Shopify Tutorial for Beginners 2026 - Step by Step

Hey, my name is Dan and in this tutorial I'm going to show you how to build your Shopify store step by step. Even if this is your first time using Shopify, I will walk you through picking a theme, designing your store, adding products and collections, and getting all of the important settings ready before you launch. By the end of this video, you'll know exactly how to build and customize your Shopify store from start to finish. Shopify has a free trial and a $1 per month offer for the first 3 months. That makes it really affordable to get started and gives you plenty of time to make adjustments to your store, even if you don't want to launch right away. To get the extended Shopify offer, sign up using the link right here at the bottom of the screen. Or just scroll down to the video description and click on the first link that you find there. By using that link, you should end up on this signup page where you can activate a 3-day free trial and your first three months for $1 per month by simply entering your email. After clicking the link in the description and entering your email here, follow the prompts to create your account until you land on the Shopify dashboard. Choose a password to create an account and then enter your credit card info to start the trial. If prompted to choose a plan, try basic and then you can skip any customization at this point. Here you've arrived at the Shopify dashboard. If you weren't prompted to choose the basic plan already, let me show you how to check your plan so that you make sure to take advantage of the special $1 offer. In the bottom lefth hand corner, click settings and then click plan in this lefth hand list. You can verify that you've selected a plan here or you can click here to change your plan at any time. Now, in the top right corner, click the X and that will bring us back to the Shopify dashboard. From the dashboard, the next step is to pick the theme that will control how your store looks. Horizon is the default theme, and it's one of the most popular Shopify themes that works really well as a clean, flexible starting point for most new stores. Because of that, I recommend sticking with Horizon for your first store. And I'll be using Horizon in this tutorial as well. But I'll show you how to try the new theme generator and how to browse other themes in case you want to try something different than Horizon. All the way over on the left hand side, click online store and make sure that brings you to themes once you've clicked on it. Here you'll see that Horizon is the current theme that's been installed. If you scroll down a little, this is where you can try generating a theme using a prompt. You can use your favorite AI to help you generate a short prompt. And I'll paste mine in here. Once you've added your prompt, click generate themes. And that may take a few moments to generate your themes. To see how they look, hover over a theme and then click view demo. And that will open the theme in a demo window. If you like one of these generated themes, you can click try theme right here or you can close this and click try theme from this view. Once you click that, your new theme will start to install. The other way to change themes is to scroll down to the popular free theme section. That's right here. And in this tile, click visit theme store. That will open in a new tab. And it lets you filter all these themes by price and by industry. If you find one that you like, click to open it and then you can demo it like you've done before. To add this theme to your library, click try theme. If we scroll down, that will add the theme to your library. And to switch from the current theme to the one that we just added, simply click publish here and publish again to confirm. If you want to follow along with me and continue to use Horizon, scroll back down to the popular free themes and you should see it in this section. Click here to add it. That will add Horizon to your theme library. And we can make it the current theme by publishing it like we've done before. To remove any inactive themes from your library, you can click the three dot menu and then remove. I'll remove this theme as well. Now it's time to actually design the homepage of your store. A clean, professional design not only looks better, it also helps visitors trust your brand and makes them more likely to buy. Before we start, I'll just close this extra tab. And then to start customizing your store, find the edit theme button that you see across from your current theme. I like to rightclick this button and open the link in a new tab. That way I can stay on my Shopify dashboard here on this tab and I can have my store editor opened in this new one. Or if you prefer to jump back and forth on one tab, the exit button in the top left will bring you back to the dashboard like this. And you can always return to the editor by clicking that same edit theme button. Before we start building the store homepage by adding your elements and adjusting the layout, let me show you the interface of the editor. At the very top, we have the main toolbar. Here you can switch between different pages of your store using the page switcher. You can also toggle between desktop and mobile view using these buttons. And that's helpful to see how your design looks on a phone. And on the far right, you'll see undo, redo, and save buttons. Over on the far left hand pane, you'll find your sections and your elements organized into a hierarchy. Here we see the announcement bar within the header. And if we hover or click on it, we can see this element highlighted with a blue border. I'll click back. And we can see that our header section here contains the logo, the menu, and the search and cart functions. We can also scroll down to see our footer. So, if I come to the bottom of the page, our footer is here. And I'll often use this visibility button to toggle sections on and off, which will help you easily identify which is which. The main content of your page is within its template where you have the hero and the featured collection section. If we go back and you expand the hero section, you can see different elements for the heading and the button. It's easy to click and drag these within a section to rearrange elements. And to add new elements, you can just click add