This is a sample store that I created to show you guys my template. In this video, we're gonna break down exactly how I set it up and give you guys the foundation and all the behind-the-scenes of how to make sure your store is functioning properly from day one. So make sure you watch this whole video because there's important things that you need to have set up on your store or else it's not gonna work the right way.
The first thing you need to do is go and click the link down below and get access to this link. This is gonna give you your first month for a dollar on Shopify and it also supports the Viral Vault team. So if you want to do that and get started, just click the link down below. That's the first place you need to go to.
Now, once you have your store set up, you're gonna be on the dashboard like this. And I know it looks a little complicated and crazy, but really there's a thousand videos online that break down step by step each thing inside the platform. We're not gonna be doing that today. I'm just gonna give you the overarching understanding of what a good store looks like and how I set up each element and also how to do the settings.
But what I'll show you today is this tab right here is the online store. So we're gonna go ahead and click that and yours is gonna look a little different than mine. You're probably gonna have this theme right here, Dawn set up. But this is really your theme. This is your starting place for your store. You can come in here, you can click on customize and you'll see your store looking something like this.
Now what I've used to build this store is actually a paid theme called Shrine, but you don't have to use a paid theme. I really don't recommend it if you don't have the extra capital. It's literally a waste of money. I like using this paid theme because it has some features on the product page that are really nice, especially on mobile. Like it has different things that really make it look super clean, but you can replicate a lot of those features on the free theme as well. So just keep that in mind. In this example, I am gonna be showing you guys this paid theme, but almost every single element that I'm breaking down you can get access to on the free themes. And my favorite free theme out of my opinion is gonna be either Dawn or Refresh. So you can try either of those on and see which one you like.
So look, the first thing you're gonna need is of course your name and your logo. And the last video I helped you figure out how to create a name. But when it comes to creating a logo, there's a really easy tool that you guys can use called Canva. Um, let me just log in real quick. So once you're on Canva you can go right here and search a logo and hit search and it's gonna pull up all these logo templates that you can go and use to create your branding.
We have super clean ones like the one I just was showing you in the last example. Um, we also have some more complicated ones if you want to get a little crazy. But yeah, you can use this tool and the templates on this tool to create a clean logo very easily. If you're a little bit more advanced you can use Photoshop, which is what I use and honestly I recommend it because if you have the ability to Photoshop stuff, it's gonna level you up a lot and make you a better marketer. Can make pictures look nicer, you can put your logo on certain pictures. It just gives you that extra level up on other people. So I use Photoshop, but Canva's really good as well for my people that aren't super talented designers and you can figure it out in in five seconds. It's very straightforward.
Like for example, you click on something, you click on customize and then you can literally come in here and put viral vault or you can just put viral and you can change the thing down below to that. And you could come up with different logos really easily because of all the templates they have. So once you have your logo and once you have that logo exported and you have it saved, you're gonna go ahead and come here to themes and click on customize. And again, there's a million tutorials about this step by step piece by piece how to use this platform. That's not what we're gonna be doing today.
I'm giving you all the more higher level, but you can go ahead and put your logo here inside of the store, inside a logo and then you go ahead and insert that right there. Now let's break down this actual homepage kind of piece for piece so you can understand what's inside of here. So the first thing that I like to include of course is an announcement bar. So on the announcement bar up top, we just wanna let them know that there's some offer going on. There's some exclusive sale and in this case it's 50% off plus free shipping today.
Now get creative with this, especially if there's certain holidays going on like Valentine's Day sale or Christmas sale or Black Friday sale. This is a great place to demonstrate that Right below the announcement bar we have our header. The header is basically where they have their links to get access to different things. And our logo pretty straightforward. I'm actually gonna show you the website on mobile because mobile is really where we're gonna optimize 'cause we are gonna be running ads on TikTok and only psychopaths use TikTok on desktop. Everybody's using that on mobile.
So we have below our header a nice clean image. Um, if you click right here on image banner, you'll see that there's this woman right here. Where did I get this image from? Um, you can click right here on Free Images and Shopify has a bunch of pictures so we can just type in woman and it's gonna show us a bunch of pictures of women and we can find exactly what we need on there. If you need other pictures, feel free to search the internet, but be careful because some pictures are copyrighted and you can get a season desist on your website, which is super annoying. So I recommend just using this. There's a million pictures in there and they're all really good.
They only wanna just have a basic explainer of what our brand represents in this case like find your Glow. This store is really a store focused on products for women. It's pretty broad but it allows me to either sell beauty or it allows me to sell either women's clothing easily. We don't have this super constrained thing of only makeup or only clothes with a sword this broad, it's clearly targeted to women. We have women all over the place. It's pink, it's white, it's black, but we can sell a variety of products to them.
So the only thing that would really change right is of course the logo and the brand name and the colors. So if I was gonna do for example like a health niche, I would probably do like a blue color 'cause blue is kind of like a calming and trustworthy color if you want. There's a really cool thing, it's like a color chart for marketing psychology of colors. If you're struggling to figure out the color scheme for your brand, go ahead and check this out. You can see right here obviously pink represents femininity, blue represents trust, confidence, you know this is a good tool to use when um, trying to figure out the color scheme of your brand.
