Help File

Please take 5 minutes to read this as it will save you time when setting up your site. We will discuss the four P's of Profit.

What are "The four P's of Profit"?
“The four P’s of Profit” set a structure, and step by step process that you may find it useful to follow when creating your Store site. What are they you ask? Well the Four P’s of Profit are this. Pen, Paper, Plan, Produce. I am not going to get into the nitty gritty of the Pen and Paper steps, as those are pretty self explanatory, you can even use Word or Excel if you prefer, but lets talk about Plan and Produce. 

Plan
Planning your site and creating your content: Before starting any project, it is always helpful to know where you going and what you want your final outcome to be. If you are at this point, it means that you have signed up for a Store account, or are thinking about it, so I am going to assume that you have an idea or have existing products or services that you would like to advertise and or sell. The first step would be creating a site map. All that a site map is, is a layout of the structure and pages that you want to have on your website. A site map can be as simple as stating that I want to have four pages on my website, or you can make it complicated by having separate folders and many levels.  But let’s not worry about that now. Let’s create a site map of 4 Pages. Home Page, Products Page, Contact Us Page, Checkout Page. The Next step would be to gather all the content(text and pictures) that you would like displayed on your each of the above pages. 

Now one rule of thumb when building an ecommerce website, especially if you are a start up, is that you need to build credibility. You need to engage your customers and show them that a) you are serious about your product, b) you know about your product and c) you are committed to customer satisfaction. One of the ways that you achieve this is by adding useful and valid content not only about your company but possibly more importantly, about your product. Now I am not saying kill them with details but you need to give them useful information that they can trust and that they can use to influence their purchase decision. You cannot simply add a product to your website and expect it to sell. So I need to stress that your content is just as important as your service, because without the correct content you may never get to offer the service. One way to write useful content is to give background information on the product. Is it an upgrade or a new and improved version of an old product? What improvements have been made with this new version? Can the product be used for any other purpose other than its core use? Essentially just give them information that matters. 

Planning your products.

Once you have gather all the content and images that you would like to display on your site, the next step is to consider the products that you want to sell and how you would like to categorise and structure these products. In our demo store you will notice that we have five types of products, those are T-Shirts, CD’s, TV’s, Sound Systems and Face Cream. So when categorising them, choose categories that make sense, you can also create child categories. The demo sites category structure is as follows.

Clothing, electronics, CD’s and Health and Beauty are all top level categories. Audio Systems and Visual Systems are sub categories of Electronics. The bottom row is the actual products themselves. So as you can see you can add your products to either top level or sub-level categories. You just need to figure what works for you.

That is the main planning that you need to do, but there are some other considerations such as your shipping pricing and methods, as well as your customer groups. Customer groups allow you to define different pricing and shopping rules for different groups. You would then assign users to a group.

Ok, so now we get onto the fun part. And that is producing.

Producing
Now that we have got our site map, product information and category structure, we are ready to build our site. The first thing that we should do is to familiarise ourselves with the top bar control panel. We will use the panel to build our site and to set certain configurations and Meta information. The Meta information is used by search engines to locate categorise your website. So needless to say they are very important. You will notice that the Control Panel is made up of five key areas. Plug-in, Page, Site, Store and Help. 

The Plug-in area is what you will use to drag the plug-ins (pieces of Lego) onto the pages of your website

The Page section will allow you to manage the Meta information for that specific page, the layout of that specific page and switch between design mode and view mode.

The Site area will allow you to create and manage the individual pages that make up your website and to assign the global Meta information of the site. This section will also allow you to state whether the site can go live or is under construction

The Store section will launch the Store and Customer management module. This is where you will manage all the information that relates to the shopping portion of your site.

The Help section will give you quick links to get help from the Help Files, the FAQ’s or chat to a consultant.

Quick Steps to produce our website. 

1.The First step is to create all the pages that we are going to have on our website. We will use the CMS tools in conjunction with the site map we created.

2.The Second step is to create and manage all the products and configurations for our Store.

3.The Third and final step is to place all the plug-ins onto the pages we created in step one.

That is it. Then when you ready, you go live.