How to create an online store

Creating an online store and selling “merch” seems to be the craze these days. Who doesn’t want to set up an online shop with the potential to make more money? Small businesses, podcasters, streamers and anyone with a creative idea are jumping on the train.

But how do you go about creating an online store from scratch? It’s actually relatively easy! We say easy, but that doesn’t necessarily mean quick. There are several steps involved, but those steps are generally pretty easy to knock out.

Our New Online Store

Before we get into the details, now would be a good time to let you know about the new Harden Digital & Design Shop. That’s right, we jumped on the bandwagon, too! Riley explains the thought behind opening our online shop in the latest Digital Wrap-Up episode. Basically, there’s two reasons. The first is that we wanted to find another revenue stream for the business. One that could hopefully be a little hands off, but still bring in money each month.

The second is that we noticed there was not a lot of Tipton related merch/swag available in the community. Since we’re based in Tipton, Indiana, we thought it would be a good way to launch our store with our “Love Tipton” collection. This collection has five different designs placed on several different items. We wanted the Love Tipton collection to be a collection of merch/swag that people could get printed on-demand without have to have something designed and sent to a print shop in town.

So, the Harden Digital & Design shop was launched! How did we do it? Let’s break it down.

Creating Your Online Store

If you’re selling products and you don’t already have a physical store front, you’re likely in the same situation we were. We wanted to sell products, but not have to deal with the manual shipping/handling for each order. Also, you might not want to have to order products in bulk and hope you’re able to sell them down the road.

Enter print on-demand products.

Print on-demand means that the products you sell online aren’t actually produced until someone orders that specific item. Instead of buying in bulk and hoping to sell your inventory, you can now sell individual items and have them produced one at a time. While this can be a little more costly than ordering in bulk, it saves you tons of time once your shop is up and running.

To sell product this way, we used Printful. Printful is an easy-to-use e-commerce platform that allows you to take any design and have it produced on a wide range of products. We’re talking almost endless possibilities here. Coffee mugs, mouse pads, phone cases, bags, sunglasses, etc. You name it, Printful likely allows you to put your design on it.

Once you have a design, you can create a store on Printful and start placing it on any of the available products. Easy as that. Create as many as you want in your new store. Go through the process of selecting colors, sizes, prices, etc. for each of the products and they’ll all be grouped into your one store.

Here’s a more in-depth, step-by-step break down of how to get setup in Printful.

Shopify Setup

Once you have all your products created, it’s time for the next step – building your e-commerce website. (See, we told you it can be time consuming…)

What’s the best e-commerce website? Shopify. Hands down. Shopify is built specifically as an e-commerce platform to sell your products online. So you’ll need to create an account and go through the process of setting up your first shop. Here’s another step-by-step guide specifically for Shopify setup. Follow the steps in this guide and you shouldn’t have any problems at all.

So you have your products setup and your Shopify website created, now it’s time to link the two. Once again, it’s an easy process, just multiple steps involved. Click here for your third and final guide 😉

Shopify is great because it’s so easy to use and manage on the backend. It also allows you to setup selling your products directly on Facebook and Instagram in just a few clicks. This is so important to get your product out there, especially if you have an established following on those platforms already. Users can buy directly on those platforms without having to leave the app. So you want to make sure you take the time to set that up in Shopfiy as well.

Watch the Digital Wrap-Up to Learn More

Riley goes over all of this and shows you the backend of both Printful and Shopfiy in the latest episode of the Digital Wrap-Up on YouTube. Check out the full video below!

You can also listen to the entire episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Or listen right here in your browser:

Contact Us for Help Setting Up Your Online Store

Have you been wanting to set up your store, but it sounds too overwhelming for you? Send us a message and Riley will be happy to chat with you! We can make the process simple and smooth for you so you can start making more money through your online store ASAP!

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