Checklist before going Live!

Here is a short list of things you should do and check before you email admin@magicdust.com.au asking for your eShop2.0 website to be taken live.

1.Confirm your Contact Us form is sending emails to the correct email address. 

Log in to your Dashboard. 

Hover your mouse over Website, and click to select ‘Content’. 

Click ‘Contact us (form)’ or the ‘edit’ button to the far right to get to the editing side of this page. 

Click on the ‘Form builder’ tab. 

Ensure the email address in the ‘E-mail to:’ field is correct.  If not, change it and click ‘Save’ . 

2.  Confirm your Shipping methods and payment methods are working correctly. 

We recommend you do some thorough testing of your system to ensure when your website goes live; your customers can actually place their orders!

To do this, we recommend setting up a ‘test product’ with the price of $1 with the Quantity being the number of test orders you need to complete. 

We suggest you do one test order per each shipping method and payment method. 

Once you’ve got your test product set up, with a weight set for it, and a price and quantity allocated, it’s time to test your system!  An easy way to get to the product page of your test product is to navigate to it in the admin side of your website and when you’re on the editing side of the product page, click ‘Preview’ and that will take you directly to the product page. 

Add the product to your cart, click checkout, confirm your shipping methods for the location you have chosen for your account are showing up correctly and are showing the correct prices.  Confirm that the payment methods that should be showing up are also showing up.  Then, test test test!  Test with each of the payment methods and each of the shipping methods, so you have all your bases covered.  If you come across any issues, that’s a potentially big issue avoided when your website goes live and potentially less angry customers when they find out you’ve overcharged or need them to pay more when the website is live!

3.  If using Real Time Shipping, confirm your products have the correct weights set.

If you’re using Real Time Shipping through Australia Post so that it calculates the cost to ship an order with a weight of X from your post code (set in Settings > Company)  to the customer’s post code and determines how much it will cost to ship that with Australia Post, you need to double check all your products have the correct weights set.  If not, you may end up overcharging or undercharging some products and customers, and neither of these are ideal. 

4.Check your Order Statuses are set up correctly.  (Orders > Order Statuses)

You should ensure that for each of the order statuses that will be used by your website inform the relevant parties (Customer and/or Orders Department email addresses) at the relevant steps, and provide the customer with any relevant or useful information.  For example, how long it will take for a direct debit payment to be received, credit card payment to be processed, how long before the order will be shipped after payment has been received / should be received, and some contact details like your order department email address  (set in Settings > Company) and a phone number perhaps. 

If you use a payment gateway like PayPal or eWay to process payments for you and the payment was received successfully, the order will start in your system with the ‘Processed’ status.  Read ‘Processed’ as ‘Payment received, not yet shipped/completed’

If you receive orders that are to be paid later, be it through a Direct Debit / Bank Transfer or by taking a credit card payment over the phone, the order will start in your system with the ‘open’ status.  Read ‘Open’ as ‘Not yet paid’.  In this case, once you’ve received payment, you should then change the order status to ‘Processed’. 

Once you’ve shipped the order, you should change the order status from ‘Processed’ to ‘Completed’. 

When changing order statuses as the order progresses through the different statuses, you can choose to notify the customer and/or notify the orders department. 

An example order for a customer and how it progresses through the order statuses is shown below:

1. Customer makes an order and wants to pay by Direct Debit / Bank Transfer.  Order is set to “open” order status. 
2. “Open” order status automatically sends email to customer reminding them that they need to pay and provides them with Direct Debit / Bank Transfer details like the Account Name, BSB and Account Number, along with some way of contacting you in case they have any issues.
3. Once payment is received, you manually change the order to the “Processed” order status, which sends another email to the customer saying ‘Payment received, thank you.  Your order will be shipped within a few days.’ And again some way of contacting you in case they have any issues. 
4. Once you have shipped the order to the customer, you would manually change the order to the “completed” order status, which sends another email to the customer, saying ‘Your order has been shipped.  You should receive it within 3-7 days’ and again, some contact details. 

To ensure your system works as described above, you will want to ensure that you have:

1. Changed your Order Statuses and the information in the ‘E-mail header:’ section from their default, which is relatively bland.  Eg, ‘Your order has been processed successfully.’
2. Ensured that ‘Notify customer’ checkbox has been checked for each of the three order statuses (and probably should be set for all order statuses). 
3. If you wish, you would have ‘Notify orders department’ checked for the “open” and “processed” order statuses so you have a record of when payment was received. 

5. If you’re using Direct Debit, Bank Transfer or Phone Ordering/Payment methods, ensure you have the relevant information added in the ‘Payment instructions:’ section. 

6.  Check your gift certificate statuses:

Orders > Gift Certificates > Gift Certificate statuses

Check each of the statuses are set to notify the customer at the relevant times.  The customer here is whoever the 'email to:' field is addressed to.