Shopify

Aug 31, 2024

How to build a Shopify store as a beginner in 6 simple steps

People Filming - How To Build A Shopify Store

Instant Team

How to build a Shopify store as a beginner in 6 simple steps

Building a Shopify store presents an exciting opportunity to launch a new online business or grow an existing one. The process can feel overwhelming at first. From selecting a theme to adding products, there's much to do before your store is ready for visitors. One of the most critical tasks early on is spotify conversion rate optimization. This involves making valuable tweaks to your store to improve how well it turns visitors into customers. In this post, we'll cover how to build a Shopify store, focusing on creating an instant landing page for Shopify without any code. Shopify landing page builder from Instant can help you launch your store quickly and ensure you're set up to turn visitors into customers effectively.

What is a Shopify store?

Prepared desk to learn how to build a Shopify store

A Shopify store is an online store built using the Shopify platform.

You can create a Shopify store from scratch or set up one to help migrate your business to Shopify from another platform.
Shopify stores feature a customizable layout, allow you to sell physical and digital products, and come with built-in tools to help you manage your sales operations.
Shopify also lets you integrate your store with numerous third-party apps and other business tools to help you optimize your store and improve your operations.

How does Shopify work?

Shopify centralizes your product data, customers, and operational tasks in one system that seamlessly connects to your sales channels. Once the essentials are in place, Shopify will easily explore and expand into new product lines and sales channels.

How much does it cost to build a Shopify store?

Person Holding Money - How To Build A Shopify Store

Creating a Shopify store can be pricey, especially if you want to build a professional-looking online store. The cost varies depending on your chosen features and functionalities.

For reference, a web design agency charges around $500 to $1,000 for a basic Shopify web design, which is the cost of using standard templates.

Mid-tier web design

If you hire a mid-tier web design agency, the costs will range from $1,000 to $1,200. These mid-level packages are fine, but hiring a top-notch Shopify store design is the best option. Design plays a critical role in how eCommerce works. The more attractive your eCommerce store is, the higher the audience acceptance.

Top-notch Shopify website design

As your Shopify store expands, you must upgrade your design to accommodate more products. A top-notch Shopify website design can cost between $1,500 and $5,000.

Shopify pricing plans: What to expect once your store is up and running

Apart from the development and design costs, there's a recurring cost to run Shopify stores. Typically, there are three main Shopify plans that you can opt for:

Basic Shopify Plan: $39 monthly (2.9% + 30¢ per online transaction)
Shopify Plan: $105 monthly (2.7% + 30¢ per online transaction)
Advanced Shopify Plan: $399 monthly (2.5% + 30¢ per online transaction)

Note: Other Shopify variants, such as the Shopify Plus and Shopify Starter, are offered at $2,300 and $5 monthly, respectively.

Instant: Your no-code solution for high-converting landing pages

Instant is a user-friendly Shopify landing page builder that allows eCommerce teams and agencies to create fully customizable and advanced pages without any coding knowledge. With its intuitive drag-and-drop interface, users can quickly design and publish:

High-converting landing pages
Product detail pages
Sections, all while maintaining complete control over their store's design

Instant also offers seamless integration with Figma and other eCommerce tools, making it a versatile choice for enhancing online store performance and increasing conversions.

Try Instant's Shopify landing page builder today!

How to build a Shopify store as a beginner in 6 simple steps

People in Meeting - How To Build A Shopify Store

1. Use Instant for an outclass landing page

High-converting landing pages
Product detail pages
Sections, all while maintaining complete control over their store's design

Instant also offers seamless integration with Figma and other eCommerce tools, making it a versatile choice for enhancing online store performance and increasing conversions.

Try Instant's Shopify landing page builder today!

2. Plan your store design

Designing any experience can be a never-ending circle of ideas and tasks. Without structure, creating your online store can feel stuck in the most complicated maze with no exit signs. That’s why it’s essential to design your MVP first. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, MVP stands for "minimal viable product."

