This guide is brought to you by the makers of the Shopify app Logolicious, which allows you to add a logo carousel/slider or grid to your store. You can use it to showcase the logos of your store's featured brands, partners, press mentions, and more.
At Commerce Components' parent web agency, we’ve helped many clients launch Shopify stores over the years. As a result, we’ve gotten pretty good at zipping through the setup process. We’ve also learned which settings ought to always be tweaked and which are best left at their default values.
Below we offer a quick setup guide to help guide new Shopify store owners through the process of setting up their site - on a budget, and in a single day (give or take). This assumes a basic store with a single business location, no POS system, and no more than a couple dozen products. Setting up a store in a single day is entirely possible but make no mistake, it’s a bit of an ambitious undertaking. Espresso is recommended.
You won’t find a ton of detail here on how to click through the various settings pages. That is left as an exercise for the reader. What you will find is a rapid-fire, high-level overview of all the steps that are involved in launching a basic Shopify store. We’ll link to more detailed documentation whenever appropriate, and we’ll also sprinkle in lots of advice on best practices.
Before you start, make sure you have a good product
Before you get started, you should be reasonably sure that your idea is viable. The single most important factor that determines an ecommerce store’s success is its products. Small retailers are advised to avoid general-purpose goods such as those sold by Target, Amazon, etc. as it is all but impossible to compete with those retailers on price due to their bulk purchasing power and economies of scale. It is better to find a specialty niche and dig into it deeply. Examples: luxury fountain pens, model railroad scenery, or boutique chocolate truffles. Smaller products are better for a startup merchant as the shipping costs are more uniform and easier to manage.
Many new merchants are attracted to the idea of drop shipping, which involves outsourcing order fulfillment to some third party without making any up-front investment in inventory. While there can be some advantages to this model, we don’t recommend this to new merchants for the simple reason that the market is already oversaturated with storefronts that use drop shipping. For any product that can be drop-shipped, there are already many other stores selling it.
If you need to find a good product to sell, a better alternative to drop-shipping is to approach a small local manufacturer with little online presence and open a wholesale account that will allow you to buy their products in bulk at discounted prices. This can be a win-win, symbiotic relationship for both you and the manufacturer. Such an arrangement may or may not require an up-front investment. Examples: designer bath soaps, reproduction antique door handles, or heirloom seeds.
Also make sure you have a marketing plan
Launching a Shopify store is the easy part. Marketing the store to achieve consistent sales is more difficult. Before you enter into your new venture, you should have an idea of which marketing tactics you’ll use to drive sales. For products which require consumers to do up-front research (such as specialty tools) consider Content Marketing. For products with a visual element (such as home decor or clothing) consider marketing through Instagram and Pinterest. For local merchants, consider posting on your local subreddit or running geographically-targeted Facebook ads. Different types of stores require different combinations of tactics.
If you don’t have a marketing plan in mind, then we suggest that you spend some time working on that before you proceed with this guide.
If you’re all good on this, then let’s get started with the setup of your store.
Choose a name for your store
Obviously your store will need a name. If you don’t already have one in mind, consider using an online thesaurus or a tool like Namelix for inspiration. When picking a name, you may want to consider whether a matching domain name is available. (Note, however, that we suggest registering your domain through Shopify, which we’ll discuss later in this post. So, don’t register it until you’ve read further.)
Develop your visual brand
Simply put, a brand is the “public face” your business puts forward that makes it recognizable to consumers. While there is a great deal that can go into branding, this guide is written to help you launch a Shopify store in a single day, so we’re going to focus here on just one aspect, and that is your visual brand.
Your visual brand is basically the collection of everything visual on your web site - logo, colors, fonts, button styles, photos, layouts, etc. Even within this reduced scope, it’s possible to spend quite a long time developing a visual brand, so we’re going to narrow the scope even further to make it manageable within a day.
We’ll focus on three things: color palette, logo, and photography. All three of these elements should work together in harmony to create a consistent and distinctive visual brand for your store.
Create your color palette
Probably the quickest way to create a good color palette is to use one of the many online tools built for the purpose. One of our favorites is Happy Hues, as it makes it very simple to translate the colors into a Shopify theme. Another good one is Colormind. Both of these tools allow you to visualize a color palette as it will appear on a web site.
As you are developing your palette, keep in mind that it will need to work in harmony with whatever photography you have available to you (discussed more below.) If you are working with a collection of existing photography, it may be beneficial to build your color palette around that. Colormind can help with this as well, via their image upload tool that will generate a color palette from a photo.
