The Shopify Print On Demand Tutorial For Beginners 2025 (STEP-BY-STEP)

Can I show you how anyone, including beginners, can build a simple yet high-converting print-on-demand store from scratch? And can I show you the exact free tools and apps that I use to earn passive income every day by creating and selling my own print-on-demand products with Shopify, so that you can use them too? Well, that's the challenge I've set myself today.

Yes, I have created this free print-on-demand course here on YouTube, which will cover lots of topics from how I create and design products to how I create high-converting Shopify stores, plus traffic strategies that I use to drive customers and sales to my products. And you know, we've got a lot to get through, so let's just jump straight into it. And we'll start out by first giving you a brief preview of the store that we are going to build today with Shopify.

Over the past year, I have been running tests and through that, I have identified the simple yet high-converting store layout that anyone can use using Shopify's free themes. And this here is a clean, professional-looking design, plus it doesn't use any paid apps either. We will only install one app, Printify, and it is free because, in my experience, when you're first starting a new business, you've usually got at most a very small startup budget. So it is crucial that you keep costs low, which is why in this video, I'm gonna be focusing on free websites, free tools, and free apps.

So, in addition to the store layout, I'll be showing you how you can set up your store so that it works, such as adding in things like menus, collections, and of course, products. This here is a print-on-demand t-shirt that I added in with Printify. In this course, I will be showing you both how I added it, but how I also designed it, and how I got free mockup lifestyle photos that I can legally use to promote my products. Plus, I also to be showing you how I set up the store so that it actually works, it has a working payment processor, and shipping settings have been set up to be automatically calculated correctly so that customers coming here can actually purchase and buy my products, and the store can actually earn money. So yes, this is the store that we are going to build. So let's get started, and we're gonna start off by getting a free Shopify trial account.

Yep, just click the affiliate link that I'll have in the video description below to be taken to a custom signup page for viewers of this channel that I have created in conjunction with Shopify, which includes the best current discount. Currently, you can see that Shopify is giving away a free three-day trial account, and then after that, for the first three months, you only pay $1 per month, which is honestly one of the craziest deals I've ever seen from them. So if this deal is available, you should snag it. However, I do have to warn you, Shopify does mix and match their offers, and so by the time you're watching this video, this offer may have changed to be something else, but either way, my affiliate link in the description will absolutely include their best current deal.

So yes, all you've got to do is come here and type in your email address and click to get started. Then after that, you'll be taken to a survey. You could choose to skip over the survey; you don't actually need to do this. After that, you'll then need to enter in what country your store will be legally based out of, which is usually the country that you live in, which for me, of course, is New Zealand. Although, don't worry, even though I personally live in New Zealand, as you will later see, the print-on-demand company that I'll be adding in is based out of the USA. I selected a USA-based print-on-demand company because most English-speaking customers, which are my target market as an English marketer, are based in the USA. So by selecting a USA-based print-on-demand provider, it means my customers can get their products quickly and cheaply.

So yes, even though I legally run my business from New Zealand as I live here and my bank accounts are all here, I'm still able to use international-based print-on-demand providers, which is one of the really big advantages of opening a print-on-demand store. But yes, once you've selected your country, click next and then create a login. You can create it with your email, a Google account, a Facebook account, or an Apple account, and then, well, that's it. Shopify will now build your store. This may take a few moments, which is normal; it's building a lot for us in the backend, and once it is finished, it'll then take you directly into your Shopify dashboard.

And so now we can go in and customize our store by adding in a free theme, and it's easy to do. So on the left-side menu, click "Online Store," and then you'll automatically be taken to the theme section of your store. And here you'll be able to see that by default, Shopify is using the Dawn theme. They use this in all of their new stores, so if you keep this, it will make your store look generic and boring since most people don't change this out, which is why we won't keep this and instead, we will install a different free theme. And to do that, just scroll down the page until you find the button that will take you to the theme store.

Now, as you will see, there are lots of themes in here, over 200. However, most cost money, which is why you'll want to filter the results to only show the free themes. Then from here, you can scroll down and browse through the free themes and choose one that you like to use as a base design and layout for your store. If you want to preview one, just click on it, and you'll be taken to the theme page where you can select to view a demo store. Inside of these, Shopify have created example stores using the base theme, and they've added in products and pages so that you can see exactly how it would look before any modifications if you choose to install it. If you want to see how it looks on a cell phone, you can also switch at any point into mobile view, and it will show you how your store looks like on a phone, or you can choose to switch back and instead see how it looks on a computer. And because they have actually added in products, you can go in and you can open up a product to see how the product page looks and prove you that as well.

So yes, I recommend browsing through the themes and choosing one that you like. For me, though, ever since Shopify released this theme years ago, I have loved the Craft theme, which probably isn't a surprise given that it looks like it's the highest-rated out of all the free themes. Anyway, so I'll be installing that one for this tutorial. To install it, just come to the theme page for it and then come and click the "Try theme" button. And when you do, Shopify will add the theme files into your store, and then inside of your themes dashboard, you'll see that once loaded, the Craft theme will now be available to install. So now you can click to publish it, and on the confirmation screen, confirm that yes, you do want to replace Dawn with Craft. And then that is it. You have installed your new theme.

And so now we're gonna go ahead and sign up for a free Printify account. And well, chances are, if you've been watching my channel for a while, you probably know what Printify is by now, but just in case you are new around here, I will quickly explain how it works. Yes, so this here is, of course, Printify. It is arguably the largest and most popular print-on-demand website and app. Currently, inside of Printify, there are hundreds of blank products that you can customize, including clothing like t-shirts, or homeware items like mugs, candles, pillowcases, and rugs, and stationery like stickers and books. And so the way that Printify works is simple: you just pick a blank product that you want to customize, and then you upload the picture or design that you want to sell onto it, and then you list it in your store for a market price. And each time a customer comes and buys it from you, Printify will automatically see the order in your Shopify store and go, "Yep, let's make that product." They will then charge your card on file with them the base product price, and then they'll send your order to the print shop that will then print your design onto the product and package it up and ship it out to the customer, while you get to keep the difference as profit.

This is the print-on-demand process, and as you can see, it has two big advantages for new stores. Yep, so the first is that there is very little risk because you only buy items as customers order them. So as you can see here, in this example purchase, the t-shirt sold for $19.99 in my store, but Printify charged me just $11.42, and the only charge that after the sale had been made. And the second big advantage is that this is very passive. Yep, because in just minutes of the purchase being made, you can see that the Printify app recognized that the order had taken place, and well, inside of its app, Printify automatically created an order page and sent the t-shirt design off to the print shop. And well, by the next day, that print shop had printed the design onto the t-shirt and shipped it out, fulfilling the order. I literally did nothing during this process; it was all handled for me by apps. Shopify processed the order and money, while Printify shipped it out and notified the customer of shipment. I did nothing, which is the big reason why I personally love this business so much because it lets me sell and ship my products with Shopify on autopilot, which is important to me because, as my longtime subscribers know, one of my big life hobbies is travel. So even when I'm overseas and at home, my stores just run for me passively, which is really, really nice.

But yes, to get started, just come on over to Printify. If you'd like a link to Printify, I will have an affiliate link to it in the description below. Using my link is always optional, but it's also always really appreciated. So thank you if you choose to use my affiliate link. But yes, once here, click "Sign up for an account." You can choose to sign up by using either a Google account or by creating an account with your email address. Then once you've done that, Printify will ask you to complete a survey. Unlike with Shopify, though, the survey was not optional, and I was forced to answer all the questions. You can answer however you like. The most important question, however, is which countries do you plan to sell to? I recommend not skipping this and actually selecting all the countries that you plan to ship to, or if you plan to sell anywhere, click that you will sell globally. This is important because Printify has over a hundred print shops in its network all around the world. So by selecting the countries that you actually plan to sell to, Printify will then be able to better curate and optimize which print shops in its network that it shows you that actually ship to the countries that you're gonna be selling to.

