I signed up for a shop. Now what?

Well you did it. You finally signed up for a mall shop, got a username and password, logged in, now... huh? Where do you start?

I get this question quite often, so I thought I would list the things you need to do to get your store up and running.

First of all when you login to your mall account, you will see the What do I do next? link, under the general section. Click the link, and it should step you through everything you need to do to have enough data entered to get a shop up and running.

I will go through the things that the script checks for, which will hopefully give a better understanding of the big picture and help people who maybe are thinking of signing up but haven't yet...

Step 1. Edit your profile and just check that your email address etc is correct. Also check that the notifications are set the way you want - if they're all set to yes, you will get weekly emails. The "what do I do next" script doesn't check for this.

Step 2. The script checks that you have entered payment information. You can choose Paypal, Google Checkout, or Paypal Layaway. With Paypal Layaway, you set the terms - the downpayment now and the length of time in months to finish paying.

Step 3. Optional: Enter store departments.

Step 4. Add a new store. You can go back and edit your store as often as you like once you've created it.

Step 5. Play around with the theme manager a bit. This is where you can choose from pre-existing themes or make up your own. Here you will be setting the fonts and colours for different areas of the pages. It works with the store formats from step 4, and is set on the very last field of the Format section from the edit store page.

Step 6. Go back and edit your store, and choose a template that you like. Also make sure to specify a category for your store, this will ensure that it shows up on the Shop Page under the appropriate section, as well as under "All Stores."

Step 7. Add items to your store. Go to the items link and click the "Add New Items button." If your store is not yet open, it is safe to mark all your items as "on sale", this specifies that they will show up in the listing, not that they are offered at a discount. They won't show up in the listing of any closed store. If your store is already open, mark your items as "presale" until you are finished working on them.

Step 8. Preview your store. Check that the theme and format work ok for your logo and setup. Check that you can read the font against the background. Check that the payment methods are working - especially in the case of Google Checkout. You can do this by clicking on the Payment button (obviously don't buy your own item - Paypal won't let you, Google checkout probably won't either). If everything looks ok, you can open your store by going to the edit store page, and setting it's status to "Open". It's the 4th field down under the General tab.

Hopefully this will be helpful to some people. I will cover other topics such as the USPS Shipping Calculator and the Theme Manager in more detail in later posts.