block. Here you'll see all the block types and we can add a new one just like that. You can also hover your mouse in between elements and you can see on the right hand side where that blue bar indicates the new element will be placed. But if you didn't add it exactly where you wanted to, you can easily reposition that later. To delete any element, simply click the trash can. You can also add and drag sections themselves. I'll click add section here to bring up all the options. You can scroll through them or you can search. I'll start typing image and I'll choose image with text. So now if I wanted to move a section, if I grab featured collection and I click it, you can see that the preview on the right zooms out and it changes as I drag this section to a desired location. I can collapse this and this one. And you can delete a section just like you would delete any other element. Now that you know your way around the editor, let's start designing your store by adding a slideshow section. Those are pretty popular for clothing stores. And then I'll show you a cool feature where Shopify can generate a whole section for you. On the left above the hero section, I'll hover and click here to add a new section. Then you can find or search for slideshow. If you expand this slideshow, you can see these two placeholder slides and each one has a group and in those groups there are text and button elements. First, before we edit the slide contents, let's click on the slideshow itself to access all the slideshow level settings. On the left, you now have all the settings you need to customize the overall look. The large arrows in the navigation, they refer to these here. So, you could change these to anything. I'll choose large chevrons, and you can see how those change. You can toggle the page nation here between dots and counter. You have access to different color schemes and you can set the slides to auto rotate after a certain number of seconds. Then you can edit the width, height, and padding down below. In the top right, I'll click save as you want to get in the habit of doing that often. To edit the actual slide content itself, let's click back here in the top left. Now, click on this first slide so you can access the slide level settings. Here is where you can change the visual content to an image or a video. To upload an image, simply click select. You could generate an image, but I'll click here to add my own. Once you choose one, click open and done. Once you've uploaded your image, you can experiment with the settings under layout and appearance to dial in the look. For this image, I know I want to align in a horizontal direction. And the left alignment and center position look nice. Down here, you can toggle this button to activate a media overlay. And then you can customize a dark overlay that will allow me to see this white text better. So, I'll fade in some transparency. And then I'll switch the overlay style to gradient and down. And if I toggle this, it just makes the text more readable. Up top here, you can rename this slide to anything you want. And you can edit your text or button elements by selecting them right here. For any selected element, you'll have all of your formatting options available on the left. I'll change this. And Shopify has AI tools built right in. So, if you like this placeholder text, but it's not perfect, click this icon right here to generate text. Here you can try to rephrase it by prompting a change and change the tone and generate again. Then you can select the one that works for you. Go ahead and click save. And then last thing on the slideshow, click back. I'll collapse this slide. And to add a new slide, you can right click on any existing one and click add block before or after. Then click slide. or what I like to do, I'll delete this one. Once you have this slide formatted how you like, right click and click duplicate. That way, you won't have to make as many edits slide to slide. And you can just edit the content if you want the formatting the same. All right. Now that I've edited a few more slides, let's see how you can use AI to generate a block. Under the featured collection section, click add section and then at the top, click generate. In the top left, you'll see a few suggestions, and you can prompt whatever you want to create in this box here. I want to create some social proof on my site. So, I'll enter this. Create a three column customer reviews layout, each featuring a quote, a name, and a 1 to five star rating. Each of these elements should be editable. And then I'll click send. Shopify will start to generate the code for your new section. And this may take up to a few minutes depending on how complex it is. If it's not perfect, you can tweak it with some follow-up instructions here. But mine is looking pretty good. And if I check out the settings over on the left, it looks like I have even more control than what I thought I would have. I'll scroll up and I'll call this section generated reviews. And then I'll click save. Then I'll click back. And I'll drag this generated section underneath the featured collection. And now that I'm looking at it here, we can probably improve the design of this section by simply choosing a different color scheme so that it stands out. That makes the review card stand out and this looks like one cohesive design. I'll click save again. So those are the two ways that you can generate sections. I'll collapse what we have so far. At the top of your page, you can customize the logo in your header. But even before we get to the header, you can adjust this announcement bar, which is a great way to display a message or a sale to your customers. If you open this drop down and click on the announcement itself, you can change the text and the formatting. And if you go back to click on the section, you'll have more formatting options here. If you plan to keep the announcement bar, it's nice to make it a contrasting color. Or if you don't plan to keep it, you can go back and you can hide or remove it entirely. Now, if you expand the header, you can change the logo. Click on it and then edit logo in theme settings. We were just in the sections area that you can find right here. And that hyperlink takes us to the theme settings which is found under the settings gear. And then it just opened the logo section automatically. To