How to start an online Shopify store

1. Introduction: Welcome to how to start an online shop store. My name is Donna, and I'm your tutor. And I hope you enjoy this course as much as I enjoyed creating it. The outcomes of this course are relatively easy. First of all, we're going to look at finding your target audience, identifying your Nian products, branding your shop fit. Then we're going to go into how to set up your e commerce website. Step by step, we'll tell you how to do that. Then we're going to look at adding pages, creating key pages, making sure we have them, and customizing your shop. These are basically the starting blocks of you creating store. There are tons and tons of things that you can do with it. But this is basically giving you a better understanding of if shop F is for you, if it is, there are tons of other training that I will be offering at some point. If you get to the point where you finish this course and you think I want to learn more, go on shop. They have themselves loads of training guides and things like that. If you want to learn a bit more, there's the place to go. Ideally, this course is for someone who is brand new to shop five, you've probably never used it, you're thinking about it, you've been thinking probably for a while, you've looked around. This is just giving you oversight of basically what it is that shop can do basically and how easy it is to do. Let's get started. 2. Identifying Your Niche and Products: Welcome to Identifying your niche and your products lesson. Building a thriving online store, Fire. Start with one crucial step, pinpointing your unique business idea, and selecting the perfect products to resonate with your target audience. There is no point having an amazing business idea if there's no customers that are going to be interested in it. We're going to go through basically a few key steps in thinking about your niche and the types of products that you want to sell or promote that thing. First of all, let's look at niche. Step one, discover your niche. What niche sparks your enthusiasm and aligns to the skill set. What passion do you have? You might find that you love jewelry and stuff. Well, fantastic. How can you build that into a business? But the point of having a business is enjoying what you're doing and enjoying what you're promoting and talk about because you're going to be doing a lot of it, a lot of time. Energy is going to be put into your business. It needs to be something that you're passionate about. Have a think, write down all the things that basically keep you interested and you could talk about forever thing. Those are the types of ideas that you need to be starting with. When it comes to your niche. You've probably thought some ideas or you're writing them down as we speak. You need to then think about your market analyzing. You need to be researching the market trends, looking at identifying gaps in the current offerings, assessing your potential competition, figuring out what sets you apart from them. Or is it something you look at your competitors, you think that's amazing? I want to do that. I think I can do better than that. That's where you can step in. You need to spend some time researching. There will be a PDF at the end of this course that you can download that will have all of these key steps that you need to be taking. But this is a really, really important one. Understanding the gaps in the market will help massively in getting all those customers in. Then you also need to be thinking about problem solving. Think about, does your idea address a specific pain point or an unmet need? It might be the fact that somebody is struggling to find a gift idea or something and they just can't find anything. And your website is all about gift ideas. You're filling in that need of, oh, I don't know what to get. And you're providing them the solution of, hey, check out my store. It's got all of these options for him, her, your son, your daughter, your granddad that's reaching those pain points. And that's when you can start pushing and promoting on that niche basically. Basically, I've just got a few examples to show you throughout this lesson. Here's one in particular, this is Wafer. They do, their website is beautiful, but it solves the problem, what their product is, shoe storage. And it solves the problem of, well, I've got a small hallway, some storage. Wow, fantastic. That will fit in my hallway. They've got loads of options of different sizes, different styles that basically can help solve that problem. But they're basically identified that in the descriptions about, you know, if you've got a small hallway, they know what the pain points are. Basically that that's a really good layout for a website and basically products. The next thing you need to think about is your product selection. Think about the quality over quantity. To start with selection of high quality products that basically resonate with your brand basically. Then look at you sort your profit margins. You need to be making a profit, basically, you don't want to be underselling yourself. You might offer free shipping, but that bites into some of your profit, that kind of thing. You need to be pricing things a reasonable amount so you're getting some profit back. Because the more profit you get back, the more you might put into the business, update your website, or you might be doing some other changes or adding more products, that type of thing. It's really important for your growth later on to have that their profit. Also, think about standing out so you can offer different variations of product personalization. Customer service might be amazing. You might offer like a chat box thing so that you can instantly message people back. Those types of things really stand out with people. I've done an example on the right hand side wafer, again, that's just fantastic. But as you can see, they've got different variations of cat bears. But the first one, the big pink one has got three sizes. For example, if you don't want pink, there's three options and that can draw people in a bit