Start a Shopify Store and Make Your First Sales
Make better product photos with Photoroom
Start a Shopify Store and Make Your First Sales
Shopify will give you an online store for $1 a month for your first three months. That part is easy. The hard part is everything after it: choosing what to sell, making your store look trustworthy to strangers, and getting people to actually show up.
If you want to make money with Shopify, you need a plan for all of those pieces, not just a nice theme. Below is the step-by-step process from our latest video, with the real costs and the mistakes that stop most new stores.
What To Sell on Shopify for Beginners
There are four common ways to sell on Shopify:
Your own products. Something you make or buy in small batches. It's more work, but you get the best margins and a real brand.
Print on demand. You upload designs and a partner prints and ships each order. No stock to buy.
Digital products. Templates, guides, presets. No shipping at all.
Dropshipping. A supplier ships each order for you.
If you go the dropshipping route in 2026, pick suppliers close to your customers. The US ended duty-free entry for small parcels in 2025, and the EU now charges €3 per item on low-value parcels from outside the EU. Cheap overseas shipping isn't cheap anymore.
Not sure which one fits you? If you have very little money, start with print on demand or digital products, because there's no stock to buy. If you already make something, sell that. If digital products sound good, our guide on how to sell digital products on Gumroad shows another place to sell them.
How To Check if People Want Your Product
This is the most common mistake: spending money before you know anyone wants the product.
Search for your product on big marketplaces and look at the review counts. Lots of reviews means real buyers. Then read what people complain about in those reviews. That's your chance to do it better.
Next, post about the product before you build anything. A short video or a photo is enough. If people comment or ask where to buy, that's a real signal. If nobody cares, move on before you've spent anything.
How To Set Up a Shopify Store (and What Shopify Costs)
Here's the current Shopify pricing:
3-day free trial, then $1 a month for your first three months
Basic plan: $39 a month, or $29 a month if you pay yearly
Shopify Payments: about 2.9% + 30¢ per online sale in the US
Shopify adds another 2% on Basic if you use a different payment provider
So use Shopify Payments if it's available where you live.
Pick a simple free theme. Then create the pages that build trust: shipping times, returns, and a way to contact you. Customers check those before they buy. Also connect a proper domain name. A store on its own domain looks far more trustworthy than a long default web address.
How To Make Shopify Product Pages That Sell
Nobody can touch your product online, so the photo is the first thing people judge, and they decide fast. A dark phone picture on a kitchen table makes a good product look cheap.
Every product also needs a title, a description, and alt text (the hidden description that helps search engines understand your images). Doing all of that by hand for every product is where a lot of new stores stall. The old way means taking photos, moving them to an editing app, writing descriptions somewhere else, and then uploading everything to Shopify by hand.
Photoroom for Shopify: AI Product Photos in One Workflow
In the video, we used Photoroom for Shopify to turn all of that into one workflow:
Connect your store with one click from the Photoroom web app.
Start from a phone photo. Photoroom removes the background on its own.
Make new visuals from the same photo: studio shots, AI backgrounds, ghost mannequin or flat-lay views for clothing, and even a short video.
Edit in plain English inside the editor until you're happy.
Get the listing written. Photoroom writes the title, description and alt text, and a listing score flags what's missing.
Publish straight to Shopify in batches, with no downloading and re-uploading.
Say you sell handmade candles. You shoot 20 of them on your kitchen table. In one batch they all get the same clean background, the same lighting and their own listing, ready to publish. An afternoon of work becomes a few minutes.
Two tips: publishing straight to Shopify needs the Photoroom Max plan, and always read what the AI writes before you publish. You know your product better than any tool does. For more tools like this, see our list of the best free AI tools.
How To Get Traffic to Your Shopify Store
A store nobody visits makes nothing. Start with free traffic:
Post short videos showing your product being used.
Use Pinterest. People search there when they're planning to buy. Our guide to Amazon affiliate marketing on Pinterest shows how that buyer intent works.
Write product titles the way buyers actually search.
When something gets attention, test a small paid ad. Some dropshipping guides suggest budgeting $300 to $1,500 just to test ads, so start small and stop what doesn't work.
Collect emails from day one, too. Offer a small discount for signing up. People who bought once are the easiest people to sell to again, and email doesn't cost you per click.
How To Track Profit on Shopify
Track profit, not sales. Take each sale and subtract the product cost, shipping, Shopify fees, payment fees, apps and ads. What's left is your profit.
Plenty of new stores make sales and still lose money because they skip this math. Keep what earns, drop what doesn't, and then add your next product.
Shopify Costs and How Long It Takes To Make Money
Watch the cost stack. Apps, a domain and ads each look small, but together they can cost more than you sell in your first months. Add a new app only when it saves you real time or makes you money.
Give it time, too. Some guides estimate that only about 10 to 20% of new dropshipping stores become steadily profitable in their first year. Use your first months to learn what sells, not to replace your job. If you'd rather sell without running a store at all, TikTok Shop affiliate is another route.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does it cost to start a Shopify store? Shopify has a 3-day free trial, then $1 a month for three months. After that, the Basic plan is $39 a month, or $29 a month billed yearly, plus payment fees of about 2.9% + 30¢ per online sale in the US.
What should a beginner sell on Shopify? If you have little money, start with print on demand or digital products, since there's no stock to buy. If you already make something, sell that.
Can you still dropship on Shopify in 2026? Yes, but pick suppliers close to your customers. The US ended duty-free entry for small parcels in 2025 and the EU charges €3 per item on low-value parcels, so cheap overseas shipping costs more now.
How long does it take to make money on Shopify? It varies a lot. Some guides estimate only 10 to 20% of new dropshipping stores become steadily profitable in their first year, so treat the first months as learning time.
The Bottom Line
Shopify is still one of the easiest ways to sell online because the tools are cheap and simple. But the store isn't the business. The product, the pages and the people you bring in are. Pick what to sell, check demand, set up your store, make your listings sell, bring in traffic and track your profit. This week, just do steps one and two.
Want the full step-by-step breakdown? Watch the video → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXAYE0WCjW0
