Websites equipped with an E-Commerce feature or online shop will have several unique areas in order to keep track of sales and products.
Store Sales
You can access the Store Sales tab from the Dashboard, at the very top of the menu.
From this tab you can see information on all aspects of the shop, product totals, sales totals, including a breakdown of total pending and closed sales, and most importantly a detailed list of sales.
On each sale, you have several attributes that you can change:
Status – You can manually set the status of the order via a drop-down box, effectively changing its position in the order process. This allows you to keep track of orders that have progressed manually (for example if you take an offline payment for an online order, you may change the status to Accepted Payment, then Job Dispatched when the customer picks it up). The system will progress itself automatically if the payment gateway reports a successful payment so you will know when a customer has paid online.
Tracking ID – You may add a tracking ID to the order if you are shipping via registered post, this is accessible by the customer when they log in to check their account.
Delete – You may delete orders that have been cancelled or are no longer relevant by clicking the big red X.
Products
You can access the product listings from the Dashboard menu, from here you can see a list of products and their basic details. From this screen you can Add products and Edit existing ones.
Adding Products
You can add products with the Add New button at the top of the Products page or the Add New button under Products in the sidebar menu, whichever is quickest.
On the Add New Product screen you can see various fields that may be filled out in order to detail a product. There are a few required ones though they will vary depending on your sites requirements, the most important fields are listed below:
Title – The title of the product, e.g. A.C.M.E. Anvil
Description – The large text area directly below the Title, useful for detailing product information.
Categories – To the right of the screen under the Publish button, Categories select where the product will appear on the site, we usually set up the desired categories for each site, though you can add more using the + Add New Product Category button, entering a title (e.g Equipment for flattening rabbits) and selecting a Parent Category. Simply place a tick in the checkbox of the desired categories (You may select more then one).
Variations – Variations have to be set up prior to adding products, you can do so in the Variations tab on the left menu under Products. Product variations are set up depending on the type of product, for example if you have an A.C.M.E. Anvil, you may want variations of 100kg, 200kg, 500kg and 1,000,000kg. We can select variations here after saving the product first (Technical reasons).
Price Control – Add a price with the fields provided, by default leave sale price as 0.00 unless you are having a sale.
Stock Control – You can add an SKU to the product, useful for syncing to an external database like your accounting software. You can also add a finite number on a particular item by pressing the “I have limited stock for this Product” check box and entering a number in the field below.
Product Images – You may add images to a products page with the Manage Product Images button, see Working with images for more information on how to manage this.
Once you are finished with these fields, you can press the Publish button (blue button at the top) and save your product.
Editing Products
If you wish to change the details of a product, browse to the Product list from the sidebar menu Products.
Select the title of the product you wish to modify, follow the instructions above for information on each field, then press Publish.
