View Orders
Change username / password
Edit admin settings
Affiliates program
Edit categories
Edit products
Edit product options
Edit quantity pricing
Discounts and coupons
Client login / wholesale pricing
Edit States
Edit Countries
Edit Postal Zones
UPS Shipping
Edit Payment Providers
Edit Order Status
Drop shippers / Designers / Manufacturers
IP Blocking
Troubleshooting
 

»  View Orders
When orders start coming into your online store, you can view the details here. Using the date selections up top you can view a list or all orders for different date ranges. Orders that have an authorization code are shown in black, but those that have not are shown in red. This could be because your customer gave up before making payment at the payment processor. It could also be however that they did make payment, but did not make it back to your store to complete the order for some reason. Check with your payment processor to make sure.

To see the complete details for an individual order click on the order ID. Here you will see the shipping details, tax and order totals...

»  Change username / password
The default username and password for the online web administration is mystore / changeme. For security reasons you are encouraged to change this as soon as possible.

»  Edit admin settings
This should probably be the first page to visit in setting up your store. On this page you can set the general attributes of your online store such as your email address for sale notification and the URL of your online store - the URL will generally be the same as your domain unless you have placed the store in a folder on your site. You can also choose your shipping options as well as the number of items to display per page and whether or not you want to use the stock management feature. If you decide to use it then you will need to set a number of hours that a product becomes unavailable if it is added to someone else's cart. During the set time nobody else can order the last item available in stock if another customer has placed the item in their cart. An "Out of Stock" message will appear by default - if the purchaser leaves the store without purchasing the product will again become available after the time you have chosen....

»  Affiliate program
The built in affiliate program allows you to offer partners a commission on orders made through a link to your store. The amount you pay out is completely up to you. Affiliate sales can be monitored through the affiliate admin page and payments made depending on the deal you would like to offer....

»  Edit categories
Your products are organized into categories by default, such as socks could be in the clothing category. If you only have a few products and do not want to take advantage of this feature then instead of making your main "Products" link to categories.php, just make it to products.php. Then, define just one category to put all your products into...more on the categories set up.

»  Edit products
This is where you can setup the details about the products you wish to sell online. The first screen will show a list of the products you have in your database. Normally products will be shown in bold black type, but if a product is configured to not have a "Buy" button, then it will be shown in red. If it is configured to not be shown on the store at all, then it will be shown in "strikethrough".

If you chose the "New Product" or "Modify Product" options you will be given a screen to edit the product options. Certain options such as the product reference number, price, section and name are obligatory and are therefore marked with a red asterix. Please note that the references to the product images are just references. You must upload them to your site via ftp. If you add a large image or long description then in the products page a link will be automatically shown to a "product details" page which will show this extra product information. There may be more or less information shown on this page depending on the shipping options you have chosen, such as the product weight. So, it is probably best to set your shipping options before setting up your products...

»  Edit product options
Product options are such things as the choice of different sizes for one of your products, or the product color for instance. To be able to select a product option in the Edit products admin page, you must first have set them up here. The fields are the Option Name, which is the one shown to your customers on the store. Then you have the Working Name. This can be useful if you have several different products which use the same Option Name, like "size", but have different settings, like (small,medium,large) for your T-Shirt sizes and (8,9,10,11) for your shoe sizes. Having a working name like "size (shoes)" and "size (tshirts)" means that you can distinguish them in the store admin section. The options themselves should be listed in the Options boxes in the order you wish them to appear. There is also the possiblity of having a "price difference" to the product base price. So for instance if chosing the X-Large option adds an extra one dollar to the product price, then just enter a 1 in the box corresponding to that option. If you do not wish to use this feature, just leave this box blank or zero. On your store the price change will show in real time.

The "New Text Input Option" allows you to provide a field for the purchaser to add their own information, so for example if you were selling domain names, the client could type in the name they were wanting to order.

If you have problems adding the product options to products, try going to your admin main page and look for the "Admin Tweaks" section. Then make sure "Use simple product options display" is selected. This will only affect your admin section pages by the way, as some browser configurations, notably on a Macintosh have problems with the advanced javascript used. The publicly viewable pages will not be affected and are compatible with all browser configurations....

»  Edit quantity pricing
In version 4.7.0 we introduced the option of quantity pricing. This means you can adjust the price depending on the number of items of a particular product purchased. Check the box on the quantity pricing page if you want to show a drop down menu of all product ids you have available when setting up the price breaks. Leaving the box unchecked means that you will have to enter the product id manually. You can make your customers aware of the price breaks offered by adding the details to the product description.

»  Discounts and coupons
Discounts and coupons are powerful marketing tools that allow you to give your clients special offers on products or categories, allow wholesalers to purchase at special rates, provide incentives through your offline advertising or help clear "difficult to sell" stock amongst many other uses....