add a logo under this default logo, click select and then add files. Choose an image then open it and click done. Once it has updated, you can use these height sliders to adjust the size. You can also click the edit button right here to edit your image and you can do any cropping that you need to right here in Shopify. I'll apply this crop. Save and then return. Let's go back to the sections, return to the header, and then edit this menu. You probably won't finalize this menu until after you iterate on your store design. So, I just want to show you how to make a change. Click on it to open it and then click main menu. Here you'll see a few options and we don't have other menus created to replace it with, but you could do that if you make other menus later. And you could remove it entirely, but for now, click edit to open up the Shopify dashboard. When that opens, you'll see that we're focused on content and menus, and that has opened up our main menu automatically. You can rename it here, or you can add menu items. Click to add one. And just as an example, I can add the privacy policy. We can edit the label. And then you can save. I'll go up and close this tab and save our store. And you'll see the menu updated here. To rearrange these elements, click back and then click on the header section itself. From here, you can reposition the logo, you can reposition the menu, and you have access to change other important settings down here. Here, you can hide the search. If you scroll down, you can change the sticky header settings here. I'll put this back to always. And if you scroll down a little further, you can enable the transparent background here. And this is how that changes. The footer works similar to the header, just at the bottom of the page. I'll click here to return, and then I'll scroll down to the footer. Click here to expand the footer and show the elements of the email signup. I like to remove this, but if you'll try it out later, you don't need to delete these elements. You can just hide them for now. And we don't have anything else in the footer. If you don't want to put anything else in the footer, you could just hide that as well. Below this footer section, we have the utilities. Click the arrow to expand this and click on the copyright section. Up here, you can toggle off the text that says powered by Shopify. Then to update this store name, let's first save and then click the hyperlink to manage store name. That will open a new tab and take you directly to the setting within the dashboard. It's under the general settings and you can change the name here. Then save this change and close this tab. Now back on the editor, refresh this. Scroll down and you'll see that change take place. Now click back to exit the copyright section. And here you have your policies. I'll show you how to update these later. If you click back once more, here we have our social media links for any given platform. Just click here and then you can enter your profile URL or if you want to remove any particular link, just click the X here. When you're happy, go up and save. When you added your logo before, we briefly saw the theme settings, but let's revisit those so that you can change your store's colors, fonts, and small details like the favicon so that everything feels on brand. Over on the far left, click the gear icon to access the theme settings. You'll land in the logo section. And if you have a favicon that you want to show in the browser tab of your store, you can change that by selecting an image down here. I'll add a file and select mine and then open. And done. Now, to actually see that change take place, I'll save and then I'll click the three dot menu here and then click view. in a new tab. Your store will open and you'll see that favicon right here. But I'll close this tab for now and then collapse these settings. You'll see that there are a lot of theme settings here from colors and typography to animations and buttons. But we'll just take a quick look at a few of the most important ones so that you know where to find them. In colors, you can modify all the settings that make up the color schemes. As an example, we know we used scheme 4 for this section. If you open up that scheme, you'll get access to all of the color codes. And if you modify the colors that make up this scheme in the scheme settings, it will make the changes anywhere on your site where the scheme is applied. Change this background color here, for example, and you'll see the changes take effect. I'll undo that change and then go back to collapse the colors. The rest of these settings work similarly, so you can make similar changes in typography to change the body, subheading, heading, and accent fonts. I'll scroll up to the top of the page, and we know this is a heading. If I change this text here, that's going to take effect, but I'll cancel for now. And then we can expand the buttons section. And if we decrease the corner radius, that will square this button off a little bit more. So, anytime you need to make changes to visual elements broadly or anything that you suspect might be tied to your theme, make sure to come and check out the theme settings. And if you do start making major changes within theme settings, it's always a good idea to keep an eye on how everything looks on a phone. Before we move on to creating your products, I'll save and then I'll switch to the mobile view again in the top right. Here, you can scan your homepage to make sure that any changes that you make to colors, headings, and buttons all still look good. Now that you understand how to customize how your store looks, let me show you how to add your first product. From the Shopify editor, let's return to the Shopify dashboard tab. Then on the left hand side, click products. You'll see the example products here from the homepage that come with the Horizon theme. To add a new product, click add product in the top right at the top. Give your product a simple name that your customers will recognize. For this tutorial, I'll call mine classic button down. Below that, you can add a product description. Here you have formatting tools. You can add media and you can use Shopify's generate text feature here as well. I'll paste in what I had prepared from earlier. Below the description, you'll see the media section. Here you can upload