Shopify Tutorial 2021 (for Beginners) - Create A Professional Online Store - Easy!

hey welcome back to the channel in this video we're going through everything you need to know to set up your own shopify store so whatever you're trying to sell whether you're drop shipping branded drop shipping selling your own products or maybe you just have some stuff kicking around your house and you're trying to sell it on your own website then shopify is a great tool for any one of those situations it's something that countless people have been using and finding a lot of success with you probably have heard a lot of success stories from people who made their own shopify store doing drop shipping or their own products and have quit their jobs and done that as a full-time thing it's something that's more than possible and a lot of people do it all the time now of course it can be intimidating to actually just go and start making a shopify store which is why i'm making this tutorial to help you guys with everything you'll need to know and this is a tutorial for beginners so if you're an absolute beginner you don't know anything about shopify we're starting off absolute step one setting up your account then we're gonna go through how to configure everything get inventory set up products and of course customize the site to make it look great as well so that this is a full comprehensive tutorial with everything you'll possibly need to know when you're creating your online store and of course there are a lot of other tutorials out there but one thing i want to point out is on most other tutorials if you go down in the description you'll notice that they're selling a course and so sometimes you'll get halfway through the video or they'll do half of the process and then they'll tell you that their course has the real good details and i just want to be transparent with you guys and let you know that i am not selling a course this is in no way a plug for a course i don't have a course i don't plan on having a course about shopify and so you guys can be confident that this is not going to be selling you anything everything in this video is everything i think you need to know to make your shopify store i'm not going to ask for any money this is purely a full tutorial to help you guys start your website so with that being said there's a lot of stuff to cover in this video and i i tend to honestly i tend to speak at a relatively fast pace so youtube has a couple tools one of them i'm going to put time stamps down below so if you guys want to go and revisit certain sections of this video you can definitely do that as you're building your website you can come back and keep going to different sections and follow along with me the second tool if i talk too slow they actually have a tool or if i talk too fast they have a tool you can change the playback speed to 1.25 x or 0.75 x so that it is adjusted according to whatever pace you want me to speak at so two tools i just wanted to make you guys aware of so that in this video you can follow along and be as successful as possible and really get all the information i'm talking about to you know build your own site then so with that being said guys let's get into this video the first thing we want to do is i'm going to head over to my laptop here and we want to open up whatever browser you like personally i use google chrome just because google chrome allows me to get some extensions that are very powerful with shopify so for you know pixel stuff and a lot of other ad type stuff like further on down the road it does become very convenient to use chrome but at the time of just making your website it doesn't matter what browser you use and another great thing is of course with shopify everything's all web-based so if you use one browser today and you go around the world and use a different laptop with a different browser you can still access it as long as you have your password so with that being said we want to start off by opening up a new tab and you can either copy and paste the link from the top of the description or you can type in centralmedia.com shopify i guess you could also just click on the link it'll open it in a new tab and that will make sure we're all starting at the same place it gives you a 14-day free trial so if we go there it should look something like this and of course don't be alarmed if it looks slightly different if they change the pictures that is that's something that they might do but you should see a field that says enter your email address and start free trial so i'm going to enter my email address we're going to say tutorials at centralmediamedia.com and of course because your website is being hosted on this i do recommend using a secure email don't use the email that you give out to some sketchy online poker website or something make sure it's an email that is not going to be hacked you want to make sure that you uh have a good password on there and follow all the best practices now that we have that we're going to set up our password for this so i'm just going to set up a password and then we need to make a store name and so for this store i'm just going to make an example we're going to say that we're selling maybe like coffee beans or something so i'm just going to say santrell i'm going to say custom coffee maybe it's something that people can buy and put a little custom message on it or something and send it to a friend i don't know we'll see what we actually do with this but i'm gonna call it custom coffee uh we have a little wheel spinning right there so let's just give that one second and it looks like unfortunately custom coffee is already taken i should have known that it's a pretty common name so mike's okay so i'm just gonna say mike's premium coffee beans whatever not a great store name but you get the idea i would recommend kind of messing around with this and finding uh something a little bit more condensed not four words and then we are going to say create your store and this is going to take a second while setting it up so you don't have to worry about this just sit back let it do its thing and within maybe 30 seconds or so it should be bringing you to the next page okay now on this page they want to know a little bit about us so are we selling anything i'm just going to say that i'm not selling products yet so this is going to kind of help you decide if you want to transfer products in from a different store or how much they want to guide you in the homepage it doesn't really matter what you're choosing for this you can choose whatever you want and it won't really affect your experience when making this but which industry are we doing i want to see if we have like other other food and drink that might be what i'm interested in and uh we're not developing this for clients so i'm going to say next and it's going to ask a little bit more about us and this is going to be important information about your store so don't give it like a fake name or anything definitely use your real information here now once you enter your store the first thing i want to point out is the domain on the top so if you go up and look at the top of your browser it'll have whatever your store name is dot shopify or myshopify.com admin whenever you want to sign in you can just go to whatever your domain is dot com admin and it will bring you here you could also just navigate through shopify.com but two ways you can access your dashboard now we have a lot of stuff going on and i'm going to walk you through everything on the left side but first let's kind of just start off on dashboard