But yes, once you've selected the countries, just finish up the survey, and then that is it. You have a free Printify account, and now we can go in and add in our Shopify account so that Printify will now be connected automatically to our new store, and it's actually pretty simple. Inside of your Printify account, select to "Add a new store," and then from the integration list, select to "Add a Shopify store." And then, as you can see, you will need to know your store's current URL. So to get it, come back to your Shopify dashboard and select the button to "View your online store." Clicking this will take you to your store's homepage. You can then come to the URL bar in your internet browser and copy your store's homepage URL. Then come back to Printify and paste your store URL into the box and select to connect it. After it is finished loading, it'll redirect you to Shopify where you'll be asked to confirm that you want to install Printify. And then that's it. Once it's installed, you can log back into Printify to confirm.

And so now that we have connected our Shopify store into our Printify account, we want to go into our Printify account and do a couple of tweaks so that our orders can be fulfilled on autopilot. Yes, so back inside of your Printify dashboard, come and select to "Edit the settings" for the new Shopify store you just added. Then come to "Edit your store settings" and then come and add in the name of your store and select to save it. Then come to "Order settings." You can tweak these however that you personally like to tweak, but one change I would always recommend that you do is switch the order fulfillment time so that it will happen automatically after one hour from purchase. Because you see, by default, Printify selects currently 24 hours, and I do understand why they do this. By having a 24-hour buffer, it gives customers time to email you to let you know if they made a mistake when ordering and for example, need to change and update their delivery address. But on the other hand, in my experience, customers will usually email you pretty fast if they make a mistake, and 24 hours is a long time to wait because customers usually, in my experience, are happiest when your products get sent to them and arrive as quickly as possible. So it's up to you, but I personally prefer to change this to be a one-hour buffer instead of a full 24-hour buffer. But either way, once you've tweaked the settings in here, you can click "Save."

And then we will need to come to "Wallet" and with here, add in a credit card or a debit card to our Printify account. Now, this is where a lot of people get mixed up and they get very confused because you see, a lot of people think that the way that it works is that Printify will take the money that the customer pays you and then deduct the production and shipping costs from it. But that is not how it works because, well, it is not Printify that collects the money from a customer after they buy a product from you. It is Shopify, and Shopify can't just bypass you and give Printify your money because it's your money; it's not Printify's. And so what happens is that when I sell my print-on-demand products in my store, Shopify will pay me each day the money that I earn directly into my bank account. But since banks sadly don't work on autopilot, they do take time to process payments. So it usually takes about two to three business days to get the money that Shopify has paid me, which means then that if I want Printify to start making my order for me immediately, I have to pay for that order upfront while I wait for those two to three days for the money to process into my bank account.

But you know what the truth is? Is that I honestly consider that a good thing, not a bad thing, because I like to use my credit card, the Amex Platinum, to pay for my print-on-demand products. Yes, because you see, credit cards like my Amex Platinum give you rewards as a thank you for using them. So for me, I use my Amex Platinum to earn free travel reward miles, which I cash out for luxury business class and first-class flights. Then two to three days later, after the money from Shopify has finished processing, I just pay off my credit card, well, before any interest is due. So yes, go in and add in either a credit card or a debit card into your account, and then we can move on to the next step, which is creating designs.

And of course, for some of you watching, you might have already created your designs, and if that is you, then that is great. You can just skip this section. But if you haven't created your designs, then I thought I would show you a recreation of how I designed this mug here by using my favorite design app, Canva. Yes, if you are a long-time subscriber to this channel, then you'll know that I personally love Canva, and I use it to create designs that I sell. I have several videos on this channel showing how I do this, but for those of you that are new around here and haven't watched my tutorial videos, I'll quickly show you how I do it, and if you'd like to follow along with me, you absolutely can.

So just come to Canva and sign up for a Pro account. As you'll see soon, unfortunately, we do need to use the paid Pro account; we can't use the free account. But luckily, Canva does have a huge 30-day free trial for the Pro account that you can get. So you know the drill; I will have an affiliate link to where you can get a free 30-day Pro trial account for Canva in the video description below if you'd like to use it. If you do choose to use it, thank you.

So yes, to make my design, I just opened up Canva and then I selected to create a new design, and I picked to create a custom canvas size, and I created a large canvas, 4,000 by 4,000 pixels, so that my design would be a large image when printed. Then I came to "Elements" and I selected to add in a shape. Canva has lots of pre-installed shapes that you can use. I, of course, wanted a circle, so I selected that, and I dragged it and I filled it at the edges of the canvas to make it as big as possible. And then next, in the shape editing tools, I selected to add a border to the circle, and then I changed the circle color so that it would be transparent. And then I dialed up the thickness of the border so that I'd have a perfect circle border, but be transparent in the middle. And so then, of course, I did it again. I created another circle, and then I used Canva's built-in rulers, which automatically snap elements into place, to get it perfectly centered, and I used the shape editing tools to turn it into a circle border with a transparent middle.

Then next, I came to the "Text" element feature inside of Canva and I selected to add a text box and then added in the top half of my slogan, "Death by," and made the text a lot bigger. Then I had to select a font for it. Canva has lots of pre-installed fonts. It can honestly be overwhelming, kind of. So I just use the font style folders that they have to quickly sort through the fonts to help me identify quickly what type of font I want to use in my designs. You can also click on a font to try it out and see if you like it. I quite like the Auro fonts, and so I just ended up choosing one of them. Then I clicked on "Effects" to add in the cool circular effect by having the text wrapped around the circle; it creates a nice, balanced design. I also used the text spacing tool to increase the length between the letters so that they looked less cramped. And I also made good use of Canva's built-in auto-locking rulers to help center the text where I wanted it to be. And then I went ahead and I did it all again, this time adding in the punchline of the slogan, "Decaf," except this time when I came to add in the circular text effect, I didn't have the text go downwards. Instead, I curved it in the opposite direction, and then I just dragged and dropped it into place using Canva's auto-locking rulers to help me center it.

And so now for the fun part, time to add in images. So I came back to "Elements" and instead of doing a search for shapes, I did a search for a skeleton drinking coffee. And Canva actually had a ton to choose from, which isn't as surprising as it sounds because Canva seriously has a ridiculous amount of money to throw around, literally billions of dollars. So they've invested a lot of that money into acquiring the license rights to millions of visual elements which you can use if you have a Pro account. And so I ultimately ended up choosing this fun little picture here of a skeleton pouring itself a cup of coffee. And then I wanted to just balance the design out. It looked a little bit empty with the dead space between the two slogan lines, so I decided to balance it out by adding in some coffee beans on each side. I picked a simple, minimalistic graphic to not draw visual attention away from the super cool skeleton, and I angled them to better match the angle of the circles. And then I went and I copied and pasted it and I dragged and dropped it over to the other side. But this time I flipped the image so that it would be perfectly mirrored so that it would match the coffee beans on the other side.

And so that's how I made the design. But you know what? What is just as important as knowing how to create designs is how to export them so that they are suitable for printing. Basically, you want to make sure that when you export your designs for printing, that they are in the highest quality possible so that they look nice and sharp when printed instead of looking blurry. And so here's how I did it: Come to "Share" and click "Download." Inside of the download settings, make sure that PNG is selected. Then come to "Size" and dial it all the way up as high as you can. And you might have noticed that this little option here has a little crown symbol next to it. This crown symbol means that to use the feature, you need a Pro account, which is why, as I said earlier, we can't use a free account when creating print-on-demand designs with Canva because we need to be able to use this feature, which is only available in Pro accounts. So that's why we have a Pro account, which is why earlier we selected a Pro account, not a free Canva account, because only the Canva Pro accounts have these extra features, which we need to use when we are exporting our designs.