To break that down further, it is the least amount of work needed to launch your store, collect feedback, and then iterate to improve your online store based on that feedback. Don’t feel discouraged about launching your first store with the bare minimum. For example, if you look at a store like Nike.com, Nike had a bare-bones store and slowly made improvements based on customer feedback, resulting in an industry-leading brand and shopping experience.

Now that you’re familiar with the concept of an MVP site, let’s go over six principles of modern eCommerce design you'll need to plan for:

Customer trust
Visual appeal
Color scheme
Typography
Mobile optimization
Product collections

Those principles will guide your design as you develop your store's design. The last part of planning your store will be choosing the right Shopify plan for your business's needs. Shopify offers several plans to help your business grow at each stage:

Basic: offers everything you need to create a store, ship orders, and process payments.
Shopify: for businesses that require professional reporting and more staff accounts.
Advanced: for veteran stores that require custom reporting and lower transaction fees.
Shopify Plus: for enterprise stores that do high-volume sales.

3. Choose the perfect theme

Choose the “bones” of our online store by selecting a Shopify theme. Luckily, with Shopify, you can find many unique themes (both free and paid) on the Shopify Themes Store. If you haven’t already, you’ll want to sign up for a free trial with Shopify.

There’s no credit card required. This will let you follow this tutorial and give you two weeks to build your online store. Before choosing a theme, ask yourself the following few questions:

What's your web design budget?
How many products do you plan on selling?
What industry are you in?

4. Add your products

Now that you have your theme, it’s time to add products to your store. Go to Products > Add product to your new Shopify store to create your first listing. There are several decisions to make on this page. Let’s break them down.

Write your product title

Your product title identifies the product. Customers will see it when browsing your store. Let's keep titles short, between 20 and 70 characters. Add a description.

Describe and sell your product

Highlight incentives, address common questions and objections, and help customers envision themselves using your product.

Upload product photos

Add high-quality photos that show your products in their best light. Help shoppers imagine using your product by including action shots.

Set your price

Add the price customers will pay to purchase the product.

Several variables influence how you price your products, such as shipping costs, raw materials, and the product’s perceived value.

5. Set up your plug-ins and preferences

Another way to make your Shopify store successful is by adding Shopify apps. These plug-in programs provide additional functionality to your store, which helps you create better shopping experiences and earn more sales. The Shopify App Store offers more than 8,000 apps for you. You can find apps to help you look for:

Products to sell
Bring in customers
Deliver products
Master SEO
Customize your store
Scale your business

Your options are endless. Installing a Shopify app is incredibly easy. Most apps also offer free trials, so you don’t have to worry about spending money upfront.

6. Add your own personal touches

Once you’ve chosen a theme, you can start customizing the look and feel of your store's pages. Theme Settings are below your homepage options in the customizer tool. When you select that option, you can update your color scheme based on your chosen color palette and your heading and body typography based on your chosen font choices.

Note: Every theme will have configurable options, but color and typography will typically be the same.

Can I build a Shopify store myself?

How to a build a Shopify store on your own with code

You can create a Shopify store by yourself without any prior experience. A DIY approach will help you get your store up and running faster, save money, and allow you to make design tweaks over time as you learn more about what works. “My business partner has a business and marketing background. I have a theater degree,” says Kiersten Hanly, co-founder of skincare brand, Scrub Inspired. “We are the perfect example of people who have no idea what they’re doing regarding technology, but we could do pretty much anything with the resources that were made available to us.”

Those resources included everything they could handle, from Google searches to forums to help docs and more. After trying to tackle problems, Kiersten mentioned that chatting with Shopify’s support team was also a great way to find answers and help when needed.

When should you bring in an expert to help?

Just because you’ve chosen to DIY your eCommerce website doesn’t mean you’re out on a limb by yourself forever. It’s precisely the opposite: Since you haven’t committed a huge chunk of your business budget, you have more flexibility to hire experts for specific sections of your store or your project. It’s how Scrub Inspired worked with a branding design pro when the team wanted to rebrand.