here or on home uh you'll see that the dashboard is showing you some basic stuff they give you a little checklist of the first things we want to do we're going to add a product we're going to customize a theme set up payments and shipping and so it walks you through that stuff but if we go down you'll see that we have a lot of other stuff i recommend reading through this i'm not going to you know walk through every single one of these right now because i really want to show you what's on the left side here but these are going to be best practices tutorials hopefully you don't need those but stuff like that you can find all of that on the home page here and one thing you'll see at the top is that we do have to select a plan so i mentioned that you do get a 14 day free trial with our link which is completely true if you use our link you will get 14 days for free but eventually you're going to want to upgrade your plan and if you want to actually sell anything and start accepting payments you do need to upgrade to a plan so i'm going to select a plan now of course you guys can do this anytime you want but just doing it early makes sense to me so we have all the features available so let's go and select a plan and there are several plans available depending on how much of volume you're selling different plans could make sense for you so there's actually some online calculators i can link them in the description and they'll they'll tell you like based on how many how much revenue you're expecting to make how many products you're selling which plan is actually the best but for most people starting out it's you know pretty much it's very very likely that you'd be best off with the cheapest plan right here so that's what i'm going to select right now the basic shopify and you'll see that really the big difference with these is going to be the rates that you're seeing so credit card rates is one thing but also like how many staff accounts you can have uh shipping discounts locations stuff like that there's gonna be some subtle differences between these really the rates is going to be the big one which is why i mean for a small store i'm just going to choose the cheapest plan for now so i'm not selling any volume yet actually just a tutorial i don't expect this at all but i'm going to say that i'm paying every 30 days and this is another thing of course paying longer term is going to save you money so if i'm making a website a lot of times i end up paying for like a year at a time just so i don't want to worry about the credit card payment every single month it's just a lot easier to just do it once a year and to make sure that i have my website for the entire year but for this tutorial we are going to go with the monthly plan and other than that i'm going to add my credit card and then select this plan so you guys will also notice there that it doesn't actually charge you until your free trial ends so that's another reason i just upgrade now so it's ready to go so i don't build everything and then the trial ends and i lost all of my work it's something that you don't want to end up doing i've done that before and it's not a good time so the next thing we want to do now that we have it upgraded we actually will be able to have a full-blown website so we're no longer restricted there and we're going to go down the left side um so the first thing i want to talk about is actually products i'm going to skip over orders just because orders we don't have any orders right now nothing really to worry about with that so i'm not going to i'm not going to focus on that just yet in this video but products is the first thing we really want to do we want to start making our first products and you make them here i promise we'll get into customizing the website i know right now you might be thinking like why would i make a product when i don't know where the product's going yet and of course we'll customize the website in a second so starting off with the product we're going to add a product you could also find products as you saw right there but we're going to add a new one and we're going to say for this one this is just going to be kona coffee kona coffee beans going to coffee beans and we're just going to put some text here so we're going to say like dark roasted or dark roast extra honestly i'm not really a big coffee guy myself so i don't know a whole lot about coffee um like not as much as some i know some people like go nuts about coffee and like know so much about it so i'm not even going to try here i'm just going to copy that text so you guys can see in a second where the description actually shows up but something to note is that within this you can customize the way the text looks you see all the tools here so of course you can change like the format the bolt uh if you want it bold or italic and we can add links as well in the description which is really cool so if you could say like maybe this would say like common commonly purchased commonly purchased with this item i don't know if we have some other item and we could just highlight that this item and add a link and the link could be to uh whatever you want you could link to a video maybe if you have a channel like a youtube channel and you want to link to a tutorial on how to do stuff or another domain within your website so it'd be like mike's premium coffee beans dot com slash like coffee grinder or something you could link things together within the description there so that's a cool way to do that and of course all kinds of different stuff for adding images and videos and stuff i'm not adding images right here because media i would typically add it down in the media section so here we're going to add an image okay so we click add file we can select an image so maybe like this one right here and then we'll have our image there we can add more media so if i want to add maybe another image just some more coffee beans i don't know coffee it's just not the best not the best for finding a lot of different pictures but you would want to have like different angles of your product to make sure that people have a good idea of what they're actually getting we can add our pricing then uh so maybe actually in the title we want to say like this is a a like one pound one pound bag and then let's just say that i don't know if it's like really good coffee we'll say it's like uh like 35 or something i don't actually know if that's a good price for a pound of coffee beans i'm not quite sure but let's just say that uh it says so we can choose a price and we can say compare ad price that's something that sometimes people use to make buyers feel better about whatever they're buying so we could say we're selling it for 35 other people sell it for 38. uh so that's maybe not unlikely that we'd sell it for a little bit cheaper and then below that we have cost per item and so here it's not going to be shown to customers this is something that only you can see and it helps you track what your margin is how much profit you're making and how much revenue you're making to really kind of run your business and better understand without having to do your own calculations so for this if i can buy this for like 12 dollars i'm selling it for 35 it'll tell me 23 profit for every one that i'm sold and we can of course charge tax or not charge tax it depends on if you choose to have the tax like built in or something or maybe some items don't require tax depending on where you're selling and what you're selling now next we have uh the sk the sku the sku the stock keeping unit um this is something that