more. That's a good idea. Then the last example I'll just share with you is we talked about gifts as an example a minute ago is this very interesting site called Prezi Box. And what they've done is the whole focus is on gifts. But it's great because all the gifts can come in different shapes, sizes, it could be for anyone. But the whole point is that they're all unusual gifts. Something different, so it makes them stand out amongst everyone else because people type in unique gifts. One of a kind gifts those kind of wording. And they'll come across this website, which is fantastic. And they've got different ranges of gifts, as you can see him for her Valentine's Day, all types of things, this thing actually really stands out. Have a think about your products lines, your passions. What draws you in? What will keep your business going alive for years and years and years? And you can put your heart and soul into making this business really successful because that's what you're doing. You're going to be putting a part of yourself into business. You're going to be thinking about it all the time, which many of us do. It's important to be passionate about what you're doing. 3. Finding your target audience: In this lesson, we're going to look at finding your target audience. This is a really important lesson. Without knowing who you're going to be targeting, it affects the success of your store. Basically, you need to be identifying who your ideal customer is. I'm going to go through a few things you need to think about when it comes to thinking about who perfect person is that will buy from you. First of all, we'll look at demographics. Everyone who has a successful business, that type of thing, all know who that ideal customer is. They know who they're talking to most, will probably do. What we're going to cover right now is break down all the nitty bitty parts of basically their ideal customer demographics. You need to be thinking about your age group, your gender, and your location. This is like basically determining where someone lives. For example, if you're a local business, then that's going to be important to you. You might find that you do jewelry, so it might be that your gender is female age. You might find that your products are probably for a younger generation just because that's the type of thing that they would buy. You need to be thinking about what it is that you want to do and who, who's going to buy from you. Write this down. Most of the stuff that we're going to cover, there will be a booklet at the end as you go through all these types of things but start thinking about it now. It does help. Then you're going to think about the income and education. These factors will influence the purchasing power and decision making. For example, income. If they've got a bit of disposable income, they're going to pay more for certain things. Or they might decide that quality is something that matters to them. That type of thing. Then you need to look at occupation and lifestyle. Consider their professional roles and their day to day activities. This is important as well. It seems like a random one to think about someone's occupation. But you might find that your ideal audience is somebody who's in the fitness industry. They might be like health fitness, Gus, all that type of thing. But this will help you when it comes to your marketing overall and the wording that you use on your website, all of these things into lark. Basically, that's the demographics. Now we're going to look at the psychographics, this is the interesting areas. This is basically the intern out for a person. Basically you're thinking about their interests and hobbies. What do they do in their free time? Do they belong to any groups? Are they quite social? That type of thing? Quite important. For example, what you might, might relate to a hobby. That's always interesting. Understanding the groups will help you in your marketing efforts later on. Their values and beliefs motivates them. What social causes do they support? This might be a thing that you could do later on when you're developing your shop. And you talk about the causes that you're interested in and the things that you support that could later on doesn't have to for every store. But it's just something that can resonate really well with your customers. You're going to think about the challenges and pain points. This is such an important point. What problems do they face? How can your product solve an issue? This could be absolutely anything. For example, jewelry problem that you're going to be facing is that you have somebody's birthday coming up and you don't know what to get to them. Your shop might be the solution because you give them all of these birthday ideas, jewelry pieces. They're worded in a way like this is a present for the special someone. Basically your product meets their needs. Anything can be related to fixing a problem. You just need to think about that and the types of things that you're going to be selling. Then finally, when it comes to your customers and your ideal audience, you need to continuously think about the process and always keep looking at it over and over again because it will change. For example, your persona, say now compared to six months, might change purely for the fact that the age group might shift. People's interests change. There might be different trends that are coming up and people are more interested in certain things. You just need to really think about that persona evolving basically. Also test, test, test is so important. What I say, what I mean by this experiment with different targeting strategies, different wording, things like that. If you're finding in the first six months that things aren't really picking up, you're not really getting a lot of visitors to your shop. Try something, try something different. Try changing the layout of your store. Maybe because from a customer's point of view, they don't really like it, they can't follow it. It could be minor, minor tweaks, but test as much as possible. Don't just leave something and go, well they're going to buy from me no matter what thing they probably won't. Tweaking here or the menu actually is a bit easier to read, that type of thing. Anything minor can make a big impact on people, believe or not. Also, listen to your audience, engage with them, gather feedback, adapt your offerings. You can do this on social. For example, you could do polls. You could throw out ideas to people, your friends, your family, and see what they think. Then you can always ask them, well, what age do you think? Would you buy this? Or who do you think the ideal person is for this? You can actually talk to those people. You can get some feedback before building. Your site is entirely up to you. But knowing your audience will help make your shop store really successful because you'll be hitting the right people. Hopefully, this gives some insight and I'll see you in the next lesson. 