Shopify Tutorial for Newbies

This post is part of a series:

Shopify for Beginners

• Shopify Tutorial for Newbies
• Shopify Themes and Apps
• Shopify Promotions and Navigation

One of our most popular posts is the Handy Dandy Shopify Tutorial for Newbies – from way back in 2007! While we still love Shopify just as much (or maybe more), LOTS has changed on the Shopify front since then. It’s high time for an update! Note: This article series will touch on all the major sections of the Shopify admin, but it’s not meant to be an in-depth guide. Use it to help you familiarlize yourself with the Shopify back-end rather than as a step-by-step shop setup tutorial. (Although if you want one of those, give us a shout in the comments!)

Getting Started with Shopify: a quick overview

The Shopify Admin Home Screen (click to see larger)

Log in to your Shopify admin account (yoursite.myshopify.com/admin) The first thing you’ll see is the Home screen, which (depending on your account level) shows you at a glance some basic stats, how many orders you’ve received, the last login of your staff members and your out of stock items (if any). It also shows you what’s recently happened on your site: products that have been added or deleted, pages that have been published, etc. This news feed also contains recent Shopify announcements. The green navigation strip at the very top of the screen gives you access to all the areas in your shop. The black bar above it gives you a quick link to the shop itself (your URL is there on the left, next to the Shopify logo) as well as a search box and links to Support, your Account (where billing, staff and account level preferences can be set) and a Logout link.

Shopify Navigation Bars (click to see larger)

We’re going to start on the far right side of the green bar for this overview. This article will deal with the Preferences section.

The Preferences section:

This is a good place to start, since you’ll need to set up the basic workings of your shop before you start selling anything. The Preferences drop-down has seven sections:

The Shopify Preferences Drop-Down (click to see larger)

• General Settings: Your shop’s name, your contact email, your physical address (this is required for accepting payments, but it doesn’t display anywhere on your site), time zone and currency setup. You can also enter a Google Analytics account or other javascript snippets here, and you have the option to password-protect your storefront (to keep visitors out until you’re ready to launch, for example).
• Regions & Taxes: You can set your tax rates here.
• Checkout & Payment: Choose your payment method(s) and decide how to handle checkout-based rules such as automatically closing a paid & shipped order or automatically adding customers to an email marketing database. This is also where you can enter your Refund, Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.
• Shipping: Set your shipping rules and rates here. You can also (optionally) enable carrier-based calculated shipping from UPS and USPS.
• Fulfillment Services: Do you use a fulfillment service like Amazon.com or Shipwire? Enter it here.
• Email & Notifications: The content of your order & shipping confirmation emails can be set and edited here, and you can add Web Hooks to subscribe to “events” for your products and orders (most often these are used to connect with third-party services).
• DNS & Domains: If you have a custom domain you want to use for your shop, enter it here. You can also opt to buy a domain through Shopify for a yearly fee; if you go that route, all the setup is automatically taken care of.

Next up: the Theme drop-down and how to connect with the Shopify App Store.