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How do I Take Orders?
Once you have a product catalog, it's time to start planning the shopping cart part of your store. When a customer clicks the Add to Cart button for a product in your catalog, that product gets added to the customer's shopping cart. The customer then selects shipping options, enters shipping and billing information, and completes the order. After the customer finalizes the order, you will get an e-mail informing you that you have a new order. You can then go to your back office and go to the section to view the the order details.
You have a lot of options for what features and options you want to include in the shopping cart for your store. You can configure your shopping cart in the section of your back office. The payment processing part of taking orders is covered in the How do I Accept Payments? section of this tutorial. This section will discuss general order system settings, shipping rate calculation, and tax rate calculation.
Configuring Order System Settings
ShopSite's shopping cart is designed to make checking out as easy as possible for your customers. One of the most effective ways ShopSite helps reduce the number of abandoned shopping carts in your store is by displaying the final check-out cost on the first shopping cart screen. Another way to avoid abandoned shopping carts is by minimizing the number of screens the customer has to go through to complete the checkout process. ShopSite has a maximum of five shopping cart screens. You can configure your order system settings by going to the section of your back office and clicking on Order System. You can then select the button for the shopping cart screen you want to configure, or click Layout Info to configure layout options used by all the shopping cart screens.
- Google Checkout Pre-Checkout Screen - If you accept payments using Google Checkout, customers will see a pre-checkout screen. This screen shows the contents of the shopping cart, and has a link to complete the checkout process using Google Checkout. If you accept other payments as well, there will also be a link to complete the checkout using ShopSite's shopping cart. Because Google Checkout uses a different flow for the checkout process, the pre-checkout screen can not calculate the final checkout price.
- Shopping Cart Screen - The first shopping cart screen allows your customers to see and update the contents of their cart. In order to calculate shipping and tax rates, ShopSite will ask for the customer's shipping destination country (if you have enabled shipping to more than one country) and postal code. After your customers have finished updating the contents of their cart, they can click a button to continue to the next checkout screen. To select which countries you are willing to ship orders to, click State and Country in the section of your back office.
- Checkout Screen - The second shopping cart screen is where your customers enter their shipping and billing addresses and payment information. You can control which address fields are displayed and which are required, as well as any other order information you collect. The payment information required depends on the payment method the customer selected and your payment processing settings.
- Confirmation Screen optional - You may optionally display an order information confirmation screen between the checkout and thank you screens. The confirmation screen displays the shopping cart contents, shipping and billing addresses, and the payment information for the customer to review before finalizing the order.
- Thank You Screen - The final screen of the shopping cart displays when the customer completes the order. This screen, along with an e-mail receipt, are the customer's confirmation that the order has been placed and is being processed. You, the merchant, will also get an e-mail notifying you of the order, which you will be able to view in the section of your back office.
Continue to Calculating Shipping Rates >