4. Branding Your Shopify Store: In this lesson, we're going to cover branding your shop by store Before your e commerce website becomes a bustling marketplace. It needs a distinctive brand identity. You can't just pop a theme on and then just looks the same as everyone else's. It needs to be distinct. It needs to represent who you are. It needs to stand out to people and help you connect with your customers. We're going to look at four key aspects that you need to be thinking about. First of all, you need to define your care when I say calls, like the ins and outs, the background stuff that basically makes up your business. You need to be thinking about what your brand values and your mission is. Most websites you'll see actually have mission statements on that or core beliefs or things like that. Basically, these beliefs will basically build up your brand voice and the direction of your shop. Basically like if you're targeting specific people, then your voice will vary for them compared to something else completely different. You might want to come across as being very friendly, very open. You know, that will be part of your values, but you can share that in some of the things that you write about. The descriptions will have that tone. It all carries through throughout your entire store. Think about what your brand's voice is, What's the core belief of what it is that you're trying to create. Then you need to think about unique selling proposition, USP for sure. But she might see when you're researching businesses and that type of thing that will crop up. So what makes you stand out? What unmet need do you fulfill? What is it? Why do you want people coming to your store? Basically, that's what you need to think about. What makes me stand out? What's unique about me? What do I offer? What do I do to make people come to me? That's what you need to be thinking about. Then you also need to think about your brand promise. What commitment do you make to your customers? What experiences can they expect? You can say for example, we will respond within 24 hours or within 6 hours. We're very prompt. We're very this customers are the heart of our business. Those promises you need to be thinking about. If these things are unclear, don't panic. Don't worry. You can do a Google search. You can look at brand values, brand missions. You can even go in some of your favorite shops have a look at. The About section is usually where it is or there's a page dedicate what the company is about, unique sign propositions. You can look these types of things up, everything that I'm talking about. You can do a bit more research if you're not really sure what I'm talking about, honestly. This is just the basics. This is basically giving you a basic understanding of what makes up a shop store. There is a lot more that I can talk about but I wouldn't want to your ears off, basically have a look into these three things then you need to be thinking about your name. This is really important by the way. Some people just put mound go, we'll call it there. They don't really think about why it's called that. Is it relevant to the products, that type of thing. Your name should resonate with your brand and be readily available on all platforms. Well, I mean this, I mean check out if you are going to be on social media, is the name available on that? There is no point having a shop where nothing is consistent across absolutely everything that you're doing. If your shop is called something like gifts for her or something that's taken on all the platforms that you will be using. If people are going to be searching or you're trying to market yourself and they start seeing gifts for her and it's got 24 on it because that was the only thing available. Kind doesn't show professionals. If you know what I mean, it's really important to look across everything, Do some research if there are names that you can think of, right. This second fantastic. Type them into search engine, see what crops up. If there's already sites that are doing what you do and it's called that, then it's worth trying to look for a different name because you do not want to have that problem of copyrighting issues or somebody searching for them or you and they get a bit confused of what sites and you never know. You might be helping the other business get more business, basically because your name is very similar. Have a think about it. Well, I will say there are tools out there. Shop of offers a tool where you can do a business name generator. On the left, you can see it. It's a free tool. You can pop in some names. You can pop in some ideas of the types of things you do or keywords or things like that. It will come up with some ideas. It's worth having a little go, have a think about some keywords. Actually, if you're really stuck right this second and you have no clue what to call you shop, then it's worth writing down key things to do with what you're doing, what you're selling, what you're about, the type of branding, that type of thing. And start playing around with names. It took me a while to name the shop shops that I've been a part of. I basically brain song for quite a while, tried different name generators, test out