---
title: "How to start a Shopify store: a complete guide"
description: "Open a Shopify store step by step: what to decide first, plans and fees, products, themes, payouts, US sales tax, shipping and a full pre-launch checklist."
date: 2026-08-06
lastUpdated: 2026-08-06
author: "Megan Hartwell"
url: https://storelaunchguides.com/how-to-start-a-shopify-store/
site: "Store Launch Guides (storelaunchguides.com)"
language: en
---
# How to start a Shopify store: a complete guide
> **Short answer:** Opening a Shopify store takes six moves: sign up, add products, choose a theme, turn on payments, set shipping rules, and place a test order. The current consumer plan lineup is Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus, according to Shopify's pricing page checked August 6, 2026. Plan prices are set per country and change often, so the dollar figure you should trust is the one on Shopify's own pricing page today. Card processing is billed per order on top of the plan. Using a payment gateway other than Shopify Payments adds a published surcharge: 2% on Basic, falling to 0.2% on Plus — Shopify's published tiers, not a separately confirmed US figure. Sales tax is the part that catches American sellers, because every state writes its own rules.
Most people searching for this are not asking how to click through a signup form. They are asking what the store will cost them, what the government expects, and whether the whole thing will still make sense in three months.
This guide walks the setup in order and names the real screens in the Shopify admin. Where the honest answer is "check the current page yourself," it says so. It does not promise revenue, and it does not tell you what you owe in tax.
Where a number appears, it carries the publisher and the date it was read. Platform facts come from Shopify's own pricing pages, Help Center and investor releases. The tax and shipping material comes from the Supreme Court, two named state revenue departments, the Census Bureau, the Federal Reserve and the United States Postal Service (USPS). This is an independent educational site. It is not operated by, affiliated with, or endorsed by Shopify Inc.
Disclosure: this article contains affiliate links to Shopify. If you sign up through one, this site earns a commission at no extra cost to you.
## Table of contents
- [What Shopify is, and what it replaces](#what-shopify-is)
- [Decide these things before you sign up](#before-you-sign-up)
- [Create your account and your store](#create-your-store)
- [Choosing a plan: what each tier gates](#choosing-a-plan)
- [Products, collections and navigation](#products-and-navigation)
- [Pick a theme and customize it without code](#themes)
- [Getting paid: Shopify Payments, payouts and the surcharge](#getting-paid)
- [US sales tax and economic nexus](#sales-tax)
- [Shipping with USPS, UPS and FedEx](#shipping)
- [Your pre-launch checklist](#pre-launch-checklist)
- [What the first year actually costs](#first-year-costs)
- [Frequently asked questions](#faq)
- [Sources](#sources)
## What Shopify is, and what it replaces
Shopify Inc. is hosted e-commerce software. You rent a storefront, a product catalog, a checkout, an order system and an admin panel, and Shopify runs the servers, the security patches and the payment plumbing underneath.
What it replaces is a stack of separate parts. Instead of a web host, a shopping-cart plugin, an SSL certificate, a payment gateway account and a bookkeeper's export, you get one subscription and one dashboard. That trade is the whole product: less control, far less maintenance.
The company is large enough that its numbers are public. For the three months ended June 30, 2026, it reported gross merchandise volume of $115,567 million, up 32% year over year. Revenue was $3,583 million, up 34%. Gross profit came in at $1,708 million and free cash flow at $654 million, an 18% free cash flow margin. All four figures come from the investor press release dated August 5, 2026.
One figure you will see quoted everywhere is a merchant count. That release does not publish one, and this guide will not repeat a number it cannot source.
## Decide these things before you sign up
The signup form takes minutes. The decisions behind it are what slow people down later, so make them now.
**What you are selling, precisely.** Physical goods you hold, physical goods a supplier ships, digital files, services, or a mix. Each one changes your shipping settings and your tax picture.
**Who ships it.** If a box leaves your house, shipping is your problem and it belongs in your pricing. If a supplier ships it, delivery times stop being under your control.
**Where your customers are.** Selling only inside your own state is a different tax situation from selling nationwide. That difference is covered further down.
