Homestead Blog

Here’s product designer Rina with her third and final post on Homestead’s new SimpleStore – Rochelle.

In the last two posts, we covered an overview of the new Homestead SimpleStore product, how to get it set up on your site, and how to fill it with products. Today we’ll finish off with the financials. All you need to do is get a free PayPal account, and then connect that account to your store.

The PayPal account you’ll need is called a “PayPal Business Account with Website Payments Standard.” It’s a mouthful, but we put in a link so you don’t have to search PayPal’s website for it. Just go to your Store Manager in your online website account by logging in and selecting Selling Online, followed by Store Manager, in the left-hand menu. (Multi-site users, remember to ascertain that you’re on the right site!) Under the PayPal section of this page, you’ll see a link that says Get a PayPal Account. Click on that and follow PayPal’s instructions to get your account set up.

This PayPal account is your online payment processor and all you need to run your SimpleStore’s finances. With it, you can accept all major credit cards, bank transfers, and PayPal payments without any online merchant accounts. You customers will check out through PayPal’s secure transaction system, and payments will be received into your PayPal account. You’ll add financial information to your PayPal account during setup so that you can move funds from your PayPal account directly into your bank account. Please note that it may take a few days for your financial information to be confirmed.

When you’re done setting up your PayPal account, return to the same Store Manager page and enter the e-mail address you used to register for your PayPal account into the box. You can also update your e-mail address in SiteBuilder by clicking on the second of the three Edit button in the ‘Basics’ tab. (For SiteBuilder Lite, the Manage Store and PayPal Settings link will return you to the Store Manager page).

And you’re done! Now you have a fully-operational online store that matches the rest of your website. I think you’ll have a lot of fun with SimpleStore. Happy online selling!

Here’s product designer Rina with the second of her posts on Homestead’s new SimpleStore – Rochelle.

In yesterday’s post, I gave an introduction to our new Homestead SimpleStore product, explaining some of its benefits and how to get one onto your website. We’ll start where we left off in the last post, with our SimpleStore element positioned and designed to suit our tastes.

Now that the SimpleStore is ready to go, let’s fill it with products. SimpleStore can display up to 100 products (you can actually load it with an unlimited number of products, and you choose up to 100 of them to show your customers at any given time). There are two ways to edit your product information: using your website editor (SiteBuilder or SiteBuilder Lite), or by logging in to your online website account.

To access your products in SiteBuilder, simply click on the SimpleStore element to select it. The properties editor pane to the right will then show the properties for your SimpleStore . On the ‘Basics’ tab, there are three Edit buttons—one to edit your product data, one to connect your PayPal e-mail address (we’ll talk about that in my next post), and one to set your currency.

Clicking on the first Edit button will pop up a window with the Product Manager.

To access the Product Manager in SiteBuilder Lite, click on your SimpleStore element to select it. The top left corner of the screen will now display two buttons and a link for your SimpleStore . Clicking on the Manage Products button will pop up a window with the Product Manager.

Finally, you can also access the Product Manager by logging in to your website account. Then use the left hand navigation menu to find the Store Manager sub-section within the Selling Online section. This opens the Store Manager page, which you can think of as your behind-the-scenes SimpleStore manager. The Store Manager page is where you can access the Product Manager, set your store’s currency, and connect your PayPal account to your store. It also contains an instructional section on the right side of the page, which provides helpful tutorials and videos on how to set up your store if you get confused.

For users with multiple sites, please make sure that you are signed into the correct website before managing your product information. A quick way to know whether or not the site you’re signed in on has SimpleStore is to check the background color of the instructional section on the right side of the page—if your site has a SimpleStore , it will be orange; otherwise, it will be blue.

Open the Product Manager by clicking on the Launch Product Manager link on the page.

Adding your products using the Product Manager

Now that the Product Manager is open, it’s easy to add your product information to your SimpleStore . You can enter information like product name, a description, and a price – which will be fed into your SimpleStore’s built-in search tool.