some names, did some research. This step actually does take a while, but it is worth it. Once you have a name, it helps identify the whole shop shop and the branding and everything will follow through from there. The third thing you need to think about is a logos are important in today's trending. Simple better. You'll notice a lot of social now simple. A lot of people are sticking to simple, but simple is not always best. Do take some time to do your homework on this. It's really important for your branding. Once you have identified your name, the logo will come a bit easy because you know what to basically use words. Spend some time either doing it yourself, you can always go to camera. They offer like loads of logo ideas or you can get invested in the designer. There are freelancers on work fiber, those types of sites. Don't worry, everything I'm discussing, I will put in a PDF, just some resource links. But yes, we're spending some time just identifying what your logo is. You don't want it looking like everyone else's. You want it to be unique to you, but you want it to be clear and rememberable. There's a lot of factors when it comes to creating a logo that you need to think about. Another thing you need to think about, this is the fourth one key aspect is showcasing your products. When you showcase your products, if you are a store, for example, for jewelry or something, you'll have headers and things like that. Or generally, when it comes to using images of your jewelry or whatever you're selling, important that they're high quality, it's really important that they are. You don't want someone coming on your website and it's pixelated or it's blurry or anything like that. Images are important if you're using images for the banners that you just come across, stock websites. The three ones that I would recommend are free pick pixels, Pix, Abo, they're really good sites, lows and those free options, but they're very high quality images. That's what you want to be doing. If you can, however, use images with real life images, things that you can actually take photos of yourself to do it. The more images that are yours, the better it is. But that's not always easy to do in certain shops, To be honest, it's worth taking the time to find those really good images. Don't just settle for any of one play around with some images. This one on the left for example, this is a free pick website. That's a really cool image behind it, it really stands out. But that changes week to week. Usually they like to keep things a bit interesting sometimes, but the images really stand out. It's really important to think about that. Lastly, there are a few little tips I thought I'd share with you. When you're developing your whole brand and everything, it's important to put it into like a style guide. Style guide is just a document basically with your tychopography, basically. What font do you want to use? Your color palette, the tone of voice, and your visual elements that you want to keep consistency. For example, you might find the images of the banners, you want them to black and white. Putting it all together in a style guide will really help you in everything else that you're trying to do. Obviously, when you're designing the Shopify, you can go, oh, well that's the color I'm going to use for this, and this is the color for this and that type of thing. It just keeps everything consistent throughout your entire website as you're building and adding pages and things like that. I would say it is important to conduct market research to understand your audience. I have mentioned before, but I really, really think it's important to be successful, you need to understand who your target organs. The final thing is be authentic. Let your brand personality shine through your messaging, your visuals, everything, pop your face on the website, add a flare review into it in the about section and all the pages. If you like something and you think it makes that stand out, try it. Try and be as authentic as possible. Don't just try and stick to the same format that everyone's trying to do. You want your sit to stand out, It's really important to think about these. Spend some time. Think about your brand name. Your name will lead to your logo logo. Spend some time building that. Think about what your brand represents. This is a lot of time basically doing research and brainstorming. Get people involved if you want to, honestly, it's the greatest thing is having people bounce ideas off because they come up with ideas you would never have thought of in 1 billion years. It's really worth doing. Spend some time and I will see you in the next lesson. 5. Set up your ecommerce website: In assassin, we're going to look at setting up your website. Very straightforward. You just need to go over to the Shop Fire website, Google, search it, or type in Shop Fire.com and you will go to the main page on it. You will see an option to start a trial. This is how you get to play around with the website, have a feel for it. Before you decide if you want to go ahead and sign up to one of their plans, you'll click on the button to start trial. You'll get loads of options about what kind of website you want, that kind of thing. You can skip these if you want, or you can answer them. It's entirely up to you. Then you'll come to a page. It says create an account. This on the right hand side is exactly what you'll see. You will create an account using your e mail or you'll use Google, Facebook. However you want to do it, so you can just sign up and this will be your log in details to get to Shopify. On the next screen, I'm just going to go through exactly the type of thing that you'll see when you sign up and basically a few bits and bobs. Let's have a look, once you've set up, this is what you'll get. As you can see, this is a shop fire count. Here at the bottom right is your trial. So you usually get 30 days to do it or five days. You just need to double check. Sometimes they do offers, which is great. This is one pound for the first three months. But yeah, this is the main page. And