But yes, after that, you'll need to click to make the background transparent, which is unfortunately also only a Pro account feature. And this is very important because let's say that we print this design onto a t-shirt. Well, if we don't make the background transparent, it will print with the white box, whereas if we click to make it transparent, it would instead print without it, which is exactly what we want. And then after that, you can click "Download," and that's it. That is how I did it. And of course, you may have noticed that I have created a different version of this design, one that was instead made for dark products like dark t-shirts. And well, to do that, I just changed the colors of the design to be a trendy, vintage yellow color. So you can use Canva to create different variations of designs to print onto different types of products too. And if you'd like to learn more about my personal tips and tricks that I use to come up with my top-selling designs that customers love, then you should be sure to download a copy of my free ebook, "The Six Steps That Six-Figure Online Stores Follow to Make Over $10,000 a Month with Print on Demand." You'll find a link to download my free ebook in the video description. But anyway, back to the video.

And so then we have our designs. It's now time to go ahead and turn them into products. And we're gonna start out by adding in our first type of product, which happens to be the most popular products by far in the print-on-demand world, which is t-shirts. Yes, as I mentioned in this video here, t-shirts are my number one top-selling product of all time. So I'm a bit biased, but I absolutely love them. So yes, to add in a t-shirt inside Printify, make sure that you've selected your Shopify store within your Printify dashboard. Then come to the "Catalog" menu and select "T-shirt." You can either select men's or women's t-shirts; either is fine since we'll be adding in a unisex t-shirt anyway. As you can see, there are lots of different t-shirts within Printify that you can use. Each of these t-shirts is different; they come in different styles and they are made by different brands. So since there are so many, you can filter the results to narrow it down. For example, a lot of people like Comfort Colors clothing, so you could filter it so that you only see the Comfort Colors clothing only. Or for me, I personally love Bella Canvas as a brand, so I went ahead and filtered it to only show the Bella Canvas clothing. And Bella Canvas, by the way, is a basic clothing brand; they specialize in creating basic clothes like plain t-shirts that you can print your design onto.

Over time, one t-shirt in particular that they make, the Bella Canvas 3001, has arguably become the most popular print-on-demand t-shirt, and that's for three reasons. Firstly, it's quite comfy because it is super soft. Now, that super softness does mean that the material is on the thinner side, but in my experience, most customers, myself included, would rather have a thinner t-shirt if it makes it more comfortable and more soft. I myself genuinely love and wear the Bella Canvas 3001 in my day-to-day life a lot because of the fact that it's just that comfy. And secondly, it's quite cheap. Bella Canvas have gotten the price very low due to being very efficient with production. And thirdly, Bella Canvas is very well known for being one of the most eco-friendly out of all the basic clothing brands, and they don't use sweatshops. And so for those three reasons, it is my personal favorite t-shirt to sell, which is why I selected that.

Now, before we continue, there is something that is very important that I need to make sure that you know about, and that is this: A lot of people don't realize it, but Printify is not a print shop; they are a tech company that specializes in producing apps instead of print shops. They have offices; they don't actually make any of the products that they sell. Nope. Instead, Printify is an app that lets different print shops and production partners all around the world connect into so that they can list and sell their own products through the app. Think of it like Uber Eats. When you order a burger from Uber Eats, it is not Uber Eats that makes it for you, is it? Nope, it is the restaurant that you picked through their app. Well, Printify is very much the same. Print shops can list their products that they make in Printify's app, and when you sell products through the Printify app, the print shop that you selected will be the one that makes the product and ships it out to the customer, not Printify. There are over a hundred different print shops within the app that sell products, and for the most popular products, you will see that there are actually multiple different print shops on here that are willing to print and ship them for you. Yep, you can see when you click on the Bella Canvas 3001 t-shirt that because this is such a popular product, that there are lots of different print shops that can print it for you. And you've got two options: either you can let Printify choose your print shop for you, or you can manually switch to see a list of all the different print shops in the network that sell Bella Canvas 3001. And as you can see, there are a lot.

And so the question then is this: Who should you pick? And well, you do have two options. One legitimate choice is you can let Printify choose your print shop for you. Or alternatively, you can do what I choose to do, which is to manually choose my print-on-demand provider. Because for me, as my longtime subscribers know, my favorite print shop for t-shirts in a USA customer-focused store is Monster Digital. Yep, I recently did a video where I ordered a sample t-shirt from them using this fun little t-shirt design, and while Monster Digital did an awesome job, the t-shirt came out looking great with vibrant, accurate colors and a print that did not fade after being put through the wash. But honestly, it wasn't a huge surprise to me that the t-shirt was good quality. This here is Monster Digital's facilities; they are a huge print shop based out of Miami, and I have been using them for years. My customers really like their clothes and rate them highly, and so for me, it was a no-brainer. I manually selected Monster Digital to print my t-shirts rather than let Printify pick for me.

But yes, either way, once you've chosen which print shop will make your t-shirt, it will take you to the product editor. Inside of here, you can click the little rulers icon on the top right to open up your product variations. Product variations are exactly what they sound like: variations of a product, which for t-shirts is colors and sizes. You can pick which colors of the t-shirt that you would like to sell, and you can add in as many as you like, but I'd usually recommend picking no more than five or at the very most 10 colors so that you don't overwhelm your customers. On the flip side, though, for t-shirt sizes, I'd recommend selling all of the sizes available. Then after that, open up your folder with your t-shirt design and drag and drop the image onto the t-shirt editor. And now Printify will load up your design onto it. You can click on your product colors to make sure it looks good when printed onto each color, and you can resize and move your design. You can do that by dragging it in the corners to resize it and dragging it around the printing area into position, or you can use the position buttons in your layers menu to the right to resize and move your design into position. So I use the buttons to align the design to the very top of the printing area, and I perfectly centered it.

Then, once you've got your t-shirt looking the way you want it, go and click on the "Preview" button. Now you'll be able to see what it actually will look like when printed. By doing this, you can see if you like how it looks or if you want to reposition it or resize it. And for me, I thought it looked a little bit too big, so I went back into the product editor and I resized it, making it smaller, and then I centered it and aligned it to be the very top of the printing area. And then I previewed again, and this time I was happy with the way that it looked, so I decided to add it into my store. And to do that, I first saved the product. When I did, Printify had a big success popup screen; you can just close this if you get this too. Then inside of your Printify dashboard, come to "My Products" and then tick the box next to your t-shirt and then click the "Publish" button. And well, that is it. You've now published a t-shirt into your store, and so we will soon go in and edit the product page for it.

But before we do that, I'll show you how to add in another item that is very popular with customers, and that is the classic white mug. Yep, so start out again by coming to the "Catalog" menu, but this time selecting "Mugs" under "Home & Living" products. Now when you do, you'll quickly notice that there are lots of products for sale, different types of mug styles, but also lots of different types of white mugs. Now, technically, each of these white mugs are from different mug manufacturers, so they each have their own listing, but in reality, they are all basically the same. In person, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between these basic white mugs. So instead, I just recommend picking a mug based upon whether the print provider itself selling the mug has good reviews. And for me, I've personally had a good experience with Spoke Custom Products, so I selected that mug. And as you can see, currently Spoke has a great provider score, 9.5 out of 10, so I click to "Start designing" onto it.

