My Step-By-Step Guide To Building A Shopify Store From Australia

First you need to create an account and confirm your email address. During this process you can select whether you want to add the Shopify option to an existing website or create a new website. When I created the store, Shopify was offering a three-day free trial and $1 AUD for the first month offer. But you did have to choose one of their plans to qualify for the offer.

There are four different plan types: Basic, Shopify, Advanced and Plus with a variety of different features. The Plus offer, which Shopify says is for more complex businesses, starts at $US2300 a month. I have opted for the  the $1 a month offer which reverts to either a $42 AUD, $114 AUD or $431 AUD a month, depending on the plan you choose.

At first glance, the biggest difference in the plans seems to be the credit card rates charged for purchases, which are more expensive for the cheaper plans—card rates for the basic plan start at 1.75% +30 cents AUD for online purchases compared to 1.6% plus 30 cents AUD for the next level up. In person purchase rates are 1.95% for Basic and 1.85% for the Shopify plan.

The Basic level offers up to a 44.2% discount on shipping while the Shopify level offers an additional 44.2% discount on insurance and five additional staff accounts.

You can also collect subscription credits based on a small percentage (1% on the basic plan) of your monthly gross sales.

The fine print states that you can change or cancel your plan at any time.

Shopify then prompts you to start adding your products. You add a name, image, description and price and the interface is self explanatory. There is an option to add tax, as well as the cost (to you) so you can work out your profit margin.

There is an inventory section where you can tick whether you want it to track stock and options where you can continue selling even if the item is out of stock. You can also select whether it has an SKU or a barcode.

Next, I headed into the shipping information to enter how much the product weighs for shopping purposes.

If you’re hoping for a global audience, you can add your country of origin and a HS code or international trade code. Business.gov.au has more information on HS codes here but all exports need to have one.

Next is a variant section where you can add more options like size and colour if you haven’t already done that. This section is followed by the category meta fields which will help people to find your product.

Shopify also details what the product search engine listing will look like, which is where you can make the product more attractive to your average Google shopper.

You can have an active or draft status if you want to keep your business under wraps for a while.

If you click on the information button next to each section you will be sent to a detailed explanation of what is required in that step. I was initially stumped by the ‘Product Organisation’ section, for example, mistakenly assuming it was some kind of consumer association, but after clicking on the information button, I  realised it just refers to how the product is organised and asks for type, vendor, collections (i.e. where you want it to be on the website) and tags.

Then you get to the theme template, which has a few different standard layout options to choose from. But you can also personalise with your own images and photographs of your merchandise on the front page.

It might take a bit of time to get this right, but it is fairly intuitive. You can click on the various boxes and the different options come up for colours, layout, buttons and all the different bells and whistles you expect from a website. I was able to work with different fonts and colours, and insert my logo.

You can also buy a domain name during the setup process, depending on what’s available. I bought our preferred name for $US16 ($23 AUD) a year.

Depending on whether you’re a sole trader or a registered business, the information you put in this section vary as you may need to prove that you have a registered business.

I registered as an individual and there was also an option to update verification details, such as a passport, which Shopify said would improve the chances of being verified. But even without the identification documents, it didn’t take long to be verified, and I was able to continue with the setup almost straight away.

You then need to add your bank account details in order to be paid for your products. You can add additional payment methods such as PayPal if you wish, and you need to select a payment capture method (when payments will be authorised), e.g. automatically at checkout, when the entire order is fulfilled, or manually.

There’s also an option for payments made outside your online story (through bank deposit, money order or cash on delivery). You can choose a payment customisation app, which Spotify says, “allows you to sort, reorder, hide, and rename payment methods to better align with your business requirements”.

Finally, there are options for gift card expiration and the ability to give customers an apple wallet pass gift card to use online or in a retail store (you can design these as well).

Shopify also enables currency conversion, which means that if you are selling internationally, you can be paid in different currencies and Shopify will automatically convert it to Australian dollars. You need to have Shopify Payments activated and select the currencies you want to accept.

At this point, I was pretty much ready to go live. To do this you need to set a password and then remove it. Password protected means that you can only view the website with a password. If you just want to trial your store with a few select customers, you could keep it password protected during this process.

To see what your store will look like, you can click on ‘Online Store’ under ‘Sales channels’ in the menu on the left and select the ‘View your store’ tab in the main section at anytime. This will show you exactly how your store will appear.

You can restrict your online store in the ‘Sales channels’ section as well by clicking on ‘Preferences’ and scrolling down to ‘Password protection’ where you will be able to change the password to something you are more likely to remember.

To remove the password, you simply uncheck the ‘Restrict access to visitors with the password’ box and you’re live!

Shopify definitely makes it easy for anyone to create an online store, regardless of their web design skills. The process took a little longer than anticipated, but was mostly intuitive, and it was easy to get an answer to any question on the Shopify Help Center. You can also try books like Paul Waddy’s Shopify for Dummies for extra tips and tricks.

I was very impressed with the end-result and consider it time well spent. It certainly looks like a professional website with all the features you would expect, and it makes it much easier for any type of retailer to have an online presence.

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