How to create a Shopify store?

Do you want to know how to create a Shopify online store — and, more broadly, how to create a Shopify site from A to Z? This guide will accompany you every step of the way: account, theme, catalog, payments, shipping, taxes, applications, and going live. Before diving into the heart of the matter, one question arises: what exactly is Shopify? In short, it's a SaaS solution that hosts your store in the cloud, manages updates, and lets you focus on what's essential: selling.

Making the initial settings yourself is an excellent way to master the platform, optimize your budget, and accelerate the launch. That said, depending on your ambitions, it may be wise to consult a Shopify agency to support you with strategic developments.

Here are the 6 key steps to successfully creating your Shopify store.

1. Create a Shopify account (starting point for creating an online store)

Go to the Shopify account creation page and enter your email address, then choose a name for your store. This name serves as a unique identifier — it will be visible in your Shopify URL of the type myname.myshopify.com. Don't panic if this isn't yet the definitive name of your brand: you will point your custom domain name to this address once the store is ready.

Fill in the requested information and start your 3-day free trial, followed by a first month at €1. Shopify pricing then starts at €27 / month (Basic plan, annual payment). Take a few minutes from the start to define your objectives: catalog, sales channels, languages, currencies. These choices will guide your theme and application decisions in the following steps.

2. Choose a Shopify theme for your store (design, performance, conversion)

The theme is the graphical interface of your store: its look & feel, its navigation structure, and a large part of its perceived performance. A good theme is not limited to being pretty — it must also offer modular sections, a solid SEO foundation, and optimal loading speed on both mobile and desktop.

Shopify has an official theme store, with free or paid themes (generally between $180 and $350). These themes are developed by independent publishers, but reviewed and approved by Shopify: this is a guarantee of quality, clean code, and lasting compatibility.

To learn how to analyze a competitive theme and draw inspiration from it, consult our guide on how to identify a site's Shopify theme. Once your theme is installed (Online Store > Theme), click Customize to adjust fonts, colors, the main menu, and page templates.

If your technical skills allow it, you can go further by modifying the theme's code (HTML, CSS, Liquid, JavaScript). For advanced customizations — performance, SEO, accessibility — do not hesitate to call on a Shopify agency or a certified freelancer.

3. Organize and upload your product catalog (structure for a solid Shopify site)

You have a beautiful empty shell — it's time to fill it intelligently. Before creating your first product pages, take five minutes to think about your nomenclature. Shopify offers three simple but powerful concepts to structure your catalog.

Product types (main families)

The product type corresponds to the product's logical family. If you sell clothes, your types could be: t-shirts, pants, dresses, skirts... A product belongs to only one type. This field is managed directly at the product page level.

Tags or labels (filters and merchandising)

Tags are free keywords. They serve as criteria for navigation filters and to build dynamic collections. A product can have several tags — color, season, promotion, etc. They are also found on customer profiles and in automation scripts.

Collections (automatic or manual groupings)

A collection groups products according to automatic rules (based on tags, type, or title keywords) or manually. This is Shopify's central navigation and merchandising tool: homepage, menus, category pages — collections are everywhere.

Create your product pages (manually or by import)

Once your organization is defined, you can create your product pages. For less than 10 references, manual creation from the admin is efficient. Beyond that, favor importing via CSV file or via your Shopify plan which includes advanced import functionalities. Our advice: first create a complete product manually, then export it to get a perfectly structured import file template.

4. Set up your site (payments, shipping, taxes)

Essential settings are made in Online Store > Preferences and Settings. Browse each section and modify the default values according to your activity. Three points deserve particular attention.

Payment system (PSP)

The PSP (payment service provider) collects payments on your behalf. On Shopify in France, the recommended players are Stripe, Mollie and Payplug — prefer them to traditional bank connectors, which are often less flexible and more expensive. Also add PayPal, which has become essential to reassure buyers and reduce cart abandonment.

Good news: since 2023, Shopify Payments is officially available in France. This native solution eliminates third-party transaction fees and significantly simplifies accounting. It accepts Visa, Mastercard, Apple Pay and Google Pay cards.

