Need a Shopify store, for free? One without a time-limited trial, that allows you to work on it until you get the hang of it and can afford a monthly subscription?
You're in the right place.
When starting your Shopify store, the first way to limit costs is not to pay for Shopify immediately. There are two ways to do that:
You can start with a free store for an unlimited period, or you can get started on a limited free trial.
More...
Get Shopify Free (Without a Time Limit)
I'm talking about a Shopify store that's free until you decide you are ready to pay! It's called a Shopify Development Store, and it's pretty cool.
How to Get Your Free Shopify Store
1. To start a development store, you need one of two things:
- Someone like me to set it up for you. You can request that here.
- Your own Shopify Partner account. Create that here
The next step applies if you're starting your own Partner account. Otherwise you can skip to Step 3.
2. Create your development store, following Shopify's instructions below:
3. Pick a theme. There are plenty of good free ones from Shopify's theme store. Check them out here
Don't overthink it on this one. Keep it simple. The more complex your theme, the more images, videos, and other content you might need just to fill it out.
4. Add your content.
Start with product images, videos, and descriptions. Make at least one blog funnel for your main product.
5. Make your store live, and start testing it.
- Go through each page, check that all your links and menus work and that there aren't any theme placeholders left blank.
- Run some test payments with the fake gateway
- Run a test transaction with your real gateway.
Why Use a Development Store?
When you build your store, you may not get everything done in 14 days (the standard trial period). If you only have 14 days, you may end up having to start a Shopify Plan subscription just to finish your store.
With a development store, you can spend more time getting content loaded, driving traffic, and spreading the word before you have to pay.
I always tell my clients to get content on their store before they pay. Catchy product descriptions, good photos, and blog content are three things that every store should have before spending a lot of money on the store or on advertising.
This dev store will give you the ability to do all of that.
Get your free dev store today, set up by me.
More details and signup here:
What is a Shopify Development Store?
A development (dev) store allows you to do almost everything you can do with the Shopify Advanced plan, but on an unlimited trial basis.
With a dev store, you can:
- Pick your theme, and customize it
- Create unlimited products, and build the product pages
- Process up to 50 test orders
- Add a blog, landing pages, contact pages, and more
- Add in text, images, and videos to your product pages and blog
- Create collections (like categories) of your store's items to make a complete shopping experience
- Set up payout options
- Set up email notifications for your customers and staff
- Install and set up free apps (and some paid apps - as allowed by the app developer)
- Build required pages from templates (privacy policy, return policy, terms of service, etc.)
- Create navigation menus
- and much more!