Now, here is the thing, right? There is a big mistake when designing mugs that you don't want to do. What you don't want to do is to place your design in the middle of the mug. With most products like t-shirts, you usually do want to center it, but if we preview this mug, you'll see why this is an exception to the rule. If you place it in the middle, it won't print on the side with the mug handle like most people expect it to. Instead, it is weirdly printed on the outside of the mug. So then, yep, instead, inside of the product editor, resize and place your design on one of the sides of the mug. You can use the ruler or dotted lines to help you place it, and use the automatic placement buttons to get it into the right spot too. And then when we preview it, this time you'll see that it's now printing correctly next to the handle. However, on the back of the mug, you'll see it's currently empty. So let's change that so that the design will now show up on both the front and back of it. And to do that, come back to the product editor and click the "Duplicate" button. This will create a copy of your design, then move it to the other side of the mug, and then drag and drop it into place and use the buttons and ruler lines so that it matches up with the other copy of your design. And then once you've done that, you can preview it, and look! Now our design is printed on both the front and back of the mug, and it doesn't cost any extra for us to do that; it's included in the mug price. Plus, another way to check your mug placement is back in the product editor; you can open up the 3D preview box. This will generate a 3D image of your mug that you can drag around to see how it looks. And then once you're happy with it, you can then click to save it. And then just like before, we will publish it by coming back to the "My Products" page, and then we will tick the mug and select to publish it. And now it will be available to sell inside of our Shopify store.

But first, I've got one other popular product to show you how to add in, and that is stickers. Yep, stickers have been a great product for me because, as I explained in this video, customers often add them onto bigger orders. So they might, for example, buy a t-shirt from me and then decide, "Hey, why not just add on two or three or four stickers?" It's a really easy way to repurpose your existing designs to increase your average order value. So then let me show you how to add them. And to do that, in the product catalog, find the "Stickers & Magnets" option under the "Home & Living" section. Again, when you do, you'll quickly find that there are lots of different types of stickers and magnets to choose from. And some, like car bumper stickers, can have excellent profit margins. But for this video, we'll be adding in the most popular sticker, which is the kiss-cut sticker. And again, since I've had good experiences with Spoke Custom Products, I chose to select their kiss-cut sticker.

So yes, once you've chosen and uploaded your product, click the "Start designing" button to go to the product editor. And then once inside, open up variants. For me, I like to sell all sizes of the stickers from two inches to six inches. You can also choose to just sell one type of sticker or both types of stickers. And as I'll show you, they do look quite different. So then after that, all you have to do is upload your design onto the product editor and make sure your design fills as much of the product printing area as possible. And that's literally all you need to do. So then, as I said, I'll preview the sticker to show you the difference between white stickers and transparent stickers. So transparent stickers have a transparent back to them, and so they look a bit washed out, but they also blend in with whatever they're put on, whereas the white stickers have a white background and a white border around them, but they maintain their vibrant colors. So white kiss-cut stickers are the most popular in my experience, but some customers do prefer transparent stickers, and so you can sell them both just as different variants. But yes, either way, once you've finished editing your sticker, just save it. And then again, you can come back to the "My Products" page, select your sticker, and then publish it in your store. And now it will be pushed into your store ready to sell and edit.

And one of the ways that we're gonna edit our product pages is we're gonna go get some cool lifestyle mockup photos and add them into our store. So let me show you how you can do this for free. And to do that, we're gonna be using my personal favorite mockup generator, Placeit. You know the drill; I will have an affiliate link to where you can get a free Placeit account in the video description below. But yes, I do genuinely love Placeit. And something I often say is that it is pretty much the Swiss Army knife of print-on-demand stores because it has a lot of versatile features included in it. Because you see, it doesn't just have editable product mock-up photos; nope, it also has some other features too. For example, it has a print designer included in it. And the app also has thousands of pre-made design templates that you can use as well to customize to create your own. You can then download these designs and then sell them as prints on your own products in your own store. Plus, it also has a bunch of advertising templates in it too, like Instagram and TikTok videos, which you can customize and then use to advertise and promote your products. But if I'm gonna be honest, the main feature that I do personally use Placeit for is the lifestyle mockup photos. And the way it works is simple: inside of Placeit, there is an enormous library with thousands of photos of blank products. All you do is upload your design onto the app, and then you can digitally place it on their mock-up photos, and it will turn it into a realistic-looking photo for you. It has saved me thousands of dollars because I no longer need to hire models to take photos with my products.

Now, of course, unsurprisingly, Placeit has both a free account and they have a paid account. The paid account costs between $15 to $7.50 US dollars per month depending on if you pay upfront or not. This is the account type that I use because it gives me access to all the photos. So I can do a search and find a photo theme that also matches with my design. So for me, I use Placeit to find blank mockup photos of models and coffee shops since, well, my store is themed around coffee merch. However, the free account is also really great, and honestly, for many beginners, it is perfect. Yep, the free account gets you access to the free template section of the website. There are hundreds of templates included here. You'll find a mixture of different types of templates too; some of them are lifestyle mockup photos, some of them are print designs, and some of them are advertising videos. But yes, they do have a range of different mockup photos in here for many of the most popular print-on-demand products. For example, this here is a really great lifestyle t-shirt photo, and it is included in the free version of Placeit.

So after you've opened it up, you just choose what color you want your t-shirt to be and then click to upload your design. Once it is uploaded, you can then use the mockup editor to resize the design and to also place it onto the t-shirt. You'll see on the bottom right corner that there is a live preview showing you how your design looks so that you can get it right. Then once you place your design on the mockup, click "Crop," and that's it. You can now come and click the "Download" button, and Placeit will then process your mockup photo, which usually takes a few seconds, and once it's finished processing, you can then download, and that's it. You now have a free mock-up photo that you can use to advertise your t-shirt. Something I will say though is that the free version is much more limited in the number of photos included in it compared to the paid version. However, something I've also noticed is that they do periodically switch these out, so you can come back to the free templates regularly to see which new photos they've added so that you can use them. And there is also something that I really do want to note about Placeit, and that is that when you are generating a mockup image, you can't upload a super high-resolution image of your print design. Nope, you will need to upload smaller and more compressed files. So if you're using Canva to make your print files, make sure you also create a small version of your design to upload to Placeit for your mockup photos.

There is also something else that we need to do before we can start editing our product pages, and that is that we need to add in our product collections. Yep, by creating product collections like this t-shirt collection here, it makes it much easier for customers to browse and find the perfect product to buy in our store. And there are two common ways that you can categorize products in your store. One is to literally categorize your products by product type. Yep, so if you were selling t-shirts, and mugs, and hoodies in your store, you create one collection for t-shirts, then one collection for mugs, and then one collection for hoodies. But another way that you can categorize your products is by the niches. So let's say that you have a store that only sells t-shirts, but in your t-shirt store, you sell dog-themed t-shirts, you might have Corgi t-shirts and Labrador t-shirts and Bulldog t-shirts. Well, you could create a Corgi collection, a Labrador collection, and a Bulldog collection. And keep in mind, you can also do both; you could create product collections based on product type, and you could create product collections based on niche. Either way, that's up to you.

And adding them is easy. On the left-side menu in your Shopify store, click on "Products," and then click on "Collections," and then come and click "Create collection." And then type in the title of your first collection. So for me, my first collection I added was for t-shirts, so I called it "T-shirts." Then come to the "Image" option and then upload into it a photo of one of your products. If you did create a lifestyle mockup photo with Placeit, it would be a great idea to add it in here. So then, once it's finished uploading, take it and click "Done." And then you just need to come back and save your collection, and that's it. Now you've added in your first product collection, yay! But we can't stop there because, as you will see later on the video, when we are editing our homepage, we will need to have at least three different product collections. So just click to "Add another collection," and again, add in the title for your next collection. For me, it was "Mugs." And then upload a photo to the next collection. And again, I used a photo that I created from Placeit, and then save your collection, and do this until you have at least three collections. For me, as you can see, I created four new collections: one for T-shirts, one for Mugs, one for Enamel Mugs, and one for Stickers.

