Before you start setting up your Shopify store, it's important to understand your goals. Ask yourself basic questions about your store. For example, do you want to sell your products both online and in person? Do you want to sell your products through social media channels like Facebook? This can help you to focus your attention and speed up your setup process. Here is a checklist to help you.
he consumer base is growing increasingly multi-channel—73% of consumers use multiple channels to conduct a single purchase with a brand, and spend 10% more than those who don’t use multiple channels.
Want to reap the benefits of multi-channel retailing for your online store? Find out how to choose the sales channels that will work best for you, then add the available sales channels to your store.
Adding a custom domain to your site gives you brand recognition and makes it easier for people to remember your URL.
You’ll want to conduct a domain name search first to see if your business name is available. If it is, and the name isn’t already a trademark in use by another business in your industry, you can purchase your custom domain name directly through Shopify.
Before you drive any traffic to your store, you’ll want to ensure people can actually complete a purchase. According to Baymard Institute, the average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate is almost 70%. It’s wise to fix any errors and remove friction at checkout, otherwise you risk losing more sales.
It’s important to have a few pages that visitors can browse to learn more about your company. In Shopify’s research on what wins buyer and customer trust, we found that shoppers to a brand new store are looking for answers on whether the store is an upstanding business and if it treats its customers fairly.
Based on our research, these are the pages which are recommended online stores include in their sitemap.
Email is a powerful tool for online store owners. On your Shopify store, there are several automated emails you’ll want to customize before launch. Edit your email templates and create sequences that nurture your list and ultimately drive sales.
Sometimes you’ll be so close to your work, you won’t notice small mistakes like spelling, grammar, or broken links. Reviewing backward—starting with the last paragraph and working your way to the top—will help you spot errors you may have missed.
Slow-loading images can hurt your site’s user experience and performance in search engines, and slower load times have been shown to lower conversion rates. It’s important all your images are optimized for the web to ensure fast load times. Shopify handles the technical complexity of keeping your images fast, because we know speed matters for online stores.
Analytics are important to set up from day one. This data will give you valuable insight into your visitors and customers. Your Shopify store will have its own set of analytics reporting built-in, but you may also want to install a third-party tool. Google Analytics is one of the most well-known and popular analytics tools, but you can also look at SE Ranking, Piwik and Adobe Analytics.
Once you launch your site, you’ll want to make sure people know about it. The best way to do that is with a marketing plan. Document your marketing plan so once you go live, all you have to do is follow the steps you’ve already outlined.
You’ll want to check that your tax settings and shipping rates are appropriate for the product(s) you’re selling. Otherwise, you could unknowingly eat into your profits by not charging enough. Double check your tax and shipping settings before launching your store.
Remember that contact page we recommended you set up? That’s not the only place where you should have information on how customers can get in touch. You’ll want to include your business address, phone number, and even live chat on most pages of your website if you can.
According to ICMI, businesses that chat with site visitors have a 48% increase in revenue per chat hour, a 40% increase in conversion rate, and a 10% increase in average order value
Though there are tons of apps in the Shopify App Store, not all of them are essential for a brand new business. In fact, some won’t make sense for your online store at all. When you’re just getting ready to launch, you’ll want to install only the most essential apps, and deciding which ones are most important will depend on your business and your industry.
If you’re coming to the end of your 14-day free trial, set up your store’s billing information to ensure there aren’t any hiccups when your store finally goes live.