In short: Creating a Shopify store in 2026 is still accessible (3-day free trial, first month for €1), but the ecosystem has become more sophisticated. Three major changes this year: the arrival of agentic commerce, which lets AI act as shopping agents; the native integration of Sidekick (Shopify's AI assistant in the admin); and the rollout of B2B features across all Shopify plans. This complete guide walks you through the 6 essential steps, updated for 2026.
Want to know how to create a Shopify online store or how to build a Shopify site from A to Z? This guide takes you through every step: account, theme, catalog, payments, shipping, taxes, apps and launch. Before diving in, one question comes first: what exactly is Shopify? In short, it's a SaaS solution that hosts your store in the cloud, handles updates automatically and lets you focus on what matters: selling.
Handling the initial setup yourself is still an excellent way to master the platform, optimize your budget and speed up your launch. That said, depending on your ambitions, it may be wise to consult a Shopify agency to support you on strategic developments: visual identity, in-depth SEO, ERP/PIM/CRM integrations, international expansion, or migration from another platform.
Contents
- The 3 Shopify 2026 changes to know before you start
- Step 1: Create your Shopify account (with Sidekick enabled)
- Step 2: Choose and customize your theme
- Step 3: Organize and publish your product catalog
- Step 4: Configure your site (payments, shipping, taxes, B2B)
- Step 5: Add the right apps
- Step 6: Launch your store
- Shopify B2C or B2B: understanding the positioning
- Agentic commerce: what changes for merchants in 2026
- Frequently asked questions
The 3 Shopify 2026 changes to know before you start
Before diving into the 6 setup steps, here are three structural changes that transformed the merchant experience in 2026.
1. Agentic commerce: in 2025-2026, Shopify rolled out native infrastructure for commerce driven by AI agents. In practice, AI assistants (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, etc.) can now browse your catalog, run comparisons and trigger purchases on behalf of their users. For Shopify merchants, this opens a new acquisition channel to structure from launch (clean catalog, structured data, open APIs). We cover what's at stake in the agentic commerce section below.
2. Sidekick: Shopify's AI assistant is now natively built into the admin. It helps you create products, write descriptions, set up Flow automations, edit the theme or analyze performance in plain language. For a new merchant, Sidekick shortens the learning curve by several weeks.
3. B2B built into every plan: B2B features (separate catalogs, negotiated prices, payment terms, company carts) are no longer reserved for Shopify Plus. They have been rolling out gradually on the Basic, Grow and Advanced plans since 2025. Details in our guide Shopify B2B on the Basic, Grow and Advanced plans.
These 3 changes affect how you structure a new store. We factor them into the steps below wherever relevant.
Step 1: Create your Shopify account (with Sidekick enabled)
Go to the Shopify sign-up page, 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, such as yourname.myshopify.com. Don't panic if it isn't your final brand name yet: you'll point your custom domain name to this address once the store is ready.
For this step, our guide to connecting your custom domain name explains both methods, DNS settings and the email pitfall.
Fill in the requested information and start your 3-day free trial, followed by a first month for €1. Shopify pricing then starts at €27/month (Basic plan, billed annually). Take a few minutes from the start to define your goals: planned catalog, intended sales channels, target languages and currencies. These choices will guide your theme and app decisions.
Enable Sidekick from the start. Shopify's AI assistant is available via the sparkle icon at the top right of the admin (the location may vary depending on your version). Sidekick understands plain-language requests such as: "add a product with this title and this description", "set up an automatic welcome email", "generate 5 collection ideas from my current catalog". For a new merchant, it's a huge time saver during the first weeks.
If Shopify Plus fits your profile (projected monthly revenue above €100,000, multiple markets, advanced B2B), read our guide what is Shopify Plus to frame your plan choice upfront.
Step 2: Choose and customize your theme
The theme is your store's graphical interface: its look & feel, its navigation structure and a large part of its perceived performance. A good theme isn't just pretty; it must offer modular Online Store 2.0 sections, a solid SEO foundation and optimal loading speed on both mobile and desktop.
Shopify has an official theme store, with free and paid themes (generally between €180 and €380). These themes are developed by independent developers but reviewed and approved by Shopify: a guarantee of quality, clean code and long-term compatibility. To identify the theme of a site that inspires you, use our Shopify theme detector.
To go further on selection criteria, the comparison of paid themes by vertical (fashion, beauty, food, furniture) and the method for customizing or migrating a theme without breaking your store, read our complete guide to choosing a Shopify theme.
Customizing a theme: 2 levels to distinguish
Customizing a Shopify theme happens at two distinct levels, which correspond to two different merchant profiles.
