In this article, we discuss the stage your online store has reached, if you have gone through the entire quick guide. Here, we will briefly introduce features, with which you can further develop your online store.
If you have gone through the quick guide chapter by chapter, your online store has reached the following stage:
- Your own and your company's details have been added to MyCashflow settings.
- Your store has a product classified by a category.
- Customers can order the product by using the payment and shipping methods that you specified.
Before launching your online store, you may want to fully develop it.
- Add your whole product catalog to the online store. Add new products, categories and brands, and organize them logically.
- Create new payment methods based on what kind of payments you plan to accept in your online store.
- Create new shipping methods that are best suited for delivering the products you offer.
Test your online store whenever you make major changes to your settings or contents. This way, you will discover potential problems before your customers encounter them.
Launching the online store
After you have added all the necessary contents to your store and defined functional settings, you can open your online store for the public.
This is done by using the Publish store function. Before publishing the store, you can preview the customer-facing store by copying a preview link into your browser's address bar. If you have more than one store versions, you must publish all of them one-by-one.
Now your online store should be open to the public. To test it, log out of the admin panel and go to your online store's customer side.
If the online store is not yet open, try the following:
- From the menu on the left side, select the version marked as Default version.
- In the version settings, make sure that Close the version temporarily from the visitors. is not selected. If necessary, unselect the field and save the version settings.
Now visitors can access your online store. If you'd like to make some more changes before customers will be able to place orders in your store, close the store temporarily once again by using the settings presented above and re-open it once you've made the changes.
What next?
Note that the purpose of this quick guide was to get an extremely simple and functional online store that can be easily used for shopping and as a basis for further development.
Below you will find suggestions for further development: Detailed instructions for any actions listed below can be found in the user guide.
Product management options
In the quick guide, we created a simple product, so that you know the basic principles of adding products. However, MyCashflow enables you to create highly diverse products. Here are some examples:
- Product variations allow you to create several variations of the same product that differ from each other according to a quality you specify.
- With product customizations, you can enable your customers to customize your products according to their needs, before buying them.
- You can also create downloadable products, which will become available for download after the order has been processed.
- In MyCashflow, you can also manage your products' stock balances, which enables you to e.g. stop selling a product automatically, if runs out of stock.
Read more about product management options in the user guide.
Campaigns and product discounts
Campaigns allow you to create sales discounts and offers that are valid under certain terms.
You can also create discount coupons, which you may limit for certain customer groups or individual customers.
Maintaining a customer register
The customer register in MyCashflow allows you to create customer groups and manage the information of individual customers.
Customer groups can be used to limit the availability of certain contents and features of your online store to a selected customer group. For example, you can create payment methods restricted to selected customer groups. You can also target advertising and communication at selected customer groups.
Content management, communication and advertising
You can create content pages that allow you to build a versatile website around your online store.
Additionally, you can use news to keep your customers up to date. In the MyCashflow default theme, news are used to create a feed on the front page that is updated automatically.
Apart from news, you can also use text messages and emails to communicate with your customers and advertise your products.
Modifying the online store's layout
You can change your online store's layout by creating a custom theme or by purchasing one of MyCashflow's ready-made themes. Ready-made themes can be found in MyCashflow's Theme Store.
Alternatively, you can contact our designers who will create a new custom theme specially for your store.
If you are skilled in HTML and CSS, you can also create a store theme by yourself. Theme creation and theme-related tools are discussed in the MyCashflow theme guide.
Buying a custom domain and SSL encryption
A custom domain – such as www.example.com – helps to create a unique image for your online store and makes it easier for customers to remember the store's address. By default, MyCashflow stores' addresses are in the form example.mycashflow.fi, but you can order your own, easily configurable domain via MyCashflow.
SSL encryption makes shopping in your online store more secure and reliable. The SSL encryption protocol prevents anyone from seeing information that moves between your online store and its customers during their visit to the store. You can also order SSL encryption directly from MyCashflow.
Translating the online store to other languages
Most of MyCashflow's internal user interface texts have already been translated to numerous languages. If you sell abroad, you may also want to translate your own contents. If you want, you can also modify the translations provided by MyCashflow so that they fit your purposes better.
To translate your store's content to other languages, you have to create new language versions of your store. With multiple language versions in use, you can translate for example the following content (and much more):
- Product, category and brand contents
- Content pages
- Campaign content texts
- News
If you want to translate your online store to another language, read the following articles in the user guide:
Installing extensions
Extensions allow you to add new functions and features to your online store. Most extensions can be installed free of charge, however, some of them require signing up to external services that may have their own costs.
Here are some examples of features that you can enable with extensions:
- Shipping and storage services
- Web analytics
- Search engine optimization tools
- Affiliate marketing
- Integrations with financial administration software
- Social media buttons
