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The Shop function within the MySouthWest website allows merchants the ability to sell goods online with the minimum of risk and the maximum amount of flexibility. The overall concept allows a merchant to have up to 20 separate products available within their online shopping trolley. Processing of online payments can be carried out by the merchant directly or can be delegated to MySouthWest. The online shopping experience runs automatically with minimum input required. All that is required is for the online merchant (you) to enter some initial details, including: Who you are and how you wish to charge for on-line products The items you wish to sell The areas you will ship the products to The methods you will use to ship and The costs involved for shipping. Once these have been entered, the world of e-commerce is at your command. This fact sheet is designed using a fictitious drama group who wish to sell tickets and some souvenir items online. Starting Out: On logging in to the main administration window and clicking on My Organisation the main information screen is displayed. This screen contains an entry for an account balance. At the outset of setting up an online trading facility this balance will be zero
To begin establishing an online shopping presence the trader must click on the blue SHOP tab.
Obviously, at this stage there are no orders to be displayed. The first action required is to set up the merchant's details. To do this, click on the green Merchant Setup tab and the following screen will appear:
By clicking into each box you can add the required information: ABN Number is your registered Australian Business Number. This is followed by the Credit Card Processing Method you choose to use. The drop down box offers two choices. If you select to process your own transactions then the surcharge fee is 2% of the purchase price. If you select for MySouthWest to process the Credit Card transactions then there is a 5% surcharge applied. Please Note: Due to legal restrictions, if you are selling alcoholic beverages and/or other restricted goods you will need to select the 2% option and process your own credit card payments. The 'credit card message to appear on statement' is dependent on which way the transaction is handled. If you have chosen MySouthWest to process the transaction then this should be filled in with “Connect SW Ass Inc”. If you are processing the transaction through your own business then this should be filled in with your own bank account name. This is so that the customer is aware of the name of the organisation/transaction which will appear on their credit card statement. Method of Notification allows you to select how you wish to be notified when an order is made by a customer. You can either select Email Only or Email & Fax or Email & SMS. This feature has been included to allow people that are not online regularly to have an alternative means of notification that an order has been placed. The email to receive orders is the main email of your business. This is the address that will be notified in the event of anyone ordering your goods online. This is vital that this field is completed for the online process to work as you must receive notification that an order has been made to allow you to ship the goods to the customer. If you have selected Email & SMS please include the mobile phone number in the “SMS to receive orders” field that you wish notification SMS’s to be sent to. If you have selected Email & Fax, please include the fax number in the “Fax to receive orders” field that you wish you notification faxes to be sent to. Refund Policy is your specific refund policy and this will appear at the foot of each shop page in your online store. Merchant description appears at the top of your shopping page and is the text that is used within the MySouthWest listings of each trader within their particular category, i.e. Arts and Crafts or Home & Garden etc. The following screen shows what the drama group have filled in:
Having entered all your details, click on Update Merchant Settings. Shipping Classes: The next step is to set up Shipping Classes for any items that you wish to sell online. It may appear a little 'back-to-front' but the system is designed to determine each shipping requirement and then apply that to the items on sale. Therefore, the shipping classes must be created first. Click on the shipping classes tab.
Obviously, you have not entered any classess yet, so the first thing to do is to click on the Add new class link.
The Drama group want to sell, T-shirts, Drama Mask Lapel Pins and Tickets online. The T-shirts will cost more to post than the Pins and the tickets will not require any shipping at all. They therefore will need three classes of shipping. One for the heavier and bulkier T-shirts, one for the light and small Pins and no shipping charges for the tickets. They could have classified a more generic group like Bulky & Heavy and placed more items than just the T-shirts into it if they had intended to sell more goods (for example sweatshirts) but in their case simple is good! They do intend to sell two types of lapel pin and both of these will use the same shipping class.
They also intend to sell tickets online and these will not require any shipping. It is important therefore that they create a shipping class for these items and select NO in the shipping required box. Having completed the number of shipping classes you require you can move onto the green Shipping Tab. Shipping Setup:
To finish off the shipping setup it is now important to choose those areas you wish to ship to, the shipping methods you wish to use and the prices to be applied for each. For example: The drama group want to be able to sell T-Shirts throughout Australia and they would also like to sell their products in the UK as they have a dedicated cadre of followers over there. However, they will only mail their products by First Class Australia Post services. They will not use registered mail nor will they use a Parcel Delivery Service. They also know that to post a package to anywhere in WA will be cheaper than to the rest of Australia and obviously overseas will cost even more. Having done their homework by finding out how much the Postage and Packing will cost, they can now set up the classes and charges as required. (Please note the costs used in this example are not verified P&P prices and are used for illustrative purposes only). Begin by clicking on Setup shipping areas. The following screen shows how you would set up a WA only shipping area:
The area is given a meaningful name, the Australian postcode range is entered and the country chosen.
