How to start a Shopify store step by step

This is the practical sequence for starting a Shopify store from nothing. The order matters — several steps are painful to redo, and doing them in this order means you never have to.

For a small catalogue on a purchased theme this is roughly a weekend of work, most of it content.

1. Create the account

Sign up, name the store, answer the setup questions. Fifteen minutes — creating a Shopify account covers the details and what to do about the store name.

2. Decide the catalogue structure before loading anything

The step everyone skips and the one that ages worst. Write down your top-level categories, how each splits, and what attributes customers narrow by. That becomes your collections and tags, and it defines your URLs.

Changing it later means redirects. Twenty minutes on paper now — store structure and navigation.

3. Load a few products by hand

Five, not five hundred. Get the structure right — handles, SEO fields, images, options, variants — and confirm it works before you import in bulk.

4. Pick a theme

A good free or paid theme is the right answer for a first store. Configure it before customising it; most people over-modify a theme they haven't used yet. Templates vs custom design if you're weighing it up.

5. Import the rest of the catalogue

Now that the structure is proven. Check the import for tracking status, weights and SEO fields afterwards — bulk imports quietly leave gaps in all three.

6. Build the key pages

Home, and any content pages you need. Homepage structure covers what belongs there. Resist adding sections you don't have content for.

7. Shipping

Zones, rates, and the free-shipping threshold if you're having one. Test the edges — cheapest order to your furthest zone, one unit either side of the threshold. Shipping setup.

8. Payments

Activate a payment provider. In countries where Shopify Payments isn't available you'll use an external gateway and pay a platform transaction fee — worth calculating before you choose a plan, as covered in payment gateways.

9. Tax

Set your registrations and decide whether prices include tax. That second setting changes every displayed price, so decide before you finish pricing. Tax setup.

10. Policy pages

Refunds, privacy, terms, shipping. Written, not generated and left with placeholders — the returns policy in particular converts. Policy pages.

11. Notification emails

Around twenty of them. Edit the order confirmation and shipping confirmation at minimum; every customer reads both.

12. Domain

Buy it or connect one you own. If you're connecting an existing domain, copy the MX records first — that's how businesses accidentally lose their email. Domain and DNS setup.

13. Analytics

Install it and confirm a test purchase registers as a conversion, not just a pageview. Do this before launch or the first weeks of data are gone.

14. Test, then launch

Place a real order with a real card, on a phone. Refund it. Check the emails arrived and read properly. Then remove the password page. The launch checklist is the full list.

If you would rather not do all of this yourself, what a setup service actually includes covers what to buy and what to keep.

What to do in week one

• Read every support email. The first fifty are the best usability report you'll get.
• Watch where people drop out — conversion design.
• Fix the three most obvious problems before adding anything new.

What not to do yet

• Don't install ten apps. Start with none and add only what you can name a reason for — how many apps is too many.
• Don't customise the theme's code before you've run the store for a month.
• Don't build a blog strategy before the store converts.

The steps that look boring — structure, shipping, tax, redirects — are the only ones that are expensive to redo. Everything visual can be changed on a Tuesday afternoon.