a lot of people like to use when they're tracking inventory just so they can have like labels on their products to have like instead of just having a name for everything it'll just be a number so if i could say like this one is uh 1001 and we could have a bar code if we want so that's a little bit more advanced barcode it's not something i would typically i'm not using that right now but we could track quantities it's something that i i recommend doing so the quantities that we have let's just say that in stock right now we have maybe 150 available so this will keep track and it'll tell us how many we have in stock still so we don't have to go and count every single time of course counting is a good idea just in case you know some fall off the truck or whatever happens but you know it's something that you can do right like that so this is going to be one pound uh so we can change the units there one pound of coffee is what we're selling and that's gonna help us estimate the shipping so we'll take care of shipping a little bit later on in the video but the last thing i want to point out is that uh we can have some or second last thing rather we have some variants so if we want to have maybe different sizes or different uh like you know whatever we want so size is one option we could have a different they only give us a couple options here but you could have like color if we want to have like dark roast so like dark dark we could have a light one um right and we could also have other options would be instead maybe like size so we could say like one pound um and we hit enter we could say like two pounds enter and then down here you'll see that we do have kind of a permutation out of all of those so we have a bunch of different options so dark dark light light so two you know two of each and we can change the price so maybe two pounds is going to be um like 55 for each of these and you can just change the price for each one of those and then maybe light is like a little bit cheaper so we could say maybe that's like 33 and of course we can track the inventory for each of those as well so they're each tracked as a different item even though they're all within the same category it makes it honestly this makes it a lot easier on the back end when you have everything tracked through here um it's something that when you're setting it up it's a little bit annoying but it's a tool that is very powerful and i like having that so let's just say 150 of this 150 of that and then maybe we only have 50 of the last one and something to note again is that on the right side you'll see that we do have a new sku for each one of them which is great so we can track each thing individually and then here's the last thing i wanted to mention the search engine optimization seo so if we click on edit website seo this is essentially just saying what is it going to look like when somebody searches this on google or when it shows up on google and you want to make sure it looks good it looks as good as possible so that's a little boring we don't want it to just say what the product is so we could go and have like two little vertical lines and say mike's premium coffee beans and we could say um i don't know something like that that's not a bad way to do it of course you'd want to really customize this um but we could just you could add your slogan there you could say like start your day out write with some great kind of coffee or something or we can add that down here by default the description of the product is showing up as the description or the metadata on the on on google here but that's not necessarily what you'd always want so we could say here start your so we could say whatever we want you want this to be enticing obviously people are seeing that this is overkill of course but just to give you guys an idea of you probably want about 150 characters in your description and then on the bottom it says our url and handle so this is sometimes called a url slug it's the little thing that goes at the very end of your domain so we have our whole domain which by the way i'm going to upgrade that in a second and at the very end uh it's going to be you know whatever the name of the product is so you want this to be something that's short and understandable but still unique on your website so we're just going to say like kona coffee would be would be just fine for this product so actually i forgot to mention on the right side we have a couple other items that i don't know why shopify puts them over here they try to make it easier but i just i always forget to look at those so on the top we have the status so it can be draft or active this isn't sure an active product and then we can go down and change some other things we can have a product type if you want this something that's going to be searched so we're going to say coffee beans and we're going to add that as a product type on our website so add that as a as a as a type um and then collections if we want to make a new collection uh i'm just gonna leave it on like the home page collection that sounds fine but we could add like a new like the fall coffee collection or something and that would show up there and of course tags is if anybody's searching on your website so we want to say like coffee coffee beans and maybe like kona i don't know something like that so that way if somebody searches if we have a search tool on our website which i generally avoid doing then this is how they're going to find it so now we can say save and that's going to be pretty much everything we need when we're setting up this product right here so if we go back to all products on the left you'll see this product says active it's all set up and we can continue to set up more products in this in a similar fashion very easy to do and like again if you just go to add product in the top right you'll see that we can add and it'll have exactly the same fields we saw and it's easy to customize so this is the next thing go through and start adding all of your different products and then we can go back to inventory now inventory is something that you will be going in to edit uh whenever you buy new products but it should automatically update when things are being sold so incoming is something that you could you could set if you want to and know like when things are coming if it's like recurring or something like that but it's a good way to uh see what's going on to kind of manage all of your inventory in one place obviously it's called inventory so that makes sense and again they all have the same picture but it's easy to see that especially when you have a lot more products you can see what you need to make place orders for and kind of manage your store proactively so you don't run out of products and lose money we can go down to transfers i'm not really going to talk about that in this video collections is a big one so i talked about before how you have like the you could have like the fall coffee collection or something and this is something that when you're actually editing your website to make it look better collections are very powerful because you can have a slideshow of like a collection for example and then you'll have uh all the similar products are placed together so we can make our own collection uh just by going to create collection it's gonna be really similar to making a product so i'm not gonna go through and add everything right now we could say like the fall coffee collection i don't know why i called it that but you could you could do that maybe we'll just put some text there just again so you guys can see what