And now we've got one more thing that we want to do before we go in and edit our products, and that is we want to update our market and shipping settings. Yes, and it's actually pretty easy. So in the left-side menu, click "Settings," and then in the "General" settings, come and check your store currency and make sure that it's set to the currency that you want it to be set for. So for me, I changed mine to be USD.

Because, well, as I said before, for all of my stores, my main target market is the USA since English is my first language. So it's much easier for me to market my stores in English and far and away the USA is easily the biggest English speaking country in the world. So this is usually my target market.

Then once you've checked your store currency, check your default unit and weight system, and depending on which country you're targeting, change it to be either metric or imperial. So since my target market, the USA uses Imperial, I set mine to be Imperial two, and then if you changed it, click save.

So next up we're gonna create two markets within Shopify. This is actually a relatively new feature within Shopify. So you can create different markets and then go in and add countries into them, and then only people who live in those countries can buy from you. People living in other countries can't. This is helpful. For example, if you don't wanna ship to Europe because the European consumer laws are stricter, you could instead choose to ship only to countries with simpler e-commerce laws, which in my experience are the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. All of these countries have a lot less consumer laws. So depending on your goals, you may want to focus on some of these countries. It is up to you.

So within settings, come and click on markets in the left side menu and then click add market and name it your main target market. For me it is the USA, but yours might be the UK or Europe or whatever it will be. Then come and do a search for your target country or countries if you're focusing on multiple and tick them. And then once they're all ticked, click add market. Then inside of your new market settings, come and click the more actions button and set this new market to be your primary market. Then come back out of settings and open up the default market that Shopify made for you initially for me, this was New Zealand, since while I live in New Zealand and select to remove this market. Awesome.

So then as an optional extra, you could also go in and add in a secondary market that includes countries that you are happy to ship to but that aren't your main focus. And to do that, come and click add market and give your new market a name and then again, come and add countries into it. And actually one way that you can do this is to actually just mass add an entire continent. So for example, if I came to the European countries, I could tick the Europe box and now it will automatically tick all of these countries for me, and I could then go in and untick countries that I didn't want to ship to or sell to, but keep the countries that I did want to sell to. Or of course you can just do the standard thing of doing a search for a specific country and then adding them into your list. And again, if you're looking for countries with less complex e-commerce laws to sell to, I recommend taking a look and considering the USA Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. But yes, either way, once you're done, click to save your new market and make sure it is set to active. And that's it.

We will now just go ahead and double check our shipping settings. And as you'll see, printer file made this very easy. So in the left side menu, click shipping, and then once inside the shipping settings, open up the printer file app shipping profile. As you can see, printer file has added in shipping rates for each of the different suppliers and products that we've added into our store. So now what you can do is you can open these up and check what the different prices are for each country. Most likely you will just want to keep this the same and not change them as purify just charges the customer the exact same shipping costs that they'll charge you. But just in case you did want to change these, you can now come in here and edit them if you like.

So then now it is time to finally edit our product pages. Yes. So to do that, come and click products, and then you'll see all the products you've added in with printy. So choose one to edit. This will open up the product page editor. So start off by of course, giving your product a name. Then come and give your product a description. I just pasted in one that I'd pre-written, but if you do need any help in writing this, then honestly AI can help a lot. You can use any free chat bot for this, like Google's Gemini or Microsoft's co-pilot or of course, my personal favorite chat, GBT to help you write a great draft for you to customize, give it information about what your product is, what its features are, and who your target customers are, and then let it write a draft for you. You can also come and use Shopify's formatting tools to add formatting features like making words italic or bolding them. And you can also add in bullet points by pressing the three circle button to get access to more formatting features. So yes, just finish off your description and then we will come to photos.

Now depending on the product printer five, sometimes by default add in a lot of photos like it did for me here. It added in four different types of photos per color. So for example, it added in a photo of the front of the T-shirt, laid out flat with no wrinkles. It also added in a photo of the back of the T-shirt, again, laid out flat with no wrinkles, and it added in another photo of the front of the T-shirt. But this time laid out to have wrinkles and to be a bit scratched up. And so what I did was I decided to just pick one type of photo and then delete the rest. So I picked the wrinkly front facing photo. Of course, if my design featured on both the front and the back, then I'd keep two photos per T-shirt color, one showing the front and one showing the back. But since my t-shirt had no back print, I got rid of those. Then once they were deleted, I reordered the photos by clicking the black T-shirt and dragging and dropping it to the front. And the reason why I did this is because while black t-shirts have been shown to usually sell the best, that is both a statistical fact that black t-shirts just sell the most, but I've also seen it in my own stores, black or dark clothing colors are usually the most popular. So I try to prioritize those when I can. Then after that come and open up the lifestyle mockup photo that you may replace it and upload it into the product photos. I usually like to place this as the second photo after the thumbnail image because studies have shown that having a customer see a product being used in a lifestyle context significantly increases sales and conversions for it.

Then after you've edited your photos, come down to variants. Now not all products will have variants, but if they do, you can edit them here for this t-shirt. You can see it comes in two different types of variants. It comes in different colors and different sizes. So I decided to edit the color variants and choose to reorder them by placing my most popular T-shirt color black as the first on the list. Then next will come down to pricing. So first up, make sure that each variant has a photo associated with it. If it doesn't, click the empty photo. And then from your photo list, choose the photo of the product, then come and edit the price. You can set one price, which will be applied to all variants of your product, and you can also edit each variances price. So for example, you might want to slightly increase the prices of your two Excel or three Excel t-shirts. Since while oftentimes print on demand providers will charge extra for T-shirts that are size to Excel or larger because they cost more money because they use more fabric. So it's pretty common for print on demand stores to go ahead and add on this extra charge onto their larger size t-shirts. I personally try not to, but it is very common to do so. So it's up to you what you want to do. So yes, just go ahead and do the same step for each variant. Make sure that you set a product photo for it if it doesn't have one, and set your product prices for them.

Then once you've edited your product prices, we'll come to edit the product organization section of your product listing. So first of all, come and select collections and add it into the collection that it belongs to. And as you will see shortly, we will want at least four or ideally even more products that we really like to showcase on our store homepage. So be sure to also add your best products into your homepage collection too. I liked this t-shirt, so I add that into the collection. And then next, come to vendor and delete print file and replace it with the name of your store. Then scroll up and make sure that the product is set to active. And then just come and click save. And that's it. You've edited your product.

So what I recommend that you do now is that you just open up your product page and just give a quick look over to make sure that let's look in the way that you want it to look. And to do that click preview. Now your product page will load up. I recommend scrolling through making sure that your product description in particular is formatted correctly with no formatting errors. And I recommend that you go ahead and you click on each variant and to make sure that the photos were selected correctly before. And you can see the T-shirt color changes to the picture of it whenever I click on the color, which is perfect and exactly what we want. So this page is working correctly.

So then let's go in and edit the homepage and design layout of our store so that it looks nice, simple, and clean, yet professional. Yes. So to get started in the left side menu, click online store and you'll be taken to the themes page on here. Click to customize your theme. Now, inside of the theme editor, you'll be able to preview your store as you edit it. You can click the mobile view at any time to see how your store looks like on a phone or a tablet, and you can click desktop to see how it looks like on a computer. So yes.