“When the business was growing, our next step was a rebrand. We wanted to figure out what our product looks like and who we're selling this to, and use that information to inform all of our visuals,” says Kiersten. “That’s the first time we discussed with a designer, who worked with us on our brand. Building out our entire branding guide meant that when we used a website builder to design a website, we knew what colors we should focus on. We knew who our target market was. We knew our buyers' paths to go down on the site.”

How can you get started with no experience?

Building a website yourself might involve learning, whether from Google or your friendly neighborhood Shopify Partner. A good approach is to start with doing it yourself. Hiring a pro can feel reassuring because you know they know what they’re doing. But you’ll still do some work since you’ll spend time with them so they understand what you want, and afterward, you’ll need to rely on them for any changes.

If you don’t know how to change products in your store, you’ll have to call your web development team whenever you need a tweak. Knowing how your store works is a good investment for a small business, whether you DIY forever or bring in pros later in the process.

How profitable is a Shopify store?

How to build a Shopify store that is profitable

If you search Google for the average Shopify success rate, you’ll find two widely quoted and seemingly contradictory statistics. One claims Shopify has a success rate of around 5% – 10%, meaning up to 95% of stores fail. The other, supposedly based on Shopify data, insists that 81% of Shopify merchants are still active and profitable after two years.

Unless all those profitable stores suffer a dramatic slump in performance shortly after the two-year mark, it doesn’t feel like both stats can be correct. In reality, Shopify doesn’t publish success rate data. And why would it? You might not bother starting your own if you knew that many Shopify stores don’t last the distance.

General business success rates

It’s possible to find general statistics on business success rates. For instance, the US Small Business Association’s Office of Advocacy revealed that:

Between 1994 and 2019, 67.6% of new employer establishments survived at least two years.
The five-year survival rate was 48.9%.
The 10-year survival rate was 33.6%.
The 15-year survival rate was 25.7%

In other words, most businesses survive the first year, but few remain strong 10+ years later.

Average Shopify store profitability

The average Shopify store owner earns a profit of approximately $13,445 per year or about $1,120 per month. How did we reach this figure? Shopify no longer regularly reports the number of merchants using the platform, but when it last announced this data in February 2021, it gave a figure of 1.75 million merchants.

Shopify’s latest earnings announcement revealed a gross merchandise volume of $55 billion. If you divide that total by the number of merchants, you get an annual figure of $31,428.57. Multiplying that figure by the average gross profit margin of 42.78% for online retailers, as the NYU Stern School of Business reported, gives us an average annual profit of $13,445.14, or about $1,120 per month.

Instant: Your no-code solution for high-converting landing pages

High-converting landing pages
Product detail pages
Sections, all while maintaining complete control over their store's design

Instant also offers seamless integration with Figma and other eCommerce tools, making it a versatile choice for enhancing online store performance and increasing conversions.

Try Instant's Shopify landing page builder today!

Mistakes to avoid while building a Shopify store

How to build a Shopify store without making common mistakes

Selecting your Shopify theme too early

Picking a Shopify theme can help you get a jump on creating your store. Before you choose a theme, it's best to have a good idea of the kind of products you will sell and the target market for your business.

Rushing to select a theme before you're ready can lead to costly mistakes. You may choose a theme that doesn't fit your needs, and changing themes later can be tedious. You may have to:

Pay for another theme
Rebuild your store
Apps to replace functionalities that should have been included in your original theme.

Choosing the right Shopify theme for your store

There are many free and paid Shopify themes to choose from. Each offers different features and functionalities, so it's important to investigate them before deciding. Some Shopify apps require specific themes to work correctly, so it's a good idea to narrow down your theme choices based on your store's needs before selecting.

Prioritize functionality over aesthetics

When choosing a Shopify theme, focus on its features and section layouts rather than its design. You can always change the visual look of your theme later, but switching themes can be tedious and time-consuming.