there's loads of options down here which I'll go through later on. First of all, you need to set up all of these sections here. You'll go through each of them. As you can see, it actually gives you a bit of a guide. There's 12 steps that you need to complete. If you just click through each of them, it'll tell you how to go about it in the learn more adding a product and what you need to do in each section even helped you create a logo. If you need to add a custom domain, that type of thing. But if you ever get stuck, you can click on the links. You'll just need to start going through each of these to create your store. They like to make sure that the store is complete as possible before it goes live. That's why they've got this little guide to help you get started. What I would say is account, you'll get something like this. You do get a trial, so don't panic about if you're not ready to set up a store. This just gives you an idea of what to expect. Basically your credit card details or payment options. There's nothing added to this. Yes. Nothing will be taken out of your account. They just like to see if you want to set up a store to begin with a play a look. Each of these things are pretty self explanatory on how to do it, but I'll go into depth on certain key things that you need to know, especially some of these tabs down here in a La. 6. Add a product: In this lesson, we're going to cover how to add a product. As you'll find as you're looking at Shopify and you're playing around with it, is pretty straightforward and how it works to add a product. You go over to the third hand panel and click on Products. And then you'll see this button that says a product. If you just give that a click, and that's how you add a product. When you add a product, you'll see something like this. It will be a full screen, But what I've done is I've cut it into chunks. I'm going to go through each section and how to fill it out. The first one is to do your title description. You want a nice clear product title basically, so people know what it is. Then you're going to write, it's a really good description that target audience highlights the benefits, the key features, all of that. Then you could probably put in some information about any concerns or any anticipated questions. For example, if people are asking about dimensions or if it does this or that, put it all in there. If you do find that you're struggling and you probably will when it comes to writing descriptions because not everyone can write them and they're not pretty straightforward sometimes. If you look where it says descriptions in the image below, it is a couple of stars. As long as you've put the information that you think you want to include, you just need to put it into a nice flowy text. Basically, if you click on that button, it will give you an option to use an AI tool. However, if you don't want to use this and you use a different one, go ahead. I think it's a really good idea just to utilize them as much puzzle. And it will make adding all the products really straightforward. That's adding a title and description. Now as you scroll down, you'll start to see, this is what you'll be seeing. You'll see media and pricing. But first of all, media, this is where you'll upload your photos, your videos, your three D models. It does give you the option to add from a UL if you can, but it's really important to add consistent photo, consistent styles. You don't want some to be black, to be white, have like a filter, some done stick to the same style. It does offer some tools to edit some of the images if you want to crop something out, it does give you that offer. Basically, once you've uploaded the image, try and use photos. Are lifestyle photos, if you like. For example, if you have clothing or jewelry, try and get a model to do it. Have the jewelry in the hand on the neck or however it needs to go, if you can. It's just because a lot of people like to visually see it being used. It's a really good idea for them. Yeah, upload, nice clear photos. It will be really useful to give you a professional feel for your shopper account. It's important to that. Next we're going to look at pricing. Pricing isn't always straightforward just because there's so many different factors to think about. First of all, you need to think about various costs to you. The materials, the overhead, the time it took, your time is we money. By the way. If you're making something handmade, add that in at that time that you took into it, like don't sell yourself short on that. A really good idea is to look on other sites for similar things that you're selling. Just to get a baseline doesn't mean you have to copy their pricing. But just to get a feel for what the market is wanting and how people are pricing it, it just gives you a bit of feel. Also, last one in the big circle, you can see a tick box saying charge tax on this product. It's important to include that just because you yourself will be taxed at some point. It's important to add that tax because it adds into the pricing, which means it's not coming out of your profit, which is something you don't want. Then as you scroll down, you'll come across inventory. In the inventory, there's a few options on here. For example, inventory, you'll see ticked where it says track quantity. It's really important to basically track it just because if you don't and you say you have ten items and some 11 people go to, another person tries to buy something and you don't have it. Then when you go back to them go, well that's out of stock. It's going to give the customer a bad experience with yourself. It's really important to write down your quantity and keep a track on that, which shop will do? Every time you sell something, it takes off that number. Basically, if it's out of stock, then it basically says sold out. However, there are a few options where you can you see the option below where it says shop location says You sign when out of stock. You can do this, but that's entirely up to you and how you're going to manage it. I wouldn't advise it, but if you want