How to Start an Online Boutique with Shopify

See how Shopify makes it quick and easy to design, build and host your own cutting-edge, responsive online store/boutique.

It's important for an online venture to become operational as quickly and cheaply as possible. To this end, Shopify undoubtedly represents the best solution for small to medium sized startups.

Follow along with this step-by-step guide to setting up a Shopify eCommerce site, and you'll be selling online in no time at all.

1. Start a Free Shopify Trial

First thing's first. Create your free trial account (Hint: Click the screenshot below).

Once you've added your details, hit the "Create your store now" button and Shopify will build the new site and respond with a success message, like this:

2. Configure Store Settings

Click "Take me to my store" and complete the form presented to reflect your particular details:

In particular you will be able to specify what type of products you want to sell. Don't worry if you aren't 100% sure about anything as it is easy to make changes later on.

3. Get Ready to Launch

At this point, your store is essentially ready to go. Not bad for about a minute's worth of work, right?

You should now be able to see the store's dashboard that, by default, shows a startup tutorial:

It clearly denotes the 3 remaining steps required to launch the site:

1. Customize the theme
2. Add products
3. Choose a domain

You can follow along with each step to get the store just how you want it.

4. Customizing the Theme

I recommend that you browse through the theme store (hint: click 'Themes' from the left hand admin menu, and then 'Visit the Theme Store' button at the top right of the page) as there are a wide range of free and paid themes that will give your store a slick, professional look and feel:

A word of advice: Don't waste too much time on the theme. Find something that is lightweight and clean to begin with and then focus on adding products and marketing.

The quicker you can start selling and generating revenue, the easier it will be to spend time and resources tweaking the site's template later on.

5. Add Products

It's super easy to start adding products to the store. Either click on the link to add products in the startup guide, or click on the Products link in the left hand admin menu, and click Add a product:

From here you can add info such as:

• Title
• Description
• Price
• SKU
• Barcode
• Tax
• Shipping
• Weight
• Options
• Images
• Tags
• SEO

Remember that if you intend to attract valuable search engine traffic it is absolutely vital to provide unique and helpful product content.

Provide informative product descriptions. Genuine reviews. Original photos. Helpful advice and tips. Anything that a potential buyer would find compelling and useful.

Without great content, even a powerful platform like Shopify won't be able to make your products rank well in Google.

6. View & Refine the Store

At any time you can click on the View your store button at the top right of the admin dashboard page to check out the store.

Chances are you'll want to do some tweaking and add a few standard pages like About us, Terms & conditions, and so on.

You can access everything you need from the left hand admin menu, and it's a good idea to familiarize yourself with the following options:

• Reports
• Blog posts
• Pages
• Navigation
• Settings

Bear in mind that some options may not be available, depending on which hosting plan you select.

All in all Shopify represents arguably the best value for money for the highest quality hosted shopping cart solution. Check out Shopify, Volusion & Bigcommerce for more on how it compares to other leading solutions.