How to open an online store

1. Select an ecommerce platform

You can create and launch an online store, sell products, and fulfill orders using an ecommerce platform. An ecommerce platform can be compared to a website builder. You simply list new products and take payments online. They can do much more.

Your ecommerce platform is your control center. It manages everything, from marketing to inventory, and gives you all the tools to sell online as well as customer support.

The following are key features you should look out for in an ecommerce platform:

• Usability. Easy use. This is especially important if you’re just starting with ecommerce. To create an online store, you should look for a tool with intuitive features and a drag-and-drop store builder. To find out more, schedule a demo or a free trial.

• Accessible customer service You should look for a platform that provides support throughout the process. Shopify is a great platform to help you launch your website or migrate it from another program. They also offer ongoing support. Live chat, email, and phone support are available in 19 languages.

• Friction-free checkout. A simplified checkout is crucial for sales. Shopify is an ecommerce platform that makes shopping easy. Shopify’s Shop Pay simplifies online shopping, increasing checkout speed four-fold. Shopify also offers plug-ins that allow you to use more than 100 payment gateways to accept different payment methods and currencies.

• Web hosting. Web hosting stores your website’s information in a server database. Web hosting is required to allow people to access your online shop. Some ecommerce software comes with web hosting, while others require that you use a third-party solution.

Consider your future and current needs when choosing an ecommerce platform. While some platforms might be best for today, Shopify is a powerful platform that can help you get started and support your future growth.

Shopify offers a free trial and you can build your online store using one of our professionally created templates. If you follow the guide, you’ll have enough time to set up an online store and launch it within 14 days.

2. Choose a target audience

Your target audience is the people you want to market to. Knowing your target audience is crucial when starting an ecommerce company. This helps you to find new customers and attract buyers to your site, which leads to higher conversion rates and greater sales.

Depending on the products you intend to sell, you can create an audience of any size and attribute. As an ecommerce entrepreneur, you should be aware of three key categories.

• Demographics. This includes characteristics such as gender, age, occupation, education, income, and so on.

• Location. Geographical location groups are used to divide the market so that you can better serve a particular area.

• Interests. Based on psychographics. It includes attitudes, personality, and opinions.

It is easier to choose a target audience if you already have a product. Think about who is likely to buy your product. What is their personality? What is their age? This information can be used to create a buyer profile and included in your business plans. It will be useful when you write your website copy or market campaigns.

Even if you don’t yet have a product, think about who you are most familiar with. Perhaps you are a pet lover and can understand the needs of pet owners in their 50s and 60s. You probably have an idea of their likes and dislikes, as well as their fears and needs. This could be your target audience.

You must be able to connect with your target audience to sell online. 

3. Select your products

Finding profitable products to market is one of the greatest challenges for entrepreneurs. Although it can be difficult to come up with product ideas, if you know your target audience, you are one step ahead. There are many ways to sell products, regardless of whether you’re manufacturing or reselling.

There are many ways to find profitable products that you can sell:

• Attract enthusiastic hobbyists
• Follow your passions
• Take advantage of trends early
• Take a look at the latest trends in online marketplaces

4. Your site design

You’ll first need to sign up for a Shopify trial before we can begin. This guide will give you 14 days to set up your online store and launch it. Remember that you can add products to your online store and keep it updated after it goes live.

When you start your trial, you’ll be prompted to enter a store name, which will become your default URL (e.g., storename.myshopify.com). This will remain the default URL, and you won’t have the ability to modify it. However, you can purchase a custom domain (e.g. yourstore.com) later. So don’t fret about choosing the perfect name.

After answering some questions, you will be able to log into your Shopify account.

Here is a quick list of things you need to have before you start and what I will be using to help you open your store.

• An idea for a business. Because so many hot sauce companies boast about their “hottest hot sauce ever,” it was fun to start a store called Kinda HOT Sauce, which sells mild hot sauces that are great tasting and easy to use. You can also browse our list of business ideas if you don’t yet have a business plan.

• A business name. Before I settled on a business name, I checked Namechk if any of my ideas for business names were available on social media and as a domain. I chose kinda hot sauce. shop for the domain because it was difficult to find some.com URLs. Are you unsure what name to give your store? You can learn how to choose a domain, or use Shopify’s no-cost domain generator.

