Shopify is an industry-leading e-commerce solution that helps you to hit the ground running as far as online stores go. You’ll agree setting up an online store is no easy task, more so if it’s your first time.
I mean, you just want to sell as soon as you can but, how in hell are you supposed to setup an online store? Your coding know-how is nothing to write home about.
Shopify eliminates the technical hurdle of building a fully functional online store. I gave the free trial a go, and color me impressed.
If you are in the market for an e-commerce solution or simply would love to link a Shopify store to your WordPress site, you’re in the right place. But first things first, what is this animal called Shopify?
What is Shopify?
With the myriad e-commerce solutions on the web, why should you give a hoot about Shopify? What’s so special about this platform and does it have the power to support your online store?
Shopify is a reliable e-commerce solution that lets you sell instantly. The team hooks you up with an online store on a subdomain (e.g. yourstore.myshopify.com) that’s easy to manage and scale.
They offer three price packages as shown below. Always go with a plan that’s suitable for your business:
Shopify is not a WordPress plugin, but their shopping cart plugin helps you to add a store to your existing WordPress site. You can display products on your WordPress site, but you’ll need to login to your Shopify account to manage your store.
Why Shopify?
To start a store, just pick a suitable price plan, setup a couple of things and add products. Shopify takes care of all the hard parts of building an online store.
- For starters, they offer you a hosted and secure solution meaning there’s no need to invest in a web host.
- Secondly, every Shopify store you create comes with SSL encryption meaning your customer’s information is secure.
- Thirdly, the 70 payment gateways are easy to activate and the transaction fees are on the lower side.
- Attending the local fair? You can even sell in person and charge your customers using the Shopify POS app.
At the end of the day, you can use the platform as a standalone e-commerce solution (if that’s all you need), or add it to your self-hosted WordPress site and enjoy all the good things you’ve heard. It’s cheap, flexible and robust an e-commerce solution for all types of businesses – big or small.
How to Setup Shopify On Your WordPress Site
Now that this system looks incredibly great, how about we link the whole thing to your WordPress site so you can take advantage of both platforms to win big at e-commerce?
We shall use some nifty WordPress plugin, so this ought to be easy and fun. I love that you can install a plugin directly via the WordPress admin, but I prefer to download all my plugins first. But that’s just me.
The Plugin
Download the eCommerce Plugin, install and activate on your WordPress site. Now click the Shopify tab the plugin just added to your WordPress admin:
The second step involves connecting to your shop. If you have an existing store, well and good, you can skip the next part. If this is your first time, creating an online store using Shopify is the stuff of fourth graders.
How to Create a Shopify Store
Just to get it out there, a 14-day free trial plan exists so you can test the waters. You should love the platform so bad and upgrade to one of their paid plans, that’s the hope.
And it’s this free account we used for the purpose of this study, but the procedure remains same whether you’re linking to a free or paid shop.
Go to the Shopify website, enter your email address and click the Get Started button:
Next, provide your details. Btw, below form is a great example of how to design your forms. For example, did you know any option you select under the “Are You Already Selling?” field brings up even more options?
And then this…
Fill out the form as you desire and click Enter my store. One second please…and your store is ready! Just like that.
Wasn’t that easy? How long did that even take? 3 minutes? Now if you visit your shop, you should see something like this:
(Secret Tip: You can find store links, $120+ worth of goodies and more in your email after creating your shop)
Urrm, the above looks like a coming soon page hombre, what’s happening? Well, we don’t need people to see our unfinished store yet, but hey, they can at least subscribe and share your store on social media.
Don’t sweat about a thing yet. Later in the post, we add products and setup shipping and payments, which is incredibly easy from the Shopify admin dashboard.
For now, let’s get your Shopify store hooked to your WordPress site.
