How I Launched My eCommerce Store in Less than 30 Minutes

I’ll be honest, I tried to launch my first store for 12 months! I followed the usual way to begin with.

I incorporated myself, looked for wholesalers, underestimated my marketing budget need, developed a great looking store, manually added thousands of products, …

… and never made a sale.

Today, after just selling my eCommerce project with $3M annual sales and 7 eCommerce stores in my CV, I understand what I did wrong and found a way to fix it.

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I did what most people do — I concentrated too much on creating a great looking store instead of actually trying to make a sale.

People think that if you are launching an eCommerce business that you should do it the hard way. They think that you should never launch a poorly developed store, or that you should try to land a super deal with a wholesaler long before making any actual sales.

But what I have found is that it’s much more productive to learn and create along the way. Your first step is to simply create you store. Once your store is up and running, you can explore ad campaigns and logo designs at a later time.

As my favorite quote says: “Get going, get better”.

Below I’m sharing a detailed tutorial on how you can launch your first eCommerce store in under 30 minutes with dozens of products. It won’t be perfect, but it’ll be exactly what you need to get going.

In this example, I will build a full category women’s clothing shop that sells non-branded funky clothes. I strongly suggest that you follow the guide as it is written and try implementing additional features and ideas later after your launch.

Set Up a Store (~5 minutes)

1. Pick a Name

Picking a name shouldn’t be a huge concern right now. Think of something random and simple. For my women’s clothing shop I came up with: Forest Store, Hill Hill Store, MarsIn1999.

I recommend adding ‘store’ or ‘shop’ because you will need to find an available internet address (domain), and it’s easier to find an available one when there are several words in the name.

2. Create a Shopify Account

In the olden days, you had to get a server, upload an eCommerce system to it, hire someone to change it according to your needs, and pay to maintain it. It was expensive, time consuming, and the final result was still a slow and ineffective website.

Thankfully, Shopify and other alternative softwares has simplified the process. You can create your store in just a few clicks and all of the server setup and maintenance is taken care of for you.

Go to Shopify.com, click ‘start your free trial’, enter your store name, and create your shop.

Your store is now ready!

3. Fine Tune Your Settings

3.1. Add Your Store Payment Option

Add your PayPal email address under the Shopify Settings, Payments Section. Later, you can change, remove, or add additional payment options.

If you don’t have a PayPal account, registration at PayPal.com will take about 5 minutes.

3.2. Generate Required Policies

Shopify offers a handy tool for generating terms and conditions, standard privacy, and return policies. Just go to Shopify Settings, Checkout, and scroll down to the Refund, Privacy, and TOS statements section to generate each policy sample.

3.3. Add Free Shipping Rate

The sourcing tool I will recommend to you will offer most of the products with a free delivery option. So I suggest adding a free shipping rate for all of your orders as well.

Go to Shopify Settings, Shipping, and delete all shipping zones that are non-international, and edit the international zone rate to Free.

3.4. Create an Online Store

Shopify allows you to sell your products across multiple channels like Online Store, Facebook Store, Brick and Mortar store, etc.

We want to create an online store now. Go to Shopify Settings, Sales Channels and add Online Store as your sales channel.

3.5. Buy a Domain (Optional)

Buying a domain is optional. Currently, your URL looks like [storename].myshopify.com. But you might want to change it so it will look more normal: [storename].com.

You don’t have to do this right away, and there will be a cost (about $13 per year). You can set this up later once you decide if you want to invest further money into your business.

It is important to note, however, that a custom internet address provides social accountability when you start advertising your site, which can increase your sales significantly.

To buy a domain, go to Shopify Online Store, Domains Section, and click Buy New Domain.

P.S. You’ll need to confirm the domain before it starts working. The confirmation letter is in your email inbox.

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by Tomas Šlimas via SitePoint