• A logo. This logo was created by me and a designer for a “challenger” brand. It’s bold, clever, mischievous, bold, and spicy. (Tongue in cheek for mild hot sauce companies). It’s easy to resize the.png file without losing quality. To create your logo

• Photos. Clear product photography allows you to put your best foot forward. For lifestyle imagery, I will be using mockups of hot sauce bottles against a white background. You can also use stock photos to create your custom lifestyle photos if you have a limited budget. 

TIP – Shopify’s smart search bar can be used to navigate directly to pages, products, or settings if you are unsure of where to perform an action or are unable to locate the location you need.

1. Add your products

You don’t need to have anything to sell online. You should add products to your online store as soon as possible. Your products will be the basis of the design of your website’s look and feel.

To create your first product listing in Shopify, navigate to Products > Create a product.

We’ll make many decisions on this page. Let’s break them down into steps.

WRITTEN YOUR PRODUCT TITLE & DESCRIPTION

Customers can find information about products on product pages. It’s important to share the right information, whether it be pricing or sizing. You can find inspiration from other online shops in your area if you are unsure what information to include when creating your website.

The product title must clearly state the product’s purpose. This is what your customers will see when they visit your store. It will also help them locate what they are looking for in your catalog. Keep it brief and include your product description (more later).

We’ll use Hot Enough Habanero as our first product name for our first product.

Product descriptions describe your product and help you sell it. These descriptions are also common sources of writer’s block. To write compelling product descriptions, you don’t have to be a professional copywriter. All you need is:

• Get to know your audience. Describe what your customer needs to buy your product.

• Highlight incentives Are you able to offer free shipping or a generous return policy? Are your products eco-friendly? Think about the features, benefits, and offers that matter. These selling points are often communicated quickly by stores using icons and text.

• Anticipate common questions or objections. What could make a customer hesitate before buying? Do they fear buying the wrong size? Are they concerned about allergic reactions? Are they required to know if your products are ethically manufactured?

• Make it easy to read your text. Your descriptions will be easier to read if you use bullet points, bullet points, and bold text. Next, ask yourself how fast a visitor can find the information they are looking for.

• Let customers experience your product. Customers cannot touch, feel, or feel your products. You can make your products more real by sharing information about the materials used, such as a sizing guide, or describing the process behind making them. It all depends on the product.

Hot sauce is a product that customers are likely to care about. We can assume they will be concerned about ingredients, flavor, quantity, and how spicy it tastes. My store visitors have all the information they need at their fingertips.

UPLOAD PRODUCT PHOTOS OR OTHER MEDIA

You can upload any visual media to the Media Section of your product page. These include photos, GIFs, and videos.

The presentation is everything. Make it possible for customers to imagine themselves owning your product. Let them see your product in action, or proudly displayed in their space. These are some points to keep in mind:

• High-quality photos should show your products at their best. Avoid low-resolution or blurry images.

• Keep your product photos in the same aspect ratio. This means that they should be the same width and height. When you set up your online store, this consistency will give it a professional look.

• You can shoot high-quality product photos with most smartphones, even if you have a limited budget. You can also use free photo editors to edit them (like removing which allows you to remove the background completely for free).

• You can click on an image after uploading it to make basic edits such as cropping or resizing. To make your photos more accessible to those who are blind or unable to see them, you can edit the Alt Text. To help people with visual impairments shop with me, I have written: “a 150ml bottle Hot Enough Habanero by Kinda Hot Sauce”. 

A single image of a hot sauce bottle will be used on a white background. Multiple photos can be used to increase customer trust for products that require more visual information such as clothing and jewelry.

SET YOUR PRICE

It’s now time to determine the price of your product for listing. This is the price your customers will pay for your product.

You can also use the Compare price field to show how much the product would normally cost, particularly in the event of a sale. If we want to show savings by buying a hot sauce three-pack we can enter the original price for three bottles here. This is a bad idea, especially if you sell premium products. It could lower the quality of your products.

