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A step-by-step guide to starting up your Merchant Solutions website.
This document will outline the steps necessary to complete the Open for Business process. The process is defined as the steps required to prepare your store to open for business as outlined in the Open for Business Control Panel. Several recommended steps will also appear that are not required to submit the form but should be completed by merchants before opening for business.
Not all aspects of building, managing and promoting your store are covered in this document. To get in-depth information on building, managing, and promoting your store, consult our online help. Get started here.
You can print this document and check off items as you complete them, or you can follow along while reading online. Items outlined in this document will be marked in two ways:
This outline has been designed to be used in conjunction with the Open for Business Control Panel. You can access the Open for Business Control Panel by signing in to your My Services page and clicking the Store link for the store you wish to access.
The Open for Business Control Panel is your guide to completing the tasks necessary to open for business. You will use the links to access the tools needed to complete the tasks. As you meet the requirements for each task, the Open for Business Control Panel will update to show the status of each task and whether it is complete, progress messages for the tasks you have completed, and also which task we recommend you complete next. All tasks must be completed in order to open your store for business, but you can complete the tasks in any order.
While you can choose to jump right into the tasks needed to open for business, you may wish to consider the following before you start:
| Time to complete | 30 minutes or more. | Design is really an ongoing process. You can use Theme Manager to select a starting design. You can then use the Variables page in the Store Editor to customize theme elements. The Divitto, Fanal, and Sambee themes each have their own sets of variables. If you need some inspiration, browse for sites in the same or similar market to your store. What elements of their design work? What elements don't work? Use those sites as guidance to how your site can look. Keep in mind though that you can start with a very basic design to open your store. Then, after focusing your attention on adding products and promoting your site, you can always revisit your site design later. Create your item/product pages - Your store needs to have at least a few products in order to open for business. To create item pages, use the Add Product Wizard. You can also consult the following help topics:
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| Required materials | Company logo, colors, policy, and text . | If you have a company logo, you can pick colors for your site based on the colors of your logo. If you do not have one, you may wish to consider hiring a graphic designer to create one for you. Do you have any company brochures or letterhead? If so, you can use any colors you may have chosen for those. |
| Goal of this task | Design and publish your site. | This task will be marked as complete when you choose your theme. Don't worry about publishing your site before you have added products or completed the other steps as shoppers will not be able to purchase from your store until you open for business. Remember: It is better to get open and start selling, and giving search engines a chance to find your site, than to keep your store under construction for months trying to perfect the design. |
Note: If you are building using your own tools and your Web Hosting portion of your account, you will need to click the link for building using your own tools on the Design Your Site page and then select the check box to indicate you will build using your own tools. The Design Your Site page can be found by clicking the Looking for the legacy side and top navigation templates? link on the bottom of the first page in Theme Manager. To access the Web Hosting portion of your Merchant Solutions account, click the Manage My Services button appearing in the top of the page and then select the Web Hosting link.
Turbify can also offer you the time-savings, expertise and convenience of our Merchant Solutions Developer Network--a group of professional web designers and developers who have expertise in designing and building Merchant Solutions stores.
Developers will help you to:
More design help:
| Time to complete | Depends on number of products added. | Consider adding your top products only to start. You can always add more later. To start, add the name, image, description (including product keywords) price, sale price, and any product options. You can always return to edit product description and pricing, or change product images. |
| Required materials | Product images, product descriptions, and other product data (price, options). | Product images are critical to selling products online. If you are selling unique or custom products, you may need to take your own product photos. If you are selling goods from a manufacturer or supplier, you may be able to request stock photos from the supplier. Product descriptions should contain enough information to answer buyer questions about the product. Your descriptions should also have keywords and key phrases about the product for which you would want the page to be found in search engines. Also, you will need to add other product information such as a price and sales price (if applicable). If your product has options such as size or color, those will need to be added as options for buyers to select. |
| Goal of this task | Add at least one product. | You only need to add one orderable product to open for business, though you may have many more. Consider only adding your best selling products (or what you believe will be your top sellers). You can always continue to add products after opening for business. |
More add product help:
| Time to complete | PayPal signup and setup: 20 minutes. Merchant Account: Varies. | PayPal is a good choice for many merchants just starting with an online store. You can set up an account very quickly. Merchants can also choose to set up PayPal while they are waiting for approval on a merchant bank account. Merchant accounts allow you to offer credit card payment options directly on your site. |
