Before publishing your online store, it's essential to ensure that all the pages look right and the settings are configured correct.
This article gives advice for the most common things that should check before publish
Payment- and shipping methods
For customers to buy items on your website, at least one payment and shipping method should be installed in your online store. It's also good to make sure that they function correctly.
You can check it by making a test purchase in your store: Add a product to the shopping cart, proceed to checkout, and confirm the order.
It's also good to check that the shipping fees are added to the order the way you want.
Theme, content, and products
You can continue editing the online store after publishing, but it's good to ensure that all the necessary information is there when you publish it.
In most cases, an online store should contain at least these pages:
Contact information of your business
What comes to products, make sure that:
The product images are of good quality.
Product details (for example, name and description) are set up well.
Possible color- and size menus work correctly, and the stock balances are correct.
Products' prices and taxes are correct.
Usability on different devices
An online store is often designed and tested with a computer's larger screen. It's worthwhile to keep in mind that your customers might use the website on all kinds of devices, such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, or desktop computers.
It's good to test your website with those different devices, or at least reduce the browser window to see how it looks on a smaller screen and how easy it's to put items into the shopping cart. Finqu's themes use responsive design, and often the site works just fine, but anyway, this kind of testing is quite easy to do.
Domain and SSL certificate
Domain and SSL certificateIt's always good to register a unique domain and attach it to your store. After the domain is all set up, make sure that:
Your domain stays on the browser's URL bar when you go through the pages in your online store.
You can add products to the shopping cart.
After the domain is attached to your online store, you can ask Finqu support to add an SSL certificate to your online store. It makes the online store safer for your customers, and browsers don't warn visitors about connections.
Analytics and search engines
Tracking your site's visitors and measuring the site's performance on Google search are important tools for boosting your store's visibility and sales. Even if you're not sure how to use analytics services, it's always good to install them at the very beginning to gather as much data as possible. You can use that data later when you have more experience.
Fulfilling orders
After you've made the test purchase or several purchases, you can fulfill them, allowing you to be more prepared when you receive actual orders from your customers.
Changing the online store's status
The last step in publishing an online store is to change its status to Published.
Go to Settings.
Go to Online store > Information.
Change the Status from the menu at the top right corner of the page to Published.
Click Save
Now your online store is published on the internet.
Congratulations! 👍