One other thing to keep in mind is that any text which appears on your site should have sufficient contrast against the background. This will ensure that it’s readable even for low-vision users, which is a must for accessibility. The above color palette tools do a pretty good job of ensuring text contrast, but if you have any concerns you can check your colors using contrast-ratio.com.
Once you’ve chosen your palette, make note of the color codes and keep a copy in a safe place, as they will be an essential part of your business going forward.
Select product and lifestyle photography
Product and lifestyle photography can make or break an ecommerce web site. Thus, it’s essential to source the best photos you can for your store. If you’re selling a product that comes from a manufacturer, you can ask them to provide product photos. Many have these and are happy to share them with their retailers. If you don’t have access to existing product photos, then you’ll need to either shoot them yourself or enlist the help of a professional. If you’re really on a budget, then reach out to your amateur photographer friends on social media and offer to barter something. Or, contact some photography students at a local art school.
You may want to feature lifestyle photography throughout your store as well. According to Wikipedia, lifestyle photography is “a style of portrait/people photography which aims to capture and document real-life events, situations, or milestones in an artistic manner and the art of the everyday”. If you have access to such photos already, great. If not, you can find some great free images at Pexels, and some reasonably-priced ones at iStockphoto or Shutterstock. (Beware, these stock photo sites will try to push you into choosing a recurring subscription. Just purchase photos a la carte unless you think you’ll need to use the service often.)
Again, all of your photography should have a consistent feel and work in harmony with your chosen color palette. Note that it’s possible to edit photos for color consistency using a process called color grading. If you have Adobe Photoshop and want to tackle this, you can access various color settings under the Image -> Adjustments menu. The most important thing to do is to mute any colors which aren’t in harmony with your palette (as opposed to adding colors). For most people, though, color grading is an advanced topic that would take more than a day to get through. So, unless you’re a Photoshop wizard, just do your best here to make sure you’ve chosen photography that works well with your color palette.
If you want to remove backgrounds from your product photos, we recommend the online tool Clipping Magic.
Design your logo
Good logos are distinctive, offer good contrast against background colors, communicate meaning at a glance, and are simple. Logos should be designed for versatility and legibility at all sizes - that is, they should be instantly recognizable on either a small embroidered patch or the side of a blimp. Avoid fonts that are too thin, as these can appear washed out in certain placements. Did we mention that your logo should be pretty simple? We can’t stress this enough. Don’t try to add a lot of tiny detail or excess wording.
We’ll add one more piece of advice for your logo: stick with a landscape-oriented (horizontal) logo rather than one which is vertical or square. Most Shopify themes are optimized for horizontal logos, and can look out of balance when a differently-oriented logo is used. (Note here that it’s sometimes possible to create multiple versions of a logo - one landscape and the other stacked. This is fine, so long as you end up with a horizontal version you can use on the site.)
Unless you’re a professional illustrator (or have one handy), then the best way to get a decent logo in less than a day is probably to use a tool like Looka, which is one of the better online logo generators. Alternatively, you can run a logo design contest on Hatchwise. While Fiverr is a popular choice for low-cost logo design services, in our experience the results are of inconsistent quality.
Make sure to specify your brand colors when creating your logo, and make sure that the logo works against your chosen page background color.
Once your logo is complete, you should have copies of it in both PNG (bitmap) format as well as a vector format such as EPS, AI, or SVG. The PNG version should be saved with a transparent background. Save copies of these in a safe place, as they are now an important business asset.
Create a Shopify trial store (and optionally sign up for a paid plan)
It’s time to sign up for Shopify. To do so, visit this URL, enter your email address, and click the “Start free trial” button. Once your store has been created, you’ll find yourself at the Shopify dashboard (colloquially these back-end management screens are referred to as the “Shopify admin”). Feel free to click around in this tool to get the lay of the land. Then let’s get back to business :-)
The trial plan is good for 14 days, however it is only a trial and there are a lot of limitations. You cannot attach a custom domain name to a trial store, nor can you set up a payment method or accept orders. So, if you’re pretty committed to launching your store in a single day (give or take) then at this time you may want to just go ahead and upgrade to a paid plan. With that said, please make sure to read the Shipping section below prior to upgrading, as that may affect your choice of plan.
Enter basic details about your store
In the Shopify admin, navigate to Settings -> Store Details and fill out all of the fields on that page, most of which are related to contact information.