Then first up, let's edit the theme settings. So click the settings button and inside of the logo section select to upload a logo. And you can just drag and drop your logo from your computer folder into here. And if you're wondering how I got my logo, I actually made it for free using Canvas. So if you have a Canva account, this is another good way to get extra value from it by using it to make graphics for your store like this. So yes, once you've finished uploading your logo and you've selected it, you can then increase the size of the logo. I think that a hundred pixels is quite small, so I like to increase it to be somewhere between 200 to 300 pixels. Then after you've selected your logo size, scroll down and add in a fcon. Now if you don't know what a fcon is, it is the little icon that you see in your internet browser tab. So for me, usually with the help of Canva, I like to turn a little piece of my logo into a nice little fcon image. But yes, either way, just upload your Fcon image that you've created in the image, upload a screen and then select it. And then that's it. You now have the store fcon.

So now come and close the logo tab in your theme settings, and instead open up the color tab and we're gonna edit the first color panel, and we're gonna change the background color. You can change this to be any color that you'd like using the color picker, but I'm gonna pick white because it is neutral and works with lots of different products and niches. So then now let's come back and we will close the color tab in the theme settings and open up the topography tab instead. Now inside of here, we can change the store fonts. So select to change the heading font and scroll through the list of fonts that Shopify has installed. As you can see, it is a huge amount of fonts that they have here to pick from. You'll definitely want to choose a new font though, because most people who install craft don't, which makes your stores look very generic and cookie cutter. So take time to pick a font that matches your store niche and vibe. For me, I quite like the catamaran font, and so I selected it. And something else you can do is either increase or decrease your font title size. So I prefer my font to be smaller, but this is just a personal preference. So yes, you'll notice in your store preview that you'll now be able to see how the font looks when it's selected in your store. So if you like this and you like the way that it looks, I recommend going and choosing it to be your store font body as well. You can pick different fonts, but mixing and matching different fonts that actually look good together can be tricky. So most of the time it's easier to just use the same font for both. But yes, once you've selected your fonts, look over your store and your preview, make sure that you like the way that it looks. And if you do come and close the typography tab.

And now next, come and open up the layout tab. Now this is optional, but something I like to do is to decrease the page with down to a thousand pixels. This is so that I can use smaller images that are easier to both source and load for my store, but again, this is a personal preference. So then after that, close the layout tab and now open up the buttons tab. So I will admit, I personally like the way that the buttons look within the base craft theme, so I'm not gonna modify them, but I wanted to show you this in case you do want to edit them. You can change things, for example, like making the buttons either more round or less round and have them be square, sharp edges. And so you can just use the sliders here to do that. So then after that, close the buttons tab.

And now we're gonna come down and open up the social media tab. And this is optional, but here you can enter in the u ls to your social media pages. Again, though, this is optional, you might not have these yet, so if you don't have them yet, don't worry, you can come back and add them in later. But I wanted to show you where to add them in when you do have them, because once my store preview here has refreshed, we can scroll down and you can see that Shopify has added my links as buttons to my store footer. So you will definitely want to add these in once you have them. And then after that, come and open up the checkout tab and we're gonna make two changes to our checkout page. The first is we're gonna select the logo that we uploaded before to show up on our checkout page, and I like to set my logo to be a large size so that it is prominent. And then we'll scroll down the checkout settings and come to colors. And we're gonna change the accent colors for it just to customize it a bit more around our brand. So pick a color that matches your brand. For me, I picked a copy of being brown color by using the color picker. And then for buttons, select your brand color. Again, it should be saved by Shopify under the recently selected colors.

So then that is the theme settings edited. Now we're gonna come back to the sections tab within the theme editor to customize the store layout. And the first thing that we're going to edit is the announcement bar by clicking it on the sections editor side menu. So if you're offering some sort of deal or you have something important to announce, like a free shipping option, you can add it in here. But if you aren't, then I recommend hiding it by clicking the i icon located in the section editor side menu. Then after that, we will come and edit the text for our homepage. So on the left side menu, select the text and then add in your own text advertising for your store. And of course, if you need any help in creating this, then a tip I have is that again, you can use a free AI chat bot like chat, GPT, tell it about restore, tell it who your customers are and how long you want your homepage slogan to be, and ask it to come up with some variations. You can then use these as drafts for creating your own ones, or you can tweak them again with the help of chat GPT. For me, I'd already created one in advance, so I just pasted it in.

Then next, come back to the sections editor side menu and come to the collage section and we're gonna make some tweaks. So first up, we're gonna add a block into it, and then we're gonna add a collection into this. So then click on the first collection and select one of your product collections that you created earlier, the image that you added into it. We'll show up as the collection preview photo. So then do the same again, click on another empty collection, and then pick a product collection that you created earlier to be showcased here. And then finally come to the third collection and choose another one to be showcased here. As you can see, this is the biggest collage section. So pick a collection that has a photo that you really like and think will look good here. So yes, you can see why earlier I said that you would need to have at least three collections for the homepage because we advertise and highlight them here. But yes, after that in the sections edited menu, come and click on the feature collection below the collage section and choose your homepage collection to highlight. Again, I recommended earlier that you add at least four of your favorite products in this to showcase on your homepage. So if you haven't done that, make sure you go back and do that. But yes, if you've got more than four products in it, like me, I added eight products. You can use the slider to increase the number of products shown on your homepage featured collection. So I increased this to showcase all eight of my products. And then once you've done that, you can click save, and that's it. You've now customized your store design and layout. Yay.

And as I said, I have tested this and had high conversions with it, even in a brand new store that has no reviews and no social proof. And we'll just make it full screen and give you a quick preview. So this is a preview of how our store looks when it is loaded on a computer, like a desktop or a laptop. It is a nice simple clean design that highlights our favorite products, and we can come and change it to be mobile view so that you can get a preview of what it will look like on a mobile device like a tablet or a phone. And as you can see, craft is very well optimized for mobile devices. And also this here is a quick preview of what our product pages now look like. And as you can see, it is looking a lot nicer than it did before, and it looks a lot less generic now that we've gone in and customized it. So yes, our store is looking quite nice now.

And so it's time to start adding in some final tweaks such as adding in extra pages that we might want to have like an FAQ page or an about us page. And to do this inside of your Shopify dashboard, come and click on online store again, but this time select pages from the dropdown menu. Then inside of the pages section select to add in a page. And now inside of the page creator, type in the name of your page in the title box and in the content box, type in the text you want your page to have. So if you're creating an about us page, describe what your store is and why you made it, or if you're creating an FAQ page, type out the most commonly asked questions and answer them, that sort of thing. But yes, once you've added in your text and use the formatting buttons to get it looking the way that you like, just come and click the save the page and that's it. I also, of course, always recommend that you go in and check out a preview of your page that you just added so that way you can double check to make sure where the formatting looks good and that you're happy with it.

And then once you've gone in and you've added in all of your extra pages, we can go in and add payment processes to our store. And we're actually gonna add in two different payment processes. We are gonna add in PayPal and we're gonna add in Shopify payments. So just to quickly clarify, our payment processor is basically a company that handles and manages payment information like credit cards and collects the money securely from customers and then processes the money and then pays it out to us. This data is two secure and too much of a security threat for us to collect ourselves. So yes, we do need a payment processor for our store, and there are two main payment processes people usually choose to install. One payment processor is of course, PayPal, and another is actually Shopify's own payment processor. Shopify Payments, which is basically a reskin version of another popular payment processor Stripe. And here's how you add them in.

So in the side menu, just click settings and then come and open up the payment section. Now when you do, you'll see that PayPal has actually already been installed on our store and it's working already, which is very convenient. Currently any customer who comes into your store can pay with PayPal. But to collect that money, you'll either need to sign into a PayPal account and have it connect into your store, or you will need to set up a new PayPal account, which you can do here. But other than that, it's already been connected for you. However, Shopify payments has not been set up. And I should also note that it is optional. You don't need to have two different payment providers in your store, so you could just choose to use PayPal if you want, but in my experience, customers usually prefer to use Shopify payments because it is a nicer checkout experience compared to PayPal. So even though it is optional, if your country is eligible for Shopify payments, I highly recommend that you do consider turning it on. But as you will see, it is admittedly a bit more complicated.