Optional is the Cost per Item field. You can also use it to track profit margins for individual products if you wish. This allows you to track profit in your Profit Report if you have the Shopify Plan or higher.

There are exceptions to the rule, but businesses selling goods and services must collect taxes every time someone orders. We’ll check this box and set our tax settings later.

We’ll keep it simple and assume that my per-product cost is $5. This means that the cost to package one bottle of wine and produce one bottle of wine costs me $5. I will make a healthy margin if I sell each bottle at $15. This leaves room for marketing and discounts.

Pricing is not always straightforward. How you price your products can be affected by many factors, including shipping costs, raw materials, overhead such as rent or employees, time cost, and most importantly, your perception of quality.

Tip – Don’t assume lower prices will result in higher sales. Customers use price to determine quality. You should price premium products as such if you have compelling and professional branding.

Based on the information you gather after you have started marketing, you can always revise and adjust your pricing. Customers may pay more for your products. Or, you might find creative ways to reduce costs and increase the value of each order.

INVENTORY

We wouldn’t have to keep track of inventory if we were dropshipping and printing on demand. We need to track inventory in Shopify because Kinda Hot Sauces makes and sells its hot sauce.

You might be unfamiliar with some terms if you’re selling online for the first time. We’ll go over them quickly.

• SKU. This stock keeps unit tracks and manages your inventory for certain products and variants. You can easily identify the item by using numbers and letters.

• Bar code. Bar codes (UPC, GTIN, etc.) These codes are used when you sell products or want to add scannable barcodes to your items to simplify inventory management. Since we are making and selling our products, you can leave this field blank.

• Quantity. It is the amount of a product that you have in stock. You can display multiple inventory locations in Shopify. In my case, I am starting with 10 small bottles of each hot sauce. Then, I will use my space to store inventory.

It takes very little time to produce more products. However, you can toggle “Continue Selling when Out of Stock” to turn it on. You can also mark items as “Sold Out” if you have limited inventory or take longer to replenish.

SHIPPING

You’ll need to enter shipping information to automatically calculate shipping costs and print shipping labels for each order.

We’ll verify that my Kinda Hot Sauce Store is a physical product and then enter the following information.

• Weight. Weight of one single bottle. I will enter 0.5 pounds.
• Customs information. If you intend to sell internationally, this is very important. Since Kinda Hot Sauce is manufactured in Canada, we’ll use “Canada” as the country. The search bar will allow you to locate the Harmonised System Code for condiments which are 21309.

This tutorial will help you determine the shipping costs and other options that your customers will receive.

OPTIONS

Although I won’t be setting up product options, I want to show you how Shopify can do this. Many Shopify store owners already do.

You can add different versions to your product instead of making each product a separate product. Each option can be given its image, price, and tracked inventory.

You can also drill down on your options by offering multiple colors in different sizes.

You will need to set the Media and Pricing sections for each variant.

This section will be left as is since our product only comes in one size. You should edit the product pages for any variants you sell of the same product.

ORGANISATION AVAILABILITY AND PRODUCTS

You can label products in the Organisation section to make it easier for you to organize them, create product lists, curate products for customers, and apply discounts or rules to certain products. Let’s see what each label is.

• Product availability You have many options to sell your products, including Amazon and Facebook Shops. We’ll get into that later. Your product will not be visible if it isn’t available in the online store.

• Product type This is a product category you can use for identifying certain products (e.g. a tee-shirt). Only one product type can be used for each product. We will only use hot sauce.

• Vendor This refers to the manufacturer, wholesaler, or third-party seller of the product. This allows you to filter your product list by the vendor. This can help speed up the ordering process. Quite Hot Sauce is the manufacturer so we’ll list that as the vendor.

• Tags: tags are keywords you can associate with your product. Multiple tags can be added to a product to make it easier for customers to find it using your online store’s search engine. Tags can be used to automate tasks in your online store, such as adding a product that has a particular tag to a certain collection. Since I don’t see any reason to use tags, I’m going to leave it blank.

• Collections: collections are very important. You can organize your products and create collections for specific audiences and purposes. An apparel company could have a collection that includes products for women and men. Multiple collections can include the same product. After we have added more products, we will be establishing our collections.