»  Client login / wholesale pricing
In Version 4.2.0 we introduced the customer login feature. This allows for wholesale pricing / tax / shipping exemption for login customers and page protection. This means it is possible to offer retail and wholesale pricing without the need for a second database as well as offering tax and shipping exemption to particular users. You can also restrict access to certain pages of your site...more on the customer login feature.

»  Edit States
The store software displays a list of the US states in the checkout phase, and on this page you are given the option of supporting that state, and if shipping to that state incurrs any State Taxes. It is possible to replace the US states with the counties / provinces etc of several countries by downloading and installing the relevant regional plug-in available .

»  Edit Countries
The store software displays a list of worldwide countries in the checkout phase, and their attributes can be edited here. Firstly you can chose if you wish to ship to the country at all. Be careful when deciding this as it is tempting to support every country to increase sales, but unfortunately some also attract more fraudulent orders than others. Country tax can be set on this page also. The figure is expressed as a percentage, so for instance if a country incurrs 16% tax, then just enter 16 in the box provided.
The position can be used to set the order the countries are displayed in the checkout drop down. "On Top" will put that country on the top of the list. "On Top of Top" will put that country above that even. This means that you can have the "United States" above the "United Kingdom", and then the rest in the usual alphabetical order.
If you have chosen "Weight based shipping" you are also given the option to set the shipping zone that applies to that country. We have ordered the countries roughly into the United States, the Americas, Europe and the rest of the world, but do examine these carefully for the countries you decide to ship to.

FSA This setting only applies to "Free Standard Shipping". It enables you to set free shipping only for orders within a particular country. Only those countries checked will be eligible for free standard shipping. Remember that a rule will have to be set up first in your discount admin page for this to apply....

»  Edit Postal Zones
This option is only shown if you have chosen Weight Based shipping. The first screen is a "named" list of the zones you wish to support. The names are for your own purposes only really, and can be anything like "Zone 1", "Europe", "Eastern Europe" or whatever has meaning for you. Once you have added some zone names and clicked submit, go back to this page and you will see that there is a link "Edit Zone Rules" next to the zone names. The first column is a list of weight limits. The second column is a list of costs. The actual scale of the weight limits is irrelevant really and can have any meaning you wish, such as grammes, kilogrammes, pounds etc. So you can set a list of rules as follows
 

Max Weight	Charge
0.2	0.3
0.5	0.5
1	0.9
5	2

This would mean that any product whose weight you have set up to 0.2 would be charged at $0.30. Any product weight up to and including 0.5 would have a shipping charge of $0.50 and so on until the highest weight in the table. For products above the highest weight in the table you can set the system to add say an extra 50 cents for every 1 weight unit above the highest weight. If you wish the highest weight in the table to in fact be the highest shipping charge then just enter zero for the "For every 0 above the highest weight, add an extra 0".

»  Price based shipping
This option follows the same rules as weight based shipping as described above with the obvious difference that we are referring to maximum price rather than maximum weight. After editing your list of rules you'll need to apply the rules on the countries admin page.

»  Shipping methods
"Edit USPS Shipping Methods" and "Edit UPS Shipping Methods" only show up if you turn on USPS or UPS shipping. This is to limit the shipping methods available for USPS and UPS.

»  UPS Shipping
More information can be found on the UPS set up page.

»  Edit Payment Providers
The payment providers allowed by the sytem are shown on this page. You will need a valid account with the payment provider, and once you have that you need to enter the account details on these pages. The "Email" option means that no payment is taken for that particular order, and only details of the order are recorded in the database. It is useful for taking orders where payment will be taken later, and also for testing the system prior to going live.
Payment options that are operative are shown in Bold. Those that are in demo mode are shown in red. Please note that there is actually no demo mode available for PayPal. They recommend setting up a cheap (say 1 cent) product for testing..

»  Edit Order Status
This is where you can set the status of your order and the default options are unauthorized, cancelled, deleted, authorized, packing, shipping, shipped, completed. It is possible to change these values in the Admin Order Status page to give a clearer message to the public if they choose to view the status of their order.
Using Internet Explorer on a PC there is a quick method for changing lots of order status at once. If you say change an orders status to "Shipped" and hold down the Ctrl key the all the orders on that page will have the status changed to shipped. This is not available on other browsers....

»  Drop shipping
Here you can group products per manufacturer etc., keep track of the sales per group and allows the ability of email notification when a particular order is ordered through your store. This may be the drop shipping company, a manufacturer, a contributor or anyone really you need to notify of a sale.
Once you have set up the accounts for each entity you can then choose who needs to be notified from the drop down box on the corresponding product admin page.
Sales can then be tracked through the drop shipper admin page...

»  IP blocking
If you need to block someone using a particular or range of IP numbers then you can set them up here. Use this function sparingly so as not to block legitimate users. Visitors who are blocked will not be able to complete the checkout process.