So begin the process by clicking the complete the account setup. And as you can see, Shopify warns you in advance that they'll need to do some ID verification checks on you. And this by the way, isn't because Shopify is being nosy and just wants to collect as much data from you as possible. It is because payment processes that accept payments from customers have a lot of security processes that they are legally required to follow. That is because there are a lot of scammers that want to steal money from customers online. And so Shopify needs to verify who you are to know that they can trust you before they let you use their payment processor to collect money from customers. So then you can get started by clicking to submit details about yourself. And as you can see, one question they want to know is what sort of business you are running. But most people watching this video, chances are you have not registered your business with your local government and are running your business as an individual sole proprietor, otherwise known as a sole trader. Either way, once you chose new option that is relevant to you, click next. Then on the screen you'll need to give Shopify some personal information about yourself. And then after that, you'll need to tell Shopify what sorts of products you intend to sell in your store. That is because many payment processes, Shopify included, restrict certain types of controversial products that could get them into legal or PR troubles. For example, vaping is a prohibited business for Shopify payments. They don't want to run any payment processing for products related to it, which is why they ask you for information on the type of business and products that you're selling to confirm that you are indeed eligible to use their payment processor and you're not selling prohibited products. But yes, after you've confirmed your details on the final screen, they will then ask you to submit a form of identification. This is currently optional, but it does speed up the manual process of verifying you a lot. I uploaded my passport to this and I got verified pretty much immediately, but I do understand that not everybody wants to upload their own personal identification for privacy reasons. So this is currently optional and it is up to you whether you choose to do it.

After that, you will need to turn on two step verification for your account. So go ahead and do that. And then after that, you'll need to add in your bank account number. And this is definitely not Shopify being nosy. This is the bank account that they are going to send customer payments into. So you have to add this so that they can actually pay you the money that you have earned. And then well after that, that is it. As I said, I got immediately verified after I submitted my bank account and Shopify payments was turned on, and shortly after turning it on, I actually did a test order and it was working perfectly.

It's now we're gonna go in and do a small tweak to our store, and that is that we're gonna edit our privacy banner. Yes, you may have noticed that little banner popping up in our store, which is now a legal requirement in many jurisdictions, such as in Europe. Well, Shopify recently streamlined the process massively of adding these as a built-in feature, which is very convenient, but you still might want to go in and edit how these look in your new store. So here's how you do that. Just come and click on settings. And this time in the settings menu, come and click on customer privacy. Now, here's something that's actually pretty cool. You'll see the Shopify's automatically done a bunch of stuff for us like creating an automated privacy policy and an automated privacy banner, but you can still edit and customize these. So for example, when we click on the privacy cookie banner, we'll come to the editor page for it, and here we can change how it looks. So if we preview it right now, you'll see the current layout is that it is a white chunky rectangle at the bottom middle of your store. Well, you can come back into your settings and change this, so we can instead make it a black rectangle using the dark theme, or we can come in and choose custom colors for it to make it look the way that we want. Either way, it's up to you. You can also come down to the position section and pick a different type of banner placement. But yes, once you've managed and modified your privacy banner settings, it is almost time for us to launch our store, which is pretty crazy.

However, we still need to do a few more tweaks before we can launch it, such as choosing the right Shopify plan. Yes, because you see currently when a customer tries to come into our store, they greeted not with our homepage, but with a password screen and while to turn it off, we do need to choose a Shopify plan because Shopify won't let you turn off the password screen until you buy a plan from them. Now, some of you might be watching this and thinking, wait a minute, Sarah, I got a free Shopify trial. Don't I still have extra free days on it? If I purchase a Shopify plan, will I lose my extra free days? And that's a good question, and the answer is no. You get to keep your free days, and then your Shopify plan starts after that, which is good.

So then we can go in and we can choose our Shopify plan now. And to do that again, come to settings and then click on plan, and then click to choose your plan. Now, as you can see, there are several different plans available because of the current promotion. They are currently discounted to $1, but once the promotion period is over, they won't cost $1. They'll cost the usual monthly price per month. So for the vast majority of people watching, I recommend picking the cheapest fully featured plan, which is the Shopify basic plan. The main reasons why most people switch to their more expensive plans is that they either need to create extra staff accounts or because the higher plans have cheaper credit card processing fees. So once you're making a lot of orders, it financially makes more sense to switch up to a more expensive plan because you will save money on processing fees. But when you're just starting out and you don't yet have any staff, it is cheaper to choose the basic plan. And then once you do, you'll need to enter in your credit card or PayPal details to complete the purchase process. And then once you do that, Shopify will then ask you to fill in some business details that they need to know from you. And again, it's not because they're being nosy, it's because of legal reasons. So go ahead and fill in this information, and then we can go ahead and do another very important tweak that we need to do before we launch.

And that is to choose a custom store URL. But yes, currently our store URL, or in other words, our domain name is just a bunch of garbled letters, which obviously customers would probably find a bit suspicious. So we need to choose a custom URL, and we've actually got two different ways that we could choose to do this. One is that you could sign up with a dedicated domain provider like Pork Bun and buy a URL on here and connect it yourself. And that is by far the cheapest way to add in a custom domain name into your store. Yep, currently right now pork bun is charging $11 and 6 cents for a domain name. Whereas as you'll see, when I go and buy my.com domain name from Shopify, they're gonna charge me $16. However, the connection process is also quite technical, and in my experience, it's not beginner friendly, whereas if you pay the extra $5 to just buy it from Shopify, you can skip all of this and let them connect it for you. And so honestly, in my experience, most people prefer to just buy their domain name from Shopify for a few extra dollars so that they can let Shopify take care of the connection process for them. So that's what we're gonna go ahead and do now. Yep.

So here's how to do it. Just come to settings and then click on domains, then come and select to buy a new domain. You can now type in what you want your domain name to be and see if it's available. If it is available, it will tell you. But if you come do a search for a domain name that is already been bought by someone else, it will tell you that you cannot purchase it. And something else I need to note is that in my experience, if you wanna sell to either USA customers or to a global audience, choosing a.com domain name is an excellent safe choice. Customers like it and they trust it. But if you're instead targeting a very specific country, like for example, Canada, it is better to purchase that country's domain name. So for Canada, that would be.ca. And for the United Kingdom, that would be.co.uk. And for Australia, that would be.com au. You get the picture. But yes, once you've found a domain name that you like and want to purchase, click to buy it. Then you'll need to fill out your personal information. And again, as frustrating as filling this out can be, this is not Shopify being nosy. It is because nonprofit organization ICAN requires this information to be registered each time that somebody purchases a domain name for security reasons. But yes, once you've purchased your domain name, you will be sent an email like this with a verification link. You will need to go and verify your domain name as again, this is another I can legal requirement. And then that's it. Shopify will now take care of the connection process for you. And as they do, you might see these errors. And if you do, don't worry, this is normal. It's just your domain name propagating and connecting. Now, a tip I have is that Shopify can expedite this connection process for you if you want. I contacted their live chat support and I asked them if they could prioritize my domain name connection and complete it for me quickly. And they did. It was connected within just five minutes. So if you don't mind waiting, you can. And that's okay. This process can take anywhere from a few minutes to up to a day or two. But again, if you don't want to wait that time and you want to speed up the process, just contact your live chat support.

