Adding the E-commerce Store add-on gives you more than a product list and an order log. Your store area has a full set of tools for running the shop day to day. Here's what each one is for.
Your catalog
- Products — what you sell, with images, prices, and variants. Covered in managing products and orders.
- Categories — how shoppers browse. Good categories matter more as your product count grows.
- Brands — useful when you stock several makers and people shop by brand.
- Inventory — stock levels, with a log of how they changed, so you can see what sold and what was adjusted by hand.
Selling
- Orders — every order and where it has got to, from placed through to shipped.
- Customers — who has bought from you, with their addresses and history.
- Coupons — discount codes, as a percentage or a fixed amount, for promotions and win-backs.
- Reviews — customer reviews that you approve before they appear, so your product pages carry real feedback without being open to abuse.
Getting orders to people
- Shipping — zones and methods, so buyers in different places see the right options and prices.
- Tax — rules that apply the correct tax for where you and your customers are.
- Payments — how you take money, configured per store.
Understanding how it's going
Reports pull the rest together: what sold, when, and what it brought in. Read them as trends rather than single days, in the same way as your site analytics.
Store settings
The Store page holds the settings that apply everywhere — your store's details, its currency, how the account and cart buttons appear on your site, and the cart hold duration.
A sensible order to set things up
- Store settings — details and currency first, since prices depend on them.
- Tax and shipping — so checkout totals are right from your very first order.
- Categories and brands — before products, so you can file each one as you add it.
- Products and stock.
- Payments — then place a test order yourself before you announce anything.
- Coupons and reviews — once you're actually selling.
Stuck on a step, particularly tax or payments? Open a ticket from support.