Creating a Shopify account: what to get right at signup

Creating a Shopify account takes about fifteen minutes. Three of the decisions in it are annoying to change afterwards, and nobody tells you which three at the time.

The signup itself

Go to shopify.com, enter an email, set a password, answer the onboarding questions about what you sell and where. You get a trial period to build in before choosing a plan.

The onboarding questions mostly just tailor the interface. Answer them honestly but don't agonise — they aren't a commitment.

The three that matter

1. The store name becomes your .myshopify.com address.

Shopify generates a permanent internal URL from the store name — your-store.myshopify.com. Your customers won't see it once you connect a real domain, but it appears in the admin, in app configurations and in some integrations, and it cannot be changed later. The display name can change; this cannot.

So don't sign up as "test-store-2" while you're experimenting with the intention of tidying it up. Use the name you'll actually trade under.

2. Who the store owner is.

The account that creates the store is the owner, with permissions nobody else can have. This should be a business email address you control permanently — not a personal address, not an agency's, not an employee's who might leave.

If a developer or agency creates the store for you, transfer ownership to yourself before the project ends. This is the same principle as owning your code, and it's on the twelve questions for a reason.

3. The email address on the account.

Order notifications, billing and password recovery all route through it. A shared business inbox is better than an individual's.

What you don't have to decide yet

The plan. You can build the whole store on a trial and choose when you're ready to launch. Choose on the transaction fee at your expected turnover rather than the monthly price — which plan to choose.

The domain. Connect it when you're closer to launch — domain and DNS setup.

Business registration details. Needed to activate payments, not to build.

Development stores are a different thing

If you're a developer or agency, don't create a trial store to experiment in. Create a development store from a Shopify Partner account: free, unlimited, no trial clock, and transferable to a client when the build is done.

That's the correct starting point for any client project — see development stores and staging.

Secure it immediately

• Two-factor authentication on the owner account. Not later. Now.
• A password manager, because this account controls your revenue.
• Never share the owner login. People who need access get staff or collaborator accounts, which are attributable and revocable.

If the admin looks overwhelming at this point, Shopify for beginners covers the eight concepts that make the rest of it make sense.

What happens next

The trial store is empty and the admin is large. The useful order to work through it is in starting a store step by step, and the decision that matters most in the first hour is the catalogue structure, before you load anything.

If you already signed up badly

The common regret is a .myshopify.com address you're stuck with. It's genuinely permanent, and the options are: live with it (customers rarely see it), or create a new store and move the data across, which is a small migration with all that implies.

If the store has orders and history, living with it is almost always the right answer.

Fifteen minutes of signup, one permanent decision. Use your real store name, put the ownership on an address you'll keep, and turn on two-factor before you do anything else.