Signing up for Shopify account

So you are ready to start and to set up your shop. Luckily, with Shopify, you can do it within just a few minutes. Head on to Shopify main page and sign up for a free trial. You will have two weeks to decide if you want to continue using the platform, which is a lot of time given that you can have everything set up within hours (especially if you have site copy and product images/descriptions ready). After that, you’ll have to select a plan to use. Currently, first tier Shopify plan will cost you $30/month, allowing you to create two additional staff accounts for your team members, an unlimited number of products in the database, unlimited file storage and cms for creating static pages and a blog. It also includes a couple of very nice additional features like discount codes and abandoned cart emails that increase your conversion rate when used correctly. You will also be able to extend your store’s functionality by using any number of Shopify apps.

Please note that in addition to monthly payment you’ll also have transaction fees for every purchase made. The basic plan will cost you 2.9% + 30¢ for every credit card transaction that goes through your Shopify store. In addition to that, you’ll have to pay 2% if you want to use third-party payment gateways like PayPal or Amazon payments.

I’d recommend starting with default Shopify Payments powered by Stripe, one of the biggest players in payment processing industry. There’s a big chance your customers already used Stripe payments elsewhere, so they’ll have a simplified process without the need of typing credit card details. Also, Shopify is not storing any credit card data. Stripe securely handles everything.

Buying a domain

After signing up for an account, set up wizard will ask you few simple questions like your shop’s name. One important thing is to choose shop subdomain correctly because there’s no way to change it. Once you’ve created an account, you can change the user-facing domain, but your admin panel will use the domain you created initially. The only way to overcome this is to create a brand new account and migrate everything, all your data, which is quite a hassle.

I’m pretty sure that you’ve already chosen the name of your shop and maybe even bought a domain. If you did then all you need is to connect it to your Shopify store. I purchased my domain through Google Domains because I already use G Suite for business and it’s straightforward to manage the domain and set up custom domain emails with these two services (and I think every company should have email at the custom domain to look professional).

If you haven’t purchased a domain yet then head to Google Domains and get one. Once the domain is purchased you need to go to domain management screen. It will prompt you to sign up for G Suite so you can do that if you still haven’t got yourself an account. A domain will cost you $12, and you’ll have to pay $5 per user on basic G Suite plan. The basic plan will allow your team to have shared contacts, calendar, disk and custom domain emails. You’ll also get a two-week trial to try things out. If you already have G Suite and want to use it with your custom domain you need to sign in to Administrator Console and then go Settings -> Domains in the main menu (burger icon in the top left). After connecting the domain, you will be able to create user accounts and emails.

Connecting your domain to Shopify

After buying a domain, you need to connect it to your Shopify store. With google domains it’s pretty straightforward — their service includes DNS management so that you edit records within your domain. You own a top-level namespace, e.g., example.com, and you need to root domain and subdomains like www.example.com to your server, which is your Shopify store. To point them to the right server you need to add A and CNAME records, but if you use google domains, you won’t need to do that by hand. For custom domain email to work, you’ll also need to add few records to your DNS server, but in case of G Suite with Google Domains you don’t have to do it by hand.

To add G suite custom domain emails:

1. Go to domains.google.com
2. Select “Manage my domains."
3. Make sure you are signed in to the right Google account. You should see a list of your domains
4. Click ‘DNS’ icon in a row for the domain you want to set up email for. You will go to DNS management screen for that domain
5. Scroll to ‘Synthetic records’ block down below. Synthetic records allow you to add features to your domain in a few clicks
6. Select ‘G Suite’ in a drop-down menu and make sure only ‘Email’ checkbox is selected, then click ‘Add’ button

To connect your domain to your Shopify store do the following:

• Go back to the list of domains
• Click an icon in the ‘Website’ column for the desired domain
• Select ‘Shopify’ in a list of service providers and then choose ‘I already have an account’ down below
• After that, you will need to grant Shopify access to your Google domain account. It will be needed to auto-setup A and CNAME records for you. You will also need to enter your shop’s subdomain (myshopname.myshopify.com)

After connecting your domain to Shopify account, you’ll need to wait while your new domain settings will propagate among all servers on the internet. Typically it takes an hour or two, but in some cases, it can last for as long as 24 hours.

Setting up the domain on Shopify.

After your domain is set up and connected (you will see that in your store’s Domain settings in the dashboard) you’ll need to do two things. First, you’ll have to set up a primary domain for your shop. I highly recommend using www subdomain for that (e.g., www.yourstore.com) because using a subdomain instead of root domain gives you a lot of flexibility in the future. After that, you’ll want to enable redirects, so that users visiting your shop from non-primary domains (e.g., non-www root domain and myshopify.com subdomain) will redirect the user to the primary one. It is called canonical host redirection and is very important for SEO.

Without redirects, search engines will treat every domain as separate sites with duplicate content and will penalize you when ranking within search results. One crucial thing that Shopify does for you without you even noticing is getting you an SSL certificate and redirecting all users that are coming to HTTP version of your store to its HTTPS counterpart. You need to use HTTPS because Google announced that they are going to penalize HTTP websites. They already display a warning that a website is not secure in Chrome browser for any HTTP site. Again, search engines treat websites with different protocols as entirely separate websites, so you need a redirect in that case.