Back to: BigCommerce 101
Launching an eCommerce store can be a daunting task. There are a lot of moving parts, screens to check, and payments to verify. So in this video tutorial, we’ll walk you through the entire process of launching a BigCommerce Store.
To begin, let’s look at the most important configurations and customer flows.
First and foremost, make sure you’ve added and published all of the products you wish to have available at launch.
Next, review your shipping settings. If you haven’t configured shipping yet, you’ll want to follow the entire process. Select your origin, install the appropriate add-ons, create shipping zones, and configure your label settings.
Once shipping is ready, take a look at your payment methods. Add each payment method you want to support and connect the appropriate accounts.
After payments are sorted, turn to the Tax Settings. You can even enable a tax service that will automatically configure and track taxes for you (recommended), or manually configure all of the tax settings for your store.
After you’ve reviewed the most important store configuration settings, it’s time to start testing!
You’ll want to walk through your entire customer flow at least once.
The exact customer flow depends on how your store is configured. A common flow begins on the home page, moves to the product catalog or category view, and into a single product. At each step, you should look carefully and confirm all the data and layout matches your expectations.
From there, add at least one product to the cart and step through the entire checkout process.
You’ll want to run at least one test for each payment gateway that you support. While running in test mode you can use the fake credentials provided by the payment gateway. In live mode you will need to use real credentials, but you can refund the order at the end of the test.
Next, review every order confirmation, including the emails that should be delivered to both the customer and merchant.
If applicable, review the various order fulfillment stages supported by your store… particularly the refund process.
Once you’ve confidently tested each of your customer flows, it’s time to switch your payment gateways to “live” and start driving traffic to your new store!