your product photos. Try to use clear, highquality photos that will show the product from a few different angles. These can make a big impact on how well your store does. Based on your information so far, your category will likely autofill, but you can change it if you need to. Under pricing, set the price that you want to charge for this product. If you expand this drop down, you'll find options to set a compare at price, a unit price. You have a check box for charging tax, and you can enter the cost information. If you enter that cost, Shopify will show you your profit and your margin for this product. Below the price section is the inventory section. If you want Shopify to track inventory for you, make sure to toggle this inventory tracked button. Then you can enter the inventory details in the drop- down fields below. Under shipping, you have a physical product toggle, and you can toggle this off if you're selling a digital product. If you're not, keep it toggled on. And you can enter your package information here like inventory. There are some additional options in this drop down. And if your product comes in different sizes or colors, you can configure all of your options easily in the variance section. For example, adding sizes is easy. Click size here and then in this field, you can quickly select the sizes that you offer. Once you add your variants, you'll see some fields added that you can enter information about each individual variant. And finally, if you scroll down a little further, you'll see the category meta fields section. Because shirts and clothing tops was picked as the product category above, Shopify automatically filled in things like age group, target gender, and top length type. These fields help Shopify understand what you're selling, which can improve how your products show up across your store. Once everything is looking good, go up to the top right and click save. Now that you have your first product in Shopify, head back to the products page. And now that we have one of our own products, you can select these example ones. And you can bulk delete them by opening the three dot menu here. Confirm. Now, I'm going to spend some time off camera adding a few more products. Once I have some more products added, I can then show you how to create product collections from multiple individual products. With multiple products in place, let's group them into collections so that your customers can browse your store in an organized way. On the left, under products, click collections. If you have some default collections here, you can ignore them for now, or you could select them, click the three dot menu, and delete the collection. To create your first actual collection, click add collection. For the title, I'll type men's. And below, you can add a short description for the collection. And then you can choose the collection type. I like to keep full control, so I'll choose manual. And I'll show you how to add products to this collection one by one. To add an image for the collection, click the add image button on the right and upload a photo that represents the collection. I'll add a file, and I'll choose this one. and I'll click done. Then if you scroll down to products, you can search or click browse to select products. Search for each product that belongs in the collection. Select all the ones that do and then click add. The products in the collection will now show in this list. And if you need to remove any from the list, you can just click the X here. Once you're done, click save. Then click here or here to return to the list of collections. I'll repeat those same steps now myself to create two additional collections. One called women's and another for new arrivals. You can also add products to collections from the products page itself. Go back to products. Then select the product that you want to add to a collection. Go up to click the three dot menu. Click add to collections. Choose the collection that you would like to add it to and click save. Now that you have some collections, let's return to the editor and place your collections on the homepage to create a clear layout. First, let's revisit the featured collection. Since we've added products and all products was the default collection, your page will show everything. For some stores, this makes sense, but if you have many products, it might not. To change the collection, click the featured collection and then change the collection in this drop down by clicking it and then replace here. You can choose something new. Then you'll have a bunch of options to control how the products show within the collection that you've selected. And for my collection, I'll set the product count and the columns to four. And then I'll also change the color scheme so this stands out. And I might change that to color scheme 5. That way we have some more separation section to section. And if you want, you can edit how the collection title is displayed by simply clicking on it to edit. Here, I'll replace title with whatever I want to rename the collection. You can also display multiple collections in any section as well. Click back. I'll collapse this and then add a section above this featured collection. From here, choose one of the collection lists. The preview here can help you make a choice depending on what you would like your site to look like. Click one of them to add it. Then click on the list so that you can edit. Next to collections, click select and then you can choose the collections that you want to feature. I'll add all of these and I'll click select to confirm. Like we saw before, you have the same formatting tools to change how this collection list looks on the page. Because I'm showing the products in the new arrivals collection in the section below, I'll make some adjustments to this collection list so that we deemphasize the new arrivals in this section. To do so, I'm going to change the type to carousel. And then I'll make it two columns. So that will emphasize just these first two collections given the sizing. I'll need to reorder them. So I'll click change here and change collections. And then I'll uncheck new arrivals and then recheck it to order. Click select to confirm. Down below, I can change the color scheme like we've done before. Finally, if you go back and collapse this, you could build out the hero