If you’ve added your products, configured your site, and automated your checkout—congratulations! The next step in the process is to get your hands down to it and open up your store for your customers. As orders start coming in, there are a few things that you’ll need to take care of.
Some of these things include:
Processing your orders
Keeping product and sales tabs
Replenishing inventory
Adding employees
Configuring email settings
Offering discounts and coupons
Managing product reviews and comments
As you prepare to open your store, make sure you’re ready to take on the day-to-day tasks that come with operating an online store.
Processing orders
For every order you receive, you’ll want to track its status updates until it’s been delivered. Once you confirm an order, choose a method to ship it—by yourself or via a shipping carrier you’ve linked to your store. After you enter your shipping details, your order status will change to ‘Shipped’. Once the order has been delivered, record it by clicking Mark as Delivered. In the case of an offline payment, click Mark as Paid once your customer has paid.
You can handle cancellations and returns from the Item Cancellations/Returns tab. Simply select the items you want to cancel or return and proceed to refund them.
From the Shipping tab, you can print the packing slips and delivery notes that you’ll attach to your order packages.
Keeping tabs on items, sales, and returning customers
As you run your store, you’ll want to know information like who your customers are, what products are selling best, where you’re getting your traffic from, and so on. Using your store’s reports, you can stay on top of your sales—orders, products, page traffic, frequent customers, and abandoned shopping carts. Recovery emails for abandoned carts will be sent the following morning, and you can see if your customer has completed the purchase.
Replenishing inventory
When you have your email notifications enabled, you’ll receive a reminder when your product’s stock is low. When you re-stock, update your quantity from the Manage Stock section. You should also remember to increase your stock when you receive returns. In all other cases, your inventory auto-updates with every sale you make.
Adding employees
When you need an extra pair of hands to take care of your store, you can give them access to your website. You can even give different employees select access to different sections of your store. For example, you can give someone access only to the orders section, or only to the site builder.
Add users to the admin console from Users in the Settings page, and to your store’s website from Contributors in Site Settings.
Offering coupons & discounts
Usher in more customers and increase your store’s sales by offering product-specific and store-wide discounts.
To provide product discounts, enter your offer price under the product’s selling price, and the original price under retail price. Make sure to have the On Sale toggle enabled so that the product has a ‘Sale’ tag on it.
To add store-wide coupons, use the Coupons section in the Settings page. Type a coupon code, select if you want to offer a flat or percentage-based discount, enter the discount value, and select the start and end times for the coupon. Your customers can use this coupon during checkout. You can even make coupons available only for specific sets of customers that you choose, or for specific products.
Managing product reviews & blog comments
Your product reviews and blog comments serve as valuable feedback for your store and help you to get a feel for your customers’ needs. Positive reviews can even serve as potential testimonials for your store.
You can filter and moderate reviews and comments from the Moderation section of Product Reviews in Settings, and Comment Box in Site Settings. Make sure to configure your moderation options beforehand. By default, moderation would be turned off. When moderation is off, all reviews and comments will be posted. With automatic moderation, all reviews and comments except spam will get automatically posted.
Enabling customer portals
Enable member portals to provide customers with easy access to their profiles, including past orders. You can create a member portal from Site Settings, and then you’ll want to change your checkout settings to members only from Preferences in the Settings page. This will help you maintain records of your customers.
Configuring email settings
As you process your orders, stay notified about low product stock, order status, and payments. Send your customers regular updates about their orders, including refunds, returns, and cancellations.
You can do this by setting up your email preferences from the Email Notifications section in the Settings page. Order-related emails will be sent whenever you mark status updates on every order.
Creating collections
One of the benefits of an online store is that you can create groups of your products using collections.
Collections are a way of displaying groups of items that are bound by a common category, such as all the products that belong to a particular brand, or a winter sale that you have going on. Think of it as part of your store’s visual merchandising.
You can easily create collections from the admin console, and drive sales by offering more variety to your customers. You can also enable Smart Recommendations from the Preferences section so that your customers can view product recommendations while browsing your store.
Optimizing your site for search engines
Give your store better visibility and improved chances of being found on a search engine. Use the SEO settings in your product and category pages and in the Site Settings page to enhance your store’s online presence.
Integrating extra functionality onto your site
Make life easier by integrating with Zoho Books, Zoho Inventory, and Zoho CRM. With the help of these products, you can easily take care of your bookkeeping, enjoy extensive inventory functions, and manage your customers and contacts.
Integrate with Zoho SalesIQ to provide live chat on your store, while you can do A/B tests and conversion rate optimization using Zoho PageSense. Use the Mailchimp integration for your email marketing campaigns, and Avalara to assign taxability rules and jurisdiction boundaries for your taxes.
You can use Zoho MarketingHub to nurture leads and view customer journeys, while Zoho Survey can help you send feedback surveys in your emails. Use Zoho Flow to build and customize other integrations and automate workflows amongst them.
With these processes in place, you should be able to efficiently run your online store. For any questions or further assistance, feel free to email us at support@zohocommerce.com.