- Hey everyone.
So there's something that I've got to admit,
even though over these past two years,
I've been making lots of videos
sharing how my Shopify based drop shipping business works,
and even becoming a certified Shopify commerce coach,
I have never gotten around to updating
one of my most popular Shopify videos of all time,
my step-by-step tutorial where I showed
how to set up an AliExpress drop shipping store
using Shopify and Oberlo.
So it's probably not much of a surprise then.
There are lots of people are like,
"Sarah, this video is massively out of date,
"when are you going to make another one?"
It's kind of getting ridiculous here
that it hasn't been updated in so long.
And you know what?
I completely agree.
Making tutorial videos like this is to be honest,
a lot of work, and so I just kind of keep putting it off.
And so as a result it has now become
my most requested video of all time.
So you know what team?
The time has come to stop putting it off
and to take action and to do it.
That's right.
It is time to create a new tutorial video
where I share the updated method
on how to create an AliExpress drop shipping store
using Shopify and Oberlo step by step.
And I know in my New Zealand accent,
it sounds like I'm saying stip by stip,
but really I do indeed mean S-T-E-P by S-T-EP.
20 steps to theme tags.
So you can see why making these tutorial videos
definitely takes a while, but it's totally worth it.
This here are all the steps that we'll be covering
in this new updated video.
If you wanna skip ahead to individual steps,
I'll have timestamps in the video description.
So you can jump to any particular section that you like.
And of course, here's a preview of the store
that we are going to build.
Remember this isn't a real store,
it's just an example tutorial store
that I've set up for this video.
As you can see, the design is nice, simple, and clean.
I've designed the store in a way so that even
if you don't have any design or artistic abilities,
you'll be able to follow along with my instructions
to create a professional looking store like this one too.
As part of the store design, I'm gonna teach you
how to set up an image slider like this one here,
featuring pictures of the products
that you're gonna be drop shipping.
I'm gonna teach you how to set up a store menu
with the drop down menu that features
each of your item categories for customers
to be able to easily browse through.
And I'm gonna teach you how to set up
a custom store domain name and a favicon image
which is that little image that you see
in a website's tab in your internet browser.
And I'm also gonna teach you how to add products
into your store, the drop ship from AliExpress
and update the product pages for each them,
as part of this, I'm gonna be showing you
how to find products that you can drop ship
straight from the USA that feature fast shipping time,
so one to two weeks, sometimes even faster,
arrive at your customer's door in less than a week.
And I'm also gonna show you how to update
each of the product variants
when you add them into your store
such as this coaster here which I updated
so that it can be drop shipped in three different colors,
tabby, white, and gray.
And I'm also gonna be showing you
how to modify the settings in your store,
so that customers will be able to actually
buy items from you, we'll be sitting up shipping
and we'll also be setting up a custom checkout page
that features your store logo and color scheme
so the customers will see it and trust your store more.
And then I'm gonna tell you how to set up
Shopify's payment processor and how you can set it
so that customers can spend money
and buy items from your store.
So this here is the store that we're gonna be building.
So let's get started.
Step one, how to get a free 14 day trial to Shopify.
So obviously as this is a tutorial video
on how to set up a drop shipping store with Shopify,
probably the very first thing we should do
is actually get an account with Shopify.
With Shopify, they let everybody who sets up
an account with them get 14 days for free.
However, like a lot of things in life that are free,
with us comes one small catch.
And that is this, your store is gonna have a password screen
protecting customers for being able
to enter your store and buy things.
And while you're on your free 14 day plan,
you can not turn this password screen off.
However, once you've finished setting up your store
and you have purchased a paid plan,
this will allow you to remove your store password screen
and send your store live,
which we're gonna do later in the tutorial video.
So to get started, head on over to Shopify,
I have a link to Shopify in the video description below.
Please note that is an affiliate link,
however, if you are one of the kind viewers
that chooses to use my affiliate links,
I greatly appreciate it as it enables me
to keep making tutorial videos on YouTube for free.
All right, so to get started,
just come on over to Shopify and create a free 14 day trial.
So you're gonna need to create a store login
by choosing an email address to sign in with and a password.
Make sure your email address guys is a real email address,
emails will get sent there and you will need to verify them.
So please choose a real email address that you can access.
You're also gonna need to choose a store name,
however, the really cool thing
is that you can change this at any time.
So if you have a store name in mind, then sure, go ahead,
but if you're like, "Sarah, I'm just getting started.
"I don't have a store name yet."
That's absolutely fine, you can just enter any filler one,
choose a real store name later.
Now, Shopify are gonna ask us to fill out a survey,
but there is this wonderful skip button
where we can just skip on over that survey.
It does nothing other than give
Shopify additional information for the marketing team.
So don't think that you have to fill it out at all,
but this section here, you definitely do have to fill out.
You're gonna have to give them your address
and your information.
So you need to give them your first name,
your last name, your address, and your phone number.
And you do not have to give them a website,
that is entirely optional, you probably thinking,
"Well, Sarah, aren't we literally setting up
"a website right now, how can I give them a website
"if I haven't made it yet?"
And that's a great question.
(Sarah laughs)
And the answer is you don't have to give them one
but this is a legal requirement for Shopify.
Later on in the tutorial video,
I'm gonna show you how to set up Shopify payments
and Shopify are going to need to have this information
to verify your identity so that they can
send you the money that you earn.
But yeah, that's it, super simple.
It's time to move on to the next step.
Step two, how to install the free Shopify theme, Simple.
So here's the deal, in life a lot of people tell you
that nothing comes free but obviously we have seen
that some things do indeed come free
as Shopify does have a free 14-day trial.
And in addition to that, there are two other things
in life that you can get for free.
The first thing is my eternal gratitude
for taking a moment out of your very busy day
to give this video a like and to subscribe
because seriously every time you do that,
it genuinely supports me,
so thank you so much to everyone that does so.
But the other thing that you can get 100% for free
is this beautiful Shopify theme, Simple.
Now, yes, while you can indeed go
and pay for a fancy Shopify theme
that comes with lots of bells and whistles,
there is just one problem with that.
All these bells and whistles require you to configure them.
And these fancy themes often have a lot of settings,
beginners buy them and then they find them overwhelming.
They spend a lot of money for the privilege
of getting confused, which is why in instead,
I usually recommend that people choose to spend no money
for the privilege of making it easy on themselves
by picking a free theme, like Simple,
that is very easy to use and configure to create a nice,
clean, simple design that looks professional
and that customers will enjoy and trust.
For this step, we're just gonna be installing the theme
and we're gonna make configurations
to the settings later on in the tutorial video.
So let's do this.
So come on over to the left side menu
and click online store.
By default, you'll be on the themes tab,
which is perfect because it's exactly where we wanna be.
So scroll down the page and then come
and click explore free themes.
Now there are many free things to choose from
but for this tutorial, we're gonna be picking Simple.
And it does come in three versions, light, toy and beauty.
And while all of them doing day look very nice,
we're are gonna be choosing light for this tutorial here.
Now what Shopify is doing is it is loading
the theme into our store.