**Your business identity.** A store name, a domain you can actually get, and whether you are trading under your own name or a registered business.
**Your budget shape, not your budget total.** You will pay a plan, a percentage of every card sale, possibly a theme, possibly several app subscriptions, and shipping. Knowing which of those lines you can absorb matters more than a single guessed number.
Write these down before you open the admin. Every setting you meet in the next hour asks you to have already answered one of them.
## Create your account and your store
Signup starts at [shopify.com](https://www.shopify.com/?ref=PLACEHOLDER_REF). You give an email address, set a password, and answer a few questions about what you sell — the answers only pre-configure your admin, and nothing there is permanent.
You land in the Shopify admin. The left-hand menu is the map for the rest of this guide: **Home**, **Orders**, **Products**, **Customers**, **Marketing**, **Discounts** and **Analytics**. Below those sit **Sales channels**, with **Online Store** under it, and **Settings** at the bottom. Almost everything structural lives in Settings.
Your store also gets a temporary address ending in `myshopify.com`. That stays as your permanent internal identifier even after you connect a real domain under **Settings → Domains**, so do not panic when you keep seeing it.
Before you touch anything else, open **Settings → Store details** and fill in the store name, the billing address, the store currency and the customer contact email. Currency in particular is worth getting right early, because changing it later is not a one-click action.
About the trial: Shopify's pricing page currently advertises a three-day free trial, followed by a promotional rate of one unit of the billing currency per month for three months. That is what the page showed on August 6, 2026, and promotions end. Note that the pricing page geo-routes by country, so read the offer as it appears to you.
**Open the admin and look around:** [Get started](https://www.shopify.com?ref=PLACEHOLDER_REF) — A trial store costs you almost nothing and answers questions no guide can. Add one product, then come back and make the plan decision. *(affiliate link)*
## Choosing a plan: what each tier gates
The consumer lineup on Shopify's pricing page is **Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus** (checked August 6, 2026). The Help Center's plan index also lists Starter, Lite and Retail, but all three are legacy. Shopify states that Starter "isn't available to new stores" and that Lite "is no longer available to new stores". Retail, likewise, "is no longer available to new merchants".
Here is what the tiers actually gate, from Shopify's own comparison table and plan pages:
| | Basic | Grow | Advanced | Plus |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Additional staff accounts | Not included | 5 | 15 | Unlimited |
| Inventory locations | 10 | 10 | 10 | 200 |
| Checkout customization | Limited | Limited | Limited | Full |
| Third-party carrier-calculated shipping | Not available | Not published | Real-time carrier rates | Not published |
| B2B catalogs | Up to 3 | Up to 3 | Up to 3 | Unlimited |
| Support | Live chat | Live chat | Enhanced 24/7 chat | Priority support |
| Third-party gateway surcharge | 2% | 1% | 0.6% | 0.2% |
Sources: Shopify pricing comparison table and the Help Center pages for Basic, Grow, Advanced and Shopify Plus, all retrieved August 6, 2026.
The staff-account line is the one that surprises solo sellers who later hire. On Basic, Shopify's Help Center states plainly that the plan "doesn't support adding staff accounts to your store."
Additional staff accounts per plan. Source: Shopify Help Center plan pages, retrieved August 6, 2026.
Now the part you came for. Shopify sets subscription prices per country, and the page served to us returned euro amounts rather than dollars. **So this guide states no US dollar price for Basic, Grow or Advanced.** Read the current figure on [Shopify's pricing page](https://www.shopify.com/pricing?ref=PLACEHOLDER_REF) yourself. That is not evasion — a price copied into a guide goes stale silently, while the pricing page never does.
Two things about the bill are verified and useful anyway. Shopify bills subscriptions in "Euros (EUR), British pounds (GBP), US dollars (USD), Indian rupees (INR)". Annual billing is also discounted. Shopify's billing overview states that it "charges the full year upfront and presents a lower effective monthly rate."
The only US dollar plan figure Shopify publishes in a table is for Plus. Its Help Center page for the Shopify Plus plan gives **$2,500 per month on a one-year term and $2,300 per month on a three-year term**, checked August 6, 2026. That tier is for large merchants, and if you are reading a getting-started guide it is not your decision this year.
