Adding business settings for your store

Before you start setting up your Shopify store, you need to create a Shopify account and add business information for your store. You don't need to include every detail right away, but be sure to add the following items:

• Store name
• Legal business name and address
• Store time zone
• Default store currency
• Default weight unit
• Password to protect your online store

Create your Shopify account

Create a Shopify account to start setting up your store. You'll need to enter a valid email address and a password.

During account creation, you're assigned an automatically-generated myshopify.com domain name, which looks something like this: 1a2b3c4-5.myshopify.com. You use this domain to log in to your store. This domain name is also considered to be your store's primary domain by default, although you can buy a custom domain to replace your myshopify.com domain as the web address that customers use to visit your store.

You can choose a new myshopify.com domain name one time only.

Set or change your online store name and contact information

Your online store name is the name that's displayed on every page of your website. By default, your store name will be "My Store". The contact information that you add is used to contact you by your customers and Shopify.

Caution

Changing your store name doesn't change your default myshopify.com domain name. Learn more about choosing a new myshopify.com domain name.

Steps:

Note

If your store uses Shopify Payments, then you also need to contact Shopify Support to change the business name on your Shopify Payments account. Otherwise, there's no limits to changing your store name and contact information. You can change them as often as you want, at any time.

Set or change your legal name and business address

Your legal name and business address displays on your bill. With the correct name and address listed on your Shopify bill, you might be able to claim Shopify as a business expense.

Steps:

Note

If your store uses Shopify Payments, then you need to deactivate Shopify Payments before you can change your store's country in your Shopify admin.

Set or change your store time zone

Select a store currency

In the Store details settings page of your Shopify admin, you can choose which currency your store uses (for example, USD, EUR, CAD, AUD, JPY).

If you are using Shopify Payments as your credit card payment gateway, then you must change your currency by editing the bank account and currency settings used by Shopify Payments.

Steps:

Tip

You can change the way monetary amounts are displayed by clicking Change formatting.

1. Click Save.

Display multiple currencies

If you use Shopify Payments, then you can set up your store to sell in multiple currencies. Customers can browse your online store and checkout in their preferred local currency.

If you don't use Shopify Payments, then you can customize themes to include multiple currencies on your online store for display purposes only. Your customers can check out only in the currency that you set on your Store details settings page under the Store currency section.

To learn more about using themes to display multiple currencies on your online store, refer to support multiple currencies in your theme.

Set or change your store's default weight unit

You can choose from the following default units of weight:

• Pounds (lb) - Imperial system
• Ounces (oz) - Imperial system
• Kilograms (kg) - Metric system
• Grams (g) - Metric system

Choose the weight unit that is most appropriate for your business. This is just the default value, and can be edited on a product-by-product basis later on.

Note

Before choosing your default weight unit, you should choose your Unit system from the same screen.

Steps:

Set or update your home page metadata

Metadata, such as a page's title and meta description, is displayed in search engine results. It doesn't affect your chances of being listed by a search engine, but a good meta description can increase the likelihood that visitors will click through to your store. It's a great way to attract more traffic.

The title and meta description must be unique for each page, and must describe the content of that page. For every product, page, or blog in your Shopify admin, there's a search engine section where you can input the information as you want it to display on search engine results pages.

There is a 70 character limit for titles. Not all search engines will truncate after the character limit is reached, but most will truncate on a word, rather than in the middle of a word, to improve readability.

You can view a preview of how your page displays as a search result on a Google result page.

Steps:

1. From your Shopify admin, go to Online Store > Preferences.

2. In the Title and meta description section, enter your home page metadata under Homepage title and Homepage meta description.

Note

Search engines will list only about 140 characters of your meta description below your title tag, so keep it short.

1. Click Save.

Common questions

• What happens when I leave the title tag blank?

Your theme will use your shop name followed by the title of the content, or it will use the title of the content followed by your shop name. If this is what you wanted to use anyway, then there's no need to edit the title tag at all.

• Where's the title tag in my Shopify theme? Can't I edit my HTML pages directly for this?

The title tag is only included in one file of your Shopify theme: theme.liquid. The theme.liquid file is used on every page of your website. The Liquid tag that outputs the title tag in your theme.liquid file is {{ page_title }}.

Your website isn't made of static HTML pages that you can edit piece by piece. Content is output dynamically by a relevant template.

• My employee wants to edit my webpages directly instead of my theme.liquid file. How do I get FTP access to my website to edit the HTML of each page?

There's no FTP access to your web pages. The code for your title tag is in your theme.liquid file. The code will be inside the head element in theme.liquid. For more information about Liquid, refer to the guide to SEO for theme designers.

• I edited my title tags. Why can't I view my change when I visit Google?

You might need to wait a couple of weeks for your edits to display in search engine results. It can take some time for search engines to crawl and re-index your content.

Format your order IDs

By default, your first order ID is given the format #1001. Orders after that are incremented by 1 for each new order.

You cannot change the number that your orders begin at (1001), but to customize the format of your order IDs you can add or edit an order ID prefix or suffix.

Add or edit an order ID prefix

You can delete the # in the Prefix field or replace it with any characters A-Z, 0-9, or symbols. You can replace it with multiple characters if desired.

Steps:

Add or edit an order ID suffix

You can delete the # in the Suffix field or replace it with any characters A-Z, 0-9, or symbols. You can replace it with multiple characters if desired.

Steps:

Choose a new myshopify.com domain name

When you sign up for Shopify, your default myshopify.com domain name is generated for you. This domain will always display in your web browser's address bar when you're in your Shopify admin, and is the default storefront address that displays to your customers.

If you want to emphasize your brand to customers browsing your store, then you have a few other options:

• You can buy and add a custom domain. When you use a custom domain as your primary domain, your myshopify.com domain name isn't displayed to customers, and is used only by you and your staff when logging into your Shopify admin.
• You can choose a new myshopify.com domain name for free to display to customers, but you can do this only one time.

Caution

If you opt to use a custom domain for your storefront, then make sure that you record and keep your original myshopify.com domain name somewhere safe. After you change your primary domain from myshopify.com to your custom domain, you still need to use your original myshopify.com domain name to log in to your store and to identify your account when you contact Shopify Support.

Steps:

1. From your Shopify admin, go to Settings > Domains.
2. On the Domains page, click Change to a new myshopify.com domain next to your default domain name.
3. Enter a new name, and then click Add domain.

The new myshopify.com domain will automatically be set as the new primary domain, and the previous myshopify.com domain automatically redirects to the new one. No additional URL redirects need to be created.

Next steps

After your business information is set up, it's time to start building your store.