This is a pretty big deal,
there are a lot of files for it to load them,
so this will not be an instant process,
you will have to give it a minute or two
and just let it load in and just be patient.
And once it's loaded in, we can then publish it.
So what Shopify is going to do
is it's going to replace the debut theme
with Simple, as we've chosen it here.
And boom, it is published.
So go on here and add in your free theme.
And it's time to move on to the next step.
Step three, how to install the free app Oberlo
and update its settings.
So now we're gonna install the most important free app
in any AliExpress drop shipping store, Oberlo.
Oberlo was actually purchased by Shopify in 2017.
And so this is another reason why most drop shippers
will choose Shopify over other e-commerce platforms
such WooCommerce, it's because Shopify
has exclusive access to Oberlo, which is the best,
most reliable free AliExpress shipping app.
Oberlo has two membership plans,
they have the free plan and they have the pay plan.
The free plan will let us do
everything we need to do as a beginner,
which means it will allow us to add products into our store
and to semi-automate the process of drop shipping them.
So there's no need to pay for this app,
we'll just be using the free version
of Oberlo for this tutorial.
And I'm also gonna be showing you how to update
several important sittings within Oberlo.
So for example, I'm gonna show you how you can change
which default shipping method Oberlo selects
when drop shipping items from China to the USA.
And I'll also show you how you can set it
so that Oberlo will effectively
remove an item from our store
if our AliExpress supplier runs out of stock for it.
So let's do this.
So on the left side menu, come and select apps,
and then come and click shop for apps.
And this is gonna take us to the official Shopify app store.
So go ahead and do a search for Oberlo
and then select them from the list,
as you can see they're by Shopify
because Shopify do indeed own it.
And then come and select add app.
And then come down and select install app.
And then we wanna come and click create new Oberlo account
and we're gonna create an account with Oberlo,
to do so you're gonna need to choose
an email address to log in with and a password,
please, please, please, please,
please choose an email address, that is real
so you can actually go in and verify any emails,
and then click create free accounts.
So now that we've done that,
we do need to update a few settings.
The first setting that we're gonna change is,
we're gonna have it so that our customers
are notified if an item is shipped out to them.
So to do that, just come and click settings.
And then come down to notify customers about shipped orders,
and you wanna tick that little box
and type in the URL that I've typed in here.
Now you wanna come down to when a product
is no longer available,
to set the quantity to zero and notify me.
And when a variant is no longer available,
set the quantity to zero and notify me,
when the cost changes, I do nothing but notify me
so that we can go in
and manually change the price ourselves.
And when inventory changes, update automatically
and then click save settings, and we're almost done,
we just now need to go in
and change the default shipping method with an Oberlo,
so come and select suppliers
and then come to default shipping method.
And right now the most reliable form of shipping
between the USA and China is AliExpress Standards Shipping,
So we're gonna select that,
and make sure you've got a custom note like this in there.
And once you do, just come and click save settings
and that's it, we've updated the settings within Oberlo.
Awesome, you installed and updated Oberlo, yay.
But before we move on, I just wanna let you know
that in addition to being a drop shipping app,
Oberlo also has a bunch of free training
that you can take advantage of as well.
Yes, they have a free YouTube channel with training videos
which I've been featured on, in a fun collaboration video
I did with Jessica, I have a link to this
in the video description below,
and they also have a free podcast that you can download.
I did an interview with them for one of their episodes
which I'll also have a link to
in the video description below.
And your Oberlo account that you created in this video
also gives you access to their free video tutorials.
One of which I filmed and hosted,
which I'll also have a link to
in the video description below.
But anyway, back to this tutorial video.
Step four, how to install the free Oberlo Chrome extension.
So now that we've gone and add Oberlo to our Shopify store,
we now need to go and download the Oberlo Chrome extension,
which we are going to use in the next step
to quickly add products directly
from AliExpress into our store.
Which means that yes, you are going to need
the free internet browser, Chrome,
if you've already got Chrome then great.
But if you don't, that's absolutely fine,
it is free to download and install it.
Yes, 100% free and best of all, it works
on both Apple and Windows computers.
I'll have a link to Chrome in the video description below.
So let's do this.
Then just come on over to the Chrome web store
and do a search for Oberlo and then select it from the list,
and then come and click add to Chrome
and on the popup box, click add extension.
And that's it.
There is nothing else to do.
Chrome is now just installing it,
and you'll get a congratulations from Oberlo,
and you'll also be able to find it
on your list of extensions within your browser.
Step five, how to add products from AliExpress
into your store with Oberlo.
So now that we've installed the Oberlo Chrome extension,
we can use it to quickly and efficiently add products
directly from AliExpress into our store.
And just to quickly clarify for those of you
that are new around here, this here is AliExpress,
AliExpress is owned by the Alibaba company,
They have two main e-commerce websites,
they have AliExpress,
and they had this website here, Alibaba.
Alibaba is a website that contains a big directory
of Chinese manufacturers
and suppliers that you can buy items in bulk from.
So in Alibaba, you come here to buy big bulk orders,
not to drop ship individual items,
instead, that is what AliExpress is for.
Here, those same Chinese manufacturers
and suppliers list their items
that they make and supply on here.
And you can drop ship them individually
as customers ordered them from your store
so that you don't have to buy them in bulk in advance.
You only order them as customers buy them.
Setting up an account with AliExpress is free
and it just takes a few minutes.
So if you haven't already got a customer account
with AliExpress, I recommend that you get one
as you are gonna need to have it later in the video
when we start drop shipping items
and ordering items from AliExpress
that customers buy from us on here.
But for this step you don't actually need
an AliExpress account, all you need to do
is head on over to AliExpress in your current browser,
with your Oberlo extension installed, so let's do this.
So you just come to AliExpress
and do a search for the item that you wanna add.
So I'm going to start out by adding in a camera lens mug.
Now the camera lens mug is gonna come
in a single color black, which is gonna be very different
from the second product that I'm going to add.
So once you found the item that you want to add
within AliExpress, come and click add to Oberlo,
and then it's gonna be a little pop-up box
from the Oberlo Chrome extension,
telling you that it's adding this to your import list.
And boom.
So, as I said, this item here comes in a single color black.
However, the next item I'm gonna add in
for this example is a tea infuser.
And this tea infuser comes in
multiple different color variations.
So in the industry, we would say that it comes
in multiple variations and it's very different adding
in an item like this, which is why I wanted to add
in both for this tutorial video
so that you could see how different that is.
So once you've added all the items
you want to add in to your import list, just come to it.
Now, the first item I'm going to edit is the tea infuser,
so remember when I said it comes in different colors,
well, here you go, when you go to the variants tab,
you'll be able to see all the different colors
and styles that it comes in.
So you can choose to select
or deselect different styles and different colors,
so I'm just picking the ones that I want to add in now.
And Oberlo will only add those colors into my store.
And then I'm gonna come to images tab
and I'm going to select and deselect the images.
So anything that's got that green tick
next to it is going to be added.
So you can just click the image to deselect it
if you don't want to add it.