to look into it or there's a reason behind that, you want to do that, that's absolutely fine. Yes, that is infentry. Next we're looking at ship, make sure to enter details automatically to create the shipping rates and to help print the labels on this. You'll see Tick saying this is a physical product. The reason for this is you can have digital products as well. With digital products, there is no shipping. Basically, that little box will just peer into like a little line and you won't have that option. As a physical product, you need to include basically the weight of the product and the region as well. This is just to help with shipping costs and things like that. To work it out, it's really important to include as much information as you can. Below this, you'll see variants. This is where you'll include the different sizes, the colors, different variations of the product. As you can see, there's color, material, style, and size on there. It's really important to fill this out as well just to make your life a little bit easier. Rather than list three separate things, you might as well list under the same thing, but different variants basically. Yeah, include those and make sure that you assign individual images to each variant. When you click on, say, for example, color, it will give you an option to add an image next to it. When you click on that image, you can assign one of the images you've uploaded to it. Make sure that if someone going through your store and they pick pink color and they click on that color, the image will appear so they know exactly what they're looking at. It's just a good customer service journey, basically. Then finally at the bottom, this gets forgotten quite a lot, to be honest. I'm not really sure why, or it could be a time thing. Always fill this out, which is the search engine listing. What this is is when you're on a Google search and you're typing in a product, you will get found easier if you've got this information filled out. If someone is looking for a black teddy bear and you sell black teddy bears and you filled this out, they will see this as well. This matches somebody search, I'll put it on the search listing. The more your shop grows, the more more well known it becomes, the higher up that listing will go. And also when people keep searching, it will appear a bit more as well. It's really important to fill out, make sure to include relevant keywords for your product. Also include your business name as well. You'll be surprised how often somebody will look up a business name. If it is linked to your name, it will appear more often, your full shop might appear as well. It's just a really good practice just to add your businessing into the meta description there. If you're struggling with this, I would say try using AI tools. Bard is pretty good if you just write in, I want a page title or a method description for this product and give it a bit information, it will generate something for you to fill this in. Don't worry about spending so much time doing it. There's a lot of AI tools there to help you. Last but not least, when you have a product writing a product on the right hand panel, you will see this which is product organization. Basically what this is doing is it's organizing it in your store, figuring out where it goes. Basically, on here you've got product categories and product types which are labeled. Basically you'll see you've got category, product type, vendor collection, and tags. They all mean different things, to be honest, it's funny why there's so many of them. But basically product type is basically working out what it is. Is it home decor item or piece of jewelry? That thing vendor, I don't tend to use this. I'm not overly familiar, but it's down to basically who designed it. Collections are used to group products with similar features. Tags are created to refine a search. Basically on a tag, you can put like Valentine, then wife, girlfriend, husband. Basically what it will do is it will appear in different places when someone is searching it. Your collections, for example, you might have various ones. You might have a collection for Valentine's Day, one birthday, one granddaughter anniversary. Those types of things. Basically, the tags will be assigned as well to those collections. They're all interlinked in a way. If you do want to learn more about this, I would suggest doing some reading. Go on to shopify itself and type in those words, and it will give you some examples on how to utilize them a bit more. But basically you just need to think collections. Basically at the top of your search bar where you've got all the dropdowns, that's your collections Tags are basically assigning something with multiple tags that can go in different pockets. Basically, that's where you've got to see it. Bit like hash tags in a way, it's got multiple meanings. I know it's a lot to get through, but once you start figuring out how things work, you'll understand it a little bit more. You might change those collections, you might change those tags, those types of things. But it's really important just to have a play around if you get stuck. I would advise going on to the Shep website. They're really good. They some useful guides. But yeah, make sure that you do fill this out. Category is basically what type of product, what type of product it is your businesses product type. What's the product type basically? Is it jewelry, earrings, what is it? And then you've got everything else. Hopefully this has helped you think about setting it up, or hopefully you may have just followed it along while you're creating your own shelf product or something. But if you have a go over play, see what crops any questions. Do a bit of a Google search. That's how everyone, I'm just trying to give you the basics of understanding and how it should be put together. Hopefully, this wasn't too traumatic for you and we're on to the next lesson. 