It’s a great time to be an entrepreneur, and e-commerce is one of the fastest-growing industries in the world. The market is projected to reach $4 trillion by 2020—and that’s just retail e-commerce alone. Whether you’re a brand new entrepreneur or have been running your own business for decades, there are plenty of opportunities for you to make money online by selling products through Shopify stores. If you’re interested in starting an e-commerce business with Shopify, it can be overwhelming at first! But don’t worry: We’ll walk you through everything from basic setup and configuration up to advanced development and customization so that you can start making money online as soon as possible!
Table of Contents
Understanding Shopify
Shopify is a commerce platform that allows you to set up an online store and sell products, or allow your customers to sell products. It’s used by small businesses and large companies alike.
Shopify has an intuitive interface and powerful features that help you build, manage and grow your business.
Why Become a Shopify Expert?
As a Shopify Expert, you’ll have access to an enormous community of experts and resources. The Shopify Partner program offers free training, coaching, and mentorship to help you succeed.
You’ll also become part of a large ecosystem that includes other developers, designers, and entrepreneurs who can share their knowledge with you. This can be invaluable when building your business or exploring new opportunities in e-commerce. Learn more about the costs associated with hiring a Shopify Expert on our blog: https://gettrusted.io/blog/how-much-does-it-cost-to-hire-a-shopify-expert/.
Building a Strong Foundation
Before you can start building a strong foundation, it’s important to understand the basics of Shopify. The platform is made up of several different parts that work together to create an e-commerce business.
Shopify Platform
This is the core technology behind your store it handles all the back-end functions such as order processing, inventory management, and more.
Shopify Ecosystem
This includes third-party apps such as shipping providers or payment gateways (payment processors). These apps provide additional functionality for your store without having to build it from scratch yourself!
The next step is learning about all the different plans available on Shopify which will allow you to find one that suits your needs best!
In addition to the various third-party apps available in the Shopify Ecosystem, such as shipping providers and payment gateways, an exciting addition for many store owners is the integration of custom t shirt printing services. These services offer a unique way to diversify product offerings and appeal to a broader customer base.
The next step is learning about all the different plans available on Shopify which will allow you to find one that suits your needs best!
Mastering Store Setup and Configuration
There are many aspects of Shopify that you can configure, but we’ll start with the basics. It’s important to set up your store correctly so that it functions properly and delivers a great experience for customers.
To do this, there are a few settings that need to be configured before you launch the site:
Store name
This is what appears in search results and on other sites when someone searches for your business name or product name.
Logo
You’ll need an image file (.jpg or .png) for this field, which will appear on all pages of your online store as well as emails sent from Shopify when someone makes an order through one of your accounts’ payment methods (such as PayPal).
Design and User Experience
If you’re new to Shopify, it can be hard to know what makes a good design and what makes a bad one.
A good design is simple, clean, and easy to read. It uses colors that complement each other without clashing and avoids using too many colors altogether (unless you have a very specific brand image). A bad design will have unclear messages or instructions; it might also include unnecessary graphics or text that distracts from the message you’re trying to convey.
A good user experience is intuitive: when someone lands on your site for the first time in their lives, they should know exactly how everything works without having to ask questions or hunt around for information. A bad user experience is confusing or difficult to navigate for example, if there are multiple ways of getting around in different parts of your site but no hints about which path leads where!
Enhancing Functionality with Apps
Shopify apps are software programs that can be installed to enhance the functionality of your store. There are thousands of Shopify apps available on the Shopify App Store and they range from essential tools like payment processors and tax calculators to more advanced functionality like inventory management or sales reporting.
You might have heard about apps for e-commerce – these are software programs that allow you to build an online store on top of another platform (like WordPress). They’re great for people who want their website but don’t have the time or expertise to code one from scratch. Shopify is different because it offers hundreds of pre-built templates so there’s no need for any coding knowledge at all!
Managing and Maintaining Shopify Stores
Shopify is a powerful e-commerce platform, but it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the options and features. In this section of the course, we’ll help you learn how to manage and maintain your store so that you can make sure it runs smoothly from day one.
Managing Your Store
We’ll show you how to set up automated tasks so that your business can run on autopilot when needed.
Securing Your Store
Shopify has built-in security features that help keep your customers safe and protect their personal information but there are also some things only human eyes can catch (like fraud). We’ll teach you how to spot potential problems before they become serious issues!
Monitoring Performance
Once everything else is taken care of, it’s time for some good old-fashioned analytics! With our step-by-step guide on monitoring performance with Shopify Insights (and more), we’ll show off exactly where those sales are coming from so that next time around they come even faster!
Advanced Development and Customization
Shopify’s development tools are some of the most powerful in e-commerce. Understanding how they work and how to use them will help you customize Shopify for your business.
Shopify provides a suite of built-in apps that can be used by site owners to add features like payment processing, shipping management, and inventory tracking. These are great for getting started with an online store but if you want something more specific or customized then it’s time to dive into custom code!
In this section, we’ll cover some basic concepts related specifically to Shopify’s frontend codebase (also known as Liquid). This will give us enough knowledge so that when we get into more advanced topics later on such as creating custom fields or developing apps from scratch using Ruby on Rails instead of just using pre-built ones available within Shopify itself – which is also possible – then all those things won’t seem quite so intimidating anymore because now we know where everything lives inside their system architecture.
Networking and Building Your Brand
As a Shopify expert, you need to be able to build your brand and get more clients. This is where networking comes in. Networking is important because it allows you to meet new people and make connections that could lead to future business opportunities.
There are many ways to network:
- Meetup groups
- Social media groups (Facebook Groups)
- Google Hangouts or Skype calls with other Shopify experts
Conclusion
We hope this guide has helped understand Shopify and its potential as an e-commerce platform. If you want to learn more about the platform and how it can help you build your business, we encourage you to check out some of our other resources. They include more articles on Shopify, books written by experts in their fields who have used this software for years (and therefore know what they’re talking about), plus even more information on how other businesses have gotten started using Shopify!
