Before you can begin taking orders on your new Magento website, you need to confirm that you have all the necessary configurations in place.
In your Magento backend, go to Stores | Configuration | General | General. Review your settings for the following panels:
- Countries Options: This panel allows you to restrict the countries to which you will sell products. Your store owner may have limitations where they can ship and/or receive payments. The Default Country sets the default for any country selection drop-down menu.
- Locale Options: Use these settings to accommodate the backend users of your Magento store.
- Store Information: The values entered here will be used throughout the Magento stores as defaults for name, telephone number, and address.
Even small online vendors may use different email addresses for different purposes. We often set up multiple email addresses for our client's stores, even if the same person may be receiving emails for sales and support. Having separate email addresses helps to segregate emails by purpose. Additionally, if the business grows and assigns different people to different purposes, you will have already established different email addresses with the store's customers.
Tip
A little known feature for those of you who use Google Apps — more specifically, Google Mail — you can create multiple email addresses for the same email account without having to add forwarding or alias configurations to Google Mail. For example, if you have an email address of info@domain.com, you could create the following emails and each one will go to the same email account: info+sales@domain.com, info+support@domain.com, and info+contact@domain.com. Google Mail will ignore the portion of the email address after and including the "+" in the address. We use this often to provide different email addresses without creating multiple email accounts.
The panels on the
General | Contacts screen allow you to enable the standard Contact Us form and set to whom these emails should be sent. You can also assign a customized transactional email.
Use the procedures , to confirm that any necessary currency conversion settings are ready to go.
Under Stores | Configuration | Sales | Sales are various panels that control a rather eclectic group of sales-related functions.
- Checkout Totals Sort Order: Using numbers of any value, you can control the order in which various order line items are displayed.
- Reorder: Select whether registered customers may use previous orders to generate new purchases.
- Invoice and Packing Slip Design: Earlier in this checklist, you uploaded any custom logo designs. You can also enter a company address that you wish to use as an alternative to the company address you entered before.
- Minimum Order Amount: In this panel, you can set any minimum order amount (if one is to be enforced), as well as set whether to validate multiple addresses submitted in a multi-address checkout.
- Dashboard: If you find that server processing power is low, you may want to set Use Aggregated Data to No.
- Gift Options: For sellers of gift items, such as flowers or jewelry, you may want to allow Magento to include a field for purchasers to use to include a gift message to the recipient. These messages will appear in your order detail page for processing.
If you plan on having more than one customer group (for example, wholesale, preferred, and so on), set up multiple customer groups according to the process described in Chapter 6, Marketing Tools.
In addition, there are a few settings you should review under Stores | Configuration | Customers | Customer Configuration:
- Account Sharing Options: Set whether you want customer accounts shared among all websites or not.
- Online Customers Options: The vaguely named Online Minutes Interval is used to calculate the number of current customers visiting your store, as displayed under Customers | Online Customers. For example, if you set this to 30 minutes, then any customer accessing a page of your site within the past 30 minutes will be considered a current online customer.
- Create New Account Options: Use these settings to control how new customer accounts are handled. Reference the transactional emails you created earlier for the email-related settings.
- Password Options: If you created a new transactional email for sending customers their forgotten password, select it for Forgot Email Template.
- Name and Address Options: In this panel, you can customize how you capture customer information.
- Login Options: Select if you want the customer to land on their Dashboard page or your site home page after logging in.
- Address Templates: This is an interesting panel and one often forgotten when customer address layout issues arise. If you find that any layout in your site is not displaying customer information properly, refer to this page.
The Stores | Configuration | Sales | Sales Emails screen provides panels to allow you to choose customized transactional emails and sender email addresses for orders, invoices, shipment notices, and credit memos.
In Chapter 4, Configuring to Sell, we discussed at length how to configure sales tax rates and rules. Afterwards, you should go to Stores | Configuration | Sales | Tax in your Magento backend for additional sales tax configurations:
- Tax Classes: Select whether sales tax is to be calculated for shipping charges.
- Calculation Settings: Based on the expectations of your customers and your marketplace, you can configure how sales tax calculations are made and presented in online shopping carts and invoices.
- Default Tax Destination Calculation: Since sales tax is generally calculated for sales made to customers living in the taxing jurisdiction of the business, you can set the default sales tax rule for individual store views. Your actual taxing rules will override these default settings.
- Price Display Settings: These configurations affect whether products and shipping prices should be displayed with or without including any applicable sales tax calculation.
- Shopping Cart Display Settings: Generally, the default settings are appropriate, but this is especially useful if you should review how prices, totals, and taxes are to be displayed in shopping carts.
- Orders, Invoices, Credit memos Display Settings: This panel is the same as for the previous panel.
- Fixed Product Taxes: Where products are assigned fixed taxes, such as excise taxes, you can configure how those taxes are to be displayed on the site.
Using Chapter 4, Configuring to Sell, for guidance, confirm that the shipping methods you want for your new store are configured and ready.
Likewise, you should confirm your desired payment methods. Most can be set in test mode during configuration.
Configure and test your newsletter configurations. Refer to Chapter 6, Marketing Tools, for detailed information on creating and sending customer newsletters.
Later in this checklist, you will set whether or not you want customers to confirm that they have read your site's terms and conditions before completing their purchase. To compose your terms, go to Stores | Terms and conditions in your Magento backend. Here, you can add the actual text that will be displayed during checkout.
Now, let's turn our attention to the checkout process. Go to Stores | Configuration | Sales | Checkout, where you will find the following panels:
- Checkout Options: On this panel, you can decide whether or not to use the onepage checkout feature, allow guests (non-registered customers) to checkout, and require the customer to confirm they have read and will abide by your terms and conditions.
- Shopping Cart: This panel dictates settings for how long quotes should survive, to where shoppers are redirected after adding a product to their shopping cart, and what images should be displayed in the shopping cart for grouped or configurable products.
- My Cart Link: Set whether the My Cart Link shown on each page should display the total number of items in the cart (number of unique products) or the total item quantities (products X quantity of each). For example, if you choose Display number of items in cart, a shopping cart with two baseball bats will show 1 item in the My Cart link. Display item quantities would show 2 items.