PREVIEW SEARCH ENGINE LISTING

You can modify how search engine results display pages in the search engine listing preview. You can also improve the visibility of your products using search engines such as Google.

To increase your chances of appearing in search engine results, it is helpful to know the keywords that your target customer uses to search for similar products to yours.

To find out how many people are searching for keywords related to my products, I used Ubersuggest to do keyword research. I found “habanero” (5,400 searches a month), “mild sauce” (590 searches a month), and “medium sauce” (50 searches a month) as keywords that I might want to incorporate into my product page.

While we’ll be more in-depth about SEO later on, here are some tips to optimize this section.

• Page title. Your page title should include your target keywords, but be concise and clear enough to be clicked on. Because it is the most relevant for this product, I will focus on medium hot sauce. To ensure your title isn’t cut off in search results, keep it to under 60 characters. Medium Hot Sauce” as my page title.

• Description. This space can be used to present any compelling information that could persuade searchers, whether they see the link in search results or via social media. While I keep my page title short and sweet, I expand on the information in my description.

• URL and handle. This should be simple, unique, and meaningful for those who use search engines to locate your product. I’ll be using “/hot-enough-habanero,”

After we are done, you can save and view our product page to check what it looks like. You can modify the details like fonts and colors later when you customize your store.

This can be repeated for every product that you wish to add to your online store. However, you don’t have to include all of your products to launch your business.

ORGANIZING PRODUCTS INTO COLLECTIONS

We now have at least a few products, so we can organize them into collections under Products > Collections in Shopify.

You can create collections to help you target specific audiences (e.g. bestsellers, children’s products) or product categories (e.g. accessories). You can choose to add or remove products manually based on price tags or other conditions.

There are many reasons why collections can be useful, including:

• You can pull certain products you wish to show in a section of your homepage

• To help different users navigate quickly through your catalog, you can link to products collections in your navigation or your homepage

• You can put items on sale by curating them (or applying discounts to certain collections).

For the moment, I will be creating a collection of medium hot sauces. This is because I only want to include the three hot sauce products that I make and not the bundle. This allows me to highlight each flavor and the bundle individually.

Based on how I want visitors to feel when they arrive at this collection page, I will fill out the collection title/description. You can fill out the search engine preview using the same best practices as for product pages. A collection image can be added to the search engine preview. This will be used to show your collection in the customizing step of creating an online store.

2. Online shopping pages created for your store

We’ve mainly focused on products so far. When you start your online shop, you will need more than products. It should help customers understand your business and give them reasons for trusting you.

These pages can be created under Online Shop > Pages.

While you don’t have to prepare all of your pages for launch, it is a good idea to include the following:

• Contact page. This page provides customers with clear ways to contact you if they have any questions. It also points them to an area where they can find answers such as the FAQ page.

• About Page. Your About page is a way to connect with customers and share your motivations for starting your business. An About persuasive page can make it easy to gain the trust of new brands. Keep this in mind as you build your online store.

• FAQ. You can find answers to some of the most common customer support questions on our frequently asked questions page.

• Policies pages. You can create certain pages that customers expect, which can protect you in the event of disputes. These include your privacy and return policies.

We will be creating an About page (called “Our Story”) and a Contact page. This tutorial also covers the essential policy pages (Privacy, Shipping, and Terms of Service). However, you can make any pages that you feel will help you win customers’ trust.

ABOUT THIS PAGE

About pages can be a great way for you to embrace the small in your business and gain trust as a new merchant when you start your online shop.

A video can be uploaded introducing you as a founder. Links to awards and mentions in the press, and images explaining your supply chain are all possible. You can also include any information that will help this page communicate with your customers about who you are and what you stand for.

We’ll create an online store for Kinda Hot Sauce with a simple About Page that acts as a letter to customers. It explains our philosophy, and why we started the business.

If someone comes into my store but isn’t convinced to buy, I want to send them a warm and sincere message.

We’ll be relying mainly on the text so I’ll make the copy more appealing by using the formatting options in the toolbar.

You should customize the Search Engine Listing Preview section of your pages just as you did for products. It should be based on the URL you want and the order you want it to appear in search engine results.