Level 1: settings changes (no code). This is the native theme editor, available via Online Store > Themes > Customize. You can change colors, fonts, images and section layout, add or remove blocks, configure the mega menu and manage the theme's global settings. With Online Store 2.0, you can build each template (home page, product, collection, cart, blog) with different sections using drag and drop. This level covers 90% of a standard merchant's needs and requires no technical skills.
Level 2: code customization (Liquid, CSS, JavaScript). When the native editor is no longer enough (a very specific section, integration with an external service, fine-grained checkout customization), you need to edit the theme code. Shopify uses the Liquid language for templating logic, HTML/CSS for structure and styling, and JavaScript for interactivity. You access the code via Online Store > Themes > ... > Edit code. Always save a copy of the theme before any code change (Actions > Duplicate).
For advanced customizations (performance, technical SEO, accessibility, ERP/CRM integrations), don't hesitate to call on a Shopify agency or a certified Liquid freelancer. Best practices in 2026 include: creating reusable custom OS 2.0 sections rather than modifying the base theme, versioning code with Git, and testing in a staging environment before publishing.
Step 3: Organize and publish your product catalog
You have a nice empty shell; now it's time to fill it intelligently. Before creating your first product pages, take five minutes to think about your naming structure. Shopify offers three simple but powerful concepts for structuring your catalog.
Product types (main families)
The product type corresponds to the logical family. If you sell clothing, your types could be: t-shirts, pants, dresses, skirts. A product belongs to only one type. This field is managed directly on the product page. Types also act as a signal for agentic commerce: an AI buys better when it understands the product category.
Tags (filters and merchandising)
Tags are free-form keywords. They serve as criteria for navigation filters and for building automated collections. A product can carry several tags: color, season, promotion, limited edition, certification. You'll also find them on customer profiles and in Shopify Flow automation scripts.
Collections (automated or manual groupings)
A collection groups products according to automated rules (based on tags, type or title keywords) or manually. It's Shopify's central navigation and merchandising tool: home page, menus, category pages, collections are everywhere.
Create your product pages (manually, by import or with Sidekick)
Once your organization is defined, you have three options for creating your product pages:
- Manual creation in the Shopify admin, efficient for fewer than 20 SKUs
- CSV import or via Matrixify for larger catalogs
- Sidekick-assisted generation: ask it to generate descriptions from bullet points, translate existing product pages, suggest relevant tags
Our advice: first create one complete product manually, then export it to get a perfectly structured import file template. This saves hours of trial and error on the file format.
Step 4: Configure your site (payments, shipping, taxes, B2B)
The essential settings are in Online Store > Preferences and Settings. Go through each section and change the default values to suit your business. Four points deserve particular attention in 2026.
Payment system (PSP)
The PSP collects payments on your behalf. On Shopify in France, the recommended providers are Shopify Payments, Stripe, Mollie and Payplug. Choose them over traditional bank connectors, which are often less flexible and more expensive. Also add PayPal, which has become essential for reassuring shoppers and reducing cart abandonment.
Good news: Shopify Payments has been officially available in France since 2023. This native solution eliminates third-party transaction fees (-0.5 to -2% on every order), greatly simplifies accounting, and accepts Visa, Mastercard, Apple Pay, Google Pay and Shop Pay.
Shipping and delivery
Define your shipping zones, your rates based on weight or order value, and your delivery options (Colissimo, Mondial Relay, pickup points, in-store pickup). Free shipping above a certain threshold remains one of the most effective levers for increasing average order value and boosting conversion rate (typically +10 to +25%).
Before you click, decide on your model: the configuration follows the strategy, not the other way around. Our guide explains how to configure your shipping rates without improvising.
Taxes (VAT and international sales)
Check that the VAT rate applied matches your business and your products. If you sell in several EU countries, the OSS (One Stop Shop) rules apply from €10,000 in annual revenue outside France. A meeting with your accountant is strongly recommended before launch. For exports outside the EU (post-Brexit UK, US, Switzerland), plan for automated customs declarations.
Use this pass through the settings to fill in your legal documents, which are configured in the same place. Our guide to Shopify terms of sale and legal notices explains what French law requires and why we recommend starting with the free generator rather than a lawyer.
Enabling B2B features
New in 2026: B2B features (separate catalogs for professionals, negotiated prices per account, payment terms, order approval, multi-user company carts) are now available on the Basic, Grow and Advanced plans (with volume limits) as well as Shopify Plus. If your brand combines DTC consumer sales and B2B sales (concept stores, retailers, restaurants, businesses), enable these options from the start.