Back to the design right below we wanna have a featured collection. So again, all these that I've used so far are available On every single theme on Shopify. They're really easy to find and all you gotta do is go to the bottom and you click on add section and you're gonna see everything. So I'll show you why I use this theme later, but there's nothing I did so far that you couldn't do on another theme. Just letting you know that so far the feature collection, we're gonna put four products just so we can clean up and have something on our page. We might be saying, well I don't have any products on my store. So the app that I use to import the products to my store and to fulfill my orders is called Auto Ds. I'll put the link to that down below as well. Um, we are partner with them and we do have a discount for you guys so I'll make sure to put that down below.
But I'll show you guys real quick how to use auto DS and import products to your store. 'Cause this is essential information that you have to know. So after you've created your account with Auto Ds, you really just want to go and find the product you want to import on Ali Express, they have a bunch of products on here, but I just like to go find it on Ali Express because usually I can find the specific version that I want. So we're gonna go pull up, I'll pull up a product for example, um, that we looked at in the product research guide.
This website is so spammy, it's crazy. Um, we'll go ahead and look up the hair oil that we were looking at before. The reason why I like Ali Expresso is 'cause they have all the different options of the products and you can find exactly what you want. And the reason why I partner with Auto Ds is because they allow you to take these products from Ali Express and then actually get them with a better supplier and get them with fast shipping and even customize the product for yourself. So if we can go on here and find the exact one that we want, then we can send it to them and they can get us the product with faster shipping, eventually getting us having our own branding logo and everything on the product.
That's what we want in the long term and they're the best partners to do that. But I'm looking for the one that we saw in the, in the video. All right, so this is the one I was looking for. And when we're identifying people to pick for this, very important that we find the one that actually has reviews and also a lot sold. We don't want to find one that has nothing sold or no reviews because they're literally gonna go and source this exact version of the product.
So if you give them a crappy product to source, well you're gonna be selling a crappy product. But as we can see, this one's pretty good and it has nice images. That's another thing we wanna look for. 'Cause as you'll see, we're gonna go ahead and copy the link right here and then go back to Auto Ds and click on add products and click on single product. And then we're gonna paste the link right there. And when we click on edit, you're gonna see that it pulls all the images from Ali Express and that's why we wanna make sure it has good images because sometimes we can get away with just keeping the default images there without having to go and search for too many more.
And from here you can go and just, you can say natural hair growth oil. Of course we can fix the name um, a little bit more later, but we can make the name shorter. Um, we can put it in a different category but we're not gonna do that for now. And yeah, we can go to description, you can edit all this later on so don't be pressed about it. But normally I like to go in here and just delete it all 'cause we don't want this crappy Ali Express description. So we click on save, then we have our variant. Again, you can go and change this stuff but you can also Change it it all on Shopify. So for now we're gonna leave it as is and we're gonna click save and import and after a couple minutes or a couple seconds, this product is gonna be imported to our store and then we can customize it accordingly.
So after it's done importing, you can go into your products and you hit the refresh button and you'll see that it's now uploaded into our store. And you know, off the default it doesn't really look perfect but you know, we have a product into our store. In the next video, in the product page video, I'm gonna show you how to sauce this up. So we're not gonna do that just yet, but for now, let's keep going through the homepage and the essential pieces of our store.
So we have our featured collection, we now know how to import products so we can get that foundation going for you guys and you're just starting a store. I recommend that you do put at least five to 10 products in there just so it feels more authentic. We only have one product on a store that's supposed to be some women clothing empire. Nobody trusts that stuff that looks super fake. Below that we just have an image with text. So this is sort of our brand mission. You know, we're just saying we the essence of beauty. I didn't write any of this. I literally went and tried GPT and Shopify even has an AI tool that pops up sometimes that you can use. I'm right here to generate text. So you don't have to be a genius to write this. This is like the foundation, right? We're building a house here and this house is gonna make us successful, but the homepage and the branding and everything is the foundation.
Now the different pieces of the house that actually make it successful is the product is the product page is the offer. So this is literally just the foundation of the house. It's important that we get this right, but this is not the thing that's gonna make or break our success. Um, I've even seen stores with the most garbage homepage and most garbage logo ever scaled because they nailed the product, the offer and the marketing. So if you can get the foundation right and nail those things, that's how you set yourself up for long-term success.
This is our icon bar. Um, again, this is another thing that's available already inside of every other theme, I just put different things, fast shipping satisfaction, easy returns, um, over 10,000 sold. And then we just say one more time, you deserve the best, blah blah blah. What you write is not important, but it is important that it looks good and it represents your brand. So if you're doing beauty, look, we're saying a message. We believe every woman deserves to adorn herself reflecting her confidence. We have a collection of women's stuff to make you feel your best. It just stuff that represents your brand and what you're trying to sell.
