Welcome to today's video, in today's video we are going to be going over Shopify, what it is, what it can do and briefly going over how to get your very first store started.
What is Shopify?
Shopify is a massive online store creation platform which requires subscriptions to use. It is a simple platform to get started with your business, advanced features are available later on. It includes everything you need to turn your idea into a successful business. This includes integrated payment processing, Hosted online store, SEO and marketing tools, shipping tools and a wide variety of store themes to choose from.
There are also a massive range of third-party applications and tools to use for your business, some of these are free and some are paid.
The massive platform has increased 10x in 3 years, over 150 thousand store owners and over $7 billion in volume. Impressive stats.
If you have a brick and mortar store, you can pair this with Shopify's point of sale system. This syncs your inventory so you can manage everything from one account. If you're looking to create a simple store with the expectations of large growth, Shopify scales with you.
What are the costs of Shopify?
Shopify has standard subscription models. Basic Shopify is $29 USD per month. This includes 24/7 support, shipping labels, up to 4 inventory locations(we will go over what this is later videos), 2.9% transaction fees and some other cool features shown here.
Standard Shopify is $79 USD/Month. This includes everything from the basic subscription as well as lowers transaction fees to 2.7%. There is also the ability to get a 50% discount with shipping providers if you don't already have your shipping carriers set up.
Advanced Shopify is $299/USD/month. This is a great upgrade especially for stores who are already generating a lot of revenue. 2.4% transaction fees and up to 52% on shipping discounts.
There are also some other subscription plans Shopify offers which is Shopify Lite for $9/USD/month, this will allow you to add products to any website or blog and accept credit card payments.
Shopify Plus is another subscription plan they offer. This is for very large businesses with millions in revenue annually.
Why should you use Shopify?
Firstly, Shopify is extremely easy to get started. They offer a 14 day free trial, which is usually more than enough time to get your website off the ground and running. Obviously if you're creating a larger store, more time may be needed.
There are a few free themes available for you to choose from as well as premium themes on the Shopify theme store. Themes will be the general overall look and layout of your store. At the beginning most people opt for free themes. Debut is the most popular theme for people to get started.
There are also a lot of Third Party themes people create that are actually better than the ones on the Shopify Theme store. Theme forest has a lot of themes people have created for you to use and purchase. Out Of The Sandbox is another theme creator, they have some of the most powerful themes in Shopify. In upcoming videos, we will be creating stores from scratch using their Turbo Theme. Keep in mind these are paid themes, but if you are serious about getting into ecommerce, some of them are definitely worth it.
Starting your Shopify Store
Let's start getting our free trial started. Head over to Shopify. Once you are on this screen, select start free trial on the top right corner of this page. Next all you will need is to add your email address, password and your store name that you want. This can be anything, I would recommend having this something very close to your brand/store name.
Once you have entered this information it will ask you a few questions. Are you already selling? What is your current revenue and what industry will you be operating in? Lets go ahead and add ours, I will select not currently selling products, $0 current revenue as this is a new store we are creating in the Clothing Industry. I will walk though in future videos on creating a clothing store with the Turbo Theme from Out Of The Sandbox. This is just for Educational purposes.
Next you will be asked to add all personal information required to get your store started. I will go ahead and blur this out and get this store running. Once information is entered, press enter the store. Once everything gets activated you will be taken to the Shopify Dashboard page, this is where you will be spending most of your time, this page can show a lot of useful information for your business including total sales, analytics and much more.
That's it for today's video, in the next video we will begin exploring the Shopify dashboard and adding specific data to our store.
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