To understand which B2B features are available on your plan, read our dedicated guide: Shopify B2B on the Basic, Grow and Advanced plans.
Step 5: Add the right apps
The Shopify App Store now has more than 10,000 apps in 2026. Most of them are useless or slow your store down needlessly. An effective app strategy rests on 4 essential fundamentals.
Matrixify, bulk data import and export
The must-have app for managing your store's data in bulk. Matrixify lets you import and export all Shopify data: products, collections, customers, orders, 301 redirects, metafields, metaobjects. Essential for migrations from another platform, seasonal catalog updates and accounting exports. Compatible with Excel, CSV and Google Sheets formats.
Judge.me, customer reviews and SEO rich snippets
The #1 app on Shopify for collecting and displaying customer reviews. Judge.me automates post-purchase review requests (email, SMS), displays reviews with rich snippets (stars in Google), handles photo and video reviews and offers advanced moderation. Compatible with Online Store 2.0, with native integration into theme sections. The free plan is enough for launching brands.
Weglot, a turnkey multilingual site
Easy to install and configure, Weglot gives you a multilingual site in a few hours. The app handles both on-the-fly machine translation and manual review. Compatible with multilingual SEO (hreflang, sitemaps per language). A French company with support in French. For brands with international ambitions in Europe or beyond.
Sendcloud, multi-carrier shipping management
The app best suited to the French market for logistics. Sendcloud centralizes labels, tracking, automated returns and multi-carrier integration (Colissimo, Mondial Relay, DHL, UPS, Chronopost, DPD). Essential if you ship more than 30 to 50 parcels per month.
Metafields and metaobjects (native to Shopify, no app)
Before adding a third-party app, check whether the native feature is enough. Metafields and Metaobjects are Shopify's native solutions for storing and displaying custom data: materials, care instructions, size guides, store locator, lookbooks, global FAQs. No code required, with direct integration into the OS 2.0 editor via "dynamic sources".
Beyond these 4 fundamental apps, the Shopify ecosystem is full of specialized tools (page builders, product configurators, pop-ups, loyalty, subscriptions, advanced search, etc.). For an up-to-date selection by use case, read our complete guide: the best Shopify apps in 2026.
Golden rule: every app adds JavaScript and can slow the site down. Audit performance after each installation, uninstall unused apps every 6 months, and favor OS 2.0-compatible apps.
Step 6: Launch your store
Once you have tested your store thoroughly (complete purchase journey on desktop, mobile and several browsers, a real payment test, checking transactional emails, Core Web Vitals performance), 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 SEO. Optimizing your Shopify store for Google is long-term work that starts with the site structure (meta tags, URLs, structured data, loading speed) and continues through content creation and link building. Also remember to structure your data for 2026 agentic commerce (clean catalog, schema.org Product, public API).
Congratulations, you've just launched your Shopify store. Would you rather entrust this project to an expert Shopify agency that masters the full 2026 stack (Shopify Plus, applied AI, SEO, B2B, agentic commerce)? Read our guide to choosing a Shopify agency in 2026, with criteria, price ranges and a detailed FAQ.
Shopify B2C or B2B: understanding the positioning
Shopify is historically and primarily a B2C platform (selling to consumers). More than 90% of Shopify stores worldwide are DTC sites selling to end consumers. This profile is what made the platform successful: a smooth, mobile-first shopping experience optimized for mass-market conversion.
But since 2023-2024, Shopify has invested heavily in built-in B2B. B2B features (separate catalogs, negotiated prices, payment terms, multi-user carts, hierarchical order approval, ERP integration) are now available on all plans with progressive volume limits. This lets a brand easily combine a DTC consumer channel and a B2B wholesale or retail channel without needing two separate platforms.
Typical B2B use cases on Shopify: a cosmetics brand that sells to concept stores alongside its DTC business, a food brand developing a channel to delicatessens and restaurants, a fashion brand managing its resellers in parallel with its consumer site. To understand which B2B features are available on your plan, read our guide to Shopify B2B on the Basic, Grow and Advanced plans.
Agentic commerce: what changes for merchants in 2026
Agentic commerce refers to the ability of AI agents (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot and their equivalents) to act as purchasing intermediaries: browsing catalogs, comparing products and triggering orders on behalf of their users. It's the major evolution of online commerce in 2026, comparable to the arrival of mobile in 2010 or marketplaces in 2015.
For Shopify merchants, agentic commerce changes three concrete things.
1. Your catalog data becomes a strategic asset. AI buys better when it understands your products: descriptive titles, structured attributes (type, material, color, size, certifications), clear tags, descriptions free of marketing jargon. A well-structured product page will win "agentic" sales; a sloppy one will be ignored.
