First Steps with Shopify – Instructions and Examples

Someone wants to open an online store, but negative thoughts immediately come to mind: programmers, hosting, tons of money, months of work. In reality, it's simpler, especially with Shopify. This platform hides all the technical details. Many people seek Shopify consulting because a couple of hours of explanation saves weeks of trial and error.

How Shopify is Different from What You're Afraid of

A beginner's biggest fear is breaking something. With Shopify, this is nearly impossible because everything is set up like a construction kit: drag a block, change the color, and click "Save." The second fear is money. People think they need to buy a domain, pay for hosting, hire a designer, and only then start selling. Shopify is different: a three-day trial is completely free, and you only start paying once the store is up and running and generating orders. 

The domain is temporary; you can connect your own after a month, once you're confident the project is viable. The third thing that can be intimidating is setting up payments. It seems like you need to open a bank account, sign a mountain of paperwork, and wait weeks. Nope. Shopify Payments can be set up in five minutes, or PayPal even faster, and customers can start paying for purchases right away.

Four Steps to a Trouble-Free Launch

The most common mistake newbies make is trying to set up everything at once. The best strategy is to launch with a minimal set of features and then fine-tune everything else as you go, once you have orders and feedback from customers.

Here's what you need to do to get your store up and running today:

• go to Shopify and come up with a name for your store;
• add at least three products with photos and prices;
• go to payment settings and enable credit cards or PayPal;
• remove the password protection that hides your store by default.

After these four steps, your store is up and running and accessible to users. The design will look basic, like everyone else's on day one, but that's okay.

Three Examples That Prove It's Real

It's helpful to look at those who have already walked this path. Not large companies with billions in revenue, but ordinary people who started from scratch, made mistakes, but didn't give up.

Here are three Shopify stores worth exploring for a beginner:

1. Hiut Denim sells jeans, but the main story of their store is the rebirth of an entire industry in a small town.
2. ColourPop didn't build a complex website with animations, but invested in Instagram, where ordinary girls show off their cosmetics without Photoshop.
3. Gymshark started out printing T-shirts in a garage and grew into a huge company only because its founders interacted with their followers.

Their design was simple at the start, their budgets were small, but they had energy and desire. The platform didn't hinder, but rather helped, and everything else came with experience, not the other way around. Anyone can start selling on Shopify, even if they didn't know the difference between a builder and a browser yesterday.