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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.
You also have the option to dump the orders to a CSV file, this
can be opened in Excel so you can save or print the information
regarding your orders...more
information
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...more
on the admin settings.
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...more
on the affiliate program.
View ratings
Product reviews are a great way of providing on-topic content,
useful to both customers and search engines alike. As they are provided by
visitors and reviewed by the store owner before publishing you can be guaranteed
fresh and relevant copy for your store. To turn on this feature you will need
to add the following to vsadmin/includes.asp enablecustomerratings=TRUE
...more
on the product review feature
Gift certificate management
The Gift Certificate feature allows your customers to purchase
a gift certificate on your store for the amount of their choice and send it
on to their chosen recipient. The difference
between the value of the certificate and the product(s) added to cart is calculated
and the difference recorded accordingly. The recipient is notified via an email
which includes a personalized message and the code they will need to enter
on checkout to redeem the gift certificate...
more on gift certificates
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.asp,
just make it to products.asp. 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 under the categories you have chosen.
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 asterisk.
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. more
on the product admin settings
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 possibility
of having a "price difference" to the product base price.
So for instance if choosing 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...more
on the product option settings
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...how
to set them up in your admin section.
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.
Email message admin
From version 5.6 headers and footers for the order emails and
dropshippers can be formatted through the control panel rather than going through
vsadmin/includes.asp. It is also possible to change the order status email
as well as the ones sent to the buyer and receiver of a gift certificate. These
can be used in conjunction with the FCK
HTML editor on our free downloads page...more
on the email message admin.
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 incurs 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 here.
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
incurs 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....more on coupons and
discounts.
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 grams, kilograms, 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.
More shipping help
Edit Payment Providers
The payment providers allowed by the system 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...more
on the payment providers settings
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.....more
on the admin orders page
Edit Manufacturers
This is where you can add new manufacturers. Once
you have them set up you can assign them to products in the products
admin page, choosing from the drop down list. These can be added
to help narrow down the search on your search page - to do this
you will need to add
searchbymanufacturer="Manufacturer"
to vsadmin/includes.asp and to show the manufacturer
field on the products page, add
manufacturerfield="Manufacturer"
...more
information on manufacturers
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...more
on the drop shipping settings
Mailing List Management
This is the page where you can administer the sign-ups
for your mailing list. You can confirm, modify, add and delete
users as well as sending out text or html based emails. The newsletter
feature is designed for small to medium sized lists so shouldn't
be used if you have many thousands of members. To see how it all
fits together, please take a look at our tutorial
and help 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.
CSV
upload
From version 5.1.0 it is possible to update your database, and upload
new
products
to
your
database
from
a windows CSV file. (This is the kind that would be generated from Excel.)
Browse to the location of your CSV
file and click submit. You can choose "Add
to database" to add new products to the database or "Update database" to
update the products in the database.
The first row in the CSV file must be a list of database columns. The columns
available are . . .
pID
pName
pSection
pImage
pImage2
pImage3
pImage4
pImage5
pLargeImage
pLargeImage2
pLargeImage3
pLargeImage4
pLargeImage5
pGiantImage
pGiantImage2
pGiantImage3
pGiantImage4
pGiantImage5
pPrice
pWholesalePrice
pListPrice
pShipping
pShipping2
pWeight
pDisplay
pSell
pExemptions
pInStock
pDims
pTax
pDropship
pStaticPage
pStockByOpts
pRecommend
pOrder,pSKU
pManufacturer
pDescription
pLongDescription
pDownload (Only if using the digital downloads plug-in)
Most will have sensible defaults so you only need specify the
fields you require, but you should normally set pDisplay and pSell
to 1 and you must have a pID specified for the product id. The
pSection column currently has to be the numeric id of the product
section which you can find on the admin categories page.
You should be able to dump the "full inventory", edit
this and reimport it. However you cannot currently reimport the
stock inventory.
Please also note this is for small to medium sized CSV files of
up to around 3 thousand to 5 thousand products.
NOTE
If your product ID begins with zeros then to avoid them being truncated, try
the following
Open Excel and create a new blank worksheet.
Go to Data -> Import External Data -> Import Data.
Browse to your CSV file and open it.
In the text import wizard step 1, choose "Delimited".
In step 2, in "Delimiters" check "Comma" and uncheck all
others.
In step 3, with your pID column selected set the column data format to "Text" then
click "Finish".
You will be asked where you want to put the data and just accept the default.
Troubleshooting
If you can't find the solution to your questions here, please
take a look at the following pages:
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