How To Start A Business With Shopify

After pandemic, we have observed many small, medium, and even large-scale businesses opting for some online visibility or their own online store. The lockdown has made every business owner realize the power of technology and online business. However, to set your own online store and managing the payment gateway, transactions, and security is a tough job to handle, especially for beginners. And thus, to our rescue we have various software and third-party website builders, one such is Shopify that can help you to easily start your own business online.

What is Shopify?

As you may find it on google, Shopify is just like a subscription to a software service or third party that helps you with creating your own store and business presence online through a website. It handles all the mechanisms of the website and offers you free templates to design, assigns you a payment gateway, and uses their shopping cart solution to promote, sell, and ship your products to your buyers. They also provide you various tools and services that you can use to set-up multiple products, design your website, and handle tax, etc.

Pros of using Shopify

Secure and Reliable  
Shopify is a safe and secured platform, most of the time many credit card details, payment details are felt at risk by the customer, however, with Shopify you do not have to worry about the same, it is reliable as well. 
 
 Easy to use 
 You do not need to be a tech expert or know great amounts of details about websites and coding to understand how Shopify works or how-to set up your store on Shopify. It also has its own set of instructions and guidance that help you to easily set-up all the templates and necessary settings. 
 
24 x 7 support 
 At any point if you feel you are lost or require support, you always have an option to contact the Shopify support system, which will handle your problems or any grievances if any. Furthermore, you also have access to various community forums, where you may find answers to questions that are similar to yours. The customer support is fairly fast and reliable and hence at no point would you feel isolated in any issue.

Starting your Business with Shopify

After understanding the various benefits of using Shopify, we may as well be mentally prepared to start an online presence of our business using Shopify. Let us have a look at the step-by-step process of establishing your store. 
 
Signup  
 Step one to creating your online presence with the help of Shopify is to signup with them. Signing up at Shopify is quite easy, you just have to create an account and fill in the necessary details. One of the crucial details is to fill in a store name, and the store name has to be unique or else it won’t proceed further. You also have to add details about the products you plan to sell, for beginners you can always try the free trial which Shopify provides. 
 
Setup your Store 
 Now that your account is valid, you can set up your store by adding your products, filling up the description and details, setting up their prices, and so on. You can add the various tabs that you wish your visitors to see on your website. You can also select the themes for your website, which one would suit according to the nature of your business or the types of product.  
 
Themes and Tabs 
 As we already discussed in the earlier point, your theme should match your profile. One of the best ways is to check the recommend themes from Shopify, most of them are free to use. You can click on the preview button and check all the themes which may suit best to your website. You can also create various tabs for easy assessment on your site.  
 
Product details and Shipping 
 While launching your product on your website, you can also upload various attractive pictures of your product that will increase the chances of your sales and also add variants if necessary. You need to add shipping details on Shopify, such as offering free shipping on orders above a certain amount or charging fair shipping fees according to the weight and quantity of the products ordered, international shipping, and so on. 
 
Taxes 
 As you would deal in goods and services, collecting and paying taxes would be mandatory for any region, unless your goods or services comes under the tax exemption category. You can change the tax settings and charge or collect taxes accordingly, differing from region to region. Shopify already provides some default tax settings; however, you can change them at any point. 
 
 Payment Gateway 
 The best part, you need to decide the method or the sources through which your customers can pay, and you as a seller can get paid. The default source is Shopify payments, which would charge you 0% transactional fees. However, you can also add other payment options such as Paytm, PayPal, etc. As for your own information, after completing the initial steps, you can add your bank account details and necessary documents where you wish to get the payments transferred. In case, you also sell and ship internationally you may have to change settings and set up the currency in which you want to get paid. 

It’s time to Launch! 
 After finishing the above steps, you are almost ready to launch your own store. You can also do a bogus transaction to check if all things are set up in motion properly and if the transaction is proceeding without any error. The final step required to successfully launch your store is to select a domain name for your store. You can easily buy a domain of .com through Shopify and mark your presence. That’s it, you can set your store live and begin your business with the help of Shopify.

Conclusion

Creating an online store has become easy thanks to Shopify. After understanding the pros, we can easily start our business with Shopify by Signing up, setting up the store by adding products, selecting good themes and tabs, adding product details and shipping charges, varying taxes according to regions, selecting the payment gateways, and finally selecting a custom domain for getting your store live.