IV Help Guide

Building Your Catalog

Welcome to our tutorial on setting up your eCommerce shopping cart. This tutorial is spread across several smaller tutorials, and walks you through the entire process from just getting started to being ready to place your first test order. This process will walk you through setting up a full, user-friendly catalog is a long process that requires many steps.

Before you begin, we highly recommend that you sit down and plan out everything you will need for your catalog. This includes the products you are selling, the attributes they share, how you plan on sorting them, etc.

We strongly suggest taking each of the following steps in order while setting up your catalog, and after the process is complete placing a test order. A test order will ensure your customers will have no problems purchasing your products once your website is live. If you have any questions our 24/7 technical support will be able to assist you in working out everything that will be needed for your product catalog.

1. Set Up Your Sales Tax Settings - Usually, you will only need to charge sales tax to customers within your own country and state/province, so you will at least want to create tax rates for those customers.
2. Create Custom Email Templates - These emails will be sent out for order emails, customer account info, and other customer services. There are many default emails included, so this step can be skipped if you don't need to create your own email.
3. System Configuration - This section includes basic information about how your catalog will work, inlcuding shipping methods, payment methods accepted, and others. This is also where you choose which email templates are used. Fill out as much as you can, and return later to setup the rest.
4. Create Your Attributes and Attribute Sets - Attributes are the shared properties of your products. For example, most of your products will have attributes like "Price" or "Weight", but you might have a group of similar products that share attributes like "Size" or "Color".
5. Create the Categories for Your Products - You'll want to group your products by common categories, whether it be type of product, manufacturer, etc.
6. Create the Products You Are Selling - At last, the meat of the process. If you have a large number of products to add, you may want to use a spreadsheet program to Import your products. As you add your products, you will be able to add them to categories. You can also wait until you are done adding products, and then add them to categories by editing the categories themselves.
7. Create Your Customer Groups - These will be used in the next step....
8. Create Your Promotions - These are the sales and other price modifications you provide for your customers.