section on your homepage, add other sections, or you could hide the sections that you aren't using to keep your homepage simple. I'll hide the hero for this tutorial. And when you're happy, click save. Once you're happy with your products and collections and how they look on the homepage, let's add your policy pages. The policies help set clear expectations around refunds, shipping, and privacy, so they make your store look more trustworthy and professional to new customers. To find your policies, return to the Shopify dashboard, then click settings in the bottom left. In the bottom of the settings list, click policies. At the top of the policies section, you'll see return rules. This is where you can turn on more advanced return rules to help you manage things like return fees and return shipping. For this tutorial, I'll leave these return rules turned off, but you can come back here later if you want more control over how your returns work. Under that, you will see your written policies. You have a return and refund policy, a privacy policy, terms of service, a shipping policy, and your contact information. The privacy policy is already automated unless you want to make manual adjustments. And for most of these, Shopify gives you a template you can insert as a starting point. Under terms of service, for example, you can insert the template, make any changes, and then click publish. I'll draft a shipping policy. I'll insert the template for contact information. I'll set a return and refund policy. And then once you've published them all, your policy should look like this. No matter which templates you use, make sure you read through each policy carefully and update any details that don't fit your store. And if you're unsure, you may also want to speak with a legal or tax professional to make sure everything is set up correctly for your region. To see the policy menu now that we've added them, return to your Shopify editor and then scroll down to verify that the policy links are unhidden in the utility section. of your footer. If you have these hidden, expand utilities and toggle this visibility. If they're visible, click the three dot menu and then view. I'll hide this bar at the bottom by clicking the three dot menu and hide bar. Then I'll scroll all the way down and I'll see that the policy information is nicely contained in this expanded menu. Now that you have your policies in place and they're showing correctly in the footer, there are just a few important settings that we need to review before we publish your store. To do that, let's close this preview tab and then we'll go back to the main Shopify dashboard. If you aren't already in settings, click the gear to get back to settings. First, we will set up your payment provider so customers can actually check out. Click payments, then click complete account setup. If you get prompted for a verification code, make sure to enter it here. Then fill in your personal details, business information, and follow the rest of the prompts so Shopify knows where to send your payouts. Once that's finished, your customers will be able to pay with credit cards, Shop Pay, and other fast checkout options. When your account is all set up, you'll find a few more options. For example, when to capture payments, you'll see that here. And how to handle gift cards. That's down here. Next, scroll up and click on shipping and delivery. Here you'll see your general shipping profile, which controls where you ship to and how much you charge. You can click here to modify those general rates. If you go back, you also have a lot of options down below. And because your shipping practices can vary widely depending on where you are, all of these different options help customize your shipping behavior to fit your store. You can always come back later and fine-tune your shipping as you learn more about your orders as well. Next, let's open taxes and duties. Shopify will suggest default settings based on your store address, but it's still important to make sure they match how you need to collect tax in your region. If you're not sure what to select for taxes and duties, this is a good place to check with an accountant or tax professional since every country and state can have different rules. For this beginner tutorial, I'll keep things simple and leave the default suggestions in place. Lastly, click up top to open your general settings. You can confirm or change your store name, contact email, and phone number by clicking edit here. Below, you can set your legal business name, and enter your billing address by clicking edit here. And after you confirm your store details, you can check out the store defaults and related settings to make sure everything else is operating as you would expect. It's a good idea to familiarize yourself with the other groups of settings when you get a chance, but I've covered the most important areas here. The last thing you need to do before publishing your store is to set up your store domain. From within settings, click domains. Down here, you'll see your current Shopify subdomain. Now, if you already own a domain, you can click connect existing here and follow the prompts to point it at your Shopify store. If you don't yet have a domain, click buy new domain. Try typing in some names that you would want and then search for them. Choose one of the available options and then click buy to follow the checkout process. With your store created, your important settings taken care of, and your domain purchased, you're ready to remove the password and go live so that your customers can visit your site. Go back to the dashboard by clicking the X, and then click home. In the top right, you should see a button that says unlock store. I'll close this. And here's where you see the password protection. If you don't see this toggle enabled, make sure that you add your store address. Once you've added your business address, this toggle should be enabled. And now you can simply click it to untoggle. Then click save. And now your online store is live and it's open to everybody. You can view it by clicking here. If you've only been following along so far, remember to click on the link in the description to sign up so that you can activate a 3-day free trial and only pay $1 per month for your first 3 months. Thanks for watching and good luck with your store.