1. Collect product information: The first step is to make a list with all products you wish to sell and collect their names, photos, prices and descriptions. The more complete this list, the faster you will build your online store.
   Once this is done, follow the steps below to setup the various parts of your store.
   
   Note: You need to think about the product descriptions, as a common mistake is to copy the content of printed catalogs online. People do not read on the web as they read printed materials, so your products’ descriptions should be complete and carefully written. Valuable help about writing for the web can be found here: http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/
   Tip: Here's a quick tip to help your search engine ranking: Provide a full name for your products. For example, a retailer sells a computer mouse named “IntelliMouse” and publishes it to his online store with its exact name. A more search engine friendly name would be “Microsoft IntelliMouse optical USB mouse”.
   
   
2. Setup tab: Use the 'General' tab to define your general store settings: here you can add your store's name and logo, design your homepage content, enable different currencies on your store and lots more!
   Use the other tabs under 'Setup' to define your payments, taxes, shipping options and other store settings.
   
   Read more about the 'Setup' tab here
   
   
3. Catalog tab: Organize your products in categories, product filters and product variants and import them to your store catalog. The better you organize them the easier your visitors will navigate your store.
   
   Example: Let’s select a product (digital camera) from our demo store. It belongs to the category “Digital Cameras”, which is a subcategory of “Digital Photography”, which is a root category (has no parent category). At the same time it belongs to 3 product filter groups: “Manufacturer”, “Megapixels” and “Camera price”, and comes in different variants: "Colors" and "Service Plans" (you can see product variants in the product's page).
   Note: Although organizing your products in both categories and product types seems more complicated than just having categories, we highly recommend it, as it is the way big stores organize their products (Amazon, Yahoo shopping, Microsoft shopping, Wal-Mart, …) and is a strong point of Magnet Commerce compared to other turn-key ecommerce software solutions. Of course, you can start by organizing your products in categories and subcategories now and improve navigation by adding product filters sometime later.
   
   Read more about the 'Catalog' tab here
   
   
4. Design tab: Use the 'Design' tab to customize the design of your store. Choose colors, buttons, layouts and banners to make your store look as unique as your company!
   
   
5. Product Stock tab: Set the product stock record for all products of your e-store
   
   Read more about the 'Stock' tab here
   
   
6. Site Content tab: Design the custom pages of your store, add news and enable the product review and rating functionality on your online store.
   
   Read more about the 'Site Content' tab here
   
   
7. Marketing tab: Add banners to your site and setup checkout questions to get valuable customer feedback. You can also use this tab to send newsletters, and get a product feed for submitting your products to Froogle, and Shopping.com. Finally you can export your store members to IntelliContact, a web-based email marketing and surveying software.
   
   Read more about the 'Marketing' tab here
   
   

Administer your Magnet Commerce Store:

Orders tab: View, Manage and Export incoming and past orders at any time

Read more about the 'Orders' tab here

Members tab: Edit/export your store's registered members. You can also use this tab to manually add new members. For example you might want to do this when a customer has placed an order via phone.

Rea more about the 'Members' tab here

Reports tab: Get sales reports according to sales by country, by payment method, by shipping method and more. You can also use this tab connect your store with StatCounter.com, Google Analytics or add your own tracking code to get detailed web statistics for your e-store.

Read more about the 'Reports' tab here