For me, I'm choosing to deselect images
for the colors that I chose to not add.
And I'm also deselecting images that have any text on it,
that text looks really ugly and quite unprofessional.
So I avoid any sort of pictures that have text on it.
But once you've chosen to do that,
you can leave all the product data in text
because we're actually gonna edit that later,
and then just come and click import to store.
Now, again, we're gonna skip over
product data like the title.
And as you can see there's only one variant for this mug
because it only comes in black,
so we actually don't need to change
anything in that tab at all.
But we are gonna come to images
and select the images that we want to add.
Again, I'm deselecting anything that has text
or logos on it, and I'm looking
for images that show the product at different angles.
And if there is a product image that shows it
in a real life context, I try to add that as well.
Like I just did there.
And once you've chosen the images you wanna add,
just come and click import to store.
And that's it, you've added products
into your store with Oberlo.
So as you can see, adding items into your store
is super simple, thanks to Oberlo.
If you'd like some inspirational
on what type of items would be great to sell?
You should be sure to download my free ebook:
"The 6 steps and 6 Figure Online Stores Follow
to Make Over $10,000 a Month."
And you'll find a link to download my free ebook
in the video description below.
But anyway, back to the tutorial.
Step six, how to find USA based products
to drop ship with fast shipping?
So here's the deal,
as my long describe as know,
I personally built my drop shipping business
not around drop shipping items from China
but from drop shipping them from the USA.
Yip, and you can do this with AliExpress as well,
because while some AliExpress manufacturers
and suppliers will only ship items
from their headquarters based out of China,
others have warehouses in the USA
where they store their items.
You can add items being stored
in these USA warehouses into your store.
And then when a customer in the USA buys one from you,
it'll get shipped to them via ground shipping
such as USPS and arrive within one to two weeks.
And drop shipping these types of items,
instead of items being drop shipped out of China
is great for many store owners.
So for example, if your customers are USA based
then you'll get to skip international air shipping
and just have local shipping instead,
cutting back on shipping times and emissions.
And you won't have to worry about
dealing with Chinese customs and border issues.
These are just some of the reasons
why focusing on USA based suppliers
is the right choice for many store owners.
By default, however, most items on AliExpress
are not dropped shipped out of the USA,
instead, they are dropped shipped out of China,
so if you want to drop ship out of the USA,
you will need to know how to use
AliExpress to find these items.
And not only that though, but you're going to need to know
how to use AliExpress to find the right USA items.
'Cause you see, here is the thing,
on AliExpress if an item listing looks like this
and it doesn't say what country and item it's shipping from.
Then you know it's gonna be drop shipped out of China.
However, some item listings instead look like this,
and I have an additional option
to select which country you want to drop ship from,
such as the USA, which is great,
but there is just one problem.
If we select the USA here, you'll see that AliExpress
notes that the item is going to ship
via sellers shipping method,
whereas if we come to this item listing here,
you'll see that if we select the USA
as our preferred shipping location,
this listing is instead gonna give us
a specific shipping method, USPS, these are the types
of USA based suppliers you want to work with.
And not these ones, these ones don't give you
a specific shipping method such as USPS,
because they want to not promise you
that they're gonna do that in case they run out
of stock in the USA, and they'll instead drop ship
your item from China with expedited shipping.
Whereas by promising a specific shipping method
and promising a short one to two week turnaround time,
these suppliers will have to ship your item
out the USA to be able to meet their promise
and to maintain the strong feedback score
from happy drop shippers like you and I.
So then let me show you how you can find USA
based drop shippers like this within AliExpress.
All right, so come back to AliExpress
and then click on the flag icon
and change the ship to location to be the United States.
This is extremely important, you cannot skip over this,
if you do skip over this, this won't work.
So make sure that it's set to the United States
and then come and do a search for the item
that you want to add.
And then change the ship from location to be United States.
Now all of these AliExpress supplies here say
that they're shipping from the USA, but we can double check.
So to double check, just go in and open up an item listing
and then come and select United States
in the ships from section, make sure that it's specific,
make sure that it tells you specifically
that it's shipping with USPS and there's four to 13 days,
if it's not specific, skip over it.
So once you've gone in and added an item
into your import list, you wanna come to the variants tab
and you want to untick anything
that doesn't have ships from United States.
So I'm ticking the China and France locations
because I don't want it to ship from those locations,
I want it to ship from the United States warehouse
and just like before, go ahead
and choose which images that you like
and then just import the item into your store.
Step seven, how to add product collections.
So once you've gone ahead and added all the items
you'd like to add into your store from AliExpress,
it's time to create product collections for them
which we're gonna use later on in the video
when we're updating the product pages for each of them.
So for this store here,
I'm gonna be adding in full collections.
I'll be adding a collection for my coffee mugs
and I'll be adding in a collection for my coffee spoons,
and I'll be adding in a collection for my tea infusers,
and I'll be adding in a collection
for my coffee accessories, such as my fun themed coasters.
So think about what types of products
that you added into your store
and how they could be grouped into different collections,
and then you can follow along with me and create them.
So on the left side menu, come and click products
and then come and click collections.
Now you wanna come and click the correct collection button,
and we're gonna type in the name for our first type
of product that we're adding, which is coffee mugs.
And when it come to collection type and select manual,
and then click save and that's it,
you've created a collection.
Now of course, I highly recommend going
and creating collections for all the different types
of items that you're selling,
I'm also selling tea infusers,
so I'm gonna create another collection now, and click save.
And I'm also selling coffee spoons,
so I'm going to click create another collection,
and then create one for coffee spoons
and then come and click save.
And I'm also selling coffee accessories.
So I'm gonna click create another collection
and then title this one coffee accessories.
And again, I don't need to change collection type
because it's already now set to manual
by default for all new collections that I create.
So that's it.
That's how you add in collections into your store.
Step eight, how to edit product pages.
Now that we've added in collections for our products,
we can go and update the product pages
for each of those products.
For this video, I'm gonna be updating the product pages
for two of the example products that I've added to my store.
Firstly, I'm gonna be updating the product page
for this item here, the vinyl coasters.
This item only came with one product variation,
a pack of six coasters.
And as you'll see, editing the product page
for an item like this is very different
compared to editing an item like this one here,
these cat coasters which came
in three different color variations, tabby, white and gray.
And something that's important to note
is that in the industry,
when we say that a product comes in a variation,
it can refer to lots of different variations.
So for example, a product might come in different variations
because it comes in different styles,
such as these coasters which feature different animals
or it could be that a product has different variations
because it comes in different colors.
And a product can also have different variations
because it comes in different sizes
or a product might even have multiple types of variations.
Take clothing such as hoodies, they often come in both
different colors and different sizes.
Oberlo adds all the variations that we selected
when we were adding an item into our store,
so we need to modify and update them.
It's important to note that Oberlo
just pulls the data directly from AliExpress,
including the variation names and sometimes suppliers
will name the product variations with weird names
that are just a string of numbers and letters
which we're gonna need to turn into English.