Shopify plans, pricing and features change; always verify the current details on shopify.com before deciding.
## Products, collections and navigation
Go to **Products → Add product**. A product needs a title, a description, at least one image, a price, and — if you hold stock — an SKU and a quantity under Inventory.
Variants are the part people get wrong. If a shirt comes in three sizes and two colors, that is one product with six variants, not six products. Each variant carries its own price, SKU and stock count.
The Shipping block on the product page matters more than it looks. Check "This is a physical product" and enter a real weight, because carrier-calculated rates later depend on it. Digital products get the box unchecked.
**Collections** are how customers browse. A manual collection is a list you curate by hand. An automated collection is a rule — for example, every product tagged `candles` — and new products join it on their own. Build automated collections wherever a rule exists; they maintain themselves.
Then wire up the menu under **Online Store → Navigation**. Your main menu should be short and boring: the two or three collections that matter, an About page, and a Contact page. A first-time visitor should not need to think about where to click.
## Pick a theme and customize it without code
Themes live under **Online Store → Themes**. Shopify ships free themes, and the Theme Store sells paid ones as a one-time purchase per store.
Start free. A free theme configured carefully outperforms an expensive theme you never finished setting up, and you can switch later without touching your products or orders.
Click **Customize** to open the theme editor. It is a visual editor: pages are built from sections, sections hold blocks, and you drag them into order. Nothing here requires code, and the changes stay unpublished until you press Save on the live theme.
The settings worth your first hour are the logo, the color scheme, the two fonts, the homepage hero, and the announcement bar. Everything else is decoration you can revisit after you have real orders.
One caution on paid themes: budget for them as a real line, and read whether a theme's demo relies on apps that carry their own monthly fee. That is where a "one-time" theme purchase quietly becomes a subscription.
## Getting paid: Shopify Payments, payouts and the surcharge
Open **Settings → Payments**. This is where money either flows or does not.
Most sellers land on Shopify Payments, Shopify's own built-in processor. The United States is one of the countries where it is available, per the Help Center's supported-countries page, checked August 6, 2026. Activating it means entering your business details and bank account for identity and banking verification, then waiting for that verification to clear.
Card processing is a separate charge from your plan. Shopify publishes an online card rate per plan for each country, and the rate falls as the plan rises. The dollars-and-cents US rate was not verifiable for this guide, so read it on the pricing page along with the plan price.
The surcharge is the fee that catches people. If you use a third-party payment gateway instead of Shopify Payments, Shopify adds a transaction fee on top of whatever that gateway charges you:
Shopify's published third-party gateway surcharge by plan, identical across every locale pricing page checked. Source: Shopify pricing pages, retrieved August 6, 2026. The US page did not render in dollars for this check, so treat these as Shopify's published tiers rather than US-specific figures.
That surcharge disappears when you use Shopify Payments. Shopify's fee documentation is explicit about which routes avoid it. You "aren't charged third-party transaction fees for orders that are processed through Shopify Payments, Shop Pay, Shop Pay Installments, and Paypal Express." Manual methods are clear of it too. Shopify states there are "no transaction fees on manual payment methods such as cash, cash on delivery (COD), and bank transfers."
For most first-time American sellers that settles the question. Use Shopify Payments unless you have a concrete reason not to, because a competing gateway has to beat both its own fee and the surcharge stacked on top.
How Americans actually pay is worth knowing before you decide what to offer. Federal Reserve Financial Services published the 2026 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice in May 2026. It reported an average of 47 payments per month per consumer: 16 with a credit card, 15 with a debit card and six with cash.
## US sales tax and economic nexus
This guide is general orientation, not tax advice. Sales tax rules differ by state and change; check your state revenue department or a tax professional before you register or file.
Sales tax in the United States is set by states and local governments. There is no single national rate to look up, and two customers in different states can owe different amounts on the same order.
The concept that decides whether you must collect in a state you have never visited is **economic nexus**. It comes from *South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc.*, No. 17-494, decided June 21, 2018. The Supreme Court overruled the physical-presence rule, expressly overruling *Quill Corp. v. North Dakota* (1992) and *National Bellas Hess, Inc. v. Department of Revenue of Illinois* (1967). After *Wayfair*, a state may require a remote seller to collect based on economic activity alone.
