How to Set up a Shopify Store in 2026 - Step by Step

Do you want to build your first online store using Shopify, but you're not sure where or how to start? Then you've clicked on the right video. Over the next 10 minutes, I'll guide you through all of the important steps so that way you can build your Shopify store from complete scratch. And the first step is signing up for Shopify. At the top of this video's description, you'll find a special sign up link. It's going to get you a 3-day free trial and three months of Shopify for only a dollar per month. So, be sure to use that link to save yourself some money. Signing up is super easy. Just follow the prompts until you arrive to your Shopify dashboard. Then to make sure we activate the special $1 per month offer, let's click on select a plan. The basic plan offers plenty of features for most stores. So I'll click on select basic. Now just fill out your payment information and click on subscribe to move on. Okay. Now that you're subscribed to Shopify, the first thing we'll do is choose a theme for your store. To do this, click on online store and you'll see by default the Dawn theme is already installed. But if you'd like to choose a different theme, just scroll all the way down and click on visit theme store. And once you're there, you can find many free and paid themes to choose from. For my store, I'll be sticking with the Dawn theme, which is already installed for us. Now, let's begin customizing your store. To begin, click on customize. and this will take you into the store editor. This is the main interface that you'll see when customizing any Shopify store. So, it's a good idea to take some time and get yourself familiar with it. Let's first add a nice banner image to our homepage. Click on image banner here on the lefth hand side. Now, I'll simply drag and drop in my image. Let's also change out the heading text. Simply click on the text and change it here. Now, to add your store's logo, let's go to the theme settings on the lefth hand side. And under logo, we can upload our logo to our store. And once it's done uploading, it'll be displayed on the left side of the store's header. Also, under the colors and typography sections, you can choose your own brand colors and fonts for your store to get a nice branded look. Next, let's add some products to your Shopify store. To do this, we'll go back to our dashboard. So, let's save our changes and exit the store editor. Then, let's go to products on the lefth hand side. If you're drop shipping your products from places like AliExpress or Printify, you can simply import your products directly from those platforms. But if you're selling your own products, go ahead and click on add product. Here, we can enter all the important details like our product name and a short description. If you need some help with generating a good product description, you should try using chat GBT. Just give it some information about your product and brand and then paste in the description here. Then we'll begin uploading our product photos. And your product photos are arguably the most important part of your product page. So be sure to use highquality images that show your product in the best light. Here we can set the pricing for this product. Then if you want to use Shopify to track your inventory, make sure to set the quantities you currently have in stock. If you have multiple colors or sizes for your product, you can set them up down here under varants. Once everything is filled out, click on save to add this product to your store. Now, you can simply repeat this process for the rest of your products. As you can see off camera, I've gone ahead and added in a couple more products to my store. To keep all your products nice and organized, let's create some collections to house them in. On the lefth hand side, click on collections to set up your first collection. Since I'm building a clothing store, I'll create a collection called t-shirts. I'll set the collection type to manual so I can have control over which products are being added into the collection. And we'll also add a image. Then we can add the relevant products that we want into this collection. Since I'm creating a t-shirts collection, I'll search for the t-shirt product I created just a moment ago. I'll select it, then click add. Once you're done adding products into the collection, click save to finalize everything. And like before, I've gone ahead and repeated this process a couple more times off camera, so I now have a few different products and collections to add into my store. With that done, we can spend some more time customizing our store pages. To get back to the store editor, click on online store and then customize. When we scroll down, we can see that there's already a featured collection set up on the homepage. Let's delete this by clicking on the trash icon. And then let's click on add section on the left and choose the collection list. Here we can display the collections that we just created. So for my store, I'll add the t-shirts collection, the hoodies collection, and the pants collection. Then to make the collection images appear properly, let's click the back button. Then click into collection list and change the image ratio from square to adapt to image. To add more content to your homepage, simply click on add section and add any section that you like. Now, if you look at the top of the page, you'll see your store navigator. With this, you can switch to the other pages on your store, like your product pages, and customize them the exact same way. To customize the navigation menu at the top of our store, we'll have to go back to the dashboard again. So, I'll exit out in the top left, then go to content and click on menus, then click on the main menu. And here we can add new menu items. For example, we could add a specific collection to our main menu. And we can also create sub menus. For a clothing store, it would make sense to have a men's and a women's collection and then add all of these different types of clothing as a submen so everything is nice and organized for your customers. To check out how our new menu looks, we can go back to the editor and we'll be able to see all of the changes that we've made here. Once you're done customizing your store, you'll need to configure your store policies before selling any products. and Shopify makes it super easy to set up those policies. Let's start by going to settings in the bottom left. Then scroll down and go to policies. Here we can create our policies from the Shopify templates by clicking on insert template. Now before you save these, make sure you read through the policy template and customize them to fit your specific store details. You'll also notice that there's no template available for the shipping policy as that varies between stores. So, be sure to configure that along with your contact information. And now, we'll want to add these policies to the footer menu of our store. So, let's close the settings and go back to content and then menus. Now, click on footer menu. And here we can add all the store policies that we just created. Once you're done adding in your policies, click save. Now, let's go back to the store editor. Scroll all the way to the bottom, then click on the small drop-own arrow next to the footer. Here, we'll add a new block. We'll choose the menu block. And just like that, we now have the footer menu and our store policies displayed at the bottom of our store. We're getting close to being able to launch our store. So, let's quickly configure some important settings to make sure everything is correct before we go live. We'll start by setting up our payment processor so that customers can actually check out and complete payments on our store. In the dashboard, let's go to settings in the bottom left, then click on payments, then click on complete account setup and fill out your personal details to complete this process. Doing this will activate Shopify payments for your store. This will allow your customers to choose between many different types of payment methods like credit cards, Apple Pay, Shop Pay, and more. By default, customers will also be able to check out using PayPal. And you can deactivate PayPal payments if you want to, but I would just leave it turned on to help increase your store's conversion rate. We also want to make sure that we set up our shipping rates. So, let's go to shipping and delivery here on the left. And here we can set up different shipping rates based on the regions that we're shipping our products to. In the case that you're importing your products from a third party supplier, then there might already be a shipping profile set up for your imported products. Next, we'll click on general. And under store details, let's make sure everything is filled out correctly. Input your store name, email, phone number, along with your billing information, and currency. If you need to collect taxes for specific regions, you can set those up under taxes and duties. And the final thing we'll do is set up our custom domain, which is the URL address of our Shopify store. So, let's go to domains. And if you already have your domain, you can click on connect existing domain and follow the instructions. But if you don't have a domain yet, you'll click on buy new domain. Then type in the domain that you want, and if it's available, you can buy it right here through Shopify. I recommend doing this because everything will be automatically connected to your store, which will save you some time. to remove our store's password and publish our store. Let's close out of the settings, then click on remove password. And congratulations, you've officially built your very own Shopify store from complete scratch, and it's now online and available to all of your customers. Hopefully, it wasn't as hard as you thought it was going to be. Make sure you don't forget to claim your extended free trial of Shopify by using the link at the top of this video's description. I wish you the best of luck with your Shopify business and I'll see you in the next video.