the text looks like the collection type could be automated or it could be manual so we can manually add things to this so i'm going to manually add them if we want and then down there of course the search engine optimization again we can add an image for this collection so i'm going to add an image right now and let's just say that it's going to look maybe that image right there so this there we go so collections are really easy to make there's not a whole lot to do here but i'm going to save that and we will be able to add the other products to this collection if we want and then the last thing on products is going to be gift cards not really a product but i guess it's something somebody could buy or you could give out to somebody and this is something that you can send e-gift cards i believe the plan that i chose doesn't include gift cards so you probably would have to upgrade from not just shopify basic but let's see if we have send a gift card see if it lets us do that oh it looks like it actually does let us do that for some reason i thought that i wasn't able to do that so just taking a look at the gift card here you'll see that we can change the code the value and of course the expiration date if you want one or not and this is something that so for example if you have an email list and i'll talk about that later on in the video but if you have an email list people can sign up with their name their email and maybe their birthday and it's something that i like to do on some different websites is on somebody's birthday if you're using like a mailchimp type integration you can have an email sent to them or you could send it manually to them and you could give people a gift card for example a discount's another way you could do this and we'll talk about discounts in a second down here but a gift card would be a great way to you know if you sell everything on your website for like a hundred dollars and you give someone a gift card for like 20 bucks uh yeah it's as good as cash but of course that 20 is basically like a 20 discount because everything on your site is is more expensive than that so it's a good way to encourage more sales but it could also be a gift if you want to give something away from your site you could definitely do that here so we could save it or we could just go back i'm going to discard this one so we'll leave page and of course we could sell gift cards as well and i think this is the one that oh it looks like okay so my plan definitely does allow for gift cards i don't know why i think you used to not be able to with the with the lowest plan but it looks like now you can so the gift card is something that you can have that people can buy for themselves or to send to somebody else and this one's going to be a little bit more detailed than the other one so we can add a description for that we can add an image and i recommend just like making an image of a gift card it's kind of a good way to do this and you can choose different denominations so people can buy a different amount of the gift card so gift cards are again very cool a great thing to do and especially selling gift cards i think is something that uh if somebody's trying to buy a gift for like their niece or nephew they don't always know what they want and a lot of times a gift card is what they go for so going down we have customers this is just i mean pretty self-explanatory it's going to be the data from your customers so it's going to show you like what they ordered and stuff like that i don't usually spend much time in here but if you're going to look at if somebody calls and they said that like something broke you can go back and look at what their order was or similarly you can look at maybe anecdotally like what people buy together and start getting a better idea of what your customers are interested in what they're buying and what kind of combos you're buying so you could recommend things side by side in the descriptions like i showed you earlier all right now the next tab on the left is analytics and we have three sub tabs here the first one is your dashboard obviously right now there's not a whole lot going on here because we have no traffic whatsoever yet so you don't have to worry about this but i just want to show you guys that it's going to be a tool that you can go in and visit once you start getting maybe 100 sales or 100 visits on your site and you'll start to get some meaningful analytics you'll start to see the conversions of different things where people actually get so you can say like if people add it to the cart and then they don't actually buy it you might say like all right there's some some conversion problem there where not enough people are actually buying it maybe they're finding cheaper prices elsewhere whatever the reason is it's going to give you some insight into where you can improve your website like i said we're still starting out so we don't worry about this reports live view kind of the same concept there but going down to marketing this is something that again once you have your website really set up we'll come back and start working on this but you'll see that we do have some cool things here we have some marketing apps and we'll get to apps down there but some of the good marketing ones like pinterest you have integrations with that snapchat ads honestly is something that is largely undervalued i mean i don't know the rate for every single industry but i know that there's far fewer people running snapchat ads than for example like facebook ads so it's something that you definitely want to consider doing check out these and of course marketing apps we'll get down to apps in a second but you can have campaigns and automations as well so automations would be a cool way to set up like sms bump for example if somebody signs up for some kind of like text or email list with you you can send the messages when there's a discount and that would be a marketing automation speaking of discounts you can actually set up individual discounts this one is super self-explanatory i really love using this and just like i said before with the gift cards sometimes i make discount codes and i'll set it up with mailchimp where i send out a discount code for somebody's birthday that way they'll get a discount they're more likely to you know splurge and buy themselves something on your website it's something that you win they get a discount it's a win-win you know pretty much for everybody involved but you could set up the discount code i'm just going to say like maybe mike is cool i think that's what i used in my other tutorial as well and we can make this a percentage a fixed amount uh free shipping is a cool one or you can make it like buy x get y is what they call it so maybe like you buy one get one or buy two get one free something like that and you can choose if it's all countries for free shipping and of course each one of these gives you slightly different options so percentage you'll see countries is no longer relevant there so we can say maybe we want uh like a 50 a 50 discount to all products or specific collections in here collections we should be able to see um what i say fall did i have the fall coffee collection there we go so we can say we want that one um and let's why did it say that let's cancel okay so fall coffee collection i don't know why i just said leave page that's a little bit of a weird thing right there and we can have minimum requirements if you want to set a you know spend more than a hundred dollars to get this or whatever it is and of course the eligibility it could be everybody