'll go up then I'll copy these image addresses you don't need to save the actual image and download it you can just copy the URL go back to your page go down here I'm going to just remove all of these delete that and let me click add from URL and start pasting the URLs from these other websites I'm going to do that for all these different images you really don't want a lot of images you only want a couple three or four is perfect just to show the product in use so we've added our images right here that looks a lot better no more watermarks so now let's preview that again and it looks much better so this might look a little basic right now that's because we haven't edited or designed our store in any way we just set up one product so if you just set up a product this is what it's going to look like but now that we did that we can move on to the next step and that's pretty much how you add products to your site if you want to add them manually you can just go to the products tab click add product and create a product that way I typically do it manually because I have all my products sourced but I'm just using the DSs app in this video to show you because I understand that most of you are going to be beginners now that the product set up we can start creating and designing our storefront so let's do that let's go over to online store right here on the left hand side the themes Tab and you can see right here we have the dawn theme installed this is our current theme this is not the theme that I use so if we go down here to the theme Library below that popular free themes find the sense theme this is a theme that I always use for all of my stores it is totally fine if you choose a different theme really it depends on what you like the most I just like the sense theme because it's really basic really simple and easy to navigate around so I'm going to click on ADD next to the sense theme and like I said it's a free theme doesn't cost you anything takes a second to install and then once it's installed we're going to make that our primary theme I'm going to go over here click on publish and publish this as my main theme there we go now you can see sense is my current theme all right so now to start designing our store we're gonna go over here and click on customize and we are good to start working on it so you can see right here this is what it looks like once again it's just a basic default template same with the colors and everything like that don't worry about that we're going to get it fixed up really quickly um it doesn't take much time to make your site look great and I'm going to do that right now so you can follow along so I always like to start off with theme settings just to get my colors right so go read a theme settings go to colors and then you can see all these different colors don't change any colors if you don't know exactly where that color is that you're changing so there's some purple in here I don't see any purple I'm not going to change that right away I like to use blue as my main theme just because it looks clean in my opinion if I'm making a general store especially if I'm selling like a nightlight or something like that it just fits the vibe blue black you're selling Health Products red would be good but it really just comes down to what you like I always like to say keep it really simple don't make your website a whole bunch of different colors find one or two colors and then use those two colors throughout your whole website you can see right here we have a background radiant this is the background gradient right here let's make that instead of pink let's make that a light blue let's make this darker and then this color right here let's make that a darker blue see what that looks like just like that it looks a lot better there we go let's save that as you're working throughout this store make sure you're saving your work now let's go over to the products page click on default product and we can actually start to see what our product page looks like this is why the first thing we did was add a product because now we can see what the product page looks like and we can edit the design so here's our dark purple here's our lighter purple looks like this accent is the color we want to change I'm going to find what blue this was let's go click accent one and these are the blues we've used so far let's click this as our blue changes our buy now button right there accent two right here this is our sale button so I'm going to click that make that blue as well there we go and the accent 2 gradient now it looks like our background for our site is not white I want to definitely make that white so let's go over here make that white and actually remove the background gradient because we don't need that remove gradient and now our website is all white in the background looks much cleaner I'm going to save that making sure I'm saving my work text I always make the text black make it all black outline button make that black and then for text links this is our separate background you can see right here under the email I'm gonna make that white there we go and our product page is already looking a lot better the next thing I like to do is clean up my product page before I edit the rest of my website so the first thing I do is I always remove Dynamic checkout just click on this section right here and uncheck show Dynamic checkout buttons so you just have the add to cart button I'm going to go over here to theme settings I'm going to scroll down to cart cart type pop-up notification we don't want that I'm going to make it a page so now when you click add to cart it'll bring you to your cart page rather than just having a little pop-up and that'll move your customers through the checkout process faster and funnel them to ultimately purchasing your product not just browsing through your site adding to cart and then leaving the next thing I like to do is just remove the email signups remove that just click on the eyeball button that makes it disappear I just want people to only click on the buttons that are going to make me money unless you have a really good email marketing plan it doesn't really matter and most of you who are just getting started aren't going to be doing email marketing so we're not going to include that now this is what our product page looks like it's pretty much all set up one thing I will note is that this is for desktop most of your visitors are going to be on mobile so if you go over here at the top right and click on this and click on mobile this is what your product page looks like on mobile so right away it looks great you just have some enticing information about the product functions selling points and then specifications down below and then images in between the paragraphs so you can get your customers looking at some more visuals not just reading a huge chunk of text now right here the vendor I didn't choose a name for my store so my vendor name is 3122c because it's just some default Shopify store name that was given to me if you chose a name for your store when you're creating a Shopify account that's going to be different I'm just going to remove it because I don't want 3122cc right there if we go to our home page you can see right here we have image with text and our featured product down below that I'm gonna go to the image with text section and then select an image you can either select an image from library or you can use the free images