Welcome to Shopify! If I were starting from scratch today I’d keep things as simple as possible.
Dawn is a great free theme its fast mobile-friendly and easy to customize.
Organize products the way customers naturally shop and avoid creating too many collections.
Include a clear hero banner featured collections best sellers and trust elements like shipping returns and contact information.
Keep your main menu clean and easy to follow. Customers should be able to find any product in just a few clicks.
Always preview your store on a phone before publishing since most visitors will likely come from mobile devices.
For conversions focus on high quality product photos detailed descriptions, customer reviews, and clear shipping and return policies.
Getting these basics right will have a bigger impact than adding lots of apps.
Don’t try to nail all six of these at once, that’s the fastest way to stall on your first store, and specifically ignore “conversions and sales” for now, because you can’t optimise conversions before you have any traffic or orders to learn from, that part comes later with real data. For what matters at the start: use Dawn as your theme, it’s free, fast, mobile-friendly out of the box and the most reliable for a beginner (skip Horizon for now, the newer theme has had bugs recently).
For collections, keep it simple and group products the way a customer would actually shop, by type or use, a few clear collections beats twenty, and use automated collections so they fill themselves. Your homepage needs just three things: a clear hero saying what you sell with one main button, then a featured collection or your best products, then some trust like reviews or a few USPs, don’t cram it. Keep the nav short and flat, a handful of items matching your collections with an obvious path to products.
Mobile is mostly handled by Dawn, so just test on your own phone and keep images light and apps minimal so it stays fast. Since you’re selling into Ireland and Europe, set your currency to EUR and get your VAT settings right early. The biggest beginner mistake is launching with placeholder content and half-finished pages, so get real products, photos and descriptions in before you send anyone to it. If you’d like a hand getting the structure and homepage set up cleanly so you’re not guessing your way through it, that’s exactly what I do, happy to help.
Hope that helps! If it did, a Like and Marking it as Solution goes a long way and helps others find the fix faster too.
It’s quite good. When questions arise, do a quick search here. You’re almost never the first one to have had your problem. The forum is gold for things like how to start, what to do with images, setting up emails, and lots more. There are experts here too, who are happy to help you, should you have other problems.
For a free theme, I would recommend starting with the Horizon theme. It provides a modern and flexible foundation and is a good option for building a clean, professional Shopify store.
For your store structure, try to keep things simple. Create clear collections based on your main product categories and avoid adding too many menu items. Your main navigation could include Home, Shop, your key product categories, About Us, and Contact.
For the homepage, I would focus on a clear hero section with your main value proposition, featured collections, best-selling products, key benefits, customer reviews or social proof, and trust information such as shipping and returns.
Since you are targeting customers in Ireland and Europe, make sure your shipping information, delivery times, returns policy, currency, and contact details are easy to find. I would also recommend testing the entire shopping journey on mobile, as mobile usability can have a big impact on conversions.
My main advice is not to install too many apps or over-design the store in the beginning. Launch with a simple structure, track customer behaviour and conversion data, and then make improvements based on actual data.
If you need any help with Shopify development or setting up your store structure, feel free to reach out. I’d be happy to guide you.