it could be people that already purchased before whatever it is stuff like that so usage limits i usually just say one per customer so people don't end up doing it too much and we can have active dates if you want to set a start date and an end date so it'll tell you right there that's the summary of your of your discount so we can save this discount code and again this is something that you'll want to be sharing either on your email campaigns or maybe on your social medias for example if somebody's following you on twitter or pinterest or whatever it is then sharing this is going to incentivize people who are interested in your product already to actually go and make that purchase because now they're getting a discount so cool incentive to kind of lower the bar and get people to buy stuff then apps this is a big one this is really the bread and butter of shopify i mentioned this before but shopify is so powerful mainly because they have so many integrations so rather than just having a website that sells stuff you can do a lot more with this you can actually go and they have a couple examples here but let's go to uh like shipping for example you'll see that here we have something for returns and exchanges we have something else that you can have uh like like you'll have like a sms bump is another one where you'll get like whenever somebody orders you can just send them like a text message by default and they can track their order by text so really cool thing there and so if we visit the full shopify app store you'll see there are so many different integrations um you can set up like mailchimp and and pinterest and snapchat ads facebook stuff honey is a is a big discount one if you want to get they have deals through there uh just so many different things to look at i obviously can't touch even i can't even scratch the surface of this in this video but you just have a lot of options of course if you're interested in drop shipping oberlo is a really really really popular one so i mean some people made money early on some people didn't make as much money as it got a little more flooded but it's something that you know oberlo is it's something that you can get on shopify it integrates really well and it makes drop shipping a lot easier with shopify so i mean i'm not going to get into this too much because you guys get the idea here how there's just so much stuff that you can do and so definitely you know spend like a good hour looking through this and you'll find a lot of integrations and a lot of apps that'll work well on your site so that's everything on the left side that i wanted to talk about and you'll see now the next thing is sales channels and we can add sales channels if you want to have like ebay or if you want to sell things on messenger and another really cool thing about shopify is you can sell things through these other sale channels so you can have like a facebook shop set up you can have pinterest you can sell just by like a point of sale so if you have like a you could have it literally anywhere you want to have like your own website or whatever that's not this you can have a point of sale where people just go through kind of like paypal is a good example of that or square rather square's a good example of that and so that that's a great way to do that but ebay like a lot of other options here for buying stuff or for people to buy not just on your website to really expand your horizons but we're going to go down to online store so online store we finally get to customize our website i know we're probably like at minute 30 or 40 right now and we still have not customized our website but you'll see this is where we actually get to do that and to be you know to be honest like the most important part of your website is not necessarily the aesthetic of it right away it's setting up good products and good categories and all the infrastructure behind it so that customers have that smooth experience from finding the product to buying it to i mean hopefully not returning it but if they had to you want that to be something that's easy for them to do so going through these we can change the theme so the first thing we can view the theme you'll see what we have right now so if i just copied my domain so we'll just copy this copy this to a new tab you'll see that right now it's going to be really really boring i mean obviously nothing customized here but you honestly probably don't want to stick with the same theme that everybody uses for shopify it's something that i mean it's very recognizable and yeah it's a pretty solid theme but everybody's gonna know like right off the bat like oh this this guy didn't spend much time he just used the basic shopify theme so what we can do instead is go down and one thing you'll notice is that we have a password on there so we can disable that in a second but we can change the theme if we want to so changing the theme uh we have two libraries the shopify theme store and we have the free library so starting off with the free one i mean i like free stuff but the paid ones tend to look a little bit better let's go with the theme a free one for this video so as far as free ones go you'll see that each one of these might have a couple different options so a couple different different variations like this one i usually i usually like to go with this one and here's the three variations we have a snowboarding one an outdoor one a boxing one and really the difference is going to be the font and just kind of the slightly different layout and color scheme the images are completely replaceable you don't have to be a bouldering company to do this but let's go with let's go with this one for now so we're going to add this to our theme library which by default does not actually make it our active theme you'll see debut is still the active one so we can actually go and make this one our active one in a second but now let's actually go and publish this by disabling the password it's something that i mean you definitely have to do it if you want your site to be live so clicking on disable password brings you down to preferences you can just click disable password we're going to save that and we'll come back to preferences in a second but going back up to themes our website is now ready to go it's now live and we'll see that again debut is still right there but if we go down this is our theme library we have venture that's the one we just added and if we click on actions you can go down you can preview it of course or we can go and publish that so publishing that is going to make it our active theme and really the benefit of doing this is that you can customize so let's not publish yet let's look at what you can do you can go and customize this entire store before you go and publish it that way you're not editing your store in real time you're not editing a live store which means that you're never going to have somebody visiting your store and finding a broken site so very important thing to note when you install a new theme if you're going to kind of transfer your website to a new aesthetic it's good to customize that make sure it's all ready to go and then finally publish it so that you don't have to like i said so you don't have to worry about people visiting a broken store so let's go and publish this now and it'll be ready to go so we'll publish that and we will now have this one as our theme so now debut is down here as the kind of like the backup one in the library so we could go and publish this one again if we wanted but we're sticking with this one so the other actions you have of