ecommerce software

Overview
- Summary
- Tips & Ideas
- Get Started
- Store Setup/Management

Setup Tab
- Summary
- General Settings
- Payments
- Taxes
- Shipping
- Multi Language Stores - FAQs

Catalog Tab
- Summary
- Category Setup
- Product Filters
- Product Variants
- Add a Product
- Clone a Product
- Import/Export Products

Site Content
- Summary
- Custom Pages
- Adding News
- Viewing News
- Product Ratings/Reviews

Marketing Tab
- Summary
- Cart Discounts
- Discount Coupons
- Newsletter
- About Froogle
- About Shopping.com
- Survey Questions at Checkout
- Banners
- About IntelliContact
- About Del.icio.us
- Product Promotion
- Search Engine Optimization
- Multi Language Stores - FAQs

Reports Tab
- Summary
- Sales Reports
- Website Statistics

Orders Tab
- Summary
- Order Management

Stock Tab
- Summary
- Product Stock Record
- Quick Product Stock Guide

Members Tab
- Summary
- Online Store Members
- Add a Member
- Newsletter
- Export Store Members

Other
- Getting Help
- Setup your Email Accounts

General Settings



First Time Basic Setup - General Settings



The first thing you will need to do when setting up an e-commerce store is to set up the general store settings. This section will guide you through the simple steps you need to follow. Read through it and complete the basic setup of your e-store's main page in a just few minutes!

In order to do so, access the general settings administration panel from the "Setup > General" tab:

Figure: Setup your e-store's general settings by choosing "Setup > General" in the Administration Panel.

You are now in the General settings page. You will notice that this page is organised in two different sections: one for defining your language depended settings and another for organizing general settings common for all languages. Each section has several fields that need to be filled in so we will go through each one of them explaining what you need to do.

Language depended settings:

The first section in the General settings page will be used to define basic information about your company such as Company name, Company address etc. This information is given by filling in the following form:

Figure: Setting up the basic, language-depended information for an e-commerce store.

Company Name: Enter your company's name. This will be used in the emails that will automatically be sent to your customers once they have placed an order, as well as in the emails notifying your customers about the status of their order.

Company Country: Choose the country your company is registered in from the drop down menu. This will appear as the default country in the "quick calculation tool" drop down menu and in the checkout forms.

Shop Name: Enter the name of your e-commerce store. This will appear as the homepage name on your browser's title bar:

Figure: Shop Name will appear as the homepage name on the browser's title bar.

Shop Logo: Use the browser button to load your logo image. Make sure the image is 150-250 pixels long (depending on the shape), no bigger than 30K in size and is in a GIF or JPG format. This will appear at the top of your e-store pages:

Figure: Shop Logo will appear at the top of the e-store's front-end.

Site Description: In this field you enter the description of your site that will be used in metatags. Metatags are information embedded into the HTML source of a Web page. Their purpose is to provide search engines with information about the contents of a page and will achieve a higher ranking of your e-store in search engines. Try providing as a complete description as possible.

Keywords: In this field you enter the keywords that will be used in metatags. Metatags are information embedded into the HTML source of a Web page. Their purpose is to provide search engines with information about the contents of a page and will achieve a higher ranking of your e-store in search engines. Provide a comma separated list of keywords/phrases and try thinking of all possible queries potential customers would place in a search engine.

Homepage Content: Use this field to enter general information that will appear on your e-store's homepage. This could be a welcome message or a description of your e-commerce store.
The Magnet Commerce homepage content editor comes with many of the powerful functionalities of known desktop editors (text editing and formatting, insert options etc). You can use the powerful toolbar provided or right click on the text editor box to get a menu with numerous options for inserting, text editing and formatting. For example, using the insert tab, you could insert images, videos, pdf documents etc.


Figure: Homepage Content will appear at the e-store's front-end homepage.


Footer: Enter the text that you want to appear at the bottom of every page of your e-store. Keep this short.

