Knowledge Base

Wherever you sell, you'll need to add some basic information about your business. You can leave out the online-specific details if you plan to sell only using Shopify POS.

Online store name

Your online store name is the name your customers will use to find your business. It's displayed on every page of your website and will look something like this:

To set or change your store name:

1. From your Shopify admin, click Settings (or press G S): 

   

2. In the Store details section, enter the name of your store in Store name text field.

3. Click Save.

Change your account email address

The account email is the address that you used when you signed up for Shopify. It's where we'll send your invoices, and where you'll receive .csv files if you export your products, orders, or customer lists. To edit your Shopify account email:

1. From your Shopify admin, click Settings (or press G S): 

   

2. In the  Store details section, change your email address under Account email. This will be the email that Shopify uses to contact you about your account:

   

3. Click Save.

Change your customer email address

The customer email is your customer-facing address. It's where your customers can contact you directly, and it's the address that's associated with the automatic notification emails they receive about their orders.

Your customer email's host settings determine what address your customers see as the sender in the automatic notification emails they receive from Shopify. If you want your own email address to appear, then you might need to update your domain's settings to follow Shopify's best practices. Otherwise, your store's notification emails might appear with a no-reply@shopify.com email address or be flagged as spam.

For the best customer experience, make sure you follow the customer email best practices.

To edit your customer-facing email address:

1. From your Shopify admin, click Settings (or press G S): 

   

2. In the Store details section, change your email address under Customer email:

   

3. Click Save.

Customer email best practices

Shopify uses the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) to verify your customer email address for the automatic notification emails that your customers receive. This prevents notification emails from being flagged as spam, removes the via Shopify note from the sender information, and displays your customer email address instead of no-reply@shopify.com in the sender field.

If you're using an email address that's associated with a custom domain, then check your domain settings or contact your domain provider to make sure that it isn't using DomainKey Identified Mail (DKIM) validation (which Shopify does not support). Otherwise you might receive Mail Delivery System errors like this one:

On Saturday, April 1, 2014 12:00 PM, Mail Delivery System <MAILER-DAEMON@shopify.com> wrote:

----- Forwarded Message -----

This is the mail system at host smtp.shopify.com.

I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below.

<youremailaddress@yahoo.com>: host mta6.am0.yahoodns.net[92.134.215.23] said:
    554 5.7.9 Message not accepted for policy reasons.  See http://postmaster.yahoo.com/errors/postmaster-28.html (in reply to end of
    DATA command)

Do I need to change my customer email settings?

If your customer email is a @gmail.com or @hotmail.com address, then you don't need to change your email settings. Your customer email already appears in Shopify's notification emails.

If your customer email is a @yahoo.com or @AOL.com address, then you need to switch to a different email provider before your customer email address is verified. Both @yahoo.com or @AOL.com use the DKIM specification, which isn't supported by Shopify.

If you're using an email address that's associated with a custom domain, then you need to add Shopify's Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record to your domain's DNS settings, and then check your domain settings or contact your domain provider to make sure that it isn't using DomainKey Identified Mail (DKIM) validation (which Shopify does not support).

Add Shopify's SPF record to your domain host (custom domains only)

To verify your customer email address, you need to add Shopify's SPF record — v=spf1 include:shops.shopify.com ~all — to the TXT record in your custom domain settings:

1. Log in to your domain hosting account.
2. Find your domain's TXT record. This usually appears beside the CNAME record and MX record.
3. Add Shopify's SPF record — v=spf1 include:shops.shopify.com ~all — to your domain's TXT record.
4. Save your changes.

Legal business name and address

This is the business address that will appear on your invoice. With the correct address listed on your Shopify invoice, you might be able to claim Shopify as a business expense:

1. From your Shopify admin, click Settings (or press G S): 

   

2. In the Store address section, update all of the relevant editable text fields:

   

3. Click Save.

Store timezone

1. From your Shopify admin, click Settings (or press G S): 

   

2. In the Standards and formats section, use the drop-down menu under Timezone to select a new timezone:

   

3. Click Save.

Select store currency

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

To choose a currency for your store to use:

1. From your Shopify admin, click Settings (or press G S): 

   

2. In the Standards and formats section, use the drop-down menu under Currency to select a new monetary unit:

   

   Tip

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

3. Click Save.

Displaying multiple currencies

With Shopify, you have the ability to show multiple currencies on your storefront for display purposes only. Your customers can check out only in the currency you set on your General settings page under the Standards and formats section:

Learn more about showing multiple currencies on your storefront ›.

If you want your customers to be able to checkout in different currencies, you'll need to open a second shop. Contact our support team for more information.

Default weight Unit

There are 4 default weight units that you can choose from:

• 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.

To change your Default Weight Value:

1. From your Shopify admin, click Settings (or press G S): 

   

2. In the Standards and formats section, use the Default Weight Unit drop-down menu to select the weight unit of your choice.

   

3. Click Save

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.

A 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, you will find a search engine section where you can input the information as you would like it to appear on search engine results pages:

Here's an example of a Shopify search result as it appears on a Google result page:

The title reads "Canada's Ecommerce Software Solution | Shopping Cart Software ..." Notice how Google shortened the title tag to 61 characters.

The full title tag used on that web page was:

Canada's Ecommerce Software Solution | Shopping Cart Software - Shopify Canada

Not all search engines will truncate after the same amount of characters, but most will truncate on a word, rather than in the middle of a word, to improve readability.

To set or update your home page metadata:

1. From your Shopify admin, click Online Store, and then click Preferences (or press G S W).

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.
   

3. 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 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 I not edit my HTML pages directly for this?

  The title tag only shows up in one file of your Shopify theme, and that is the file theme.liquid. That theme.liquid file is used on every single page of your website. The Liquid tag that outputs the title tag in your theme.liquid file is {{ page_title }}.

  Your website is not 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 inside your one theme.liquid file. The code will show up like so inside the head element in theme.liquid. If your SEO guy is not familiar with Liquid, point him to our guide to SEO for theme designers and as to this page.

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

  You will need to wait a couple of weeks for your edits to show up in search engine results. It may take a few weeks for search engines to crawl and re-index your content.

Password-protect your storefront

It is possible to set a password for your storefront so that only people with the password can access your store. This is useful if you don't want visitors to access your store while you are setting up, doing maintenance, or are selling only to select clients. The default setting for the storefront password on new stores is turned on.

To enable a storefront password:

1. From your Shopify admin, click Online Store, and then click Preferences (or press G S W).

2. In the Storefront password section, check the Password protect your storefront option:

   

3. Enter the password you want your customers to use in the Password text field and the message you want your customers to see in the Message for your visitors text field:

   

4. Click Save.

When customers go to your store's URL, they will have to enter the password you enabled to see your store.

Remove your storefront password

When you're ready to reveal your store to the world, you can remove your storefront password.

To remove your storefront password:

1. From your Shopify admin, click Online Store, and then click Preferences (or press G S W).

2. In the Storefront password section, uncheck the Password protect your storefront option:

   

3. Click Save.

Your store will no longer have a password on it, which means that anyone will be able to see your storefront now.

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:

• edit the prefix (#)
• add a suffix.

Edit the order ID format Prefix

1. From your Shopify admin, click Settings (or press G S): 

   

2. In the Standards and formats section, edit the Prefix text field:

   

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

3. Click Save.

Add an order ID format Suffix

1. From your Shopify admin, click Settings (or press G S): 

   

2. In the Standards and formats section, edit the Prefix text field:

   

   Enter the desired combination of characters: A-Z, 0-9, or symbols.

3. Click Save.