Enter a title and description for the home page
Navigate to Online Store -> Preferences, then fill out the fields in the very first section of the page labeled Title and Meta Description. These are very important for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), so you may want to take a moment to learn about character length limits and best practices for page titles and descriptions.
Set customer privacy settings
On the Online Store -> Preferences and scroll down to the Customer Privacy settings. There you will find options to activate special customer data handling options for customers in California and the European Union. Read the descriptions of these, and if they apply to your store then check the appropriate option(s).
Review your tax settings
If you entered your contact information correctly during the initial store creation, Shopify should automatically set your tax settings to their correct values. Still, it’s a good idea to review these just to make sure everything is in order. Navigate to Settings -> Taxes and look over the values that are chosen. If you’re in the U.S., you’ll want to drill down into “United States” and make sure that sales tax is being taken out for customers in your state (or anywhere that you have a business “nexus”.)
Sign up for Shopify Payments
To operate an online store you’ll need to establish service with a credit card payment processor. While it’s possible to use a third party payment processor with Shopify, it’s not recommended as Shopify will charge additional transaction fees on every sale. For this reason, we suggest that you use their own Shopify Payments payment processing service.
In order to sign up for Shopify Payments, you’ll need to complete an application and provide details such as the legal name and address of your venture, bank account information, etc. You can access the application under Settings -> Payments -> Activate Shopify Payments. It can take a few days to receive approval, however you should be able to begin accepting credit card payments right away. You just won’t receive any payouts until the application is approved.
Note that it’s also possible to use Paypal with Shopify. This is nice to offer as a secondary payment option for your customers, however we don’t recommend using it as the sole payment option.
We highly recommend that you connect your payment method(s) to a checking account that is separate from your primary personal one. Not only does a separate account make accounting more straightforward, it can save you trouble with tax authorities in the future, as they frown upon the co-mingling of personal and business accounts.
Register your domain name
While it’s possible to register your domain name through a registrar such as GoDaddy, we recommend that you do so through Shopify, as we believe you’ll find it more convenient in the long run. They offer domain registration services directly from within the admin area. Domains registered through Shopify will automatically be connected to your store without the need to fiddle with settings. Further, the user interface is very good, their DNS services are solid, the billing will be combined with your Shopify store invoice, and it makes it easier to access your domain settings without trying to figure out where you recorded the password.
To register a domain name within Shopify, navigate to Settings -> Domains and follow the steps described there. (Note that you must first upgrade to a paid Shopify plan in order to perform this step.)
Set up shipping
In our experience, calculation of shipping costs is one of the most difficult things for a new store to get right, and can be a source of ongoing frustration for seasoned merchants as well. Price your shipping charges too high, and many customers will abandon the checkout process. Price them too low, and you’ll lose money. It’s often not possible to get them perfect. Sometimes the best you can aim for is to just break even on average.
As for which carrier(s) to use for shipping, here are the big three in the U.S. along with a brief mention of pros and cons:
- USPS: The cheapest option for small packages and items which can be shipped via flat rate Priority Mail envelope. Often the best option for international orders. Offers free Saturday delivery and service to PO boxes. All Shopify plans include built-in support for carrier-calculated USPS rates. Limited tracking and insurance options. Rates are not as good for larger packages.
- UPS: Fastest shipping options, excellent service, competitive rates for medium and large packages, excellent tracking. Saturday delivery costs extra. Some rates can be more expensive.
- FedEx: Good tracking, fast delivery, free Saturday delivery. Rates can sometimes be slightly higher. Not as many dropoff locations as the other two carriers.
Shopify offers a number of different ways for stores to calculate shipping costs. You may find it helpful to review their documentation on these, as it’s a bit of an in-depth subject. Here we’ll quickly go over the pros and cons of each approach:
- Free shipping: We recommend that you strongly consider whether it’s possible to offer free shipping for all products across your store, at least for domestic customers. Many studies have found that this increases cart conversion rates substantially. To recoup your shipping costs, just build them into the price of your products. This option makes the most sense when you are selling smaller items (ex: patches for jean jackets) which can be shipped in a flat-rate Priority Mail envelope. With larger items, it can be more difficult to build shipping costs into the price since the cost to ship, for example, a toaster oven can be very different depending on whether it’s going to Oregon or Rhode Island.
- Carrier-calculated shipping: If free shipping won’t work for your situation, then carrier-calculated shipping is usually the next best option. This will dynamically calculate shipping costs in real time based on the total weight of items in the cart as well as the customer’s destination.
