The system is designed around having a single consumer (your company) and several different types of providers (we call them suppliers). The correct configuration of your company is important so that the system behaves in the manner you like. There are many different options that control the behavior of the system (navigation, order process, etc.). The company configuration also governs how (and if) you utilize the various suppliers of the system along with company specific information such as userID's, passwords, merchant_id's, etc.
There are many different types of suppliers to the system. Some examples are:
In addition, your own company can also act in the role of being an Inventory Supplier.
Suppliers can only be setup by the Site Administrator. If you have a request to import/export data or to connect to a supplier via a web-service that is not currently supported, please let us know and we will accomodate you. If the supplier is unique to your company's operation, there might be a small charge for the setup and possible development work needed to accomodate.
Besides Drop-ship Suppliers, the most common are Cart Providers, Shipping Providers and Payment Providers. All of these types of providers can be configured to be used by your company through the Company Admin interface. Only the Company Administrator or members of the Company Administrator group can access the Administrative interface.
After the initial setup (you went through the initial setup during the sign-up process), you need to configure your company to interact with suppliers and to define the behaviors you want from the system. To access your company's Administrative Interface you would login to the system and then select the Admin Home tab near the top of the page. If you don't see an Admin Home tab then you do not have administrative privliges. Please contact us to resolve.
The Admin Home page provides links to various operations and activities for managing various aspects of the system. To setup your company for use, perform the following steps:
The first section of this page provides information about your company such as the name, address, phone, etc. You can ignore the areas related to Require Login?, Use Groups? and Anonymous User. These areas are ignored by the system. In addition to the normal company information, you can set a password for viewing credit carts. It is strongly recommended that you set a Credit Card Password to protect your customer's information from unauthorized eyes. Setting a Credit Card Password will hide all but the last 4 digits of credit card numbers on the OrderDetail page. If/when the correct Credit Card Password is entered on the OrderDetail page, then credit card numbers will be fully visible.
The next section titled Setp Options has several buttons displayed. A brief description of each follows:
The next few sections are pretty straight-forward and are very similar. So to make things simple (we like to do that here) we will only discuss the differences. This section allows you to setup Cart Providers, Shipping Providers, Payment Providers, Inventory Suppliers, Accounting Integration and other companies that are associated to this company. For Cart and Payment Providers, you can select whether to allow Updates/Resend's from the provider. I.e. you can resubmit a changed order from your Cart Provider and have the information accepted. Normally, updates are not allowed. The User and Passwd fields uniquely identify this company for data coming from or going to your Provider. For instance, for a Yahoo!® Store, the User would be defined as something like yhst-some-long-number. Most Providers do not utilize the Passwd field. However, if you use Google as your Cart Provider, the User would be your merchant_id and the Passwd would be your merchant_key. Shipping Providers are more complex and most have a button to take you to a configuration page specific to the Shipper. Inventory Suppliers and Companies are selected via a checkbox for whether to include them in inventory searches or not.
The final section of the Edit Company page allows you to upload a company logo that will be displayed at the top of every page and also printed on order documents such as packing slips, invoices, etc. The optimal size is 150X300 pixels. The best format is 'gif', but 'jpg' is also supported. If you have a logo image but it is not the correct size, the system will attempt to resize it for you, maintaining the correct aspect ratios. If you need help in manipulating an image, please don't hestiate to contact us.
When you're all done, don't forget to click the Update Company button to save your changes. To return to the Admin Home page, simply click Admin Home in the tabs at the top of the page. To return to your previous application context, click Return To Previous.
To edit a User, select Browse Users from the Admin Home page. Then select the user you wish to edit. To add a new user to your company, select the Add User link on the Admin Home page. The add and edit pages are very similar. The Add User page contains a subset of the information available in the Edit User page. So we will describe the Edit User page here.
Most of the information on the Edit User page is self-evident. However, there are a few exceptions that may require some explaination.
Again, don't forget to click the Update User button when you're done to save your changes.
The basic premise of security on this system is that you can't give away a privilige you don't have. So to configure a company or user to utilize a supplier you (your account) must be configured to have access to that Supplier or Company. Similarly, when configuring your company, you cannot assign a privlige to your company that you don't have. To gain access to a Supplier, you will need to contact the Support Team and arrange for that Company or Supplier to be added to your account.
Remember that help is always available by clicking the Help link at the top of each page. Currently not all pages have help available but we will be adding help information as time allows. If you ever have a question or concern, please contact Support Team via email or by calling. We are here to serve you and make this process as painless as possible.