(V5) Getting Started Print

Welcome to Ozcart! It's a pleasure to have you with us.

This introductory guide will get you started on the information you need to know to use the Ozcart administration panel, and to set up your website to begin selling as quickly as possible. It refers to other articles in our Support > Knowledge Base system, located in the Ozcart Client Area.

The Client Area is separate from your website itself. It is where our Billing and Support systems are located. Your Client Area is where you find help on how to use the Ozcart system and submit requests for support (tickets) via the Ticket system.

The Support dashboard looks similar to this:

The dashboard mostly concentrates on billing related things like Unpaid invoices and any open requests for Support. To get to the knowledge base articles, go to the Support menu in the client area, and choose Knowledge Base.

On Mobile, choose the Hamburger Menu (3 horizontal lines) on the right hand side, and select Support and then Knowledge Base from that.

The Support knowledge base caters for all of the different versions of Ozcart that customers are using, so you will find articles for V2, V3, V4 and V5 platforms. You need to read only the articles with V5 mentioned in the title, or else you will be referring to a different platform and the instructions will not make sense.

Articles are organised into groups based on the type of thing that they cover. Some articles are filed in multiple categories for ease of access. You can browse the categories, or search for something specific. To make sure that you get the articles you want, navigate to the V5 category first before searching and add V5 to the end of your search term.

You can then choose one of the results and view the specific help it gives:



Help articles contain step-by-step instructions, and where applicable are accompanied by screenshots.

If you can't find the help you need from the knowledge base, you can lodge a ticket (request for support) with the Support team. Your enquiry goes into a queue that is allocated based on the length of queue at that time and types of questions in it, complexity of your enquiry and the degree to which it stops your website from functioning altogether.

To lodge a ticket, from the Support menu, choose Open Ticket and then choose support as the department. This will open a form where you can log your specific request for help.

NOTE: When logging tickets, it's important to give us as much information as you can so that we can reproduce the issue that you're asking. If you're raising an issue, give us step by step instructions on what you did to get there and how we can generate the error too. By following your procedure, we may be able to find problem with the way that you are carrying out the tasks or at the very least trace through your activity in the logs.

Try to mention the following:

• The order number, if relating to a specific order.
• The customer that was logged in, or guest customer's name (so we can look it up).
• The exact products that were in the cart (including variants).
  
• The quantities of products in the cart.
• The post code that was being shipped to, if the issue relates to the totals on checkout.

Once we reproduce an issue, we can work through how to resolve it for you and write back to your ticket request with an update or solution to your problem.

Using your website's administration panel
Once you're familiar with how to get around our website to get support, it's a good time to get familiar with your own website and how you go about setting it up for your business. If you log in to the demo control panel with the URL that you were given by us when we sent out your site, you get to the Cart's dashboard panel.

Navigation menus are found on the left hand menu in your admin panel and are grouped based on how you might use them - managing orders, managing your products, setting your store, or for marketing/reporting:

STORE ADMIN MENU

• Home
• Orders
• Products
• Customers
• Design
• Information

CONFIGURATION

• Shipping Plugins
• Payment Plugins
• Order Totals
• Data Feeds
• Staff
• Store Settings
• Tools

MARKETING

• Campaigns
• Reports
• Affiliates
• Coupons
• Newsletters
• Social Media

Quick Getting Started Reference

This is a reference guide of the homepage. It informs you about how to modify the sections displayed.

General Setup

Before designing your site, the first thing you'll want to do is consider putting your site into maintenance mode. While it is not necessary, it will at least prevent others from viewing your site while you build it (as it is unorganized at first). Here's an article describing how to put your site into maintenance mode and how to allow yourself and others to use the Store Access Key to access the frontend without logging in as admin: How do I set maintenance mode and how can I access my site while in maintenance mode?

Next is to set up the basic store details like your business name and business number. To do this, go to the Configuration menu section and choose Store Settings and then General Settings.

Here you can give your store a name, set up your business number and address (to appear on your invoices), upload your logo, set the store email that will be used to receive order notifications, and configure a number of your store's options (which are on the Options tab of these setup screens).

Are you registered for Tax/GST? Ozcart includes the settings for Tax rates, but you have to assign it to products. If so, you will want to make sure that the following applies:
- You have entered your business number into your admin area's general settings
- You are selecting Taxable Goods (or the name you have set up) as the "class" type on each product and shipping page


You are then set to add your categories and add a product:
Video tutorial - adding a product


There are a lot of possible settings, but you can just leave as defaults the ones that you don't need.


