Getting Started
The seven things to settle before you open, in the order that saves the most backtracking, and what can wait.
Your shop works out of the box. These are the things worth settling before anybody can buy, in an order that means you will not have to come back and redo work.
1. Say Who You Are
Settings, General, Store Details. Your shop name, address, contact email and phone number appear on invoices, in every email the shop sends, and on your receipts.
The address matters more than it looks. Carriers quote shipping distance from it, so an approximate address gives approximate prices to every customer, and a missing one can mean no rates at all.
Set your currency here too, and your timezone. Order times, report date ranges and scheduled publishing all follow the timezone, so a shop set to the wrong one will have orders landing on the wrong day in its own reports.
2. Decide How You Get Paid
Settings, Payment. Nothing can be bought until at least one method is on.
Connect a card processor if you want cards. Switch on any offline methods you accept, and write the instructions on the method itself, because that text is what the customer is shown at checkout and sent in their confirmation. A cheque method with no payee name generates an email to you from every customer who uses it.
3. Work Out Shipping Before You List Anything
Settings, Shipping. Set your origin address, create at least one zone, and give that zone at least one rate.
Shipping is the thing most likely to cost you money quietly, and it is far easier to get right on an empty catalogue than after you have entered two hundred products with no weights on them.
Make the catch-all zone last
Zones are matched in priority order, lowest number first, and the first match wins. A catch-all with a low number swallows every shopper before your specific zones are looked at. Give it a high number, such as 99.
If you intend to use live carrier rates, set that up now as well, because it changes how much the weight on each product matters.
4. Set Your Tax Position
Settings, Tax. Most shops need one class and a handful of rates.
Decide now whether delivery is taxable where you trade, because it is set per rate rather than once for the shop. Decide too whether you have customers who should not be charged tax at all, because that is a customer group and it is easier to create before you have customers to sort into it.
5. Add a Product
Catalog, Products, New product. One real product, start to finish, teaches more than reading about it.
Give it a price, a weight if you post it, a photograph, and a SKU you would recognise on a packing list. If it comes in several editions, set it up as a variable product now rather than converting later, because converting after orders exist is manual work.
6. Buy It Yourself
Place a real order on your own shop and pay for it properly.
This one step finds more problems than all the others
Nearly every fault worth catching before opening shows up in one real order: a payment method that is not actually enabled, a shipping rate that never appears, a confirmation email with the wrong address on it, a tax line that is not what you expected, a product image that is missing from the basket.
Then refund it. That shows you the refund path before you need it under pressure, and confirms the money goes back the way you expect.
While you are there, check the confirmation email as the customer receives it rather than as it looks in the admin. That is where a missing logo or a wrong shop name shows up.
Expect the email to come from your shop's name with our address behind it, Your Shop Name <noreply@unifycart.com>, and expect a reply to reach you rather than us. That is correct and is not a fault: your domain has not authorised anybody to send as it, so an email claiming to come from it would be treated as forged and filed as spam. Who Your Email Comes From explains it, and how to send under your own address once you want to.
7. Look at Your Shop on a Mobile Device
Most shoppers arrive on one. Check the homepage, a category, a product, the basket and the checkout.
Pay attention to the checkout in particular. A form that is awkward on a desktop is unusable on a mobile device, and that is where orders are lost silently.
A Sensible Opening Checklist
Before you tell anybody the shop is open: one payment method proven by a real order, shipping quoting sensibly to the places you actually post to, a contact page with a real way to reach you, a delivery and returns page, and your own test order refunded.
What Can Wait
Discounts, customer groups, subscriptions, reviews, the blog, integrations and reports can all wait until the shop is running and you have a reason to want them.
Resist configuring things you have no use for yet. Every setting you turn on is one you will later have to remember you turned on.