Then we have a subscribe to our emails and then you're gonna see a bunch of other stuff, right? You're gonna see our policies, contact us, shipping current service refund policy. So I wanna show you guys how to set up all that right now because that's actually super important. If you run ads and you don't have these things on your store, you are guaranteed to get banned by these platforms. They need you to have this. But thankfully Shopify makes it really easy for y'all.
So if we actually go back here and we click on settings and we go to um, policies, they have a tool here where you can just go and generate all these different things. You can go and create a privacy policy. Just make sure you go through and update the dates and your name and every single blank spot that says your name. Um, they have a terms of service that you can just go ahead and click replace with template. They have a generator for all these things. It's important that you go through and you update them with your name but it's all generated for you. So then you could take that policy, go right here, type up the name privacy policy and then paste it right there and boom, now you have a policy but make sure you go through and actually skim through it and make sure there's no blank spaces and you actually fill in your name and everything, um, because it will drastically increase your chances of getting banned on a platform.
The pages that you absolutely need and can't avoid are a contact us page terms of service shipping policy and a refund policy. Now Shopify will generate all of these pages. In fact, when you start a new store by default there is a contact page already built in. Um, so to actually add the pages to your website, you gotta go here to the navigation tab and there's gonna be too many footer and main menu main menus at the top footers at the bottom in the main menu we got the home, which is basically your homepage shop, which is um, your best sellers or your top products. You can literally go right here and just pick products or collections and by default Shopify creates these so they're there. If they're not, you literally just click create collection and add the products in there. Then you have contact us, which we just talked about and track your order.
Now the way that I did an order tracking page is with this app called 17 Track. Um, 17 Track has a good free trial and then it's super cheap afterwards. Um, this just allows your customers to cleanly track their order. So they go right here. After you download the app, you can just search up 17 track and it'll pop up in the app store right there. And then you download it and you go to tracking page and they're gonna give you a URL right there. So then when we open that up, you'll see what it looks like. It's just a simple page where they can put their order number email and get tracking. And from there we can go and put that in our navigation.
That's basically what we're gonna set up. We're gonna take all those pages that we created and plug them into this. And from there we are going to have all of our basic essential pages inside of the store. The last things that's super important is you guys need to make sure you set up Shopify payments. So this is how you can accept payments from your customers. If you're in a country that doesn't support Shopify payments, there are other payment processes out there. You have to do your own research and find the one that's best for you.
And you guys need to set up PayPal because the majority of customers do actually transact with PayPal. So take the time to set that up. You need to have this to run your store. And then also we need to set up this shipping setting. So if you go right here to shipping and delivery, we can kind of break down my shipping settings for drop shipping and a little hack to make some extra money. First thing you gotta do is go over here to markets and you need to make sure you enable international markets because by default Shopify only lets you sell in your country.
But when you enable international markets, it allows you to run ads and get customers from every other country. So make sure you do that. That's step number one. Now step two is to go into the shipping and deliveries tab and then go right here to general shipping rates. And this is my setup that I have. So make sure it includes every product. And then we're gonna have two different setups. We're gonna have one for domestic, which is your country and one for international. And all we're gonna have is free shipping. So literally we're gonna call it free standard shipping and We're gonna have it free. It's simple as that. That's what this one is.
The second one is priority and shared shipping. Now really this is not any different from the free shipping, but we add insurance so if the package does get lost or anything happens, we cover that expense for them. The package doesn't get lost, it doesn't happen. But it's something that us and other massive companies in the world do. I mean insurance is a billion dollar industry predicated on the thing that maybe you might lose something one time, right? So that's our setup. And then we also have the same thing down there just to make sure once it's all set up, that you actually go through and check it out and make sure that it allows you to purchase. Um, before continuing and make sure that you enable the markets as well Inside of the notifications tab you can edit the email that your customers get.
You don't have to do this, but I just wanna show you guys this in case you wanted to say anything custom in there. One thing that is worth adding is mentioning that there may be a little bit of a delay in the orders because you have recently been going viral on social media. This is something that just helps like getting people to not complain as much about the shipping times, but since we're using Auto Ds, it's not gonna take us that long to fulfill the orders at all. Yeah, I mean look, that's pretty much it, right? There's a lot of other little things that you need to do to get your store up and running. And this is not the full breakdown of this is exactly click by click how to use the Shopify dashboard. No, they have their own tutorials for that.
I just wanted to give you guys a high level understanding of what a clean homepage and brand looks like and also give you the foundation for your store with the pages and with the tracking page and with the policies and the shipping settings. Um, so once you have all that set up, I guess there's one last thing that I would recommend you guys do. Go here to customize, go to settings and you want to actually look for checkout and in the checkout settings, go and put your phone number in there. The reason why we do this is because we get a lot of sales coming in. We'll get sales coming in at 3:00 AM and if the customer has an issue with something in the order, they're gonna be pretty upset if they can't call us.
And what this does is it allows them to see a phone number at the top of the screen that they can call if they have any questions. So I hope this video helps you guys out. I'm really excited to see you guys implement it and launch your own stores. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments down below. Again, make sure you use that link down below to get started with Shopify if you haven't already and I'll see you guys in the next one.
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