So in this tutorial, as you'll see,
I'm gonna be modifying this section of the product page
so that our customers are going to see
that our product variations have English colors and names.
So let's do this.
So updating products is super simple,
just come and click products from at left side menu,
and then come and open the product page
that you want to edit, so we're gonna edit this one.
As you can see, the title has been pulled
directly from AliExpress and so has the description,
which is why both of them are terrible.
So go in, delete them, add in your own one.
And something you'll see that I'm doing is,
I'm emphasizing the shipping times
and the product description,
I strongly recommend that you do that.
Now this product here is interesting
because it comes in a single variation.
There's just one seat of six coasters,
there's no other colors or anything like that.
So editing this one is pretty simple.
So first of all, come down to media
and you can drag and drop these images around
and that will change the order that they're shown in.
Now, once you've done that,
you can then come in and edit the price.
So the price is the real price of the item,
so I'm gonna set this be $14,95.
I'm actually gonna set a competitor price to $29,95.
So it's gonna show on the listing
that usually between $29,95,
but for a limited time, it is $14,95.
And you can keep all of that exactly the same,
you don't need to edit it,
but you definitely wanna come in
and select the collection that you created earlier,
so for me that's coffee accessories.
And then that's it, you can save the product
and it will be live within your store.
Now let's see, if this is a product with a single variation,
there's no other colors or anything like that.
So I'm now gonna show you how to edit
a product that has multiple colors,
so I've added in this item here
and it comes in different colors.
So again, I'm gonna get rid of the title
and add in my own title, and I'm gonna get rid
of that incredibly ugly AliExpress description
and change that as well.
But you just seeing a product with multiple variations,
as you will see, is quite different to editing a product
that has a single variation which is why
I wanted to make sure that I covered
both in this tutorial video.
But before we do that, we're gonna just go in
and once again, update the images,
so you can just drag and drop them.
Keep in mind that if you do drag
an image to be at the very front,
that's gonna be the thumbnail image
showing when customers are browsing
through your store product category pages.
But what we really wanna do is come
to this variants tab now 'cause as you can see
this looks very different to the vinyl coasters.
So we're gonna come into the color section
and we're gonna give these actual color names.
Right now, they're just a string of numbers and letters
and so we're gonna give them real English names.
And something we're gonna do,
is we're actually gonna delete the ship from location column
because it's completely unnecessary,
so come and do this and just come and delete it.
And then click done.
And then you can come and edit each price.
So you can set them to be different prices
as you can see, I could set one to 12,95,
I could set another to be 14,95, but for simplicity sake,
I'm gonna just set them all to be $12,95.
And then again, we wanna come in
and choose a collection for them,
so gonna click coffee accessories, and that's it,
we have updated the product page for the store.
So we're gonna save it, and I'm also gonna show you
an example of what it looks like right now,
keep in mind this is going to look very different
once we've edited the theme setting things
and colors and stuff like that.
So this is not the final product
but it will give you a kind of an idea
of what it will sort of look like.
So as you can see, if you choose the color,
it will match up to the picture of it
and we've got to add a description.
So yes, as I said, it's gonna look
a little bit different later on,
but for now we have successfully edited
the product pages in our store.
And actually before I move on,
I just wanna quickly show you something.
Here's what the product page would have looked like
if I hadn't modified the different variants.
When people ask me to review the stores,
this is something I see a lot,
people don't edit this section,
and so it comes out looking like this.
As you can see, the part variations would have
just been letters and numbers,
which would have looked weird
and unprofessional for the customer.
Not only this, but it would have featured the ship
from dropdown menu which would have only
featured one option in, the USA.
And so not only would this has been redundant
since all of our items for this
are being shipped out the USA,
but it also would have been confusing for the customer
who wouldn't have understood why that option was even there.
All they would have been expecting
was an option to select any type
of coaster they wanted and that is it.
So make sure that you don't skip over the step
of modifying your product variation data.
Step nine, how to set up Shopify payments.
So here's something that's pretty nifty,
did you know that out of the box,
your store can accept payments
without you having to set up anything?
Yep, that's right.
Customers can immediately start buying
items from you with PayPal,
by default PayPal is connected to your store
using the email address that you registered with,
if you have a PayPal account set up
or already using their email address,
then it'll start collecting payments for you.
If you don't have an account set up using that email,
PayPal will collect and hold the money
that customers pay you and we'll send you an email
with instructions on how to set up a PayPal account
using that email address so that you can then collect
the money that they've been holding for you.
And many stores out there choose to exclusively use PayPal
as their payment processor, which is fine
because customers can buy items
from you without actually needing a PayPal account
because with PayPal, you can use a credit card
or debit card that you have and checkout as a guest.
But if you can, I strongly, strongly recommend
also adding in this form of payment for customers as well.
Shopify payments, what Shopify have done
is they've made a deal with Stripe,
which is arguably the best payment processor in the world
to let stores easily and quickly use Stripe
to process payments for customers.
And that is this here, Shopify payments.
Now, not all residents of all countries globally
are eligible to register for Shopify payments.
But if you are, you should definitely install it.
And as you will see, when we go to install it,
Shopify payments are gonna ask us what type
of business that we're running our store as.
And for most people you will want to select
individual i.e, sole proprietor
I've seen many people falsely believe
or assume that they need to register a business license
or register a business company to sell online,
but for most countries around the world
that's not true at all.
And that's because of this, sole proprietorship.
When you start an online store in most countries
you have two main choices on how to run it.
Firstly, you could choose to set up a company
or something similar such as an LLC,
and if you do, then all the profits your store earns
will pay income taxes separately
under your company name and entity that you created.
Setting up a company usually costs money for fees.
So for example, here in New Zealand,
we have a bunch of different fees associated
performing and running a company,
and these can add up to hundreds of dollars.
But as I see it, when you're first getting started,
that's not necessary to do this at all
and pay any of those fees
and that is because of this, sole proprietorship.
If you choose to run as a sole proprietor,
what this basically means is that all the profits
your company earns will be taxed
as part of your standard usual income taxes,
along with money that you earn from your job or salary,
as there is no legal distinction
between you and your business.
And the wonderful thing is that
because most people are already registered
with the local governments to pay
income taxes on their salary or wages.
There is usually for most countries
no legal setup or fees required
to get started selling online,
if you choose to select this option for your store.
So you might be thinking, "Well, gee, Sarah,
"if it's free to sell as a sole proprietor,
"why would anyone ever pay fees to set up a company
"and run a business that way?"
Well let's because once you stop making money,
it often makes sense to do so
because companies get some extra tax and legal benefits.
So for example, here in New Zealand,
our company tax rate is a flat 28%,
whereas our personal income tax rate tops out at 39%.
And so, as you can see, once you start making money
you can save a lot of money in taxes
by running your store under your company
and paying profits as a company.
You save more money in taxes than you pay in fees.
But remember you only pay taxes
on the profits that your store earns.
And so until your store is earning money
and making you a profit, there is no need to pay
for the extra expenses and go through the hassle
of setting up a company, just wait until your store
is making you money and profit.