course you could duplicate it you could download the file edit the code stuff like that but we're gonna go and actually customize this eventually we'll touch on these but let's go and customize this so uh control click to open it in a new tab and here is our website now the thing with shopify is that when you're editing your website it's not laid out in the same way as uh like squarespace and wix and a lot of the other ones are more drag and drop and this one's a little bit more structured where you basically choose what you want so you might say like i want a slideshow then i want a ho i want an image with text and then i want my footer and you can customize each one of those but you can't just drag images anywhere you want on the screen so good and bad good because it's way easier to make and it's way easier to make sure that it's not going to break but bad because it's not quite as customizable as some of the alternatives out there so with that being said the first thing you want to note is scrolling down you'll see we have these different sections and the sections are lay down on the left side so we have like our slideshow section which is on the top i didn't mean to click on that but if we go down you'll have like your collection list here below that you have whatever from your home page you have an image with text here and for each one of them if for some reason you want this to be below the image with text we can click on the little six dot array and drag that down so we can click and drag it or we could hide it if you really just don't want to see that right now so i'm going to leave it there but if you're you know maybe just experimenting with different layouts you could hide it and then bring it back and and see what you actually like but as far as moving them around you can just click and drag now let's just say we want to add another section here we can add a section obviously by clicking add section and we have quite a few to choose from we could choose custom html if you're watching this video i just don't do that because it's a lot more advanced i don't recommend that unless you're gonna well never mind most people don't need to worry about that if you know you want that then you would know you want that the other ones we have like gallery we have image with text link logo list all kinds of different stuff here a newsletter a map rich text all kinds of different stuff so you can go through these and kind of experiment with which sections look best for your website but i could just say maybe i want to add like blog posts if i have blog posts we could have a little layout there with a couple of our blogs on the bottom of the home page so that somebody can read more about whatever we're doing maybe some how to make how to roast your own coffee beans or maybe our story whatever it is you can make your own blog post and share them on the bottom so i will select that and it brings us automatically into the editor for that but i'm going to click the back button to show you guys that you can edit any one of these sections just by clicking on for example image with text we click on that and it brings us into this layout where these are essentially the rows from left to right so this is the leftmost thing and then we have image with text and then if i want to add something to the right of that i could add content and this could be another image so you'll have another image over there and of course let's click back we can rearrange that so we can have two images and then the text we can have the text and then the two images or if we don't like it we can click on any one of these and remove it so remove is on the bottom and we can add the images as well so let's click on one say select image and we can upload an image that we have so let's go and upload maybe this one right here so we'll have this image once you upload you have to select it and then say select and as far as the text goes if we click back you can click on image with text and actually change whatever the heading is so from farm to table maybe that's like a common thing and then we can within here another great thing you kind of have a similar text editor here but fewer tools you can make it bold you can make it italic and of course you can make a link it's something that too many people don't use making links is great for linking to other products you have or other pages you have maybe an email list whatever it is so if we highlight uh maybe like chosen product then we can actually set this to link uh to if we go into link we can put any any url we want so we can we can add maybe another product on here so you can have the full domain for that or when you click on this you'll see that we have a couple other options as well so we can literally link to an individual product without typing in the whole domain uh same thing with collections pages blogs policies all kinds of stuff we can link to so let's just say products if we want to link to a product it shows us our products and we can link to that one so now when somebody clicks on the words chosen product it brings them to our product the kona coffee bean so we're going to insert that link and we are now ready to go with that of course you can also change the alignment if you want and let's click back so from here that's pretty much everything i want to do with this section but other sections i think you guys get the idea of how you would actually be editing them so if we click on like collections list you can go for each collection and select which one you want so maybe my fall coffee collection is the first one after that you can have another collection of maybe like coffee grinders maybe the other one would be coffee beans whatever you're looking for like you make individual collections and that's why we added that nice image with that and you'll have a pretty good layout here so you'll see that honestly setting it up with shopify is really easy to do like everything you just click it and then you just keep inputting information until you have what you want and that you can rearrange things however you need to by dragging them up and down so it's all it's very easy to do this the other thing is we have theme settings and theme actions i'm not going to do that just yet because the other thing to note is that we do have another page we have our catalog page and so uh i guess i didn't even mention in the middle of this guys the entire thing in the middle is interactive this is kind of like how our whole site would look so i could click on catalog to go there similarly i could instead go to the top click on the drop down menu and go to any one of our other pages so we have a lot of pages more than you see right here so yeah home and catalog that's great but there are more pages with the store so we have like a cart page we've got a checkout page and unfortunately you're also going to need a 404 error page so hopefully nobody ever ends up on this but i mean i have a lot of websites where the error page is one of the more visited pages and it's not because my website has broken links in it it's sometimes because people share it and they misspell it or whatever happens if especially if you share the link verbally or over a video like this a lot of times people might type it in wrong and so they'll end up on a 404 page which is why you want to make sure that this is looking as good as possible you want to make sure it works and redirects people back to your home page so they can continue shopping and they're not confused or lost and of course you can also customize the header and stuff like that from