SimpleStore lets you upload a picture for each product. Here’s a word of advice – I would use a good-sized product photo. SimpleStore automatically creates a smaller-sized image to be displayed in your store, and when your customers click on it the image will be displayed in its actual size.

You can also choose to assign up to two attributes for each product. For example, in my sample store I sell cookies. For my chocolate chip cookies, I created an attribute called ‘Chocolate Type’ and listed the options as ‘Milk’, ‘Dark’ and ‘White’, so a customer could choose to buy dark chocolate chip cookies from me, if that’s what he or she wanted.

You can also place your products into an unlimited number of categories. Categorizing your products is useful because your customers can then choose to display just ‘vegan’ cookies, for example, if that’s what they are looking for.

If you need to manage your attributes or your categories separately from your products – say you want to rename a category or edit the options in an attribute – you can do so by clicking the Categories or Attributes label on the left side of the Product Manager, then clicking the specific category or attribute that you want to edit. Don’t forget to save when you’re done!

Now that your SimpleStore is loaded with products, in tomorrow’s post I’ll show you how to set it up to accept your customers’ payments!

For those of you who want an easy way to sell things on your websites, have we got something for you! Here’s product designer Rina to tell you all about our new SimpleStore product – Rochelle.

There is a common misconception that if you have a website, you’re equipped to sell online. However, if you really think about it, all you have is real estate. Where’s your storefront? Where’s your shopping cart? How do you accept your customer’s payments? And if you have more than just a handful of products, how does a customer search through all of them?

As many of you may know, Homestead offers something called Homestead Storefront, an advanced ecommerce product designed to give you a way to offer your customers all those services and more. Storefront is jam-packed with great features, including shipping and billing tools, inventory management and QuickBooks integration.

Sometimes, however, people just don’t need all the advanced functionality of Storefront. They want to sell online using something simpler.

So here it is—the Homestead SimpleStore! The SimpleStore is just what its name implies: a simple way to add a store to your website, and one that matches the look and feel of your site to boot.

SimpleStore provides you with a clean, intuitive layout that makes it quite easy to give your customers a professional-looking store, complete with built-in shopping cart, product search and category browsing capabilities. You’ll be able to accept credit cards online without a merchant account by using a free PayPal account.

Perhaps best of all, you don’t need to learn any new tools to fit it into your existing website—the SimpleStore is simply another element in SiteBuilder or SiteBuilder Lite!

Here are a few sample stores that we’ve built. Click on the screenshots and you’ll be taken to each SimpleStore sample. Feel free to play with them as much as you want, just to see how they work. And don’t worry—you won’t actually purchase anything because for these samples we didn’t set up a PayPal account to accept orders.

Now, how do you get one of these? SimpleStore is currently available for Gold and Platinum website members as a paid add-on to your website account. If you have one of these accounts, you can easily add a SimpleStore to your site by logging in to your online website account and finding the Selling Online section, followed by the Simple sub-section, using the left-hand navigation menu.

Getting the SimpleStore on your website

After purchasing the add-on, you can just drop your SimpleStore onto your existing website like you would any other element in SiteBuilder or SiteBuilder Lite. In SiteBuilder, the SimpleStore element will appear under the coin icon in the menu above your page after you purchase the add-on:

In SiteBuilder Lite, the SimpleStore element is the green shopping cart entitled ‘Add Store’ that shows up in your element palette after you purchase the SimpleStore add-on.

Your SimpleStore element will first appear on your page in its default size and color. The example below shows how my store first appeared in SiteBuilder, right after I added the SimpleStore element to a new store page.

It’s really easy to change these defaults. Your SimpleStore element acts just like any other part of your website, so you can use the tools you’re used to in SiteBuilder or SiteBuilder Lite to make the changes you want. Resize and position your store wherever you like on your page, or change around your store’s size, colors, font and more until it blends in perfectly with the rest of your website design.

Building a SimpleStore is fast, and it’s fun too. Tomorrow I’ll show you how easy it is to add products to your new SimpleStore!