And in the meantime, read about sole proprietorship,
and see what the rules are for this new local country.
For most people watching this,
they'll find out that getting started
with this is super simple and requires little
to no registration fees or anything like that at all.
But anyway, I digress, let's go ahead
and set up Shopify payments.
Cool, so come and select settings,
and then come and click payments,
and then click complete account setup.
Now we need to first of all select our business type.
So again, individual, sole proprietorship,
perfect for most people watching this,
you then need to enter in your date of birth,
this needs to be accurate legally,
so enter in your real date of birth.
And then you need to disclose what items
that you are selling so that Shopify can confirm
that you're not selling something illegal or forbidden.
So for me, I'm selling retail goods
and I'm selling home goods and furniture,
and I'm just gonna say that I'm selling accessories
for coffee, tea, hot drinks, nothing suspicious here folks.
And then got to make sure that you have a phone number
set in there and then you need to enter in your bank account
and then just come and click complete account setup.
And that's it.
Step 10, how to add shipping.
So here's the thing, when you're selling an item online,
your customer doesn't just pay
for the item that they've purchased.
Nope, they also have to pay the additional cost
to ship the item to the house too.
Now there are two ways that you can handle this
as a store owner, there is the easy way
and then there is the hard way.
The hard way to do that is to go
and create different shipping prices
within Shopify shipping settings for different items.
That way when a customer buys an item
they'll be charged a shipping cost at checkout
based on what type of item that they bought from you.
The reason why this is hard is because as you can imagine,
a big bulky mug has a very different shipping cost
compared to light, easy to ship items,
such as coffee spoons.
And so you end up having to add in
lots of different shipping rules
which can get quite complicated
and can be quite easy to mess up,
which is why for most beginners,
I recommend that they take the easy way,
which is to instead just set up one single shipping option
within Shopify, free shipping,
you then just add your shipping costs into your items price.
And so the shipping for this item would cost $5,
you would then just add $5 into your product price
rather than charging it as a separate cost at checkout.
It also means that you get to use the word free
in your product listing by advertising
that the item comes with free shipping.
Customers love getting something for free
or at least thinking that they're getting
something for free.
I'm also gonna show you how to limit
which countries that you ship to.
So for example, if you set it up
so that you are only shipped to the USA,
then only customers with shipping addresses
in the USA will be able to buy items from you,
or if you set it up so that you only ship items to Canada
and the USA, now customers will even need
a shipping address in Canada or an address in the USA
to be able to buy items from you.
So if a customer in the UK tried to buy an item from you
using an address that was based in the UK
they wouldn't be able to complete their purchase.
Now I can understand that a lot of you
are probably gonna be quite confused by this and think,
"Well, Sarah, I don't get it,
"don't I just wanna be able to let customers
"worldwide buy from me to maximize
"the amount of money that I earn?"
Well, maybe you do, it's entirely your choice,
but I'd probably recommend that most beginners,
just start out with their focus
only on the USA and USA customers.
And that's because the USA has very relaxed laws
when it comes to buying and selling online,
take importation taxes, in the USA you are only charged
importation taxes on purchases that costs $800 or more,
whereas the UK, the threshold is much,
much lower, to say the least, which also holds it's delivery
of the items and complicates it too.
So it is up to you but this is just one of the many reasons
why the USA in my opinion is so beginner friendly,
there are very little complications to selling in the USA.
Once you're used to selling it in the USA,
that's what I usually recommend expanding out
to additional countries such as the UK,
but until you do, you still have over
300 plus million customers in the USA to sell to.
Which is huge.
Because think about it, if you were to expand your marketing
to other major English-speaking countries,
that being the USA's cousin, Canada,
and the USA is more distant cousin,
the UK, and the English speaking lands down under
of Australia, and me here in New Zealand,
our total populations combined are less
than 140 million people, that is not even half
of the population of America.
So really as a beginner I think you have so many customers
in the USA, why not focus on those customers
while taking advantage of America's easy
and relaxed selling laws.
Such as this, to sell to USA customers as a foreigner,
I am not required to set up a business
or register a business in the USA to do that.
Yep, the USA does not require you as a foreigner
to set up a business or register a company in the USA
to start selling to customers that live there.
(Sarah cheers softly)
So it's entirely up to you.
But either way, I'll show you how to not only set up
a free option within Shopify,
but I'm also gonna show you how you can limit
which countries you ship to
inside of your shipping settings.
Cool, so just come down to settings.
And then come and click shipping and delivery.
And then come and click manage rights.
So Shopify have set up two shipping rates by default,
they've set up a domestic rate to where I live New Zealand.
So I'm gonna delete that one.
And they've also set up a rest of world rate,
so I'm gonna delete that one as well.
And then I'm gonna come and click create shipping zone,
and I'm just gonna call it free shipping,
you can call it whatever you like,
customers don't actually see this one.
And then you choose which countries
you're willing to ship to.
I'm gonna sleep to United States.
So only people who live in the United States
will be able to order from me
because I haven't selected any other countries.
And then I'm gonna click add.
And then titled this free shipping,
customers will see this one,
so be more careful what you name this one.
(Sarah laughs)
Gonna keep the price set to zero because it's free.
And I'm gonna see that so that
as long as the customer spends at least $1 with me,
free shipping will be available to them.
And then click save.
And so that's it, I've now set up a free shipping option
and I have limited the countries that can buy from me,
now only people who live in the United States
will be able to purchase from me
and see a shipping option.
And I just wanna emphasize before we move on
that it is just my recommendation that you focus on the USA
and it is optional, and you can choose to ship
to more countries if you would like,
just be sure to either select the countries
you wish to ship to when setting up your shipping option.
Or instead, just select that you're happy to sell globally.
That's totally up to you.
Step 11, how to change your store's currency.
So here's the deal, because I live in New Zealand,
every time I create a Shopify store,
because I'm living in New Zealand,
it will automatically set my store currency
to New Zealand dollars, otherwise known as NZD.
But since my target market is the USA,
I will go in and change this to be the USA currency, USD.
And actually, even if you choose to not sell exclusively
to America and plan to sell globally,
USD is the number one global currency worldwide,
and so if you plan to sell globally to multiple countries
then USD is usually the currency
I would recommend that you use as well.
So let's do this.
Super simple guys, just come and click settings
and then come and select general,
and then you wanna scroll down this page
and we're gonna change the unit system
to be imperial while we're here,
since it's what they use in America.
And then we're gonna come to store currency,
and we are gonna change this to be US dollars,
and then just click save, and that's it.
Your store's currency is now set to United States dollars.
Step 12, how to update your store email notifications.
So here's the thing about sitting up
an AliExpress drop shipping store.
Chances are if you're adding multiple items into your store,
they're probably being manufactured by different suppliers.
And so that's gonna be shipped separately.
So for example, if a customer comes in
and adds these two items into the cart
and buys them, because they're made
by two different AliExpress manufacturers,
they're going to be shipped separately
in separate packages which is absolutely fine
because oftentimes when you buy items on Amazon,
they come from different Amazon warehouses
and will arrive in different boxes.
