Launch Your Shopify Store

Text Connects has been providing Shopify store setup and development since 2016. During that time we have worked on over 300 e-commerce stores. Based on that experience, we’ve come up with seven steps to get your product(s) ready to sell.

Why choose Shopify instead of WooCommerce or another platform?

WooCommerce is a great platform! It provides your team with a fully customized e-commerce solution to bring your product to market. [Wait, didn’t you just say you were going to suggest Shopify?!].

WooCommerce has a long list of plugins and extensions that would take years to fully grasp and see which one would fit your business. But, at the core of WooCommerce is a blogging platform, built for BLOGGING, not e-commerce. 

WooCommerce also requires you to fully host your own e-commerce store, while maintaining PCI Compliance. Most inexpensive hosting plans you see do NOT include PCI Compliance, so you need to now, and going forward, take the time to fully scan your store and keep up your reporting to handle all compliance issues.

Shopify has a large number of themes and apps as well, but Shopify provides all the hosting and foundational structure you’ll need. Including handling compliance issues, software updates, and more. This is a HUGE reason to go to Shopify by itself. Still, we’re agnostic, we typically work with our clients to determine the best platform for their needs, not the platform we think is best because it has a large following.

Shopify: Get started

To walk you through a very simplified version of getting your store online, we have created a step-by-step guide below:

  • Start your Shopify Store Journey with a Development Store
    Contact us to get started with a Free Development Store (or you can start a free 3 day trial with Shopify here)
  • Once you have signed up, you need to add your products. Click on the PRODUCTS tab on the left menu and then the purple ADD PRODUCT button. Follow along and add as many fields and details as you can.
  • Rinse and repeat. Repeat Step 2 through all your products.
    Note: If you have a large set of products, you can import the products into the store.
  • Go to Settings and setup. General Settings - Payment Methods - Shopify Payments is a great option and provides very comparable credit card rates to other providers.Shipping Rates - setup simple shipping rates for your store.
  • Click on SALES CHANNELS and then set up your theme. Shopify has a theme store with FREE and PAID themes. (https://themes.shopify.com/)
    Select a theme that looks good with your product line and install it on your store
  • Go into the Theme Customizer and go through all the settings on the left side of the Customizer. Select your logo / color scheme and other settings that apply to your theme.
  • You are ready to go LIVE and publish your store to your domain. You can quickly connect your store to your domain in the Settings area of Shopify.

That is IT! Seven steps to an online store. 

Okay, that is not 100% true, this is very much the barebones and basic items you need to go through to get live. The Text Connects Team is here to help with all the individual steps and get your store launched and working perfectly. Feel free to contact us for help.