CONTACT PAGES

Customers will search for your Contact Page to ask questions or receive support.

Shopify themes allow you to create one quickly. Create a new page by going to the Template Section. Select the Contact template. You should now add a contact form to your page. This will allow you to write instructions for customers to contact you or link to other pages (such as an FAQ) to help them solve their problems.

To make customer support more accessible, you can also install live chat applications.

POLICY PAGES

Online businesses should have policy pages. These pages give customers an overview of how your business operates and what they can expect from you. They can also protect you in the event of a dispute with a customer.

You can create templates under Settings> Legal in Shopify. These templates can be customized to suit your business and local laws.

• Return policy. How do you handle exchanges and returns? What is the minimum time customers must return the product? What product condition is required? Customers can buy with confidence from you by offering a generous return policy.

• Privacy policy. Privacy policies describe how you collect customer information.

• Terms and conditions of service. This agreement is between you and your customers and outlines how you will work and what rights you have.

• Shipping policy. This policy will help you to set expectations with your customers about shipping costs, manufacturing time, and delivery times for the areas you ship to.

These templates should not be considered legal advice. )

3. Create an online shop that is completely customizable

We now have some products and pages in our store, so it’s time for us to head to Online Shop > Themes on Shopify to start planning what our website will look like.

CHOOSE A THEME

First, choose a theme. This is a template that we use in our online store to help us design. The Shopify Template Store has both free and paid themes. Each theme comes with its set features and styles.

Some themes are designed for large product catalogs while others are intended for single-product businesses. Some themes are designed for specific industries or types, like the Express theme restaurant.

These are the key points to remember when choosing the right theme to build your store.

• There are many styles to choose from for each theme. Make sure you shop around to find the right theme for your products and your store’s aesthetic. The goal is to make online shopping easy.

• You should consider whether the theme you are looking at offers any features that you require, such as a search bar that automatically completes queries or a section that displays press releases. Remember that there are also paid Shopify Apps that can be added to your store website.

• You shouldn’t choose a theme solely based on fonts or colors. These are all options that you can change later. Shopify Experts can help you make your theme unique.

• A paid theme can be tried before you buy it.

• Keep in mind, however, that you don’t have to stick with the theme you choose. You can always change your mind and install other themes in your store.

After trying out a few themes, such as Debut or Narrative I decided to go with Brooklyn (Playful Style). Kinda Hot Sauce is a small company and doesn’t need many features to get off to the right start. The modern product grid layout, simplicity of the navigation menu, and emphasis Brooklyn places on visual branding are all things I love.

DESIGN YOUR HOMEPAGE

Each theme has sections you can arrange, add, remove, or temporarily hide. You can use sections to help you choose the layout of your store’s homepage.

When designing your homepage, consider the goals that a website must achieve and how they relate to your business.

• First-time visitors should be given priority. Help them understand your business and what it sells.

• Returning customers should be accommodated and made easy to navigate to the pages and products they are looking for.

• Every scroll should be used to increase interest in your products, and build trust in your company.

• Your visitors should be able to follow clear steps based on what they are looking for. For those who are interested in learning more about your company, you might include an About Us page. Or you could highlight your collections so that visitors can choose the products they want.

• Consider your mobile visitors when designing your homepage.

Over time, you will revisit your homepage and make changes. Do not let perfection stop you from moving forward with the launch.

These sections will be used to make Kinda Hot Sauce.

1. Slideshow (with one slide) to grab attention immediately with clever copy explaining why this brand is different from other hot sauce brands. “Not the World’s Hottest Hot Sauce,” breaks the mold while communicating my brand’s message with the tagline “Spice that’s nice.” I’ve added an overlay and increased its opacity to make my text legible over my image.
2. Featured Collection to highlight the three hot sauces from the Medium Hot Sauce collection that I created earlier. The slideshow has given me an impression. I will expand that impression by making a bold statement about my products. “Delicious hot salsa doesn’t need to be deadly.”
3. To summarise my brand’s positioning, and to highlight my store’s reasons for being there with a link back to its About page. My logo will be my image, but I could also use a photo with you, the founder, or another image that best represents your brand.
4. Newsletter to encourage people to sign up for an email newsletter. My store is not for everyone. When I drive traffic to my store, I give them the incentive to sign up for my email list (mildly spiced recipes in this instance).
5. Featured Product to highlight my hot sauce bundle and the savings it will bring to insecure customers. This last option is to provide one final way to purchase for customers who scroll down to my homepage and don’t click anything.