that they provide if you're making a general store you can really select anything you want I added this one image right here added that click save and then over here on the right hand side we can change the image heading so this will be something like that then below that we'll just add a little text supporting that saying something simple there you go let's click save so because this is a general or Niche store not a one product store we're going to keep this featured product section a collection not a one product recommendation so as I add more products throughout the store they will show right here on the front page and that's really it you don't need to make a fancy home page because in the end most people are not going to be going directly to your home page they're going to be going from an ad directly to your product page so your homepage really does not matter that much now once you start getting a lot of sales more visitors yes you can start to buff it up a little bit but right now don't even worry about it so our homepage is done our product page is done what else do we have let's go to the cart page I'm gonna need to add a product to my cart to edit the cart page just like we needed a product to edit the product page so let's add that to cart and then this is what our product page or our cart page looks like anyways what I'm looking for in my cart page is color congruency I want to make sure that these buttons are the same that's pretty much it so let's click check out let's move through the cart into our checkout page here's what our checkout page looks like there's one thing that's missing and that is our logo right here we don't have a logo so it shows just three one two to see we definitely want to update that so I'm gonna go over here to go to theme settings scroll down and just this button right here scroll let's see remove that scroll down to checkout and this is where you edit your checkout so I don't want to add a background image but I do want to add a logo so let me create a logo really quickly and add it to my site I'm gonna show you guys how I do that so I personally make all my logos in Photoshop but canva is a great alternative especially for those who do not have Photoshop or don't know how to use it so let's just go to canva.com and click on create design it's gonna be a logo right here click on Logo and then it's going to give you some examples that you can use so now I almost forgot I can't make a logo without a business name or a domain I went on good editing I found some names that I think would fit a general store and or a niche store so one thing that really is important when you're creating a general store or a new store is finding a URL or a name that could work selling Matrix glasses or anything else you know Zen Peak could get away selling these glasses it could also get away with selling this one cupping device as long as you can picture multiple products different types of products being sold under that one name then you're golden so don't find a name like the wholesale shop or General Store something.com don't do that find a name that you think could be brandable Zen Peak is unique it could be a niche door it could be anything you can sell any product Under the Sun basically because its name allows it to do so zenpeak.com is a perfect name I'm going to add to this website I'm not going to add the domain right now I'm going to show you guys how to do that right after this but this is the name I chose for this store so I'm going to create a logo around this one name so over here to canva you can type in things up top to help you with your search this one right here for example is great Mountain creative I can just do Zen Peak there we go remove that there we go remove Watermark if you upload that one big Square to your website this is what it's going to look like so this is what it looks like if we have just the square it's really small because most of the space is in that blank space in the Square so I'm going to pull up the image and then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to screenshot right below it and right above it and try to get as close as I can to the actual logo there we go and what that's going to do once I re-upload it is it's going to make it look a lot bigger and a lot better so let's change that upload the new one and let's see what it looks like looks a lot better so the next thing we need to do on our checkout page is change the position from left to Center I want it to be centered right here in the middle and there we have it nice and clean right in the middle this is what a checkout page should look like and we are all set with that let's go back to our home page and let's add our logo right here so I'm going to go to the theme settings right here on the left hand side click logo select image I'm going to select that one image once again and then I'm going to make it just a little bit bigger and there we have it looks a lot better now our site's starting to come together go change the heading a little bit make it a little bit smaller now if we go to online store and preview our website this is what it's going to look like go over here three dots click preview and boom this is our site fantastic I forgot to change the shop now button that's why it's gray so let's do that really quickly shop now button button link products and then select the product you want to go to click save so we've basically set up our entire Shopify store at least the front end of it all we need to do is edit a few things in the back end and then we're done the next thing we need to do is add our domain so let's go to settings right here we're going to click on domain right down here below now you can either buy a domain with Shopify and connect it automatically or you can buy it on a website like GoDaddy and then connect it automatically again so if I bought it on GoDaddy I'd go over here to connect existing domain I type in my domain zenpeak.co click next and then automatically connect to my GoDaddy account the next thing we need to do is just change some of these settings right here so your store details if you haven't chose a store name yet this will show 3122c we'll change this to Zen Peak save now your payments this is where you accept your payments you definitely need to set this up correctly if you plan on accepting credit card payments which you all should click on payments and then go and complete the Shopify payments account setup I'm not going to do this right now because it shows a whole bunch of private information but just click this button and complete the account set up it'll just ask you to put in your bank account information your address and other sensitive information and then you'll have it all set up and you're good to go to start accepting payments so now let's go down to the checkout and accounts phone number or email I don't show a link to download the shop app I require first and last name I need your customer information company name doesn't matter address line 2 optional and then your shipping address phone number once again I'm gonna make it optional because it's not completely required everything else looks great I'm going to click save scroll back up to the top and then click on the next one which is shipping and delivery so this one's really important you could have everything set up but if your shipping and delivery settings are not set up correctly nobody's gonna be able to buy so go over