here so i'm not going to get too much into that let's go back to another page if we look at the for example product pages each individual product is going to have this page you kind of make like one template for all your products and the good thing is remember how we added that description and the price and and the compare price all that different stuff you'll see this is what it actually shows up as so the the description is going to be down here you'll see that we have that bold text right there we could have a link in there we have links to our socials right now they're probably not actually our socials so you want to make sure that yeah there you go you want to make sure that you're actually setting up your social links there or else just get rid of those and this looks really good this was really easy to make this page we didn't even do anything we just set up the product and gave it our information and we already have this page so product page looks awesome but you could customize it if you wanted to um and product recommendations another thing i forgot to mention this product recommendations is something that really can upsell other products so you can have something like you might also like something else and if you have a dynamic it'll essentially improve with time so as people start to buy more things together you see this on amazon where it's like customers also viewed and it's something that if done correctly which i mean it will over time do this correctly most of the time it'll suggest things that are more likely to be sold together so that's basically everything we want to see with that if we go back to home we can go back on here and the other thing would be theme settings and theme actions so theme settings or wait before we do that let's really quickly go up and click save never forget to click save i've too many times you forget i have forgotten to click save and you lose a lot of work you'll see the site is live because we did publish this one if it's not live it's because we didn't publish it but we can go to theme settings and theme settings is where you can change the colors the font the collections page social media like i said you want to make sure that your social medias are actually set up so you don't just have those icons that lead nowhere or maybe to like shopify's shopify's twitter you don't want that so make sure you have your social media accounts set up correctly here definitely don't miss this step and then of course our icon another step that a lot of people forget you'll see up here we have the shopify logo on our browser and this is something that uh you want to make sure you're adding your own logo there so if we go right here our little icon is going to be whatever we want we could just add sure i don't even care let's make it this but you want it to be like a small version of your logo just so it's easier to i don't know it's easier to see and recognize on a browser this is obviously a terrible example but by default it's better than the little globe that's already there so if we go back we can change the checkout page and and that's pretty much that's pretty much everything we'll be looking at in theme settings but again one of the most important things you can change uh within this entire tutorial is these things right here you want to make sure you have the right icon you have the right social media and of course you make sure the color scheme looks good as well so click back and we can go down to theme actions not a whole lot of stuff here theme actions are not really especially interesting to me right now uh so we can actually go and save this we'll save it and before we exit i want to point out that even though you're making this on a desktop or a laptop and you assume a lot of people would view it there a lot of people actually end up shopping on their phone so if we go and click on this we can view it on mobile or in full screen just to make sure that it's still looking good in all different layouts so you want to make sure that if people are shopping on their phone it's not all screwed up it's not all backwards and everything and it's not in a really weird clunky order so definitely don't forget to check out mobile i remind people in every video uh just because it's really important to do that okay so now let's go back let's exit and there's some other things on the dashboard here that i want to talk about all right now the next thing below themes we already were working on customizing this the next thing is blog post and blog post is something that not every website needs not everyone should have it but it's a great way to gain some organic traffic and it's a great way to better engage with people who are visiting your site so whether they're fans or people that are just more interested in learning about their products blog posts are a great way to kind of engage with audi with an audience and it helps improve conversions it helps improve traffic and overall it's generally a good thing to have on on a store not every store needs it of course but it's something that i kind of recommend for a lot of stores now one that does this very very well is actually wegmans they're a grocery store very big at least like i live near philly so big it was a really big over here but uh what they do if you go to their website they actually have um their entire like recipe section and because they're a grocery store their recipes are kind of like a blog and you can read different recipes and they have buttons that are just like add add to cart for all the different ingredients you need within the recipes so that's a really big example i don't think they actually use shopify but it's an example of where a blog would really help online shopping of course you could do something similar if it's like you sell sewing machines you can have blogs about how to sew different patterns how to make different things with your sewing machine and if somebody's looking up like how to sew a pillow and they end up on your blog and then you have the link to your sewing machine or you're selling materials there then it's a better there's a way better chance that whoever was looking that up is now potentially going to buy from you so blogs are very powerful you can create a blog post here and i'm not going to go through the whole process because you'll see it's it's pretty similar to what we saw before you're going to want to do a little bit more editing in this field because the whole content is going to be there adding images it's by no means my favorite editor for a blog but i mean it's a simple little way to do this you can add a featured image add your title um add your search engine optimization here so i like your metadata it's going to be the little description on google and of course the preview down there so not the best tool for making blogs but it's something that it's still you know for shorter blogs this definitely gets the job done so then we have pages i showed you uh the ones we have right now but we could add other pages to our store and so if we add a page uh again it's going to look pretty simple not a whole lot going on here but we could go and edit that when we're customizing um the entire the website so i'm not going to do a whole lot with this right now but you'll see that i mean you can add some stuff if you want to have like for example a terms of service page really easy to dislike copy and paste whatever you wrote for your terms of service right here maybe disclaimers maybe use policies stuff like that you can add all of that right here return policy is a great example as