- By price: It’s possible to set up tiered shipping rates based on total cart price. For example, orders from $0-20 might have a shipping cost of $5, while those from $21-40 would cost $10, and orders over $100 would have free shipping. In our experience, this scheme rarely works out well. It is best suited to catalogs in which all products have a relatively uniform size, price, and profit margin.
- By weight: As with the previous method, this one allows you to set up a matrix of shipping cost tiers based on the total weight of all items in the cart. Shipping costs are usually more accurate with this one than with the price-based method, but it’s still short of ideal. It can take a lot of work to adjust shipping costs for different weight tiers and destinations, and since carriers are constantly changing their prices, your work will never be complete. As such, we don’t really recommend this method, either.
For stores in the U.S., Canada, or Australia, carrier-calculated shipping is included with all Shopify plans, however it is limited to the post office. This should be fine if you’re shipping smaller items. If you want to use UPS, FedEx, and DHL, then you will need to activate advanced carrier-calculated shipping on your account. The most cost-effective way to do this is to switch your Shopify plan to annual billing. After doing that, you can contact Shopify support and ask them to activate calculated shipping at no additional charge. It’s also possible to add calculated shipping as an a la carte option for an additional cost of $20/mo, or to upgrade to Shopify’s $299/mo Advanced plan.
Note that, with carrier-calculated shipping, you can connect your store to your existing accounts with shipping carriers to use your negotiated rates.
To set up your shipping rates, navigate to Settings -> Shipping and Delivery. We don’t have space here to go into all the mechanics of the user interface on this page. For those details, we will again refer you to Shopify’s own documentation on shipping as well as their Youtube tutorial.
The shipping rates section of the admin is a bit complicated. It’s probably the most challenging thing you’ll encounter during the store setup process, so this might be a good time to down another shot or two of espresso. With that said, we don’t want to scare you away from it. Once you spend a few minutes on those screens they will start to make some sense, and you’ll get through it OK in the end. Go on. You got this.
Add your products
To add your products, navigate to Products and then click the Add Product button. Most of the fields here are self explanatory, so we won’t bother to discuss those here. We’ll simply hit a few highlights and make some suggestions.
First, make sure to include a well-written description for each product, as this will help with your store’s Search Engine Optimization. Don’t try to stuff keywords into the descriptions - just write really clear, well-structured descriptions with plenty of detail on each product.
Make sure to enter an accurate weight for each product, as this is crucial to getting accurate shipping rate calculations.
Tags are generally used for filtering products within a given list. Realistically this only comes into play when you have more than, say, 15 products or so in any one product category. If this applies to your catalog, you’ll want to add some tags to distinguish the features of any given product from others in the same category. For example, if you have a category full of vinyl records, you could tag them by genre, e.g. Techno, Drum & Bass, Footwork. You can assign multiple tags to a single product.
If your products come in multiple options or sizes, then you’ll want to take a moment to understand the concept of product variants. Instead of creating a separate product record for a t-shirt that comes in S, M, L, and XL sizes, variants allow you to create a single product record with a separate variant for each size. Each variant can optionally have its own price, SKU, and image. Once you enable variants on a product, Shopify will display a helpful grid-style editor that allows you to update all variants on a single form.
Finally, you’ll need to set the status of each product to Active before it will appear in your storefront.
Organize your products into collections
Typically we think of the term “categories” when referring to groups of related products that appear within an online store. In Shopify, these are referred to instead as “collections” and they are a slight bit different than categories at a conceptual level. Shopify’s own documentation does a good job of describing them:
You can group your products into collections to make it easier for customers to find them by category. Here are a few examples of collections that you might create:
- clothes for men, women, or children
- items of a certain type, such as lamps, cushions, or rugs
- items on sale
- items in a certain size or color
- seasonal products, such as holiday cards and decorations
One important thing to note here is that it’s possible for a single product to appear in multiple collections - for example, a clothing store might want to list a winter hat under both “accessories” and “outerwear”.
Another thing to note is that collections are not just used for grouping products by type. They can also be used to add products to certain locations within your online store's templates. In Shopify’s text above, they give the example of “items on sale”. By adding a product to the collection of that name, it will then appear in the designated location on the home page for sale items. You could also do the same thing with “top picks” or “gifts under $20”. Collections offer a lot of flexibility.
