Now that you have added your product catalog, as well as payment and shipping methods to your store, it is time to test that everything works. Go through all the tasks listed here and pay attention to any errors.

If you want, you can ask someone else to test whether everything in your online store works properly. This could be very useful, because an outside person can give you fresh feedback regarding the organization of your product catalog, for example.

It is recommended to test your online store whenever you make substantial changes to it (adding a significant number of products, changing shipping or payment methods, or adding a new language version, etc.).

Finding products

In this section, you will make sure that the products that you added to your online store can be easily found by your customers in places that make sense. If your store's visitors cannot find products easily, they most likely will not buy them.

Browsing

It is best to ask an outside person to test browsing, because most likely you remember your store's categories too well, and will not be able to see them from a potential customer's point of view.

Try to find the products you created by using the store's navigation. If you or the test person have easily found all the products (in case you added more than one), most probably your customers will be able to find them as well.

Some visitors may only browse through your online store, just as if they were walking around a shopping center. In such case, it is important that the products are easily visible when browsing.

If it is difficult or not possible at all to find a product while browsing, try the following:

  • Check whether the product has been added to a category. If it doesn't belong to any category, it won't be possible to find it by browsing.
  • Provide your categories with clear names and organize the categories logically.
  • Add the product to multiple categories, if it makes sense to do so. For example clothes can be categorized according to several qualities (material, usage, model etc.).
  • Add a brand to the product, if you still haven't done it. It adds a new potential channel, through which the product may be found by your customers.
  • Add an illustrative and clear image for to the product. The name and image are the first product-related things that a visitor sees in the MyCashflow default theme.

Searching

Test your online store's search functionality: use the search field with terms that your customers might use to find your products. Note that your customers may not necessarily use product names to look for products. If the product can be found by using several search terms, your customers will likely find it too.

If the product cannot be found by searching, you can make it easier to find in the following ways:

  • Choose a keyword that will most probably be used to find this product, and add it to the product name.
  • Choose additional keywords that may be used to find the product, and add them to the product description and information – preferably in the beginning.
  • Also add search terms to your product's keywords, but not too many, because this can make your product more difficult to find.

Products appear in the store's search with a delay of 24 hours.

The advanced search engine included in paid plans indexes the online store's products once every 24 hours in the night, after which products can be found by searching.

The search engine in the free plan indexes the products immediately.

Ordering

In this section, we test placing an order from the customer point of view. An order is placed in the online store. The order will be processed in chapter 8. Processing orders.

Ordering has to be frictionless in an online store. If there is anything that makes ordering difficult for your customers, they might not place an order at all, even with products already added to their carts. MyCashflow's shopping cart has been carefully tested, and with functional basic settings it makes buying remarkably smooth.

You should pay special attention to the ease of ordering, when you later create or acquire a custom store theme for your online store.

Try to order products from your online store and pay special attention to potential problems (mostly payment and shipping):

  1. Search for a product and press the Buy button.
  2. Press the Order products button in the cart preview.

    The online store's checkout opens. By default, MyCashflow online stores use the single-page checkout in which order information is displayed on the same page.

    You can also opt for the multi-page checkout in which different order information (customer information as well as payment and shipping methods) are defined on separate pages.

  3. Fill in the customer information in the form at the top of the checkout page.

    Press somewhere on the page outside of the form, so that the information will be saved and you'll be able to select the shipping method. You won't be able to select the shipping and payment methods until the customer information has been saved.

  4. Scroll down and select the shipping method that you created in chapter 5. Defining shipping methods.
  5. Select the payment method that you created in chapter 4. Defining payment methods.

    You should test ordering in your online store with all shipping and payment methods.

  6. Accept the terms and conditions, and confirm the order.

    At the end, you'll be redirected to the order confirmation page with the summary of your order.

    An order confirmation will be sent to the email you entered, and the store's admin user will receive a notification about the new order to his or her email.

Your online store now has its first order, which needs to be processed. You will learn how to do it in the next chapter.