Other related help - Products/Categories tutorials:
How do I add a category?
How do I add a product?

See a list of our shortcodes to help you quickly set up extra features.

Guest Order History
If you allow Guest checkout, you will probably want to allow your guests to view their Order History. Follow this article to do so.

Designing your site
Before you go further with configuration, you'll probably want to do some of the design. Ozcart caters for this with a Visual Theme Editor that lets you click on objects from the page and change their colours, add padding, alter their fonts, etc. To use the editor go to Design > Theme Settings and the Customization tab. You'll find a button you can use to get into the Visual Theme editor and start working.

Video tutorial - Visual Theme Editor introduction
Video tutorial - designing your site - boxed or full layout
How to add a banner to the homepage
Design articles - knowledge base

Setting up shipping and payments
Plugins for many third-party providers are offered in the Shipping Plugins and Payment Plugins sections, respectively. The basic process is the same, select the option you want to use by clicking the pencil icon beside it. If it's a shipping provider, enter the shipping costs related to that provider (or for automatic plugins, the services that will be offered) along with any details the specific provider wants to use. You will then be able to test your site.

Shipping articles - knowledge base
Payment articles - knowledge base


Search Engine Marketing
You will want your website to come up in the search engines. The visibility of your website in search engines is mostly determined by your marketing efforts in promoting your website and getting others to link to it - so the search engines see it as a trusted source to link to for the products that you sell. There's a whole branch of marketing devoted to Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimisation.

Search Engine Marketing articles - knowledge base

Important: If you run into an issue when you try to view or edit Orders, please read this article.

Important: If the admin area signs you out automatically and you are wondering why that is happening, please read this article.

Important: When building or editing your site, especially when building it in a staging site, make sure to use relative links.

Important: If you cannot send or receive emails, if your website is not loading for you, or you cannot access FTP, your IP address may be automatically blocked. Simply ask us to unblock it.

Testing your site to go live
Before you start taking orders you should do some test orders to make sure that everything is working the way you expect it to. Here is a checklist of some of the important things you might want to make sure that you've set up before you go live:

• Choose your timezone in Design > Blocks > Timezone Sync.
• Have you uploaded a logo to your storefront and for invoices?
• Have you filled in your business information (Store Name, Email address, Contact Information, etc.) under the Configuration > Store Settings > General Settings section.
• Do all of your pages have Information content filled in - About Us, Shipping/Delivery Policy, Payment Policy, Refunds Policy, Site terms and conditions, Privacy Policy, etc.
• If you are registered for Tax/GST, do your invoices comply with your country's Tax Invoice requirements?
• Have you set your next order number for your store?
• Are you using Social Media? Have you set up which social buttons you want to use?
• Does the shipping estimator on checkout return a result for all of the areas that you sell to?
• Are you using custom order statuses? If so have you set these up?
• Have you set up a title and description for search engines in the configuration section of your site?
• Have you set up title and description info for search engines for each of the products and important pages that you're using?
• Have you redirected important URLs from your old site (if you're moving from a different site to this one)?
• Have you registered your site in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools?
• Have you set up the Google Sitemap?
• Have you completed a test order for all of the payment options you accept? We suggest setting up a $1 product and purchasing it through your live gateway - you can then refund yourself through the management panel of the gateway. If you are using any coupon codes we suggest testing those as well to make sure they're working as you expect.
• Do you like the colour scheme that you have set up?
• Are you happy with the main menu structure?
• What does your site look like on a mobile phone (iPhone/Android, etc.) - are there any issues compared to a desktop computer?
• Do you receive emails from your Contact Us form?
• Do all of the links in the footer of your website go through to pages?

Once you go live you might also want your website to appear in a tab on your Facebook page - see info on how to set up your store as a Facebook store tab.

When you do go live, you can tell us - we can set your site into "production" mode which means that the style information and JavaScript that helps your website perform actions like adding to cart quicker is sent in a compressed format to the browser. This can't be set by you but can be turned on at our end. We leave it turned off during testing as it can sometimes make using the visual theme editor more difficult.

Need something else?
If you have questions not covered by the knowledge base, please feel free to submit them to our Support team as a ticket, and we can look into them. There is no limit to the number of questions you can ask, we only request that you group related things together and separate unrelated things when submitting them - so we can keep track of all open enquiries and best allocate time to answering questions as fast as possible for everyone.