Homestead Blog

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!