Shipping and deliveries (zones, rates, free shipping)

Define your delivery zones, your fees according to weight or order amount, and your terms (Colissimo, relay points, in-store pickup). Free shipping from a certain threshold remains one of the most effective levers to increase the average cart value and boost the conversion rate.

Taxes (VAT and international sales)

Check that the applied VAT rate corresponds to your activity and your products. If you sell in several EU countries, OSS (One Stop Shop) rules apply from €10,000 in annual turnover outside France. A discussion with your accountant is strongly recommended before launch.

5. Add applications (accelerate Shopify site creation)

The Shopify App Store has over 8,000 applications. As a Shopify agency, we have tested hundreds of them. Here is our selection of must-haves — but to go further, check out our complete guide to the 10 essential Shopify apps.

Metafields & Metaobjects (native Shopify)

Metafields and Metaobjects are Shopify's native solutions for storing and displaying custom data, without a third-party application. They integrate directly into the OS 2.0 editor via "dynamic sources" — no code required.

Where to manage them? Shopify Admin → Settings > Metafields (schemas by object type: products, variants, collections, orders, customers...) and Content > Metaobjects (reusable types: size guides, lookbooks, store locator, FAQ...).

Metafields — main use cases

• Enriched product information: materials, care, benefits, videos, USP icons.
• Collections: banners, long SEO descriptions, editorial blocks.
• CMS pages: marketing taglines, hero images, testimonials.

Available data types: text, number, boolean, list, file, image, URL, reference to another object (product, collection, page), etc. In Liquid: {{ product.metafields.namespace.key }}.

Metaobjects — main use cases

• Size guides structured and associated by product type.
• Store locator (addresses, opening hours, geolocation).
• Lookbooks, global FAQs, teams, partners, comparisons.

Best practices: normalize your namespaces.keys (e.g., seo.long_description, pdp.usp_icons), document schemas, and prefer references rather than duplicating content.

Bulk & automation: use Matrixify to import/export metafields and metaobjects at scale. The Admin API (GraphQL/REST) also allows them to be created and updated via script.

Sufio — Automatic Invoicing

Sufio does what you would expect Shopify to handle natively... but isn't included by default. If you've ever tried to automatically send compliant PDF invoices by email, you understand why this app is essential for any B2C or B2B e-merchant.

Shogun — Page builder

Among the no-code Shopify page builders, Shogun remains the benchmark in terms of ergonomics and functional richness. It allows you to create landing pages, enriched product pages, and CMS pages without touching the code — ideal for autonomous marketing teams.

Sendcloud — Logistics & shipping

Sendcloud is the most suitable application for the French market for shipping management. Labels, tracking, automated returns — integration with Shopify is native and support is very responsive. A must if you ship more than a few dozen packages per month.

Weglot — Multilingual

Simple to install and set up, Weglot allows anyone to have a multilingual site in a few hours. The application handles both on-the-fly automatic translation and manual review. And good news: it's a French company!

Matrixify (formerly Excelify) — Data import/export

The most comprehensive application for mass data management of your store. Matrixify allows you to import and export all Shopify data (products, collections, customers, orders, redirects, metafields...) with many automation options.

6. Launch! (going live and final checks)

Once you have thoroughly tested your store — complete purchasing journey on desktop, mobile, and several browsers, payment test, verification of transactional emails — it's time to connect your domain name. Simply follow the procedure in Online Store > Domains. DNS propagation can take up to 48 hours worldwide.

And after launch, don't neglect natural referencing. Optimizing your Shopify store for Google is a long-term effort that starts with the site structure — metas, URLs, structured data, loading speed — and continues through content creation and netlinking.

Congratulations, you have just launched your Shopify store. Would you prefer to entrust this project to an expert agency? Discover our Shopify services.

Other guide topics

Getting started in e-commerce
What is Shopify?
What is Shopify Plus?
Working with a Shopify agency
Working with a Shopify Expert
Which ERP is compatible with Shopify?
10 examples of Shopify stores in the US and UK
10 examples of Shopify stores in France