Your store lives on your website: products marked On the website show in its products sections, and with the store open they can be put in a cart and paid for. Orders from the website, the register, the phone, wholesale and the other places you sell are kept together in Products, under Orders, and sent from whichever place has the stock.
Opening the store
- Open Products and choose the Online Store tab.
- Switch on Sell online.
- Work down the list on the Taking Orders card until every line is ticked, then choose Save.
The list asks for:
- Card payments set up (in Settings, Card payments).
- At least one way for orders to reach customers: shipping, pickup or local delivery.
- Products marked On the website, each with a picture.
- The website published (in Website). Until then, only you and people with its password can shop.
How orders reach customers
- Ship orders: rates by zone, each zone a set of countries or states with its own rates, by order amount or by weight, with Free on orders over if you like. A state named in a zone uses that zone before one for the whole country. Rates by weight use each product's weight.
- Customers can pick up their order: at a location, with what they are told.
- Deliver orders yourself nearby: the ZIP codes you deliver to and the delivery fee.
Tax, checkout and emails
- Charge sales tax on online orders, and whether to Tax shipping and delivery charges too.
- Under Checkout: the smallest order, whether shoppers can leave a note, whether to offer your email list, and whether to ask them to agree to your policies.
- Under Emails, give an address to Tell this address about every new order, and switch on Remind shoppers who leave at checkout.
Orders
Open Products, Orders. To send is what is waiting; Sent and Canceled are what is done.
- Open an order to see what was ordered, who it is for, how it gets to them and its Timeline.
- An order to ship goes out from Shipping with a label (see Shipping). For pickup, Tell them it is ready; the customer is emailed.
- Refund gives money back to the card it was paid with, or records a refund you give yourself by cash or check. Cancel and refund does both.
- Edit adds or takes off lines after an order was placed; what is added can be paid by a link.
- Export orders downloads them as a spreadsheet in Shopify's order layout; Import brings past orders over from Shopify's order export, checked first and undone as one (see Bringing your records over).
- Stock by place shows how many of each product could go out from each place, what open orders have Promised, and what is Free to Sell.
Payment links
Under Orders, Payment links, make a link for a customer: the products, a discount code, and their name and email. Email it from the app, or copy it and send it any way you like. They pay on your store, and it becomes an order.
Subscriptions
Under Online Store, Subscriptions, switch on Sell products as subscriptions and choose how often customers can choose and the Subscription price (such as a percent off). A product offered as one gets a Subscribe choice on its page. The customer signs in, pays the first order, and the same is sent and charged to their saved card on schedule until they cancel from their account. The team sees and changes them under Products, Subscriptions.
Reviews and returns
- Switch on Ask buyers to review what they bought: each is asked by email, once, a few days after the order goes out. Read each review before it shows holds them for you. Answer a review in Products, Reviews, and your reply shows under it.
- Switch on Customers can ask to return or exchange from their order's page, and for how long after it goes out.
Gift cards online and other currencies
- Sell gift cards online: the amounts offered, or let shoppers choose their own. Each is emailed with its code as soon as the order is placed.
- Show prices in shoppers' own currencies: add the currencies; the day's rates are fetched for you, or set your own.
Google, Instagram and Facebook
Your products as a feed that Google and Meta read on their own every day: prices, stock, pictures and the page each one is sold on. Copy the feed's address into Google Merchant Center and Meta's Commerce Manager. The feed has every product on the website that has a picture, once the store is open.
Best practices
- Work down the Taking Orders list before you announce the store. Every unticked line is a shopper who cannot finish.
- Offer pickup if you have a shop. It is the cheapest delivery there is and brings people through the door.
- Weigh your products before you set rates by weight.
- Read every review before it shows for the first few months, then decide whether to keep doing so.
- Switch on the reminder for shoppers who leave at checkout. It recovers sales you would otherwise never see.