Launching a Shopify store in a weekend: the no-regrets checklist

Settle these on paper first. Each takes minutes to decide and hours to undo.

1. Store name and domain. Buy the domain before you create the store, and choose a myshopify.com subdomain that matches, because that one is permanent. Shopify sells domains for around $14 a year or you can connect one you already own.
2. Plan. Basic at $29 a month is the default. The 90-day free trial Shopify offered this spring has ended; the standard trial is 14 days, which is enough to build and test before the first bill.
3. Catalog structure. Write a spreadsheet with every product, its variants, SKU, price, cost, weight and at least one image. Decide your collection names now. Changing product handles later means redirects.
4. Legal entity and banking. Shopify Payments needs a business or personal bank account, a tax ID or SSN, and an address. Have them ready; a payout hold at launch is avoidable.
5. Shipping policy. Flat rate, free over a threshold, or calculated. Who ships, from where, how fast, and what it costs you. This decides half your checkout settings.
6. Return policy, in plain words. Days allowed, condition, who pays return shipping, refund or store credit.

Theme. Start with a free theme. Debut suits stores with a handful of products and strong imagery; Brooklyn suits apparel; Narrative suits a single-product story. Install it, set logo, colors and fonts, and stop customizing once it looks clean. Launch, then iterate.

Products. Import from your spreadsheet via CSV or add by hand. For every product: a title a customer would search for, a description that answers size, material, fit and care, every variant, a weight for shipping, inventory tracking on, and at least three images at 2048 by 2048 pixels on a consistent background. Fill in the SEO title and description fields; they default to the product title and the first lines of your description, which is rarely ideal.

Collections. Automated collections based on tags or product type save time as the catalog grows. Add a short intro paragraph and a banner image to each.

Navigation. Main menu: Shop, two to four key collections, About, Contact. Footer: Shipping, Returns, Privacy, Terms, Contact, and a newsletter signup.

Pages. About, Contact, Shipping, Returns, Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. Shopify's policy generator under Settings, Legal, gives workable starting text; edit it to match your actual policy, and make the shipping and returns pages reachable from product pages.

Apps. Keep it to three or fewer at launch. A reviews app, an email platform (Shopify Email is free for the first 2,500 sends a month) and perhaps a page builder. Every app adds scripts and load time.

Two notes on payments. Shopify Payments card rates on Basic are 2.9 percent plus 30 cents online; third-party gateways add a 2 percent transaction fee on top of their own, so use Shopify Payments wherever it is available. Enable Shop Pay; since the Shop app launched in April it is becoming the fastest path through checkout for returning buyers, and installment options are starting to roll out to US merchants.

On tax, Shopify calculates but does not file. Know which states you have nexus in, usually your home state at launch, and talk to an accountant once you cross economic nexus thresholds elsewhere, commonly $100,000 in sales or 200 transactions per state.

Set up measurement before the first real order, because you cannot recover the data later.

• Google Analytics. Paste the tracking ID in Online Store, Preferences, and turn on Enhanced Ecommerce. The newer Google Analytics 4 property type launched in October is not yet supported natively; stick with Universal Analytics for now.
• Facebook pixel. Connect it through the Facebook channel app so standard events fire automatically. If you plan to advertise, this is non-negotiable.
• Google Search Console. Verify the domain and submit the sitemap at yourstore.com/sitemap.xml.
• Google Shopping. The Google channel app syncs products to Merchant Center; free listings became available in the US this spring and cost nothing to try.

Then place at least two test orders using Shopify's Bogus Gateway or a real card refunded afterward. Check on a phone, not just a laptop: product page, add to cart, discount code, shipping options, tax line, payment, confirmation email, order in admin, fulfillment flow, shipping notification. Fix anything that surprised you.

Before you remove the password page, confirm the custom domain is primary, SSL shows as active, the favicon is set, and the store's default checkout language and currency are right.

A launch is a starting line. In the first fortnight, watch abandoned checkouts in admin and read the reasons: shipping cost shocks and payment issues show up fast. Reply to every customer email within a few hours. Send a launch email to the people who already know you before spending on ads; the first orders should come from your own audience, and they will give you the reviews that make ads work later.

Speed matters. Run the store through a page speed test after launch; oversized images and app scripts are the usual culprits, and the fix is cheap now and expensive once the store is busy.

No product weights. Calculated and flat rates both misbehave, and you discover it on the first international order.

Inventory not tracked. Overselling in the launch week is the fastest way to earn refund requests and bad reviews.

Placeholder policy pages. Payment processors and ad platforms check them, and so do customers.

Skipping the test order. Almost every launch-day problem would have been caught by one purchase on a phone.

Launching with a 30-app stack. Each app is a subscription, a script and a support relationship. Add them when a problem demands it.

Even a weekend launch sits inside brand, growth, web and technology decisions that should connect. Discover is short for a new store: who buys, what they compare you against, what the margin and shipping economics allow, and which systems, accounting, inventory, email, the store must talk to. Plan fixes the catalog structure, the theme choice, the payment and shipping configuration, the measurement setup and the launch sequence. Build is the store itself, done to the checklist above with the integrations wired in. Improve begins in week two: conversion fixes from real session data, speed work, email flows for abandoned carts and post-purchase, and the first paid tests once organic orders prove the offer.

The launch engagement is a representative pattern. A business moving from wholesale and in-person sales to direct online selling needed to be live within weeks. We ran a compressed discovery, structured a catalog with full variants and shipping data, built on a free theme with a deliberately small app stack, configured Shopify Payments, tax and tiered shipping, set up analytics and pixel tracking before the first order, and launched to the owner's existing customer list first. The store took paid orders within hours of opening, and the first month's data shaped the theme and email improvements that followed.