However, I may expand my homepage in the future to include a section explaining how hot “hot enough” really is or a gallery of blog posts sharing my hot sauce recipes. Although I will never know if my decisions on my homepage were the right ones until marketing begins, I feel confident about this layout.

When designing your homepage, be sure to prioritize information. It is often easier to have less information than you need. Don’t try to stuff as much information as possible onto your homepage. Instead, direct your visitors to pages that will help sell your business and explain other non-essential information.

CUSTOMISE YOUR NAVIGATION MENU

The Header section allows you to make changes to the topmost part of your online shop, which includes your navigation menu and cart.

As this is how visitors will navigate your site, we’ll be focusing on creating a clear navigation menu.

In the header section, you have three options for navigation:

• Navigation main. This menu allows you to prioritize which navigation routes you wish to offer customers.

• Footer navigation. Here you can keep links to pages that are not essential but may distract visitors. Online shoppers know where to find information such as your Return policy or Contact page.

• Search. You can activate the search bar at the header to help users navigate to the information they are looking for. This is particularly useful if your website has a large product catalog and multiple pages.

It’s not a good idea to overload people with too many choices. Instead, organize your navigation so that you prioritize the actions you want users to take, with a particular focus on shopping.

I will create a simple navigation system for Kinda Hot Sauce.

• Surface my medium hot sauce Collection and three-pack bundles under the Homepage with a featured Collection section.

• Nestle my Our Story page using an Image and text section.

• Use a featured product section to include a bestselling product.

To make my non-essential pages of policy visible at the bottom of my website, I will also create a menu for my footer.

Tip – You can create a dropdown list without linking to a page. Enter a # under the Link and drag any submenu items that you wish to include underneath it.

CHOOSE YOUR COLOURS, TYPOGRAPHY, AND OTHER THEME SETTINGS

When you create your online store, color and typography are important components of your brand’s visual identity. You can customize the overall look and feel of your online store by clicking the Theme Settings tab within the editor.

You don’t have to be a designer to build your store. Here are some tips:

For colors

• Take into account the psychology behind color. Consider how different colors can make people feel. Red makes people hungry, yellow gives them safety, and purple can give off a royal feeling.

• Contrast is a great way to highlight key features on your homepage like buttons.

• To find the colors you love and the hex codes associated with them, use a tool such as Colours.

• Do not be afraid to follow your instincts or keep it simple if in doubt (even if it is a simple black-and-white color scheme).

Because I wanted Kinda Hot Sauce to be bold and colorful, I created the following color scheme. Although I won’t use all of them, I do have enough to make a variety that I like.

• #392B58
• #FF0035
• #F7EE7F
• #654597
• #574AE2

Typography

• You should choose two fonts to be used across your store, a maximum of three.

• You should choose a font that is easy to read (sans serif fonts such as Helvetica)

• To experiment with different font pairings, use a tool such as FontJoy.

We’ll use two fonts for our store:

• Headings Lora
• Accent text Roboto
• Body text Roboto

Tip: In your Theme Settings you can create a Favicon (usually your logomark) which will be displayed in browser tabs and bookmarks. The Shopify logo can be seen in the tab on this page. This is our favicon.

CUSTOMISE YOUR CHECKING OUT

You can customize the look and feel of your checkout by going to Theme Options. To give your checkout a brand feel, you can add your logo.

You can customize the way your checkout works by clicking through (or going to Setting > Checkout).

Here are some quick tips to help you make the right choice about your checkout.

• Customer accounts. Customers can decide whether they want to open an account during checkout. This is useful if your store is wholesale or members-only. Since we don’t want unnecessary friction in our checkout experience, we’ll disable it in our store.