South Dakota's own law, upheld in that case, applied to sellers delivering more than $100,000 of goods or services into the state, or engaging in 200 or more separate transactions. Those figures get quoted as if they were the American rule. They are not — they are South Dakota's.
Two named state revenue departments show how far the rules diverge:
- **New York** requires **both** tests to be met. Cumulative gross receipts must exceed $500,000 from sales of tangible personal property delivered into the state, **and** there must be more than 100 such sales transactions. The lookback is "the immediately preceding four sales tax quarters" (New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, retrieved August 6, 2026).
- **Minnesota** triggers on **either** test: 200 or more retail sales shipped to Minnesota, **or** more than $100,000 in retail sales shipped there. It measures over the prior 12-month period (Minnesota Department of Revenue, page last updated March 13, 2026).
So the thresholds differ in amount, in whether transaction counts matter at all, in whether the tests are AND or OR, and in the lookback window. That is four axes of variation across fifty states, which is why this site will not print a number for yours.
Handle it in this order. Find your home state's department of revenue and read its remote-seller page. Register there if you meet its rules. Track your sales by state from day one, because you cannot reconstruct that later. Use the Streamlined Sales Tax Governing Board's remote-seller state guidance as a cross-state index. Then take the whole picture to a tax professional before you file anything.
In the admin, tax settings live under **Settings → Taxes and duties**. Shopify can collect tax for the states you tell it to, but you decide where you are registered, and you file the returns.
For scale on the market you are entering: the US Census Bureau reported retail e-commerce sales of **$326.7 billion in the first quarter of 2026**, seasonally adjusted. That was **16.9% of total retail sales**, and 9.8% above the first quarter of 2025. The report was released May 18, 2026.
## Shipping with USPS, UPS and FedEx
Shipping settings live under **Settings → Shipping and delivery**. You define zones — groups of destinations — and then attach rates to each zone.
There are three honest ways to charge. Free shipping, with the cost priced into the product. Flat rate, one price per order or per weight band. Carrier-calculated, where the live rate is fetched at checkout. Pick one and make it obvious on the product page.
Carrier-calculated rates are plan-gated. Shopify's Help Center states that third-party carrier-calculated shipping is "not available on Basic tier", while the Advanced plan includes "Integration with third-party carriers for real-time rate calculations". If live rates are essential to your model, that changes which plan you start on.
Your three domestic carriers are the United States Postal Service (USPS), United Parcel Service (UPS) and FedEx Corporation (FedEx). **This guide quotes no carrier price**, because none could be verified from a published rate page for this edition. Rates depend on weight, dimensions, zone and your account, and every one of those pages is a live calculator rather than a printed number.
Go to the source: [USPS business shipping](https://www.usps.com/business/business-shipping.htm), [UPS](https://www.ups.com/) and [FedEx](https://www.fedex.com/). USPS is the one this guide could read in detail. Its business shipping page describes Click-N-Ship, which lets a business "pay for postage and print just one label or a batch of shipping labels online" at lower Commercial Rates. Opting into the Business Rate Card gives further savings on selected services. The services named there are USPS Ground Advantage, Priority Mail, Priority Mail Express and Priority Mail Next Day. That page publishes no parcel prices and sends you to its Calculate a Business Price tool. The one figure stated outright is a $1.65 fee per label for USPS Label Delivery Service.
Weigh and measure a packed box before you set any rate. A rate built from the product weight alone forgets the box, the filler and the tape, and that gap comes straight out of your margin.
## Your pre-launch checklist
Work through this before you remove the password from **Online Store → Preferences**.
1. **Store details complete.** Name, address, currency and contact email under **Settings → Store details**.
2. **Domain connected.** Under **Settings → Domains**, with the real domain set as primary.
3. **At least one product finished.** Title, description, images, price, weight, inventory.
4. **Collections and navigation built.** Every menu item lands somewhere real.
5. **Theme saved and published.** Logo, colors, fonts, homepage hero, announcement bar.
