Design and Develop Your Online Furniture Brand On Shopify
Have zero experience in designing a store on Shopify, but want to do it from scratch? In this blogpost, we show you how you can design and develop your own Shopify store for your furniture brand. We’re using a client’s business as reference here, a brand that sells carpets in different categories.
Step 1: Register Shopify account and add logo & social media links
Once you’ve registered an account on Shopify, you’ll want to navigate to the ‘Online Store’ under Sales channels and click on ‘Customize’. This will bring you to the page where you can edit all of your store’s design. By default, you should have a Dawn theme. This is a free theme that we use and recommend. Other free themes that do well and loads fast are Impusle and Sense.
Next, you’re going to fill in the sections under theme settings which includes logo, social media and brand information. These are the important bits to get started with.
You may now also explore customizing the landing page, however, in this guide we will be using PageFly, which is a free landing page maker that provides better aesthetics in our opinion.
Step 2: Customize landing page using PageFly
First, download PageFly Page Builder on the app store, you can simply type in ‘pagefly’ into the top search box which will lead you to the Shopify App Store in the second last option. Download the one with the purple icon. Once you’re in Pagefly, follow instructions to allow app embed & click save. Now you’re ready to build your home landing page.
Click on ‘Create from template’ and choose ‘Home’. For our client’s furniture brand, we used the ‘Phone Case’ template which allows a very simple yet aesthetically pleasing page that is easily customizable. Below here is one of the sections created as part of the home page:
Step 3: Creating products, collections and menu
Creating a product is relatively straightforward. We won’t spend too much time here on telling you how to do it. The important basics to have in a product page is your title, description, images (ideally in a 1:1 ratio), price and quantity.
When you have a number of products you want to place in different collections, click on the ‘Collections’ tab. Here, you want to click on ‘Create collection’ and set either automated or manual settings to allocate products into different collections.
For example, if you set for all products with tag ‘abstract’ to fall under Abstract Rugs collection, this will be automated in the future, as seen below.
Tags can be allocated to products in the individual product page, or bulk-edited in the main products page.
Once you have your collections, let’s set up our menu. This is one of the most important tools your customers use to navigate around, so let’s make sure you get it right. Click on ‘Online Store’, and go to sub menu ‘Navigation’.
Click on ‘Add menu’ to add your first menu item. When you click on ‘Search or paste a link’, feel free to navigate to whatever you want to add on to your menu, such as the different Collections and pages, where your ‘About Us’ usually lies. Sub menus can be added by dragging below the main category. Your main category should now show with an arrow, and your sub categories will go below it. Refer to the image below as reference.
Once your menu and sub menus is set up, save by clicking on ‘Save menu’ at the bottom and check if it is correctly by previewing your store. You can do this by mousing over to ‘Online Store’ and clicking on the eye icon that appears.
By now, you should have either a semi function store or noticed that you lack alot of images to create the look or feel that you want in the furniture brand.
Feel free to use placeholders from sites that provide free commercial images, such as FreePik or Pexels. We personally use alot of images from Pexels while clients get their own images ready. At the same time, you will be spending the next few working hours exploring on how you can get the landing page to function the way your want, so have fun doing that.
Step 4: Settings & Launch
The last important bits before launching your store falls under Settings, where you’ll have to fill in details under the sections:
– Store details
– Billing
– Payments
– Shipping and delivery
– Brand
– Domains
– Policies
These are pretty straightforward according to Shopify’s guided instructions on the page. So remember to have them completed before you start selling.
Once you are completed, launch your store by removing the password on your store so that’s it’s now open to public. With that, congratulations, you now have a fully function Shopify store that’s ready to sell! While this guide is pretty surface level, it covers all the essentials for you to design and develop your own Shopify store. If you wish to hire professional help instead, check out our services here.
We hope this has been helpful, feel free to leave a comment or suggestion – we’d love to hear from you.
Soodo
http://soodo.coSoodo | Shopify Website Development