How to Build a Shopify Store

2.2 How to Sign Up and Create an Online Store

Welcome back to the course. In this lesson, we'll sign up with Shopify and create our store. This is a very simple process. So, let's begin. To sign up, you would go to shopify.com, and you can start by either entering your email address here, and clicking this button, or clicking this button, and filling in the information here. So, we're gonna use this method. For the email address, I'm just gonna make, or use an email address that I've created specifically for this course. And then you would set your password, and then you would input your store name, which in my case is Adi's Watch Shop, let's see if it's available. And it is. And by doing this, you're automatically starting a free 90-day trial with Shopify. Now, I just wanna mention that when you're watching this course, you might find a different trial period. This course is recorded in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. So, a lot of businesses extended support for their customers, and Shopify did the same thing by extending the free trial period to 90 days. I believe by default it was about 14 days. I might be wrong about that, but it was much, much lower than 90 days. So, it is possible that when you're watching this course, this trial period might be different for you. With that said, we're gonna hit Create store. And now, Shopify will take us to adis-watch-shop.myshopify.com. And it's gonna take us through a small wizard that will allow us to set up our store. Now there seems to be a small glitch here, okay, with the text. So, tell us a bit about yourself. Are you already selling? Right now, I'm not selling products yet. In fact, for this demo I'm just gonna select, I'm just playing around. Then, what's you current revenue? Right now I'm just getting started. Which industry will you be operating in? Let's just say clothing. I believe that's where, or actually, no, jewelry in my case because I'm selling wrist watches. And then I'm gonna hit Next. Let's add an address I can get paid. So I'm gonna add my own information here, address. I'm just gonna say Romania. It doesn't really matter at this point, but in your case, you would put in your actual address. And obviously, the other information should be accurate as well. And I'm just gonna hit Enter my store, and we're in. It says my trial just started. And now I'm inside my store. I am seeing my back end or my administration interface. And if you see on this sidebar, where it says Online Store, you can click this eye icon, and it's gonna take you to the actual front end or the store that your visitors will see. Obviously, this is just a default. We're gonna work on this in the upcoming lessons. Now, before we wrap up this lesson, I promised I would go back to this page, where we create our logos. So, let's actually sign up with the same email address that we used previously. So, let's sign up. And now, the logo maker is gonna generate our logos, and it's gonna allow us to download them in just a little bit. All right, so the logo package and design files have been sent to my email address. So, let's do a quick check here. Probably takes a little bit until we get the email, and there it is. Let's go ahead and download these, and see what we have. And, we have a lot of assets actually. We have a Facebook cover, nice. Another cover, profile image, fav icon, Instagram, LinkedIn banners, that's pretty cool. We have our transparent logo as a PNG. We also have a PNG with a white background. Pinterest, Twitter. That's pretty cool. So, this service basically gives you all the assets you need for that particular logo, in the correct format, and in the correct size as well. Fantastic, so what I'm gonna do is copy all of these. I have a folder here with all my assets. I'm just gonna call it Brand. Paste these in. And in here I also have some PNG files that I downloaded from Elements. I showed you these in the previous lesson. These are just for demo product images that I'll be using. And also, I have a folder with stock photos, downloaded from both Shopify stock photo service, which is called Burst. And you can see here. Also I have a lot of photos downloaded from Envato Elements, and I searched for photos that featured wristwatches. So, we'll see which one of these we'll be using. I'm probably not gonna be using all of them, but I just wanted a lot of options to play around with. All right, so with that said, our store is now created. We have access to the admin interface, we can see a preview of it here. We can move on. Now, in the next lesson, we'll handle some Initial Store Settings. Like currency, address, formats, and so on. So, I'll see you there.