Building a New Shopify Site
Building a new eCommerce is something that has become incredibly important for independent businesses, and this has massively increased during the pandemic. This blog will go through how we go about building a new Shopify site.
Like with anything these days you have a choice, and that is no different when it comes to eCommerce website builders. As a company we’ve worked on several different ones, each has its merits but equally, each has its downfalls. Weighting them up can be a headache, but we’ve found the best overall package is the one that Shopify offers.
We won’t go into why we’ve picked Shopify, you can read our post all about why we recommend Shopify and make up your mind, instead, we’ll go through our process when we start work on a new site.
Starting The Project
To begin with we’d usually ask the client if they have any ideas they’d like to see implemented. Most of them also already have a logo or at the very least brand colours, this helps us customise buttons, wording, banners so that it all compliments their business.
Because we are often working within a tight budget we begin with one of Shopify’s prebuilt templates, this gives us a good foundation that we can build from. They are clean, look good and importantly work well. Once the template has been selected we’ll edit the colours to suit the brand and add their logo.
Adding Pages
Shopify has a section in their settings to add legal pages, the returns, delivery etc, the pages that every e-commerce site needs. We’ll edit these to suit the business, the way they trade, these are the first pages we begin with. We’ll then work on other pages for example with one site we recently completed on we added a gig guide, a location finder, a customer gallery and a blog.
As well as these you’ll want to make sure you have a contact page and an about us page. If you’re just starting your business customers will want to know where you are and who you are, this helps build up trust.
Importing Products
This part is something that we offer that many others don’t, we’ll add your products to the site. We prefer to get this done early on as it helps visualise the site. Seeing blank pages doesn’t inspire so adding products helps plus when adding products you also get to see what collections you need to add. With adding products you can also set a product page template so that all the formatting is the same.
If you already have products listed on eBay then there are ways to import and the same goes for most other selling platforms and this may be an easier way of doing it if you have lots of products. As an alternative, if you only have 200 - 250 products or less we can add them manually, this allows any mistakes to be corrected and if you wanted to edit the description now would be a perfect time.
Selecting Apps
Shopify allows you to add Apps to your site, these allow you to do certain things, so we’ve added one which changes the way the menu looks or one that allows customers to track their orders. Some of these apps are free, some you’ll need to pay for.
These come down to the items you sell, we’ve added size guides and the Cookie bar this way, you’ll find an app that will do exactly what you want to make the site work as you want it to.
It is also worth noting that Facebook and Google come under apps too, so if you want to show your products on either of these then you’ll need to install these apps.
Final Set-Ups
The last parts of building a new Shopify site are setting the delivery options, we’ll work through the different prices, which locations you want to sell the products in. A final check to make sure all the selling prices are showing correctly and it’s at this point we like to do a final stock check, are the stock quantities all correct. We don’t want you to sell a product you haven’t got and letting a customer down.
We will also talk you through the different payment methods you’d like to accept, ideally, we’ll be looking at using two different payments to give customers a little choice. If you have social media we’ll add links to this at this point too.
Other bits need finalising but we tend to do this after the store is live, the little tweaks that you notice once people are using it. The next point of focus will be getting Facebook, Instagram and Google shopping all set up. We’ll save that for our next post.
“We were over the moon with the whole set-up process that SSX Creative provided.
Moving from our original platform over to Shopify took no time at all and we’re so pleased we’ve made the change. ”
This is where we tend to start. If you’d to chat about Shopify and see if it meets your business requirements please get in touch with us now.