 

Figure: Footer will appear at the bottom of the e-store's front-end homepage.



General settings common for all languages:

The second section in the general settings page will be used for settings that are common for all languages. This section consists of 2 parts: one for defining your email addresses, weight unit and thumbnail properties and another for enabling more than one currency for your online store.


The first part looks as follows:

Figure: General store settings, common for all languages


Sales Email: Enter the mail address/addresses that the sales notifications will be sent to. Use semicolons to separate multiple addresses. The first of these addresses will also appear as the sender in all emails sent to the customers (order status notifications, newsletters, password reminders etc.).


SMS Notification Number: Enter a mobile phone number where you will be receiving new order notifications via SMS. The number format to use is: Country Code + Area Code + Phone Number, for example: 447799999999 for the UK or 19080808080 for the USA. Please note that you will need credits for this service. To purchase credits use the link indicated.

Weigh Unit: Enter the Weight Unit you want the weight of an order to be in.

Thumbnail Size: Enter the size of the Thumbnails (these will be automatically created from the original image). Thumbnails appear in pages showing category lists, search results etc. The first field refers to the width and the second one to the height of the Thumbnail. Be careful not to insert a value exceeding 175 pixels!

Mini Thumbnail Size: Enter the size of the Variants Thumbnail (these are used to show the variants of a product or related products at the side of a product's page). The first field refers to the width and the second one to the height of the Thumbnail. Be careful not to insert a value exceeding 50 pixels!

About Thumbnails and Mini Thumbnails:

When uploading a product image, two smaller versions of this image are automatically created: Thumbnails and Variants Thumbnail.
-- The original image is used on product pages, if such a setting is defined, and in pop up windows showing the product when clicking on a product's Thumbnail.
-- Thumbnails appear in pages showing category lists, search results etc
-- Mini Thumbnails are even smaller than Thumbnails and are used to show the variants of a product or related products at the side of a product's page.

! If you redefine the size of Thumbnails or Mini Thumbnails, the size of images already added will not change. The new sizes will only apply to the images you will be adding after the change is saved.

Thumbnail Quality: Enter the quality of the Thumbnails to be sent. This is a percentage of the initial Thumbnail quality. The lower the percentage, the faster you will download and view the images.

Enable Reviews / Rating: Enable the product review and rating functionality on all your store's product pages.

Allow Backorders: Allow your customers to order your products even if they are out of stock. If you allow backorders and a product is out of stock, its stock status appears as "Backorders allowed" on the storefront.


The second part is used for enabling currencies for your online store:

Figure: Enabling currencies for your e-store

The multi currency functionality will increase user friendliness by allowing your customers to choose a currency for your e-store!
To set this up you will first need to let us now of your preferred default currency (choose any of the following: US Dollar, GB Pound, Euro, Canadian Dollar, Australian Dollar, New Zeeland Dollar or Swiss Franc). This will be shown as the chosen currency under the Default list. You can then enable any other currencies you would like to include on your e-store by ticking the respective check box in the Enable list. Additionally use the Rate text boxes to set the exchange rate of each currency against the default one and define the display for each currency in the Display box.


! Whether you are using the multi-currency functionality or just the default currency on your store front, the default currency must remain enabled (the enable box of your default currency must be ticked at all times)!!

When all general settings are defined click on "Update Setup" to apply your changes to your online store.

Having enabled the currencies shown in the previous figure, the following drop down menu will appear on you online store. Your customers can choose any of the currencies available for viewing the product prices and performing an order.

Figure: Multi-currency feature on the store front



Summary:

To setup the basic features of your homepage go to the General settings page by choosing "Setup > General" in the Administration Panel .

Define the basic language depended features of your homepage (Company Name and Address, Site Logo etc.) by filling in the first form in the General settings page.

Fill in the second form for defining general settings common for all languages. Here you can define the email address/addresses that new order notifications will be sent to, the size and quality of the image thumbnails and the weight unit that will be used to explain the order.

Use the third form to enable more that one currency for your online store.