| Required materials | PayPal: name, address, email, and bank account information. Merchant Account: name, address, banking account information, and store information. | The PayPal Signup process is very quick to complete. PayPal requires some personal and banking information to register and verify your account. For security reasons, the approval process for merchant accounts is more involved, requires significant personal and business information, and takes longer to process. Merchants that wish to open sooner can sign up for or enable a PayPal Business account to accept PayPal while waiting for approval of a merchant account. Merchants can choose to sign up for PayPal Express Checkout, PayPal Payments Pro, Braintree, or an FDMS Nashville compatible merchant account. |
| Goal of this task | You must set up either an online payment option or provide information for your offline payment option. | Merchants can choose to use an online payment processing option (PayPal Express Checkout, PayPal Payments Pro, Braintree, or an FDMS Nashville compatible merchant account) to process orders online. Merchants can also choose to process transactions offline through another system. In order to process transactions offline, you must provide your merchant bank name, bank phone number, and account number for verification purposes. |
More payment processing help:
| Time to complete | Depends on number of tax rates; about 2 minutes per tax rate. | You can use the Tax Wizard to select states for which you need to collect sales tax. This will set up a default rate. You can then edit these default rates if necessary, or set up additional tax rates by zip code if you need to add a supplemental rate to the base rate for the state for certain counties. |
| Required materials | Knowledge of taxes your business will need to collect. | You can consult the Federation of Tax Administrators web site that has links to the tax agencies for all states where you can look up the most current information about when you will need to charge tax based on where you are doing business and to where you are shipping goods. |
| Goal of this task | Set up one or more tax rates to be added during checkout, or choose to use the default setting where tax is added after the order. | You have the option of setting up your tax rates so they are calculated at the time of the order, or adding any tax after receiving the order. While Turbify does permit you to skip setting up tax rates to open for business, we highly recommend merchants set up tax rates to calculate at the time the order is placed. Buyers that see one total for their order at checkout, and see a higher charge (if you added tax after the order is received) will at best call to ask why, or at worst submit a chargeback to their credit card, costing you extra fees and a lost sale. |
Note: If you have set up tax rates, but you do not see tax charges applied correctly when placing a test order, check that you have your tax rates set to calculate in real-time; you can select this setting on the Tax Rates page below your tax rules table.
More tax rate help:
| Time to complete | Depends on the number of shipping rates; about 5 minutes per rate. | When setting up shipping rules, you can use the default methods (Air and Ground) and create rates based on order total, weight, percentage, flat rate, or UPS real-time rates for those methods.
If you know you will use a specific carrier, you can create shipping methods specific to that carrier, or you can create generic shipping methods such as ground, next day air, and 2nd day air and choose the carrier with the lowest rate. |
| Required materials | A sense of how much you will charge for shipping and which methods (Air, Ground, FedEx, UPS) you'll offer to buyers. | If you are new to shipping goods, you may wish to visit your local post office or commercial mail center to determine what shipping rates will be for packages of a certain weight and size (if bulky). If you typically ship items with similar shipping costs, you can set up rules to charge a flat rate per item or per order.
You can also remove much of the guess work with shipping costs by using the Turbify preferred shipping provider, UPS. Turbify has integrated with UPS to offer real-time rates and services that buyers can review in the shopping cart before checking out. Merchants can also print UPS labels or even use the UPS WorldShip software. Read more. |
| Goal of this task | Set up at least one shipping method and the rate for that method or choose to add shipping charges after taking orders (not during checkout). | You have the option of setting up your shipping rules so they are calculated at the time of the order, or adding any shipping costs after receiving the order. While Turbify does permit you to skip setting up shipping rules to open for business, we highly recommend merchants set up shipping rates to calculate at the time the order is placed. Buyers that see one total for their order at checkout, and see a higher charge (if you added shipping costs after the order is received) will at best call to ask why, or at worst submit a chargeback to their credit card, costing you extra fees and a lost sale. |
Note: If you have set up shipping methods and rates, but you do not see shipping charges applied correctly when placing a test order, check that you have your shipping settings set to calculate in real-time.
More help on shipping methods and rates
Clicking the Place a test order link will take you to your store and will allow you to place a real order as a shopper would. Turbify recommends placing at least one test order in your store before you open for business. Placing a test order allows you to test whether or not you have set up tax, shipping, and payment options correctly in your store. A test order also provides an opportunity to see how a real order will appear in Order Manager for you to review before processing. You may also wish to try using your credit card but change the shipping or billing data to see how AVS and CVV responses appear if you have online processing enabled through a merchant account. It's recommended to place a test order using a real credit/debit card rather than a test card. Note: If you place a test order using PayPal Checkout, you will need to use a different PayPal account than the one used in your store.
Remember to cancel any test orders or these will be added to real orders when calculating your transaction fee charges.
Once you have completed the open for business tasks (and optionally placed a test order) you can officially open your store for business by clicking on the Open for Business button.
You can now start using the Store Manager interface to perform all store functions. Please note that you will still need to publish your store before it will be visible online.
Opening your store for business is merely the first step in an ongoing process of building a successful online store. You need to continually track and improve your store early on to quickly build repeat customers.
Building your store
Managing your store
Promoting your store