In today’s video, we will be going over the Shopify Dashboard and all of the features that Shopify has to offer. In our last video, we created our store and launched it into our dashboard. Let’s begin where our last video left off.
This is our Shopify Dashboard. Here you will find all of the important information and tabs related to your store including orders, products, customers, analytics, marketing, discounts, and third-party applications. On the top right of your screen, this is your profile and store settings. Here you can manage additional stores you have and personal information related to your accounts. Click on manage account, here you will have details like your name, email, store name, language, and timezone. You can modify these settings if they are slightly off from when you created your account. On the left side is security, here you can change your password, add additional account security including secondary emails and two-step authentication. Here will also show you which devices are logged in, I will have this blurred out, but if you see a location that you are unfamiliar with you can simply log out from that device. This is a very handy safety feature to keep your account secure. Simply close this tab to return to the dashboard.
In the center of the dashboard, Shopify will populate automated tasks that they think you should complete next. Here you can see it tells us to add products, and also a video tutorial above this on getting started. You can also click on design your online store, adding a domain, and reviewing your store settings here. The next box below highlights tutorials and documents if you have problems with your store. You can also click on community, which enables you to ask questions with other Shopify users. I learned a ton and the community on there is fantastic to answer questions reasonably fast. Don’t hesitate to ask questions, doesn’t matter how lame you think it may be, you may be helping someone out else as well! You can keep scrolling down and it will offer you helpful suggestions on where you think you should begin with your Shopify journey. If you are still on your free trial as I am on this account, this will display on the top stating how many days are remaining.
The left side menu will display tabs you will be using frequently. Clicking home brings you back to the main dashboard. Next let's click on orders, if you are still on trial and haven’t selected the plan you want when the trial ends you will need to do this now. With this sample account, I will go ahead and select Basic Shopify Plan, click choose plan. Here you will now be prompted to select billing information. For the sake of the following tutorials, I will select $29 USD/Month. You will now be required to enter in your credit card information or PayPal info. Do this now, i will go ahead and speed up this section and blur this out. Once completed select start plan.
On the left menu, you will also see products. This is where you will be adding all of the products for your future store. On the left, you will see a sub-menu drop-down. Here you can keep track of inventory, collections, and more. Click on add product in the middle of your screen. The next screen that pops up will display the information you can complete for a specific product. Later on, we will be populating this information in detail. As you can see when scrolling down there is a lot of information you can complete here to keep track of items. We will go over how to organize items with either collections, lists, or tags in future videos.
The next tab on the menu will be customers. Here you can add customers or import customers from a spreadsheet if you already have a list. If you have people that make purchases on your store, it will automatically create a customer profile for the user. This is great to use this data for email marketing and much more.
Next will be analytics. This will be an important tab later when you create your store and start making sales. You can use this data from the analytics tab to increase expand on your marketing strategy and where it is falling short. In the sub-menu, click on reports. Here you can create customized reports for anything you need. Live view will also display the current traffic that is on your site and where they are located.
Marketing is the next tab, this is great for beginners to get started. You can create campaigns directly on your Shopify store. I would highly recommend learning specific marketing techniques related to your business and products as well. Here you can link marketing apps including Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and much more. In future videos, we will go over linking your marketing channels to your store.
You can also create custom discount codes if you are promoting certain products or seasonal sales for your customers easily with Shopify. When you click create discount code, you can add the code name discount value, who these discounts apply to, and usage limits. This is a very powerful way to very easily create discounts for customers.
Third-party applications on Shopify are very important for your business. A lot of these applications speed up your productivity by automating easily repeatable tasks. This will save you hiring staff when your store scales to be larger and keep costs down for your customers. Some applications are free and some are paid. In later video’s I will be going over some of my favorite applications and showing you how to use some of them.
That’s it for today’s video, in our next video, we will begin adding our theme going over sales channels, and briefly exploring important settings for your store.
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