6. **Payments live.** Shopify Payments activated and verification cleared, or your chosen gateway connected with the surcharge understood.
7. **Shipping zones and rates set.** Including the box weight, not just the product weight.
8. **Tax registration decided.** Your state's revenue department read, registration handled, **Settings → Taxes and duties** configured to match.
9. **Policy pages written.** Returns, shipping, privacy and terms, in your own words and reflecting what you will really do.
10. **A real test order placed.** Buy something from your own store with a real card, then refund it.
That last one is not optional. A test order is the only way to see the checkout, the confirmation email, the order in **Orders**, the fulfillment flow and the refund path as a customer meets them. Sellers who skip it find the broken step after a stranger has already paid.
## What the first year actually costs
You cannot get a dollar total from this guide, and you should distrust any guide that hands you one without a date on it. What you can have is the shape of the bill, so nothing lands as a surprise.
**Line 1 — the plan.** Monthly or annual. Shopify's billing overview confirms annual billing charges the full year upfront at a lower effective monthly rate, so the cheaper number in any comparison is usually the annual one.
**Line 2 — card processing.** A percentage plus a fixed amount on every card sale, published per plan and per country, with the rate falling as the plan rises. This line grows with your revenue while the plan stays flat.
**Line 3 — the gateway surcharge, or zero.** Zero if you use Shopify Payments. Otherwise 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus, on top of your gateway's own fee.
**Line 4 — the theme.** Zero on a free theme, or a one-time Theme Store purchase.
**Line 5 — apps.** The line that quietly outgrows the plan. Each app is its own monthly subscription, and a stack of small ones adds up faster than a store grows.
**Line 6 — shipping.** Real money per parcel, either paid by you or recovered from the customer.
**Line 7 — in-person selling, if any.** Shopify states that casual in-person selling is included in every paid plan. Shopify POS Pro is a paid add-on charged per retail location.
Add lines one through six for a normal online-only store, and put a date next to every figure you write down. Then compare that against what you expect to sell, not against what you hope to sell.
Shopify plans, pricing and features change; always verify the current details on shopify.com before deciding.
**Check today's price, then do the math:** [Get started](https://www.shopify.com?ref=PLACEHOLDER_REF) — Shopify sets plan prices per country and revises them. Open the pricing page, read the figure for your plan and currency, then finish your own arithmetic. *(affiliate link)*
## Frequently asked questions
### How much does Shopify cost?
There is no single answer, and this guide will not print a stale one. The consumer plans are Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus, and their prices are set per country and change. The pricing page served euro amounts rather than dollars when it was checked on August 6, 2026. So no US dollar figure for Basic, Grow or Advanced appears here. The one US dollar plan price Shopify publishes in a table is Plus, at $2,500 per month on a one-year term and $2,300 on a three-year term. Whatever the plan costs, add card processing per sale, plus any theme, apps and shipping.
### Does Shopify have a free trial?
Yes, and it is short. The pricing page currently advertises a three-day free trial, followed by a promotional rate of one unit of the billing currency per month for three months. That is what it showed on August 6, 2026. Promotions end and the terms were not verified, so read the offer as it appears on the page you are served.
### Which plan should a first-time seller start on?
Start on the entry plan unless a verified gate blocks you. Two gates matter early: Basic includes no additional staff accounts, and third-party carrier-calculated shipping is not available on Basic. If you need a second login or live carrier rates at checkout, that decides it — otherwise upgrade when the store makes you, not before.
### Do I need Shopify Payments to sell?
No, but the alternative costs more. Using a third-party gateway adds Shopify's published surcharge of 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus, on top of that gateway's own fee. Those are Shopify's published tiers, checked August 6, 2026. The US pricing page did not render in dollars for this check, so read them as published tiers rather than confirmed US figures. Shopify's documentation confirms that no third-party transaction fees apply to orders processed through Shopify Payments, Shop Pay, Shop Pay Installments and PayPal Express. Manual methods such as cash, cash on delivery and bank transfers carry none either. The United States is a supported country for Shopify Payments.