2. Your public APIs become acquisition channels. Protocols such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and other agent-merchant interaction standards let AI interact with your Shopify store without going through the classic user interface. Configuring your schema.org Product, your Open Graph tags and your JSON-LD feed becomes strategic.
3. The weight of classic SEO shifts toward GEO (Generative Engine Optimization). Appearing in a ChatGPT answer to the query "which French solid cosmetics brand do you recommend" can now generate as many sales as a top 3 ranking on Google, or more. Optimizing for LLMs (citations, sources, Wikipedia mentions, rich schema.org markup) is becoming a marketing pillar.
In practice, this means measuring your current visibility in these answers before trying to improve it. Our comparison of 9 GEO tools for tracking your citations in ChatGPT and Perplexity details the available solutions and their real cost.
Shopify is gradually rolling out native agentic features on its platform (a catalog exposable to agents, per-merchant consent management, monitoring of AI-generated sales). For new merchants, structuring the store with this logic from day one saves 12 to 18 months of late adaptation.
Frequently asked questions
How do I create a Shopify online store step by step in 2026?
Create a Shopify account with the 3-day free trial, enable Sidekick (the AI assistant), choose an OS 2.0-compatible theme, structure your catalog (types, tags, collections), configure payments/shipping/taxes/B2B, install the fundamental apps (Matrixify, Judge.me, Weglot, Sendcloud), test thoroughly, then go live.
What is Sidekick and how do I use it?
Sidekick is the AI assistant built into the Shopify admin since 2024-2025. Available via the sparkle icon, it understands plain-language requests: creating products, generating descriptions, setting up automations, editing the theme, analyzing performance. It shortens the Shopify learning curve by several weeks for a new merchant.
How long does it take to create a Shopify site in 2026?
With a ready-to-use theme and Sidekick enabled, a few hours are enough for a simple store. For a custom project with extensive customization, allow 6 to 10 weeks. For a Shopify Plus project with ERP/PIM/CRM integrations, 10 to 20 weeks.
Do I need to know how to code to create a Shopify store?
No, the platform is designed to be used without code. Level 1 customization (settings changes in the native theme editor) covers 90% of a standard merchant's needs. Knowledge of Liquid, HTML, CSS and JavaScript only becomes necessary for advanced theme code customizations (level 2).
What budget should I plan to create a Shopify site in 2026?
From €27/month for the Shopify Basic subscription, plus possibly a premium theme (€180 to €380), paid apps (€10 to €200/month depending on your stack) and a domain name (€10 to €20/year). With a Shopify agency, project budgets typically range from €5,000 to €30,000.
Can I try Shopify for free?
Yes, Shopify offers a 3-day free trial, followed by a first month for €1. You can fully create, configure and test your store with no commitment. Switching to a paid plan is only required when you publish the site to the public.
Is Shopify a B2C or a B2B platform?
Historically and primarily B2C (more than 90% of Shopify stores are DTC consumer stores). But Shopify has invested heavily in built-in B2B since 2023-2024. B2B features (separate catalogs, negotiated prices, payment terms) are now available on all plans, making it easy to combine DTC and B2B on a single platform.
What is agentic commerce on Shopify?
It's the ability of AI agents (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, etc.) to act as purchasing intermediaries: browsing your catalog, comparing products and triggering orders on behalf of their users. Shopify is gradually rolling out the native features. For new merchants, structuring your catalog and APIs from the start is strategic.
How do I customize a Shopify theme without coding?
With the native theme editor (Online Store > Themes > Customize). You can change colors, fonts, images and section layout, add or remove blocks and configure the mega menu. With Online Store 2.0, you can build each template (home page, product, collection, blog) with different sections using drag and drop. This level covers 90% of needs.
Which Shopify apps are essential at launch in 2026?
Four fundamental apps: Matrixify (bulk import/export), Judge.me (customer reviews and SEO rich snippets), Weglot (multilingual, if you sell internationally), Sendcloud (multi-carrier logistics in France). Plus Shopify's native Metafields and Metaobjects, which save you from adding third-party apps to store custom data. Beyond that, read our guide to the best Shopify apps in 2026.
Is it better to build your site yourself or hire an agency?
For a small project or an MVP, do it yourself with Sidekick and a premium theme. For a complex or ambitious site (Shopify Plus, advanced B2B, migration from another platform, international expansion, ERP integrations), an agency brings expertise and saves time. Stellar Projects works on budgets from €5,000 to €30,000. To compare options, read our comparison of the best Shopify agencies in France or our overview of agencies by region.