7. Create key pages : Let's look at creating some key pages. While creating eye catching product pages is really crucial. It's only a part of the equation for a successful shoppy store. Did you know that there are actually some key pages other than just lots and lots of product pages? You need to make sure that you have the reason for this is it builds some trust and provides a seamless customer experience. Without these three pages that we're going to go through now, you will basically lose out on that trust and that customer service journey. The first one is about, you'll see on probably most websites there is about section. The reason for this is basically because it adds a bit personality to the store. It explains your history, it provides more in depth knowledge as to what your store is about and who you are. In this section, you'll create a page like you normally do. Basically what you need to be ensuring that you've gotten there is you're introducing the team, you're sharing your story, showcasing your values. We mentioned values. In another lesson, you can include your admission statement, that type of thing, into the about us. You need to also explain any like awards or mentions, or testimonials. All of that included as much stuff to big up who you are and what you're about and what you've achieved. Put it in the about section. It basically creates an emotional connection with your customers. When you're telling the story and people are interested in your brand, you aren't just another page that they've just found another shop. It adds a bit more interest into, oh, well actually this person has been making handmade goods for ten years and now they're doing it themselves online. And they start this business and they've grown and they love the backstory. Include it in the about section. Next you want to contact us. This is really, really important from a customer point of view. Make sure that someone can reach you easily. Have a clear address, phone number, E mail address. A contact form is usually helpful, but always put like a time limit, like we'll respond within 24 hours. Make sure you do as well. It just provides a way of people getting in touch with you. It needs to be really easy to find. Usually it goes on the top menu basically, and the bottom sometimes if you've got the time, you could do live chat. You also can basically do social links and ask people to message on Facebook because it might be easier for you, just find a way basically where you can contact people back really quickly. Whatever works for you, try and build it into the shop store. Because not everyone is going to have time to sit on a live chat while they're doing another 100 things. It might be easier doing it through social. It's ty also create an expectation for your customers if your support hours are 9-5 and then contact you at four, try and respond back if you can or do it first thing in the morning. But make sure that you have those times and meet those expectations. Because if customer gets frustrated, they will come away from your site. They might really want to buy something off you. But they just have a question, a quick question. I just want to narrow this that might push them into buying it. And the next page is a policies page. You need to be really upfront about your return policy exchange process, and handling of damaged goods. This is really important. You've probably had it at some point in your life where you have to exchange something or something post to tune it's damage. You want to know what happens next if you're struggling to find this information, you have to go customer service and that takes too long. Sometimes it's just nice to have a policy page that tells you upfront what you need to do, what processes and steps and what's going to happen if you do this and this, so that it gives them peace of mind. Make sure to have a clear privacy policy outlining how you handle the customer's data as well. It's really important, people don't want to know if their data is getting sent to someone and used for other purposes. You want to make sure that people know that your data is protected, clearly, display all shipping costs and process times for the regions and things like that. You don't get all those customers coming to you. Wait a minute, This was supposed to be here like three weeks ago and you're like, well, the shipping costs are here. Just make it clear, I would just say when it comes to shipping costs, times and stuff, trying to include them somewhere on the site. If you can just so that people know what it is, I think there is an option on if that you conclude it with every product when they click on so that people have a general idea, those three pages are key for your customers. Then the bonus tip is, just like with product pages, just search engine listing details for each page to improve the visibility. What I mean by this is make sure that when you are creating all of these lovely pages on the left side, make sure that you have done the search engine listing details for each of them. When you click on each page, you should be able to find the settings and adjust the search engine listings on that. Always include your business name in them. It's the same with product listings. You need to do the same as well as when it comes to search engines, if somebody wants to find out, for example, the return policy. 