And so thanks to places like Amazon,
customers are used to getting different items
in different separate packages.
It's just nice though to alert the customer
to the fact that this might happen
so that they don't get confused when one item arrives
but another one doesn't and sends you an email
asking why they didn't keep both at once.
And again, it's not a big deal, when you explain it to them,
they are not gonna mind because again, they're used to it,
but it's just slightly annoying since it means
you'll have more unnecessary customer emails to answer
when you could instead stop these emails altogether
by just letting the customer know that in advance
so that they expect it.
And the easiest way to do this is to update
this automatic email that Shopify sends out to the customer.
When they buy an item from you confirming the purchase.
We'll just add in a quick note letting the customer know
that if they purchase multiple items,
that they might arrive in separate packages.
That way you won't have to deal
with any confused customer emails.
So let's do this.
Also super simple guys, just come down to settings
and then click on notifications
and then click on order confirmation.
So you wanna come to a little bit of text
which says, "We will notify you when it hasn't been sent."
And you wanna add in additional text
that's either this or something very similar to this
and then come and click save.
And that's it.
Now I'll give you a preview of what it's gonna look like.
So click actions and then click preview to see the preview.
So as you can see, we've now added in this additional text
to the email and the customer has now been alerted
to number one, the shipping times,
we've set in here for one to two weeks on average
because we're shipping out using USA
AliExpress suppliers for these items in the store.
And we've also noted that items
may come in separate packages,
that way the customer won't be confused
if they come super late.
So that's it, super simple.
Step 13, how to add an about us page.
This is super simple, just prepare a fun text blurb
explaining what your store mission is
and why customers should buy it from you.
And once you've got that, you can follow along with me.
So simple guys, just come to online store
and then the drop down menu, select pages,
and then come and click add page.
For the title, of course you wanna give it
the title, about us.
And then in the context section,
type in whatever text you wanna put there.
So I just very quickly wrote something for this video.
I wrote it in a word document and just pasted it in.
So once you've done that you can just go in
and edit the formatting, so you can see there for example
that I bolded the title, why choose us,
once you done all that, just click save, and that's it.
I'll give you a preview of the page that we just made.
Keep in mind, this is gonna look a lot different
once we update the theme settings,
but for now, here is a brief preview of it.
So that's it, time to move on to the next step.
Step 14, how to add a contact us page.
Once again, really easy to do.
And we're not even gonna have to install any plugins
because Shopify actually has a contact form built
into the software that we can utilize.
Yay, so let's do this.
So once again, come on over to online store,
and select pages and then come and click add page.
Now we're gonna title this one, contact us,
but we're not gonna add in any content.
However, we are gonna come to theme template,
and this time select contact, and then come and click save.
So I'll give you a brief preview of what it would look like
before we add in our theme settings.
Remember this is gonna look different
once we update our theme settings,
but for now this is our contact us page.
And as you can see, because we selected contact
from the theme templates drop down menu,
it's automatically added in this contact form for us.
Step 15, how to add a store menu.
So what we're gonna do is we're gonna modify
that main menu that customers will be using
to navigate our store.
Right now, it just features this and that set,
so what we're gonna do is we're gonna add
in an about us page link, a contact us page link,
and most importantly, we're gonna add in a sub menu
so that customers can sort through our products
based on the collection that they're a part of.
So yes, we're gonna make use of those collections
that we set up earlier in the video.
So let's do this.
So once again, come and click online store,
but this time we're gonna be selecting navigation.
And then come and select main menu,
and then you wanna come and click add menu item.
So type in the name of the collection,
so I'm gonna type in coffee mugs
and then come and search for collections
under links and select your collection.
And click add.
Now drag this so that it is underneath catalog like that.
Once you've done that you can now
add a menu items directly under catalog.
So we're gonna add in all that collections here.
So I've typed in coffee spoons,
and under collections, I'm gonna look for a coffee spoons.
And click add.
And you can see say that it's automatically
underneath catalog now, don't have to drag and drop it.
So I'm gonna add in coffee accessories.
And then I click link.
And then select collections,
and then find my coffee accessories and click add.
And they've got one more to add in, tea infusers,
so that's gonna be the name of the menu item, tea infusers.
And click link.
Select collections, and then find the tea infusers.
There we go.
And click add.
Cool, so now select add menu item,
and then type in about us.
And then click link, but this time click pages
and then select about us.
And then click add.
And we're gonna add in another menu item,
type in contact us.
And then click link, pages, contact us, add.
And that's it.
And then just come and click save.
So I'll give you a preview of what it will look like,
again, it's gonna look different
once we update our theme settings
but I'll show you how it works.
You can see here that's on the left side.
And if we click catalog, our different collections
are gonna show up underneath it.
So super cool.
So go ahead and set up your menu,
and then we can move on to the next step.
Step 16, how to customize the theme, design and homepage.
Now it is time for the fun part of this tutorial.
Yip, it is the time where we go from taking our store
looking bare bones and ugly lightness
and instead turn into something
that looks nice and professional like this,
and make it look like an actual real store.
This is actually quite a large step to complete.
So what I've done is I have broken it up into three parts.
So let's start off with part one.
Update the store homepage settings.
Let's make our homepage looks super nice and professional.
And to do that, you're gonna need to get two things.
Firstly, you'll need a logo for your store.
This is the logo that I'll be using.
This was made by my favorite logo designer on Fiverr.
If you're interested in checking them out,
I have a link to them in the video description below
or of course you could use Canva
to design a logo for your store yourself.
The free Canva account works great for this,
if you're artistically inclined,
I'll also have a link to Canva
in the video description below.
The next thing that you will need is at least one
but really ideally two or three
or even more banner images that feature products
that you are drop shipping in your store.
To find these, I went to the AliExpress
product pages themselves and found the large images
that the supplies had uploaded to the listing
of photos that they've taken of their products
and then use Canva to resize the images
to be a thousand pixels by 550 pixels.
And again, the free version of Canva works great for this,
no need to pay for the pro version if you don't want to.
For me, I went ahead and made these three banner images
for this tutorial that I will be uploading.
So let me show you how to do this.
So to get started we're actually gonna head to products.
So come and click collections.
And click create collection.
And title it something like products for homepage.
And then under collection type select manual.
And then click save.
So what we're gonna do is we're gonna add
in our 12 favorite products.
So come to search products and click browse,
and pick your 12 favorite products
that you want to show up on your homepage.
I highly recommend selecting products that feature images
on a plain white background for consistency.
Amazon requires that their products,
that their thumbnails have an image
on a plain white background for consistency
because it looks so good.
So once you've done that, go ahead click add,
and then click sort and then click manually.
And now you'll be able to change the order
that these products show up in.
Whatever is at the top will show up first on your homepage.
So you can just drag and drop them around
and change their order.
Once you've done that, click online store,
and then click customize next to your theme.
We're gonna make our store look really nice now.
So come and click header,
and then click select image for logo
and click upload and select your source logo.
And then go in and edit.
So you can increase the width I think,
200 pixels looks really nice.