### Do I have to collect sales tax in every state?
No, and nobody can tell you which states without knowing your sales. Since *South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc.* (decided June 21, 2018) a state may require a remote seller to collect based on economic activity alone, but each state sets its own threshold. New York requires more than $500,000 in receipts **and** more than 100 transactions over the preceding four sales tax quarters. Minnesota triggers on 200 sales **or** more than $100,000 over the prior 12 months. Track sales by state from day one and take the numbers to your state revenue department or a tax professional.
### Can I sell in person with the same store?
Yes. Shopify states that casual in-person selling is included in every paid plan, so a paid subscription already covers occasional face-to-face sales. The fuller point-of-sale tier, Shopify POS Pro, is a separate paid add-on billed per retail location.
## Sources
1. Shopify, "Shopify Pricing: Find the Right Plan for Your Business". https://www.shopify.com/pricing — retrieved 2026-08-06.
2. Shopify Help Center, "Pricing plans and billing overview". https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/intro-to-shopify/pricing-plans/pricing-overview — retrieved 2026-08-06.
3. Shopify Help Center, "Plan features". https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/intro-to-shopify/pricing-plans/plans-features — retrieved 2026-08-06.
4. Shopify Help Center, "Basic plan". https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/intro-to-shopify/pricing-plans/plans-features/basic-shopify-plan — retrieved 2026-08-06.
5. Shopify Help Center, "Grow plan". https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/intro-to-shopify/pricing-plans/plans-features/grow-plan — retrieved 2026-08-06.
6. Shopify Help Center, "Advanced plan". https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/intro-to-shopify/pricing-plans/plans-features/shopify-advanced-plan — retrieved 2026-08-06.
7. Shopify Help Center, "Shopify Plus plan". https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/intro-to-shopify/pricing-plans/plans-features/shopify-plus-plan — retrieved 2026-08-06.
8. Shopify Help Center, "Starter plan". https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/intro-to-shopify/pricing-plans/plans-features/shopify-starter-plan — retrieved 2026-08-06.
9. Shopify Help Center, "Shopify Payments" (fees). https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/payments/shopify-payments/fees — retrieved 2026-08-06.
10. Shopify Help Center, "Supported countries for Shopify Payments". https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/payments/shopify-payments/supported-countries — retrieved 2026-08-06.
11. Shopify, "Shopify POS pricing". https://www.shopify.com/pos/pricing — retrieved 2026-08-06.
12. Shopify Investor Relations, "Shopify Delivers Big: 30%+ Growth Across GMV, Revenue, Gross Profit, and Free Cash Flow", August 5, 2026. https://www.shopify.com/investors/press-releases/shopify-delivers-big-30-growth-across-gmv-revenue-gross-profit — retrieved 2026-08-06.
13. Supreme Court of the United States, *South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc., et al.*, No. 17-494, decided June 21, 2018. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/17-494_j4el.pdf — opinion text verified against Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute, https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/17-494, retrieved 2026-08-06.
14. New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, "Registration requirement for businesses with no physical presence in New York State". https://www.tax.ny.gov/pubs_and_bulls/publications/sales/nexus.htm — retrieved 2026-08-06.
15. Minnesota Department of Revenue, "Sales Tax for Remote Sellers". https://www.revenue.state.mn.us/sales-tax-faqs-remote-sellers — page last updated 2026-03-13, retrieved 2026-08-06.
16. Streamlined Sales Tax Governing Board, "Remote Seller State Guidance". https://www.streamlinedsalestax.org/for-businesses/remote-seller-faqs/remote-seller-state-guidance — cited as a cross-state index only; no figure in this article comes from it. Retrieved 2026-08-06.
17. US Census Bureau, "Quarterly Retail E-Commerce Sales Report", released May 18, 2026. https://www.census.gov/retail/ecommerce.html — retrieved 2026-08-06.
18. Federal Reserve Financial Services, "2026 Findings from the Diary of Consumer Payment Choice", May 2026. https://www.frbservices.org/news/research/2026-findings-diary-consumer-payment-choice — retrieved 2026-08-06.
19. United States Postal Service, "Business Shipping — Rates, Discounts, Services". https://www.usps.com/business/business-shipping.htm — retrieved 2026-08-06.