8. Customise your shop: We've looked at added products and all the bits and bulbs like that. So now we're going to look at customizing your shop in this lesson. In this lesson, I'm just going to go through the themes of the shop. This is going to be your page, you know where everything is. If you head over to here where it says Sales Channel and click on Online Store, you'll see all of these options here. You've got Themes, Bog, Pose, page navigation, and Preferences. Themes is where you choose this type of style of your shop that you'd like. I've already pre selected this one, which I'll show you in a second. But if you scroll down, you can see all of these three options. The good thing about this is you can select something that's similar to what you want. You don't have to build it from scratch. You can look at the demos. That one didn't work. Let's have a look at this one. Yeah, here's a lovely one. You can see how it's all set out. You can scroll through, you can get a bit of an idea if that's the theme that you'd want. The good thing about this is when it comes to themes, everything isn't sandstone. So you don't have to pick this one over here and go on now. I've got to stick with the blues and all of that customizable. That's the great thing about these templates. They're just a foundation into creating your store the way you want to do it. I've clicked on this dawn one, if I click on here, is there. This is the theme that I've chosen. If you scroll down, you can see it's very basic on here. If you go through each of these, you have options to change things. You can change the colors, things like that. You can make it darker, can change the blues. You've got different things. You just need to click through these and you change them yourself. For example, this is the banner, but when you click on any of these headings or anything like that, what it does is it brings out like a blue box around the area. That's basically what you're changing. You'll never get confused about what you're changing or anything like that. It will tell you. So it says image banner and it says image banner up here. This is where you would add images you can make, change the heights to be a bit smaller, just play around with it. I think when it comes to creating a shop five store, it's really good idea just to play around and see what does what you've got animations and things like this. It will do some funky things which makes it nice, easy. You can change it as well. It is adaptable to your mobile as well. And then theme settings. Each of these are going to give you different options because they're different blocks and things. But what you can also see is where it says header section. This is where you would add more sections to it. Basically underneath it, you could go through and you can add whatever you wanted and it will go underneath. Or you can click, you see this like blue button here where it says Add section. That's another way of doing it, Add In. And you will literally have all of these options. As you can see, if you just go through each of them, depending what you want, you might just want a bit of text, you just click on it'll, add it in. This is where you would then click on the boxes. Anything highlighted, like I said, is blue. If you go over to the left, look, this is where you would edit it. Same with this one. You edit it here. Same with this. Everything basically on the left hand side is how you customize it. Basically, if you want to see how we look on phone, if you just go up to here, this is currently set as Desktop. Just click on mobile and it will show the mobile version as well. This is just like a brief overview of basically what themes are and basically what you can do with it. Basically, this is a lot about playing around. You might have to find some more tutorials on basically adding different things, customizing it a bit differently, but this is basically the basics of how you add a theme and what's available, basically. 9. Adding pages: We're just going to cover off how to create pages. If you head over to the left hand side, go down to online store. You can see all of these options here. We've covered themes, which is this. But if you go down a few more, you go to pages on here. It's really easy to create page. You just go up here and click a page. I've just done like a test one over here. I'll click on this. When I click Add Page, it brought me to this. This is where you'll fill in all the information. You'll add in some text. You can add in images which are pretty straightforward. Which is, click on this. I've already uploaded images, but you can get product images if you add products to your store, which is a later lesson. But for now I'm just going to click on this, then insert it. It will come on here. The other two things that you need to know about this is this bit where it says Search Engine Listing Preview. If you go ahead and click on whatever you type in here will appear here, but it's a good idea to limit it or even change it yourself. But this is really, really important when it comes to people searching for things on your store, or they're looking for some information, things like that. It's important to fill this out and then save as well. Then the other thing you need to know is about your online store here, theme template. At the minute we have a default page and then we've got a contact page. I tend to stick to default pages unless you're going to have two or three different styles. You can name them differently, but for now, that's basically what we need to know. Then if you go down to press Save, the page will say it's saved at the bottom. Then we can go over to here. This is where it'll say View page, or it will come up with a nice green band at the top so you can view it. It's always good idea just to check it out. I'm going to click on that. It will come up with a page which is basic of all this because the theme we haven't really set, we haven't add in colors or titles or anything like that. For now it's a very basic page, but it's really good idea to know how to do this. I'm going to click back out. As you can see, all your pages will just be here. So you can pick and choose which one you want to do. You can click on the name and you can go back in and basically change what you need to change. There are options here, you can go through all of this. This is a really good one, generating text, formatting your titles. Are there bullet points, numbers, indent alignment, and some colors. You can add a table image video. You can get some of the formatting clear. If you're copying and pasting and it goes a bit weird, you can just click on that. As you can see, it's so simple just to create a page on your site, have a go at it. I'm in a trial version just to show you all the ins and outs of this. It's three days it's worth doing. And I definitely recommend just trying play around with the pages and seeing what they can do and basically how it looks as well.