well so that's how you add a page like that definitely super easy to do for basic pages but i wouldn't want to make something look aesthetic using that little tiny window now navigation is going to be essentially what's on the top and bottom so the menu if we go over here you'll see on my site i have home and catalog we have way more pages than that but those are the only ones showing up there so if we go to our main menu we can customize that and add different things maybe you can add a product maybe you could add different like collections to the top if you want to have like my fall coffee collection if i want to add that to my menu i could save that and then it will be uh it'll be up here now i probably didn't publish but it'll end up like right up here is where it's going to end up so that's how you can add different things in your navigation again really great tool and so easy to do to just like if you click on link they give you all the options right there so you don't have to type in the exact link for everything it's very easy to just look and find the blogs if you go to blog it'll give you the list of the blogs you have and just put that article there so i'm going to cancel and that's my main menu right now you can do something very similar with the footer and usually the footer is where people like to add disclaimers and and you know terms of service return policies contact information people like to add that to the bottom actually i would recommend getting rid of search uh i don't really like having search on my footer or really anywhere i think search is something that it tends to just cause problems for me sometimes people search and they end up not finding what they're looking for if you don't have the tags labeled correctly so let's go back and then we have domains now domains is going to be uh obviously completely essential to having a good website so it's not mike's dash premium dash coffee dash of beans dot myshopify.com not a good look not professional so if we go and buy a new domain you could of course like connect an existing domain transfer one or you can buy a new domain a lot easier to do it that way and you're gonna buy it directly through shopify so i could just buy like mike's premium coffeebeans.com and uh it'll just automatically link that up and it's really easy to do so if we just go to buy new domain i'm not gonna do it in this tutorial but let's just say mike's premium coffee.com and it tells you right there fourteen dollars a year looks like it is available that's great oh nope it's not available mike's premium coffeebeans.com that's definitely gonna be available there we go so you could buy that 14 bucks a year real easy to get so like i said you just click buy and you're ready to go and then the last thing is down in preferences well not quite the last thing we're going to settings in a second but in preferences this is stuff that is going to help when you're sharing uh your website so how it's showing up in google how it's showing up if somebody shares it on social media so facebook for example you want to make sure you have a good image and a good title um for your your home page in general like your website so let's just say we want that to be our main thing we want a home page title so mike's premium and we can add a meta description as well now google analytics account stuff like that you can really set up like your facebook pixel and do all kinds of different stuff here i have a whole video on how to set up google analytics and another one on facebook pixel so you guys can check that out after this video i'll link them down below you can also head over to our channel this is central media so check out the full channel for all different kinds of marketing tools tips stuff like that and of course leave a comment as well guys if you have any questions about how to do this stuff any comments on on how we're doing this tutorial just let us know share in the comment section below i really appreciate that now let's go down to settings so let's oh forgot to save see that's what i'm saying you always have to click save i'm really glad that it reminds you to click save all right so now if we click on settings you have a lot of other stuff and i mean if i go through all these it's going to take forever but you can go down and manage like your legal pages here and usually they have like some templates that they have so refund policy you can create it from a template really really easy just click yeah privacy policy from template so easy to do that and it makes a page for each of those i showed you earlier how you could do that but doing it from here is just so easy to do so i'm going to save and now we have the templates that shopify already made so for the most part they're probably going to be relatively robust i mean this is by no means legal advice guys i highly recommend if you have an online store consult with an attorney a lawyer and make sure that everything's right and make sure that i mean read these and make sure that you agree with everything before just posting that but it does give you a pretty good head start when using these little templates just to make things a lot easier so other than that we have some things like files and shipping delivery uh we can set up payments as well so you want to make sure that you set up payments for uh if you're using shopify payments uh which is going to have uh zero percent transaction fee you can also have like paypal amazon pay third party ones if you probably want to use like i don't know square whatever you have a lot of different options here so very easy to accept payments with pretty much any credit card out there like i don't even i don't even know what some of these are like i don't i don't know what i don't know what that one is to be honest so payments you can set that up there's a lot of stuff here i'm not going to dive into all of these guys that's a lot more advanced if you would like me to in a future video leave a comment and i'll go through all the settings in another video but like i said really the big one is going to be the legal documents adding that and adding the payment methods making sure you're all set up with that and of course shipping and delivery is the third one you want to make sure that you have shipping setups you have uh you're the right location if there's local pickup if there's local delivery if there's regular shipping uh whatever you're doing you want to really customize that and then check the rates and figure out how you're going to do the shipping here so you don't end up you know double paying for shipping or somehow you're just getting kind of getting messed up later on down the road so guys that's what i wanted to show you with how to set up a shopify store again very very powerful a lot of tools a good thing about shopify is a lot of it is just really intuitive they give you some little videos here a nice little checklist on how to do stuff so like i said i didn't set up payments i didn't set up shipping yet either and once you do those you're pretty much ready to go so i hope you guys found this video helpful if you did consider liking and subscribing and as i said guys you can start off by clicking the link in the description and that will give you a free trial for using shopify thanks for watching guys i'm mike o'brien this is santro media and we'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Santrel Media

Views: 47,647

Keywords: nate o'brien, mike o'brien, santrel media

Id: 7--_KA2sy9Y

Length: 51min 37sec (3097 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 17 2021