Open a store

A store gives you a shopfront, a catalogue, a basket and a checkout that pays into your own Stripe account. Creating one writes the whole shop together: Home, Products, About and Contact, the product page, the basket, the checkout and a thank-you page, plus the policies a checkout has to show. It is edited with the same editor as your websites.

Before you start

• Stripe connected under Settings › Payments, so the checkout can take payment.

• Your shop's name, trade and what you sell, for example "Hand-poured soy candles".

• A Launch plan or above. On a plan without selling, the Stores tab says "Selling isn't on your plan" and offers See plans.

Steps: create the store

1. Open Sites and choose the Stores tab.
2. Press New store.
3. Fill in Shop name, choose your Trade, and fill in What do you sell?.
4. Press Create store. The window shows "Writing your shopfront…", then "Building the shopfront and its policies…".
5. When you see "Store created.", the store opens on its Orders tab.

The store's tabs

Steps: stock the shelf

1. Open the Products tab.
2. Under In your catalogue, press Stock it beside each product to put it on this store's shelf. To make a new one, press New product. See Add a physical product to your store.
3. Under On the shelf, use the arrows to set the order shoppers see. Take off removes a product from this shelf without deleting it.

Steps: set the look

1. Open the Look tab.
2. Under The shelf, choose Products to a line (3, 4, 5 or 6) and How much of the page (Narrow or Wide).
3. Under Arrangement, pick where the heading, picture and buttons sit. It applies to every page of the store at once, including the basket and the checkout.

What happens next

• The store's pages are live from the moment they are made, on your free address. Edit them from the Storefront tab; changes show once saved.
• The Stores list shows each store's address, how many products are on its shelf, its pages and its status. Open store opens it; the external-link button opens the published shop.
• Shoppers can search the shelf, filter by category and by option, and sort it, for example Price, low to high.
• Every buyer becomes a contact and every purchase an order under Sales › Orders.
• A membership on the shelf renews, and is paid for on its own: a basket that mixes it with anything else is refused, and nothing is charged. See Create a membership.

For agencies

Create the store inside the client with Sub-accounts › Open, or copy one you built with Copy to client…. The copy arrives unpublished, and the client's products stay their own.

Troubleshooting

"Tell us the shop's name and what it sells." Fill in Shop name and What do you sell? before pressing Create store.

"Selling needs a paid plan." Stores are included from Launch upwards. Change your plan under Settings › Billing & wallet.

The view button is greyed out with "Not live yet — publish a page first". No page of the store is published. A store you create here is live from the start, but a store made by Build my business stays hidden until its first product is ready to sell, as the build's list of what needs you says. If the hint says "Waiting on the domain to go live", the store is set to a domain that is not active yet.

A product does not appear on the shop. It is not stocked on this store's shelf, or it is deactivated (the shelf marks it "not for sale"). Press Stock it, or reactivate it.

The checkout says the shop cannot take payments. Stripe is not connected or cannot charge yet. The store's Settings tab says which under Taking money.

Related

• Add a physical product to your store
• Set up your store's settings
• Set up delivery zones and rates
• How checkout works