And so we are almost done. Yay. But before we launch, we need to add in our legal pages. And as you will see, we did need to purchase a custom domain name before we were able to do this. Yep. So to do it again, come to settings, and then in the settings menu, come and click on policies. Now inside of here, you will see that Shopify has listed all of the legal policies that they recommend that you have in your store. And for a lot of these, Shopify has pre-made templates that we can use to help us speed up the process of writing our own policies. Yep. For example, if we click on the refund policy, you'll see that we can click to add in their refund policy template. Now, you can go through and edit this for your store. There'll be some parts that you'll need to edit in, such as adding in a return shipping address. And you might also want to edit other parts too. For example, while this refund policy allows for returns, it is actually really common for a lot of print on demand stores to not allow refunds for change of mind in countries where it's not required because items are custom made to order. In saying that though, a common question I am often asked is this, Sarah, what is your refund policy? Do you offer refunds? And honestly, I do. And it's because in my experience, I get a really low rate of customers asking to refund their products. My refund rate is literally less than 1%. I have a video here that explains the tips and tricks that I use to keep my refund rate so low. So I highly recommend checking it out. But yes, because I follow my own tips and tricks, I've managed to keep my refund rate very low, so I honestly don't mind offering refunds. However, if you do allow customers to refund and return their items because of change of mind, you're going to need to have a return address for customers to send their products back to, which can stump people admittedly, who live internationally. For example, let's say that you live in the uk, but your primary target customers are in the USA. How can your customers return the products to you? And well, for me, I personally have a USA mailing address, but if you don't, a commonly used trick that I've seen people in the YouTube comments talk about is that they sign up for a free postal redirect service and they get people to send their return items there. You can then either then just choose to pay the service to send you the items, or they will eventually keep the item themselves if you don't collect it. So this is an interesting trick that I've seen people do.

But yes, once you've edited your refund policy, we can come and edit the terms of service using Shopify's template. Now, just like the refund policy, you'll need to go in and edit this and fill in the sections that it asks you to update. And this is actually why we needed to get our domain name first, because as you can see in it, we are required to copy and paste in the link to our refund policy in this terms of service template. So then let me show you how to do this in your store dashboard. Just click preview your store, and then on your homepage, scroll down to the bottom of your store In the footer, you will now see a link that goes to your refund page. So come to your refund page, and then in your internet browser, come and find the URL to your refund page and copy this link. Now you can just come back to your terms of service and paste in the URL to your refund page that you copied simple.

And then after that, you'll need to set your shipping policy. Now, currently, as you'll see, this is the only policy that Shopify does not have a template for. So you'll need to write out a shipping policy yourself. So I recommend coming to the products that you plan to sell on print file and come into the print provider that you chose and click to open up their provider info tab and then open up their shipping information to find out more about their shipping types. Then after that, you'll have an optional policy to add in. And this is your contact information. This is a legal requirement if you are selling within the eu. So if you opted to sell to EU countries earlier in the tutorial, you can then use this prebuilt Shopify template to help you create this.

And you know what? With that, we are almost done. We now just need to come in and add in our store menu. And this is super easy. And your dashboard, just click online store. And then in the dropdown menu, select navigation. And now open up the main menu. So first up, if you add in any extra pages, like say an About us page or an FAQ page, add those pages into your main menu now. Then after that we'll add in our product collections. So again, click add menu item, then type in the name of a collection. And in the dropdown menu, click collections and select the collection. Then click add. And now put your cursor over the little circles and click to grab it and then drag it to be nestled under the catalog. By doing this, you have created a sub menu that you can add links directly to. So now you can come in and add in the rest of your collections, and they will show up as a sub menu under the catalog button in your main menu. So go ahead and add in each of your collections into the sub menu now. And once you do, you'll have created a store menu that has all the links to your main pages and collections plus in your footer. You'll see that Shopify has now automatically added the links to your policies too, which is very convenient.

And so now we've just got two more little tweaks that we need to do before we can send our store live. So first up, we need to give our store a name. So click on settings and then click to edit your store profile and add in your store name here. And then click save. Then next, scroll down until you come to the order processing section and select to automatically fulfill order lines. This will enable print file to automatically fulfill orders as they are made. And then click save. And that's it.

As I said, it is now time to send our store live. And so to do that, we just need to get rid of that pesky little password screen. Yep, we have made it. Just click on online store and click preferences and scroll down to the preferences page until you come to the password screen. And now untick the box. And then you can go ahead and click save. And that's it. As Shopify says, your store is now live and open to anybody. Now, anybody who comes to your store will see your homepage and they will be able to browse through your products and buy them from you. Congratulations.

Of course. This all begs the question, doesn't it? How can you now get traffic and customers into your store? And well, that is an excellent question, isn't it? And while a lot of people tell you to spend money on paid advertising for your Shopify store, and you can do that, but honestly, I no longer purchase paid ads from mine. Instead, my new customers these days either come in from word of mouth, or importantly, they come in from free Google traffic. Yep. And I'll show you how it works. You see, if we come to Google and do a search for Funny Sassy mugs, you'll see that in the top search results. You don't just see big websites like Amazon or Redbubble. And see, there are actually lots of independent print on demand stores like this one here, which of course, if we scroll down to the bottom of the website, we can see that this is surprise surprise, a Shopify Print on Demand store. Yep. So this traffic method that we just used here is called Google Search Engine Optimization, otherwise known as SEO. And as I said, it is my main traffic strategy these days. It is a huge topic. So sadly, I can't include a full tutorial on SEO in this video, but if you're interested, I highly recommend watching free tutorials here on YouTube that show how to do this.

Plus, another way is to build up a brand on another third party website like Etsy. If you've never heard of Etsy, it is a third party marketplace similar to eBay, except you can't sell mass produced products on it. And print on demand products on here are very popular. Etsy sellers earn billions of dollars each year from the hundreds of millions of visitors that come here every month. And what you can do is you can name your Etsy store the same name as your Shopify store to cross promote them when customers come searching for them. I have videos on this channel, which show how I've taken a brand new print on demand store and started making with it fast, going from $0 to $4,000 a week in six months. So you can check out my tutorial videos here on YouTube if you're interested. Plus, they also discuss my own personal tips and tricks for growing Shopify and Etsy print on demand stores. And so if you're interested in seeing if my clubhouse is right for you, I will have a link to it in the video description below. But anyway, back to the video.

And here's another way that you can drive traffic and sales to your store. Mobile videos on websites like Facebook, YouTube, or Instagram. Yep. For example, take this Instagram account here for an independent print on demand store. Yep. They specialize in made to order car stickers, and every week they post mobile videos showcasing either their trendy stickers or their funny stickers. And because these are trendy or funny, they go viral, getting tens of thousands of views to hundreds of thousands of views to even millions of views. For example, this is a pretty simple video here, showcasing one of these stickers. The video is just putting the sticker on the car. That is it. But because people found it funny, the simple little video has had over 3 million views. And there are lots of tutorials and videos on YouTube about creating and growing niche pages like this on platforms like Instagram. So if this traffic method interests you, then I highly recommend watching in-depth tutorial videos here on YouTube.

Plus another popular website for driving traffic and sales into print on demand stores is Pinterest. For example, if we come to Pinterest and do a search for mugs for gardeners and look through the top pins recommended to us, lots of these are from print on demand stores, such as this mug here. And if we come and click on the URL link to the pin, you'll see that it takes us to the independent Shopify store where you can go and buy it. And as you can see from the reviews, it has been popular with customers, and there are lots of tweaks that you can make to your pins to help them rank highly in Pinterest search results like this mug does to bring in traffic. So if you're interested, again, I recommend coming to YouTube and doing a search for Pinterest search engine optimization tutorials.

So then if you'd like to learn more about how I make money online with my print on demand stores, be sure to watch my next video here on screen, and I'll see you in the next video.