Set Up Your Shopify Store

Now that you've picked your niche, it's time to get your store up and running. This is easier than you think — you can have a working Shopify store connected to ProdUp in about 20 minutes.

Create your Shopify account

Head to shopify.com and start a free trial. You don't need a credit card to get started.

A few tips for the setup:

Store name — Pick something that fits your niche but isn't too specific. "FitGear" works for fitness products. "JohnsFitnessResistanceBands" doesn't.
Email — Use an email you check regularly. Shopify sends important notifications here.
Skip the setup wizard — Shopify will try to walk you through their setup. You can skip most of it since ProdUp will handle the heavy lifting.

Connect ProdUp to your store

Once your Shopify store is created:

Sign up at ProdUp if you haven't already
Go to your ProdUp dashboard
Click "Connect Store" and enter your Shopify store URL (the yourstore.myshopify.com one)
Shopify will ask you to approve the connection — click "Install"

That's it. ProdUp can now push products and pages directly to your Shopify store.

Basic Shopify settings

Before you start adding products, configure these basics in your Shopify admin:

Payments — Set up Shopify Payments (or Stripe/PayPal if Shopify Payments isn't available in your country). You need this to accept orders.

Shipping — Set up at least one shipping zone. For dropshipping, you'll usually offer free shipping (build it into your product price) or flat-rate shipping.

Store currency — Make sure it matches your target market. If you're selling to US customers, use USD.

Legal pages — Shopify can auto-generate a Privacy Policy and Terms of Service from your admin. Go to Settings → Legal and generate these. You'll need them before running ads.

Pick a theme (or don't)

Here's the thing — if you're using ProdUp to build your product pages and storefront, you don't need to spend hours picking the perfect Shopify theme. ProdUp generates complete, conversion-optimized pages that get published directly to your store.

That said, a clean default theme (like "Dawn," which comes free with Shopify) works great as a base. ProdUp's pages will override the product page templates anyway.

What you should have now

At this point, you should have:

✅ A Shopify store with a name and URL
✅ Payment processing set up
✅ Basic shipping configured
✅ ProdUp connected to your store

You're ready to start adding products. Let's do that in the next step.