Slowing your Shopify store down with too many apps

While apps can help improve your Shopify store, installing only a few can slow it down. Instead of improving its performance, it can hurt its operations and negatively affect its conversion rate. Apps accumulate data over time, and uninstalling them can leave behind much code that bogs your site. To prevent this from happening, remove any leftover code after you uninstall an app. You can also contact the app's support team to help.

As you work to improve your Shopify store, remove redundant apps that can be replaced with better alternatives. Also, look for existing apps that may be slowing your site down and remove them to help keep your store running smoothly.

Putting all your efforts on customer acquisition

One of Shopify store owners' most significant mistakes is focusing too much on attracting new customers instead of improving customer retention. While bringing in new customers is important, ignoring existing customers can lead to a lower ROI and hurt your profits in the long run.

Customer acquisition is costly. When you focus solely on attracting new customers, you fail to maximize their lifetime value. This metric helps you understand how much revenue you can expect from a single customer over time. If you don’t have a solid retention plan, you may lose the next customer before they ever make a repeat purchase. Instead of solely focusing on customer acquisition, improve customer acquisition and retention to develop a solid marketing strategy that boosts your profits.

Forgetting to set up your shipping rates

One of the first things you should do when setting up your Shopify store is to set your shipping rates. You must do so to save money on every order, quickly eating into your profits.

Shopify makes this easy by allowing you to create shipping rate profiles based on your store’s needs.

Create custom rates for individual products.
Assess your competitors' shipping rates to understand what customers expect to pay to avoid sticker shock.
Set your shipping rates so you don’t lose sales due to overly high or confusing costs at checkout.

Having poorly written product descriptions

When potential customers land on your product pages, they want to know precisely what they buy. If they encounter poorly written and confusing product descriptions, it can hurt their user experience and deter them from purchasing.

Instead of writing long, multi-paragraph descriptions, structure your product details in a way that is easy to read and digest. Organize information so users can quickly find the details they need using:

Bullet points
Headers
Tabs

Metafields can also help you add additional information to your product pages, improving customer confidence before a purchase.

Not explaining what makes your products unique

To attract customers to your store, you must communicate what makes your products unique. Otherwise, you risk blending in with the competition and losing sales to businesses that are better at marketing their products.

Take the time to understand your target market and what they seek in a product.

Develop buyer personas to help you create a clear brand message that communicates how your products solve their problems.
Use your product pages, blog, and social media to promote your store and attract the right customers.

Using poor quality or generic product images

When selling products online, there’s no such thing as too many product photos. First-time buyers want to see exactly what they are purchasing before making a decision, and if they can’t, they’ll move on to a competitor who can.

Investing in high-quality, professional product photography will help you build trust and improve your conversion rates. Aim to capture various images showing the product from multiple angles, as well as lifestyle images showing the product in use. Include pictures that highlight any unique features or details.

Not optimizing your Shopify store for SEO

Search engine optimization is crucial for driving organic traffic to your Shopify store. Improving your SEO will help you attract visitors actively searching for the products you sell.

Optimize your site speed. A slow site will hurt your rankings and deter customers from buying from your store.
Improve your site’s accessibility to ensure visitors with disabilities can navigate it and find the needed products.
Work to optimize your essential landing pages for SEO so they rank well on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Having a lackluster email marketing strategy

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to improve sales for your Shopify store. Not only can you use it to nurture leads, but it can also help you recover lost sales from abandoned carts. Create a solid email marketing strategy to help you boost your store’s conversion rate and enhance customer retention to improve repeat sales over time.

Ignoring accessibility

Many entrepreneurs overlook accessibility when building a Shopify store. This is a huge mistake, as it can severely impact user experience. Just like we ensure public spaces are physically accessible for all people, the same principles should apply to the web.

Optimize your Shopify store for conversions without breaking the bank with Instant's Shopify landing page builder

High-converting landing pages
Product detail pages
Sections, all while maintaining complete control over their store's design

Instant also offers seamless integration with Figma and other eCommerce tools, making it a versatile choice for enhancing online store performance and increasing conversions.

Try Instant's Shopify landing page builder today!

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