Deselect the announcement bar and then hit back.
Now we're gonna come onto feature collection,
and we're gonna delete that heading,
and we're gonna change the collection
to be the one that we just created.
So, boom, there are products that we just added.
And change this to be four rows.
Cool.
Now click back.
And we're gonna delete that rich text section,
so just click on it and then select delete.
And we're gonna click add section,
and we are going to add a slideshow.
Cool.
So I'm gonna select so that the slides will auto rotate.
And we're gonna change this to be medium.
And then we're gonna click slide
and gonna click select image and we're gonna upload
the first slide image that we've created
or our first banner image.
Cool.
Go ahead, select it.
You wanna change this to be zero?
And you'll see that there is some text on there,
image slides, I recommend just deleting this
and getting rid of it.
And then click back.
And then click slide, select image
and then upload the next banner image.
Loading.
Boom.
Cool.
Same deal.
Change that to be zero.
And change this so that there's no text there.
Now back.
This time though we're gonna click add slide,
and we're gonna add in the third banner,
that image that I created.
Loading.
Boom.
Add it in.
Same deal.
Change this to be zero, gonna get rid of that text.
And then hit back.
Cool.
So now we're gonna do something pretty cool,
we are going to drag this to be above the products.
So now we've got our banner image at the top
and our products underneath it, it's just a nice,
simple, clean, professional design.
Awesome, now let's move on to part two,
update the footer settings.
And here's what our footer is gonna look
like once we're done, we'll be adding in more items
into our menu so that it looks bigger
and more professional, and we'll be adding
a text blurb that markets us to the customer.
And we'll also be adding in a new set of signup.
And I'll be honest, not many people are gonna use this okay,
but adding it and helps us make our footer
look more professional and interesting,
rather than just having a big, ugly, empty space.
So we're gonna be adding it more for visual flair
rather than as a way to try to get
lots of newsletter signups.
So let's do this.
So this time we're gonna start out
by selecting online store, but we're gonna click navigation.
And we're gonna click footer menu.
So right now in our footer section,
there is an area for links, but it's pretty empty,
so we're gonna pad it out a bit.
We're gonna put a link to our homepage,
we're gonna put a link to our about us page
and a link to our contact us page.
Now, once you've gone ahead and added in your legal pages
like privacy policy, things like that,
this will be a really good place
to link to them in your store.
So once you've created those, definitely go
and add them to your footer.
But for now, we're just gonna add in these four links
and then we're gonna come and click save menu,
and then come and click themes, and click customize.
And now we're gonna come and click footer.
So as you can see, there's just this big, blank empty space.
Definitely our link section looks a lot nicer now
that we've added in some extra links to it.
But what we're gonna do is we're gonna click add content
and click text, and we're just gonna add
in a blurb about our store.
Now what I'm gonna do with this blurb as you'll see,
is I'm gonna do something very important,
when most people try to sell products,
they try to sell the products by talking
about the features that the product has.
Perhaps they'll say, "Oh my travel mug's features,
"stainless steel," things like that.
But well, you have to keep in mind
is that most customers don't buy products
because of the fact that they have
really great features like stainless steel,
they buy products because they improve their lives,
they might solve a problem
or maybe they make their lives a little bit better.
And so when you're writing text blurbs
and product pages and things like that
and you're trying to sell your products,
make sure to focus on why your products
improve your customer's life.
Not about the different features,
which is why as you can see here,
I've said that by choosing a unique personal mug
that will add a bit of joy into your life
every time you drink from it,
that's how my mugs improve your life.
So I want you to focus on that
when you're writing your text blurb up here.
So in addition to our text blurb, we can also fill out
our footer by adding in a link to our newsletter.
So I just come and click back and then click add content,
and then click newsletter signup.
And that's it.
Boom.
I'll be honest, not many people are gonna choose
to sign up using this but it definitely
makes our footer section look a lot nicer
by having it in there, so be sure to add that in too.
And by the way, if you'd like additional extra training
on setting up the store, such as adding in these legal pages
to your footer, then be sure to check out
my premium e-commerce training program
at the Ecomm Clubhouse, which is a Shopify certified course.
If you're interested in seeing
if my course is right for you,
I have a link to it and the video description below,
but for now, we're almost there.
Now it's time to finish the step by completing part three,
update the theme settings.
To complete this part,
you're going to need to have two things.
Firstly, you are gonna need to have a small square image
that we're gonna use as your store's favicon
such as this image that I created here.
To make this, I just took the coffee bean
that my design had included and my store logo
and I turned it into a small square image.
A store favicon is just a small square image
that gets added into your stores browser tab,
uploading this will make your store
look a lot more professional,
so I strongly recommend doing this.
It can be very small because it's gonna get condensed down
to just 32 pixels by 32 pixels.
The other thing that you'll want to do
is you'll want to choose one store color
that represents the types of items
that you're selling in your store.
For me, I chose a coffee bean brown color since,
well, the store is themed around coffee.
We'll be using this color to customize our store
and adding some fun color flairs and finishing touches.
So once you have these two things,
you can follow along with me step-by-step.
Cool, so come to theme settings,
and then click colors, and then come to sale tags.
And you can use the color packer to choose a color
or you can type in your chosen color hex code.
Of course, to me, I've chosen a coffee bean brown,
so I'm gonna select and then use
the exact same color for borders and lines.
Boom.
So you can see that it's now updated that colors
so got little splashes of that color throughout the site,
which looks really nice.
So come to typography, and you wanna change the heading
and the body text font to be a new font,
Shopify has lots of fonts installed.
Now unfortunately, a lot of people skip over the step
and they just use the fonts
that Shopify have already selected,
if you do that, your store will look like everyone else
who's chosen the same theme as you,
so it is important that you change this to be a custom font
so that it doesn't look generic
but there are tons of fonts to pick from,
so choose a new font for your store.
Make sure within cap, that this is selected.
And now we're gonna come and we're gonna update
the social media icons.
Now I am aware that a lot of you
probably don't have media pages for your store yet
because they are brand new, so if you don't, that's fine,
you can skip over the step,
but I wanted to show you how to add them
and because the moment that you do create them,
you will want to add them into your store, so this is how.
So click save.
And now let me come and show you.
So they'll show up here.
They look really nice.
So make sure that you add them in as soon as you can.
So now we're gonna come in and update our favicon.
So come and click select image,
then click upload, and select your favicon.
Again, I just took a little picture from my logo
and turned it into a nice little square.
Cool.
And now go back.
And now come to checkout.
And then come to your logo,
and we wanna just find that logo that we uploaded earlier.
And we're gonna change this to that,
the logo is nice and big, we're gonna change it
so that it is large.
Cool.
And we're gonna also update the colors
on the checkout page as well.
So here under accents, change it to that same color
that we've been using and also change the buttons.
And that's it.
We've successfully gone in
and updated the theme settings in our store.
It looks so much nicer now, doesn't it?
It no longer looks generic, it looks custom towards us.
We got this nice professional clean looking homepage.
And if we come to the product page, you'll see,
it looks so much different now, looks so much better.
