Six Easy Steps to Start Selling Online with OXID eShop

Define Global eShop Settings

You’re almost done! All that’s left now is to define some global settings for your online shop. These can be found under eShop Admin > Master Settings > Core Settings. Each of the tabs on this page allows you to control a different aspect of the system. While most items can be left at their default values, you might want to pay special attention to the Main tab, which lets you enter essential information for the online store: the shop name, address and contact information, email message parameters, and bank routing information.

Within the Settings tab are global shop settings, such as the number of products to display per page, the product search algorithm, shop default language, product image sizes, and other interface elements. Apart from setting the default shop language (in Settings > Language) and adding or changing the default set of currencies your shop can accept (in Settings -> Other Settings), you should probably leave most of these as they are.

Finally, visit the SEO tab, and set a title for your shop. Typically, this would be the name of your shop, together with a very brief description. This information helps make your shop visible to various web search engines.

Every online store has different policies regarding data protection, returns, shipping rates, and security. With this in mind, OXID eShop allows you to customize some of its pages so that you can clearly state your store’s online policies. To begin doing this, visit the eShop Admin > Customer Info > CMS Pages tab, where you’ll see a list of static templates.

The title of each page template is self-explanatory: select it to customize the text on the page using an online editor. Your changes will be immediately reflected on the shop homepage. You can also disable particular templates by removing their Active flag. More information on changing static page templates is available in the OXID manual.

Process Orders

At this point, your store is fully configured and ready to serve customers. But there’s one final bit that you should know about, and it’s also probably the most important: handling orders! OXID eShop’s administration panel includes a fully-featured order processing system, which can be found under eShop Admin > Administer Orders > Order Summary.

Selecting any of the orders pops up the details of the purchase request, including the price, shipping and billing address, and product details. Selecting the Ship Now command changes the order status (with an optional email to the customer), while using the Create PDF command generates a PDF version of the order, which can be printed and enclosed with the shipment (XML export is also supported).

The order management module can also assist with printing packing slips: use the eShop Admin > Administer Orders > Packing List command to automatically generate printable packing slips for open orders.

As this article demonstrates, OXID eShop Community Edition provides a robust framework on which you can build your online store. The best part? It’s free! So what are you waiting for?