For the rest of Australia they have entered one class called Rest of Australia and they add one of the postcode ranges. Having saved this they can then add an additional postcode range to the same class.
At this point they ten have one area called Rest of Australia that covers all postcodes except WA. For the international area they enter the name of the country as follows:
Having entered each shipping area that you require, you will see that they are summarised for you on the Shipping Areas page. From here you can edit or delete them:
If you have already assigned an item to a shipping area, subsequently you will not be able to delete the area until all items associated with it have been 'unhooked' from it. This prevents customers trying to buy goods that have no shipping area or charges assigned as this will cause a general error during the purchase process. Assuming you are satisfied with them you can now proceed on to the Shipping Methods. Again as you have no methods so far, just click on Set Up Shipping Methods and add new method. Once again you enter the methods you would like to use, Parcel Delivery, UPS, Australia Post, Air, Ground etc. You can also enter a description of the method that you are using. For example this could include a description of the Parcel Delivery Service and how long it might take them to deliver etc.
Having entered the various methods you may choose to use, you can now enter the shipping charges that will be applied to each area, each method and each class of item. Under the green Shipping tab, click on Set Up Class Shipping Prices. In the following example, the class of item is a Drama Pin, it will be mailed via Australia Post to anywhere in Australia that has a postcode between 1000 and 5999, and 7000 and 9999 at a cost of $2.99. At this point you can choose how much for the first item, how much each additional item will be shipped at and an amount, if any, which will qualify the customer for free delivery. For example: If the first item is $2.00 and inclusive is $1.00 then a customer buying 10 items will be charged $2.00 plus 9 x $1.00 = $11.00. If a free limit of $50.00 was set up, then any order where the amount of goods purchased breached $50.00 would have no shipping charges attached. In the case of the drama group, where the lapel pins are $10.99 each, then any order for 5 or more would qualify for free shipping in that case. You will also see instructions at the foot of the screen on what to do if the item is COD/ATP.
Once you have completed the shipping setup you can now move on to adding items to your online store. Adding Items: By clicking on the green Items tab you can now select to add a new item. Each online store may have a total of 20 separate items. This shouldn't be confused by the amount of stock held for each article. For example, you could sell 20 different types of T-shirts, but you may hold 400 of each type. However, if you have a black T-shirt size small and a Black T-shirt size medium, these are 2 different items. The following screen is what you will have to fill in to register an item:
The name of the item, to make the item active (if you do not tick the box it will not appear in the system) GST applied or not, and the price are all straight forward. Next you must indicate if the purchaser must be over 18 (for Wines etc) and then an internal code that will be applied to the item. The description that you enter will be what prospective customers see next to the item online. Next choose how the item is sold (each or by the case or in punnets) and then the number of stock items that are available. Once this number drops to less than one the item will no longer be displayed online. The next box details how quickly you will ship the article and this is followed by any dimensions if required. You can now assign the item to a shipping class and if the item does not require shipping (i.e. tickets) you can enter a message that will appear on an email the customer would receive instead. Finally you choose a category to place the item in. You may only choose one category per item, but may enter subsequent items into other categories. For example, the drama group will assign their lapel pins to Arts and Crafts but will assign their tickets to the Tickets Category. Details of their online shop will appear in both categories. Once you have added and saved the items you will eventually have a list of them on the items page:
At this point you can choose which item gets displayed at the top of your listing on the website. You may have a particular iconic brand that you want people to associate with your trading name and obviously this would be put at the top of the list. You can then elect to upload an image of the item that you are selling. Click on the image link next to the item. A new page will appear:
As there are no images held against this item yet, you click on add new image.
At this point you can browse your own PC for a suitable image. Once you have selected the image you then click on 'upload image' and that will be attached to the item in your online shop. You can upload multiple images for an item and choose how they are displayed against the item. The image you select to be top will be the one that is displayed next to the item description on the initial shopping page on the website. The subsequent images will only be seen when the customer clicks onto that particular item. Shop Setup Complete: At this point, you have items in the shop, shipping classes and methods with which to ship them to customers. The shop setup is now complete. All that is left is to add additional items and classes as required so that your customers will be able to see the full range of your products. Once you have completed the setup, the last thing before you 'go live' to the e-commerce world is for the MySouthWest Administrator to approve and release your items onto the website. This is carried out by the MySouthWest administration team in real-time (they will get automatic notification that your goods are awaiting approval, so you do not need to do anything) and is a security policy to prevent fraudulent use of your business name by unscrupulous people.
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