Be aware that Shopify also gives you the ability to set up automated collections, which will automatically include any products that match a given set of criteria based on price, tag, etc. We won’t be working with those here, as they’re a bit more advanced. Just file that knowledge away for future reference.
Note that different themes use collections in slightly different ways. Consult your theme documentation for details.
To set up your collections, navigate to Products -> Collections, create some “manual” collections, and add products to them. As much as possible, try to balance the number of products in each collection.
Set up your store’s main navigation menu
The main navigation menu is the menu bar in the header of your store. Typically this consists of a list of links such as Home, Catalog, Contact, etc., although some themes implement it as a hidden menu that only appears when you click a “hamburger” button. A good navigation menu will offer easy access to all major sections of your catalog, without being so long that it spills over onto multiple lines. A good rule of thumb is to limit your primary navigation bar to no more than nine items (or to one line, whichever comes first).
By default, newly-created Shopify stores will be configured with a single link labeled “Catalog” that points to your entire product catalog. This arrangement can work OK for smaller stores with only a few products. If this applies to your store, consider renaming Catalog to something more descriptive of your products - for example, Perfumes. For a small catalog, you may also want to consider featuring all of your products on the home page for easy access.
If your store has a larger catalog, your primary navigation bar will ideally include links to each major collection within your store, with each major collection containing at least 3 or 4 products. For example, a skateboard store might have these nine navigation items: Home, Decks, Wheels, Sneakers, Hardware, Stickers, Shirts, Pants, and Accessories. Nav items should be listed in descending order of importance. Your main product collection should be first, and your least important product collection should be last.
To edit your main menu, navigate to Online Store -> Navigation and then click on the Main Menu. The editor is pretty self-explanatory and easy to use.
One additional thing to note is that it’s possible for a store to have multiple navigation menus. You may have noticed that there is also a Footer menu, which is where you can add links to informational pages on shipping policies, product FAQs, etc. It’s possible to create additional menus, and different themes will use them in different ways. Consult your theme documentation for more details.
Set up your policy pages
Navigate to Settings -> Policies. On that page, you can create a Refund Policy, Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, and Shipping. There are options there to create these from templates, which can make the process a lot easier. You can also link to these policies from your store’s navigation menu(s). We recommend adding them to the Footer Menu. To do this, go back to Online Store -> Navigation and click on the Footer Menu. When you add a link, you’ll see a dropdown menu with Policies as one of the options. There you can choose which policy to link.
Choose a theme
Here’s where you get to have a little creative fun with your store’s look and feel. To choose a theme, visit the Shopify Theme Store. Here you can browse all available themes, filtering only for free ones if you like. A few points of advice:
- We recommend that you try to use a theme which is listed as “OS2.0” compatible. These themes use Shopify’s newer Online Store 2.0 theme architecture. They generally load faster, have more features than legacy themes, and will be more future-proof going forward. At the time of this writing there is a limited selection of OS2.0 themes, however new ones are being added all the time.
- Newly-created Shopify stores will use the free Dawn theme by default. This is a fine choice, and at the time of this writing it is in fact the only free theme which is OS2.0-compatible. So, if you use a free theme it’s probably best to just stick with this one. We recommend that you still glance at the theme store just to familiarize yourself with the variety of themes that are available.
- Keep in mind that most themes include multiple preset styles, each of which can look very different from another. Make sure to look at all of the different styles for each theme before accepting / rejecting it.
- Don’t turn your nose up at the free themes. Because these are created by Shopify themselves, they work extremely well and are generally very polished. By incorporating your own photography and color palette, you can customize them in such a way that they don’t look “cookie cutter”.
- In deciding on a theme, consider the size of your product catalog as a factor. Some themes are better for small catalogs, and others are better for “superstores” with hundreds of products. This will be apparent from looking at their demo pages.
- Before settling on a theme, read the reviews that appear at the bottom of its detail page. Most third party themes are pretty good, but there are a few stinkers out there and you don’t want to be stuck with one.
- Note that you can try a theme before buying it. You just can’t publish it as your primary theme until you've purchased it.
Customize your theme
One of the most fun parts of creating a Shopify store is customizing your store theme, to make it shine and give it a distinctive “branded” look and feel that sets it apart from the competition. As much fun as this step can be, we are going to caution a great deal of restraint with this.
Whatever theme you’ve chosen has been crafted by a team of very skilled web designers. A great deal of time and expertise has gone into balancing layouts, choosing font weights, and lining up every pixel so it is perfect. It is better to leave these things alone for the most part, to preserve something that is already in good shape. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!