here and click on manage and then we have two shipping zones domestic and international I'm just going to remove this delete and then delete the international and create my own zones I'm going to click create Zone I'm going to do USA find United States there we go select that click done and then I'm going to add some rates so I'm going to set up my own rates I'll name this first one free insured shipping make that zero dollars click done add another rate I will do priority insured shipping five dollars on the dot click done there we go and then we're going to do that same thing again but for international so click create zone I'm gonna name this Row for rest of the world there we go and then click done and then we do the same thing for our rates we're going to do a free insured shipping free insured shipping and then we're gonna do priority insured copy that make that five dollars and there we go now if you're in any of these countries you're gonna need to add those countries to your markets and then once you have these two shipping zones set up just click save and then your shipping settings are all done and taken care of we're gonna go down to policies and then we're going to create our refund policy privacy policy in terms of service so we can create from template let's just click that do that with the next one privacy policy and then do that with the next one terms of service one thing you need to do is going to take a little bit of time not too much is remove all of your private information if you don't want your address in there you don't want your phone number anything like that go in here and then remove your return addresses remove anything private that you don't want to include also anything that's bracketed all these different bracketed sentences that are all caps you need to either update them or just delete them so I'm gonna go in here remove all this stuff but in another tab what you're going to need to do get out of your settings go to online store and click on pages and this is where we're going to add pages of our privacy policy in terms of service and other legal pages so so right here I'm gonna click on ADD page I'm gonna copy my privacy policy right here paste that right there click save and then I'm going to do that with my refund policy and my terms of service page and a copy it all add page terms of service [Music] if I can type and then paste that right there and then click save there we go we have added all that now that we've added that let's go down to the navigation tab and add our pages to our menus this is where we edit our main menu and our footer menu our main menu is right here and our footer menu is non-existent but it's down below at the bottom of the page so let's start with the footer menu and then we'll click add menu item select the page and we're going to select our privacy policy refund policy in our other terms of service policy pages and then I remove the search term because I don't want that and then I'll add one more contact page below so that's already it's already included every Shopify store has a contact page already created for you so I'll save that now for some reason the footer menu was not showing that so I just went to online store customize my theme again scroll down to the bottom went to the footer section clicked add block and then click menu and then there we go our links are right down there click save and that is all set up now if you have a general store or a niche store with a lot of different collections I just keep it simple with catalog because it shows all the different collections that you have but if you want to change that all you need to do is just go over to your products tab right here just go to your products tab click Collections and then you can create a collection so if I have 10 different products that's in the jewelry collection I'll create a collection I'll make it a manual collection always make it manual you can do jewelry you don't need to make a description and then once you click that click save and then you can add your products down below so I can search my products add these to my collection right here and that's how you create Collections and organize your products so if I wanted to do that I could have a jewelry collection up here instead of catalog but because I'm keeping this General I'm just going to do catalog and then that's pretty much it now our store is ready to go let me click on preview and this is what it looks like everything is done we've got our catalog right here our product page is set up our checkout pages are set up legal pages are done menus are done everything is set up and ready to go the last thing we need to do is take off the password from our website our website is password protected and then after we choose a plan we'll be able to take that password off and to take that password off all you need to do is go to online store go down to preferences and this is what it looks like scroll down here password protection Tab and then uncheck this one button right here that says restrict access to visitors with the password once you uncheck that it'll allow anybody to go to your website and view your products and check out and that's really it you just created your Shopify Store The Next Step would be to add reviews and other apps to your website so to do that all you need to do is go to apps and then find a product review app like judge me Ali reviews like a reviews or Luke's let's just add the Ali review apps for an example let's click add app this app also has a free plan available so you don't need to spend any extra money on it so once we have the app installed we're going to choose our rating color I'm going to do gold make it nice and gold let's click next we're going to go over here to import reviews we have a product right here click import reviews copy this URL right here import reviews paste the URL customize the settings make sure you're customizing the settings I like to do reviews with photo and I like to do five star reviews I don't want any four stars or below just like import reviews and there we go I just added five reviews you'll see that my review stars are here and if I scroll down you have all these reviews down below but this is still black so I need to change that so let's click on show reviews let's click on star rating setup now and then this is where we change the color once again so I'm gonna go here select the same gold paste that I'm going to hide star ratings for no review products on the product page and then I'm going to do the average rating score and then now if we refresh this once again it'll show the average rating score and then the average rating almost forgot something the announcement bar right here Welcome to our store we definitely want to change that I'm going to make that say free shipping today only congratulations you now have an officially completed Shopify store that is ready to make some sales and to make you some money hopefully it wasn't as hard as you thought it was going to be the next video I have planned is going to be fantastic I can't wait to share it with you and I'm going to start posting about once a week so expect much more content from me in the near future have a wonderful day thanks for watching Once Again peace out

Channel: Baird Business

Views: 42,814

Keywords: baird business, baird strudwick

Id: gDujkDTKvhw

Length: 27min 43sec (1663 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 13 2023