Look at this, it looks really nice.
And I'll show you what the checkout page looks like too.
You'll see the changes we made to it here.
There we go.
There is our store logo and also our colors on it.
So yep, looking so much better,
it's time to move on to the next step.
Step 17, how to choose a Shopify plan.
You know what team?
I know that this has been a long tutorial video,
but guess what, we are almost there,
we are almost finished,
it is almost time to send our store live.
Up until was part of the tutorial video,
we have been completing things that are free
and that only require the Shopify trial for us to complete,
but moving forward, our final touches on our store
will require us to add in a credit card,
debit card or PayPal account to pay for a few things,
such as choosing a Shopify plan.
Shopify has three main plans
and out of these as a new store,
for the vast, vast majority of you,
you only need a basic Shopify plan.
And so that is the plan that we are therefore
going to add in this tutorial video.
So let's do this.
Awesome, so come and click settings, and then select plan,
and then click update payment method,
and click add payment method.
All right, so now you can add in either a credit card,
a debit card or a PayPal account,
and we can use this to get a Shopify plan
and also to get a domain name, which we will do shortly.
So what I want you to note is that if you do have extra days
on your trial, like I do, you won't lose those days.
All that will happen is that once your trial days are over
you will then switch over to the plan
that you have selected.
So don't worry about upgrading now to a plan,
you're not gonna lose your free trial days by doing so.
Cool, so just add in your credit card,
debit card or PayPal account here.
Excellent.
Now we're actually gonna go back
by clicking the back button
and we are going to select choose plan.
And remember, the basic plan is fine.
(Sarah laughs)
And you can also just select the monthly billing cycle,
so that you don't have a big upfront charge.
And then click start plan.
And that's it.
Again, you will still get to keep your trial days
which is why it says billed now as zero USD
because of the fact that I'm not being billed anything
because I still have days left on my trial
but once my trial is over,
I will then switch over to the monthly payment.
And so that's it.
Time to move on to the next step.
Step 18, how to add a domain name.
So right now, if you were to head on over
to this tutorial store that I've been sitting up,
you would see that it is currently using a domain name
that ends in .myshopify.com, which is terrible.
This looks extremely unprofessional,
and so I strongly, strongly recommend that for many reasons
you purchase a domain name, now when you purchase
a domain name through Shopify you'll have several options,
so for example, you could choose
.com, .net, .org or .store.
But out of all of these .com is the most trusted
and it's the one that customers like the most.
So I strongly, strongly recommend that you choose that,
apart from one exception, and that is this,
if you were setting up your store
and you plan to only sell to one particular country
such as Australia, I would recommend that you choose
Australia's country specific domain name of .com.au.
Or if you're setting up your store
and selling to the United Kingdom only,
then I'd recommend choosing
a UK specific domain name of .co.uk.
But if you plan to sell primarily to the USA
or you plan to sell globally to multiple countries
then .com is the universal domain name
that people expect to see from stores like this.
So for most of you watching, it's the one that I recommend
that you chose, which is why I'm gonna be choosing it
in this store tutorial video as well.
So let's do this.
Cool.
So come on over to online store but this time click domains,
and then select to buy a new domain.
And then type in the domain name
that you intend to purchase.
Again, for most people, I strongly recommend selecting
only ones that you can buy the .com for.
So click buy.
And then click buy domain.
And that's that.
Now this process might take a few moments,
that's absolutely normal.
Right now, Shopify is just setting up your domain
and getting it ready for your store.
Boom.
That's it, you've successfully purchased the domain name.
So yes, now that we have purchased a custom domain name,
we just need to go in and find the confirmation email
that Shopify has sent us and click and confirm that,
yes, this is indeed our email.
So let me show you just how easy it is to do this.
So simple guys, just find this email, click the link.
Remember, this is not optional,
this is a legal requirement that you have to do
when you purchase domain names.
So make sure that you do this within 15 days.
So come to this page here
and then click the verify information button.
And that's it, you've met all of your legal requirements
and you can move on to the next step.
Step 19,
how to remove the store password and send our store live.
(Sarah cheering)
Yes, the time has come to send our store live.
As I said earlier at the start of this video,
up until now, our store has been protected
with a password page like this,
for any potential customers to enter your store,
they had to know your store password
otherwise they couldn't buy anything.
And this is mandatory.
You can not turn this feature off
until you purchase a pay Shopify plan.
However, if you remember in step 17,
we did go ahead and purchased a just a paid Shopify plan,
so now we can turn this off so that customers can come in
and buy our products and spend money.
Yay.
So let's do this.
(Sarah cheers)
Just come and click online store, and select preferences.
And then scroll down, and untick this box.
And click save.
And that is it.
Now there is no password protection on your store,
anyone can come find it and buy things from you.
Your store is live.
Congratulations team, on making it this far
and completing all 19 steps and sending your store live.
And don't forget, if you've enjoyed this tutorial so far
and you're interested in getting additional training videos
then be sure to check out
my premium e-commerce training program
at the Ecomm Clubhouse,
which has a Shopify Education Partner approved course.
If you're interested in seeing
if my course is right for you,
I have a link to it in the video description below.
But while it is super cool that we have our store running
and it is live, there is one more thing
I wanna teach you how to do.
And that is step 20,
how to order items from customers with Oberlo.
Because here is the thing, I would hate for you
to send your store live and start marketing it
and have a customer come and buy an item from you.
And you'd be like, "Yay, I just made a sale.
"I just made money.
(Sarah cheers)
"Oh, wait, what happens now?
"How do I get the customer their item?
"Help Sarah, help me."
Well, don't worry team, I've got you.
Here is how you order an item from Oberlo
to get it delivered to your customer.
So all you need to do is make sure
that you are using the Chrome browser
and then come to Oberlo, and then come to orders,
and you will see this order button, and then you click it.
And now the computer just takes control of your screen,
it's just doing stuff and it's completely
and utterly hands-off.
So what's actually happening is the Oberlo Chrome extension
is adding the items that the customer ordered
into your cart and it's also adding in
the shipping information for you,
and it's doing so way faster than a human would ever do it.
So that's why the process of ordering
items for customers is semi-automated.
At this point here, you now have control,
so you can double check and make sure
that you have their shipping note for them,
and you can click place order.
And when you do, if you don't have a payment method
installed already in your AliExpress account,
you can just add it now.
So you can pay with credit card or you can pay with PayPal.
And that's it.
Now you can place the order for the customer
by just clicking the place order button.
So as you can see, Oberlo semi-automates the process
of ordering items for customers
because it makes it way, way faster.
(Sarah blows sharply)
That's it team, we are done as in done, done.
I hope that my video was able to help you set up
and build your new online store.
And if it was, and you would like to learn even more
about running a successful e-commerce store,
you should be sure to subscribe
and hit that little notification bell
(bell rings)
so that you don't miss out on any of my videos.
And if you decide to learn more
about how I run my drop shipping business,
you should be sure to watch my video:
Five Apps I Use to Earn Income on Autopilot.
So go ahead, watch my next video.
And I'll see you over there.