As an amateur, you are more likely to do damage to your storefront design by fiddling with the theme settings than to improve it. Unless you are an ace designer and understand things like visual hierarchy, do yourself a favor and resist the temptation to fiddle with too many of the default settings. We’ve seen quite a few stores go downhill when the owners began tinkering with fonts and such.
On the flip side, it’s not really good to stick entirely with the default settings. There are some things that should be customized, so that your store doesn’t look too cookie-cutter. We are simply recommending that you err on the side of not going overboard.
To customize your theme, navigate to Online Store -> Themes -> Customize. Global theme settings (colors, etc) are located in the lower left under Settings. To edit specific site sections, select the template using the dropdown menu at the top of the page.
Here are the global theme settings we do recommend customizing:
- Theme style: If you liked one of the theme’s preset styles more than another, you can use that as a starting point for customizing your site. This will erase any custom settings you’ve already entered, so do this first.
- Social Media: Enter URLs of your brand’s Facebook / Twitter / Instagram / Youtube / etc. profiles into this settings panel, if you have them.
- Site logo: upload a PNG or WEBP version of your logo with a transparent background. If the theme gives you the option, resize it so that it is the largest and most prominent thing on the page without being overwhelmingly large.
- Site colors: Using the color codes that you generated when you created your brand palette earlier, customize the colors of your site background, links, buttons, body text, headings, etc. If you used the Happy Hues tool to generate your colors, these will be easy to enter into the theme settings.
- Typography: This one is a bit iffy. Most themes already ship with good font selections, and if you’re not careful it’s really possible to mess up the visual balance of a site by changing them. We recommend that you really think twice before changing the default fonts. If you do change them, we suggest choosing no more than one heading and one body font, rather than using an assortment. For inspiration, we suggest you browse the curated font pairings at FontPair.co and ReliablePSD. As a rule of thumb, serif fonts convey a sense of tradition and reliability whereas sans-serif fonts evoke cutting-edge modernity. Keep in mind that some typefaces have narrower characters than others, which can cause text to flow differently.
And, here are the home page content sections that we recommend you configure:
- Hero: The “hero” section is the large area at the top of the home page which has a photo background, headline and button. Consider uploading a nice lifestyle photo here, and a snazzy headline describing your brand. This isn’t for everyone. Some stores prefer a more utilitarian look and as such will simply delete the hero section and display grids of products immediately at the top of the home page. Use your judgement here.
- Photo and text sections: It’s nice to add some lifestyle photography and basic information about your brand to the home page. Without these, your store will look bare. Most themes offer a nice selection of blocks - some with images, text, a combination of photos and text, embedded video, or a photo gallery. Alternating between left/right and right/left layout blocks can often produce a good result.
- Featured collections: On the home page, it is possible to feature certain collections prominently. For example, “Sale Items” or “Latest Arrivals”. For smaller catalogs, you may want to just display all products on the home page. In any case, it’s often a good idea to show some products here to keep the home page from looking empty.
Quality Assurance
Click through your site and make sure everything looks good. All of your navigation links should work. There should be no placeholder text in the footer. Spelling and grammar should be correct to the best of your ability. Photos should not look pixelated or stretched - if they do, you will need to upload higher resolution versions of them. All text should have sufficient contrast to ensure that it’s readable against the background.
As a final QA step, we suggest placing a live order on your site, to test the purchasing and checkout process from end to end. A good way to do this is to temporarily set the price of one product to 25 cents, place the order, and then set it back to the correct price.
Open your store up to the public
When you’re ready to launch your store publicly, remove the password protection on the site by navigating to Online Store -> Preferences and scrolling down to the Password Protection section.
If you’re a Reddit user, you can solicit feedback on your store in the /r/reviewmyshopify subreddit.
We’d love to see the store you’ve created, so if you’d like to share it with us please drop us an email hello@commercecomponents.io with your store’s URL.
Finally, pat yourself on the back and drink another shot of espresso to celebrate! If you’ve made it through all the steps in this tutorial and successfully launched your Shopify store, you should feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment - doubly so if you pulled it off in a single day. We congratulate you and wish you much success with your new venture!
Note: in the text above, the link to sign up for a Shopify trial store is an affiliate link. All other links to external sites and services are non-affiliate links. We genuinely like and recommend all of these tools, and receive no financial compensation if you use them.