Go back to your WordPress site and…
Connect the Store to WordPress Site
Enter your shop name and click the Connect button:
This should redirect you to your Shopify admin area. At the bottom of the screen shown below, click on the Add Sales Channel button to connect your WordPress site:
And just like that, your shop is linked to your WordPress site. This is how the Shopify screen on your WordPress admin looks now:
Remember, this plugin allows you to sell products on your website, not manage your Shopify store. Managing your store happens on Shopify entirely. The screen above, however, makes managing your store easy, as all the necessary links are there, including the option to customize how your products look on your site:
Since ours was a completely new setup, how about we add a couple of products, payments gateways and shipping just for the ride. Let’s start with products.
Add Products to Shopify
Click on the Add a product button. The link redirects to your Shopify Shop, where you can enter your product:
As you can see, the layout here looks very much like the “Add New Post” screen in WordPress. This page has plenty of options to create your product exactly how you desire.
I also noticed Shopify detected my currency automatically. If need be, you can change your currency by navigating to Settings -> General in your Shopify admin dashboard.
Back to adding products, fill out the necessary details about your product, add images and when you’re ready, hit the Save button:
The above screen offers you a couple of more options as labelled. You can easily navigate to the previous or next product, duplicate a product, embed a product on your website or share said product to your Facebook page.
To add a new product, just navigate to Products and click the Add Product button:
And as you can see, you can even export and import products as you desire.
And everything looks beautiful already. For instance, this is how the product we just added above looks on our Shopify website:
Let’s test drive the checkout process because, again, all orders and payments happen on Shopify, and not on your WordPress site. Click the Add To Cart button:
If you click the Checkout button, you’ll notice order checkout is disabled for the free trial. We can, however, see how the checkout page looks like. Click on the “edit your theme” link.
This takes you to an easy theme customizer that lets you preview how your checkout page looks like:
Click the Checkout button within the customizer to see the rest of the checkout process. Checking out aside, let’s setup payment gateways and shipping so you can get paid. After that, we add Shopify products to your WordPress site.
General Settings
Go back to the Shopify screen in your WordPress admin and click the Setup payments button:
The link redirects to a page where you can choose all the payment gateways you need. Options include PayPal, credit cards, Bitcoin, bank deposits, cash on delivery and so much more:
After setting up payment gateways, don’t leave the Shopify admin. Setup shipping and so on:
Now, let’s add our Shopify products to our WordPress site. I created three test products and placed them in the same collection. This I say because you can either add a single product or a collection, which makes your work a lot easier.
How to Add Shopify Products to Your WordPress Site
Let’s add a single product to your site, because why else integrate Shopify with WordPress? The procedure, just like the others before it, is easy. You can add products to pages, posts and even the sidebar. Let’s add a product to a page or post.
Click on Posts – Add New to launch the Edit Post screen:
Next, click on the Add Product button as shown above. This should lead you to:
Choose your product, and pick how you’d like to embed the product to your WordPress site. This should place shortcode inside your editor. This means, you can add as many products to any post/page as you desire.
You definitely need to give your post or page a title. You can add a custom description, categories, tags, and those other things that make a post pop. Click the Publish button and…
Make A Toast
Here is how a product looks on your WordPress site:
Looks better than the Shopify product page, don’t you think?
At this juncture, a visitor can buy your product simply by clicking the Buy now button. However, you need to enter your credit card to activate the checkout page.
Above, I’m using the Twenty Seventeen theme, but everything looks good already. If you need a styled theme, checkout Shopify’s collection of pre-styled and Shopify ready WordPress themes. The plugin is compatible with most WordPress themes though so you shouldn’t have a problem with the theme you already have.
Next I renamed the Recent Posts widget to Our Products, pinned a Best Seller widget to the sidebar, added the share buttons using Jetpack and turned on comments. You can add a widget to your sidebar by navigating to Appearance -> Widgets -> Shopify:
Closing Remarks
Adding a Shopify store to your WordPress site is as easy as A, B, C. You can be up and running in no time with as little as $29 bucks a month. You can bank on Shopify to drive e-commerce and WordPress to take care of all CMS-related tasks. This way, you have a formidable WordPress e-commerce solution that’s easy to setup, customize, scale and migrate.
Over to You
Do you use Shopify? If you do, what do you love the most about the platform? Have you integrated the system to your WordPress site? If you have a question or suggestion, please share in the comments and we will respond instantly!
