How to Start an Online Shop in 2026, Using Ours as the Map

Somewhere between the third time a friend asks where you got that and the fourth sketch of a logo on a napkin, the thought arrives. I could sell this. Maybe it’s a thing you make. Maybe it’s a thing you find, and keep finding, before anyone else does.

We had that thought too, and the result is the Moss & Fog Shop: a small, curated store of design objects, books, printables and things from makers we can name, packed by hand in Portland. It runs on Shopify. So rather than write a generic guide, we’re going to walk you through how to start an online shop using ours as the map, screenshots and all, including a few lessons we learned the slow way.

A quick note: links to Shopify in this piece are affiliate links. If you start a store through one, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. The products shown are from our own shop.

Before you open Shopify

The software is the easy part now. A store can be live in an afternoon. What takes longer, and matters more, is arriving with answers. Spend an evening on these five.

Decide how you’ll fill the shelves

There are four honest ways to stock a small shop, and ours uses all four. Most stores start with one. Here’s what each feels like from the inside.

Make it yourself

Nothing protects a shop like a product nobody else has. Our Geometric Tray comes out of HATCHBACK, the little studio inside Moss & Fog where we 3D print objects in house, which means we control the color, the finish and when the next batch happens. The trade is time. Every one you sell is one you have to make.

Carry makers you can name

Buying wholesale from small studios is how most curated shops begin, and marketplaces like Faire make it easy to order from hundreds of makers at once. The rule we hold ourselves to: if we can’t tell you who made it and why we picked it, it doesn’t go on the shelf. Senser Woodcraft’s balance stones earned their spot because they’re shaped and polished by hand and no two sets are quite the same.

Print to order

Print on demand services produce a mug or a tee only after someone buys it, so you hold no inventory and take no risk on sizes. Our ampersand mugs and shirts work this way. The margins are thinner and you can’t touch the product before it ships, so order a sample of everything before you list it.

Sell something digital

Printables, wallpapers, patterns, guides. A digital product never sells out, never needs a box, and can be made once and sold for years. Our Field Studies art prints are a set of downloadable landscapes in a riso style. Shopify delivers the files through a digital downloads app, and several good ones are free to start.

One from each shelf, so you can see what we mean:

Set up the store

Here’s the part that used to be hard and isn’t anymore. Sign up for Shopify, and you get three days free, then $1 a month for your first three months. After that, the Basic plan is $29 a month billed yearly, or $39 month to month. That’s where we sit, and for a shop our size it does everything we need: unlimited products, discount codes, gift cards, abandoned checkout emails and shipping labels at a discount.

Then, in this order:

• Pick a theme you’d change the least. Shopify has a handful of well-built free themes, and paid ones run a one-time fee. Choose for the photos you actually have. A theme built around huge lifestyle shots will punish you if all you have is phone pictures on a white table.
• Set your type and color, then stop. We use Instrument Serif for headings and a soft sage for buttons, and we carry the same choices onto this magazine so the two feel related. Two fonts and three colors is plenty.
• Connect a real domain. Ours lives at shop.mossandfog.com, a subdomain of the magazine, so readers know exactly where they are.
• Turn on Shopify Payments and test a real order. Buy something cheap from yourself with a real card, then refund it. You’ll see every email your customers will see.

Build the front page like a shop window

Think of your homepage as a window on a street people walk past quickly. It needs to say what kind of shop this is, show a few real things with real prices, and give people a door to walk through. Here’s what ours is doing right now, in late October.

The menu is the part we’d point a new shop owner to first. Department-store words like Home and Accessories tell people nothing about a small shop. Ours says Gifts, Makers, The Reading Room and The Mini Shop, because that’s how people actually browse here: by who they’re buying for, or by a mood. In Shopify, each of those is a collection, and collections can fill themselves automatically from tags, so a new product lands in the right aisles the moment you tag it. Our Reading Room started life as exactly that, one tag and a nice name.

Make every product page do its job

A product page has one task: help a stranger decide, alone, without picking the thing up. That means a photo they can trust, a name that says what it is, a price with no surprises, and words that sound like a person who owns one.

The description is where small shops win. Supplier copy is written to be pasted into a thousand stores, and it reads that way. Rewrite it. Name the maker. Say the material, the size in inches, and the one thing you noticed when you first held it. For the balance stones, that’s the small magnets set inside the wood, which let them stack in ways real stones never would. Then write alt text for every photo, a plain sentence describing what’s in the frame. It helps people using screen readers, and it’s how your products turn up in image search.

Shipping, returns and the boring pages

Nobody falls in love with a returns policy, but plenty of people leave a cart because they can’t find one. Write it plainly and put it in the footer. Same for shipping: say what it costs and how fast it leaves. We offer free US shipping over $50, and the cart shows a little bar that fills as you get closer, because a rule people can see works better than one they have to look up.

A warning we learned the honest way: international shipping from a small studio is expensive, often more than the item itself on a small order. Shopify will quote real carrier rates at checkout, which keeps you from losing money, but expect fewer overseas orders than you hope. Weigh every product accurately on a kitchen scale. A product listed at zero pounds will quote zero shipping, and you’ll pay the difference.

Getting your first customers

Opening the store is quiet. Nobody tells you how quiet. The shops that get past it give people a reason to come that isn’t the store itself.

Ours is this magazine. When we write about something we love, and we happen to stock it, we say so and link it. That’s the whole strategy, and it works because the writing comes first. You don’t need a magazine that’s been running since 2009. A newsletter, an Instagram account where you show the making, a Pinterest board of your product photos, or a booth at a weekend market will do the same job. Collect email addresses from day one, and check that the email signup box at checkout is set the way you want it. It’s in your checkout settings, and it’s easy to leave on the default without noticing. We’ve written more about choosing tools for the storytelling side in our guide to launching a website.

Questions we get

How much does it cost to start an online shop?

On Shopify, very little to begin: three days free, then $1 a month for three months. After that, Basic is $29 a month billed yearly. Budget separately for a domain (about $15 a year), any paid theme or apps, product samples, and your first round of packaging. Card payments cost 2.9% plus 30 cents per online sale on Basic. Prices are from Shopify‘s pricing page in October 2026.

Do I need inventory to start?

No. Print on demand and digital products both let you open with nothing on a shelf. Many shops start that way and add physical stock once they know what sells.

Can I sell digital downloads on Shopify?

Yes. You’ll add a free digital downloads app that delivers the file after purchase. We sell printable art, checklists and a wall calendar this way.

How long does it take to set up a Shopify store?

The store itself, a weekend. Photographing and writing ten good product pages, longer, and worth it. Give yourself two weeks from sign-up to opening day.

From our shelves

A few more things we’re glad we stock

If you build something, we’d love to see it! And if you’d like a look around the shop that taught us all this, the doors are open.

By Moss & Fog Staff