Add Shopify Lite to your existing website

One of the best ways to sell products on your White Fuse site is to create a Shopify Lite account for $9/m and embed your products right on your website. Most of the advertised Shopify plans come with a complete e-commerce website which you don't need if you already have a website.

Create a Shopify Lite account

The Shopify user interface can feel a bit overwhelming to begin with and there are lots of features that you probably won't need. The tips in this article will help you get set up with a basic implementation so you can embed products on your website.

Go to the Shopify Lite page and get started with a free trial. You'll need to step through a few questions before you're into your account. Once you're in there is a long list of suggestions and prompts for how to get started. Feel free to ignore these for now.

Create a collection

The best way to embed products on your website is to first create a collection. Then you can get the embed code for that collection and it will display all the products in that collection at once.

In the sidebar go to Products > Collections and click the Create collection button.
Give it a title, for example, 'Website shop page' and a description if you wish.
Under Collection type, it's usually best to select Manual but you can decide.
Click Save.

Create a product

Now create a product and add it to the collection you made.

In the admin sidebar in Shopify go to Products > All products and click the Add product button.
Add title, description, image and price.
Add a quantity greater than zero.
Explore the inventory, shipping and variants settings if you wish but you can come back to these later.
In the right-hand panel set the product status to Active.
Also in the right-hand panel go to Organisation > Collections and choose your collection.
Click Save at the top or bottom of the page.

Embed the collection on your website

To embed your collection of products on your website you first need to have a page ready. So if you don't already have one create a page for your shop on your website.

In the left-hand admin panel in Shopify go to Sales channels > Buy button. (If you don't see this click the + icon to add a sales channel).
Click Create a Buy button (this step works in chrome but can be temperamental in other browsers)
Click Collection buy button.
Choose your collection and click Select.
You can use the left-hand panel to customise how things will look once embedded on your site. You might like to change the colour of the buttons to match the colours of your site.
Click Next in the top right.
Click Copy code.

Now you need to embed this code on your website page.

Go to the page on your website where you would like the products.
Choose Add > Embed from the contextual toolbar.
Paste the embed code.
Click Save.

You should see your collection of products on the page.

Important note: There is currently a known limitation with embedding Shopify code. If you subsequently wish to edit this page the Shopify code will be forcibly removed. This is due to the security settings of the text editor. We are working on a solution to this. For now, the best thing to do is keep a copy of your collection embed code to hand in a text file. If you ever want to edit this page you will just need to paste the embed code back in again.