• Contact with customers. Customers can choose how to contact you after placing an order. This could be via email or SMS text messages. To keep things simple, I will select “Customers can only checkout with email” and concentrate on building an email database that I can market to.

• Form options. You can choose whether additional information such as a company name or first name should be hidden or optional at checkout. We don’t require all of this information to fulfill each order for Kinda Hot Sauce. I will make most of it optional.

• Order processing. There are options to speed up the process or add an extra confirmation step. We will use the shipping address of the customer as the billing address and allow autocomplete for addresses to save customers time.

• Marketing consent. Customers can subscribe to your marketing emails at checkout. It’s a smart idea to turn these on, as we want to stay in touch with our customers after they make a purchase.

• Tipping. Customers can tip you by adding a tip to an online order to show their support.

• For customers who abandon their checkout, You can send an automated reminder email to these customers. Our automated email will go out 10 hours after a customer abandons their checkout. This allows you to keep your store fresh and gives them more time to think about their purchase.

If you are unsure, make a list of the options that will reduce friction for most of your customers.

ASK FOR FEEDBACK

When you have spent so much time creating your online shop, feedback is an invaluable gift. Sometimes, fresh eyes can spot areas you need to improve and offer invaluable insight that can be used to make improvements to your store.

Your store defaults to being password protected. However, you can give the password to others so they can check it out. You can change your password or find out how to change it under Online Shop > Preferences.

Other great places to get feedback are:

• You can trust your closest friends to provide honest and constructive feedback
• Subscribe to subreddits where your target customers might be interested
• Facebook groups
• The Shopify Community’s Feedback for my store forum

The following areas were highlighted to me when I gave Kinda Hot Sauce feedback:

• My product pages could have more focus on who my brand is (responsible hot-sauce lovers)

• Some people commented on how “charming”, the About page was, and how it motivated them to purchase from this company. When I started marketing, I could bring that charm into my copywriting and campaigns.

When you include feedback in your store, take both the good and bad with a grain. You will get the best feedback if you actively market your business.

4. Get shipping set up

One of the most difficult aspects of running an eCommerce business is shipping. There are many variables to consider, including product weights, packaging costs, and shipping destinations. You also need to factor in carrier rates and potential profits per order.

We can simplify it to a few key approaches that you can combine depending on your specific needs to create a shipping strategy that works best for you.

1. Offer free shipping. This can be a great incentive for customers to shop with your company, regardless of whether they are purchasing certain products or order quantities (e.g., $50 if they spend more than $50) or even regions around the globe. If you intend to absorb the shipping costs for your customers, you’ll need to add this to the retail price.
2. Shopify offers real-time carrier rates. This allows customers to select the service and price that they desire. You can get discounted rates with Shopify shipping.
3. Flat-rate shipping is charged. This helps you to plan for your shipping costs.
4. Provide local pickup/delivery. Set up specific notification settings and pickup instructions for each location.

Kinda Hot Sauce is located in Canada so we will set up shipping in the following manner to show you some of the different approaches that you have:

• Flat $8 shipping to Canada and the US
• Spend $30 to get free shipping to Canada/the USA
• Get real-time carrier rates from the rest of the globe

Shopify Shipping: With Shopify Shipping, you can get reduced rates, print shipping labels and manage order fulfillment all from one place.

Setting up our shipping areas

Your shipping strategy can be implemented under Settings> Shipping and delivery within Shopify. You can create shipping zones here where you can set shipping rates for certain customers.

Setting conditional shipping prices

To create rates specific to certain conditions within the shipping zone that we have just created, you can use the Add rate button. We can, for example, offer free shipping if an order exceeds a certain amount. We can also increase shipping rates if an order is heavier than a given weight.

Customers can make more sales by adding more items to their orders, which will save them time and money. As an incentive to customers to spend more, we offer free shipping for orders above $30 (two bottles of hot sauce or the 3-pack bundle).

Calculating real-time shipping rates

The Settings > Shipping page will display real-time shipping rates. These shipping rates are calculated based on your shipping details. At checkout, customers can choose the service and rate they prefer.

These rates can be adjusted to include a handling charge to cover additional costs such as packaging and time.