Back in October of 2015, I launched my online home goods company Teluna. I’d always loved having a side hustle where I could have a creative outlet and make a little extra money. After college, I knew I wanted to take my obsession with side hustles and turn them into my own company. Now what kind of company does an art obsessed girl with a major in graphic design and minor in marketing create?
It’s been a little over two years now and I’ve grown Teluna into a full-blown business. I’m shocked daily that I can look in the mirror and call myself a business owner. Even with each order, I think wow, how incredibly amazing are people that they would support a small business like mine? On that note, thank you so much to every one of you who have been so supportive over these past years. Especially to my friends who purchase items, family who encourage my dreams, and my love MT who thank goodness organizes and creates my excel financial breakdowns for me. He’s the CFO and I pay him in dinners and delicious cocktails.
When it comes to starting a business, you’re going to want to start with three main things. Great products, people who support you, and a Shopify account. I know the title of this article “How to build your online shop in minutes with Shopify” sounds unrealistic but it truly is that easy. It’s incredibly easy to use and a powerful online storefront.
What is Shopify?
Shopify is an e-commerce platform making it easy to sell your products anywhere, anytime. They handle everything from marketing and payments, to secure checkout and easy shipping. Shopify allows you to focus more time on the creation of your amazing products.
So are you ready to BE YOUR OWN BOSS!? Let’s get started on how to set up your very own online business with Shopify.
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SIGNING UP
When you first sign up you get to enjoy their 14 day free trial! A full two weeks of risk free and unpaid setup time. This was really important to me when I was first setting up my shop, Teluna, becuase it gave me time to add products, develop my theme and organize my site to have a fully operational shop before opening it to the public. The first step to the process, you’ll go through a few short questions to help align you with what you’ll need for your company. It’ll look something like this:
CHOOSING A PLAN
I suggest continuing your free trial for the full 14 days so you can find your way around the websites building tools free of charge. After your trial ends you get to choose your new business plan. The Basic plan still has a lot of great features and I think a great place to start while establishing your online presence.
HOME PAGE
Your Shopify homepage will soon be your favorite spot on the site…except for all those orders you’ll be racking in! The homepage will give you all of your site’s information including analytics, traffic sources, how many products have been added to carts, top search terms, top countries, top landing pages and so much more. Shopify really goes out of their way to make sure you have everything you need to succeed.
CHOOSE A THEME
Shopify offers a wide variety of free and paid themes. You can also choose themes from 3rd party sites like Theme Forest. Don’t worry too much about this at the beginning. You can always change your theme later and you don’t want to end up spending half your free trial picking colors and fonts for a theme. Pick one, and get started on the rest but keep in mind to pick a “responsive” theme, one that changes seamlessly from desktop to mobile. This is important because, for most shops, including mine, some 70% of customers are shopping on their phones.
ADD YOUR AMAZING PRODUCTS!
This is where you’ll add all your hard and creative work. Take the time to fill out each section in as much detail as possible, this will help people find you in Google search. Tell the world about your product, describe the materials you use, how people use it and why they need it.
ADD PAGES
After you’ve created your products make sure you let your customers know who you are and what your company is all about! Creating pages are quick and easy and if you have Mailchimp you can easily set up a sign-up form to gain email subscribers on your contact page. Adding pages such as About Us, Contact, Behind the Scenes, etc. allows for more opportunities to be found through search engines.
ADJUST SETTINGS
This part of your website is just as important as your products if not more so. Within your settings, you’ll set the base for all your important “numbers” information, as I like to call it. So tax information, credit card or bank account you’re billed from, shipping rates, how your customers can purchase your products and more.
ADD MULTIPLE SALES CHANNELS
This is such a wonderful feature with Shopify because it allows you so many opportunities to make a sale. For example, I currently sell Teluna online, on Facebook, on Pinterest, and I use Point of Sale at craft shows. You can choose specific sales channels for every individual product. These are easy to set up and Shopify provides their own seamless Shopify POS card reader and app.
GET PAID
Let’s get you paid! Within your settings, you’ll want to set up all the ways your customers can pay for your products. Shopify offers a multitude of ways for your customers to pay with credit card, PayPal, Amazon pay and more. People don’t want to have to work hard to purchase things they want, so why not make it as easy as possible for them to pay in any way they choose!
TAXES
Taxes are never the fun part of a company but they are important. You’ll want to set this up prior to ever making your first sale. Think about it this way; if you start selling products and never collect any taxes, then when your quarterly Sales & Use Taxes are due you’ll be paying out of pocket rather than what should have been collected from the purchase. Be sure you set this up with your state’s tax requirements.
This is just the beginning of your new adventure as a business owner. I hope this helps you get started and keep checking back for more ways to improve your shop, side hustle ideas, how to gain shop traffic and more!
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