Building a store involves a sequence of steps each of which require you to provide specific information. We therefore recommend that you collate all the information surrounding your business and the products that you intend to sell prior to commencing any work within TecknaShop.
One of TecknaShop’s unique features is its ‘internationality’, which means that you can build a store in different languages and enable your shoppers to shop in their own currency. Click and Build's store building facilities are also multilingual in as much as all of the text that is part of TecknaShop itself will appear in the browsers default language (international version) unless you choose otherwise. Depending upon your markets, consider what language(s) to use when you enter the store text such as your welcome text, terms and conditions, product descriptions and so on.
Most carriers will charge for shipping based on destination, weight/volume and the delivery time required, therefore we recommend that you obtain a comprehensive list of the rates from each of your chosen carriers for each of your possible destinations. You may also consider applying tax to your store, in which case obtain all the necessary information regarding your tax structure for each of your product types and the chosen market locations before building your store.
To help you navigate the complex subject of cross border Tax, WorldPay in association with Deloitte & Touche and Berwin Leighton have created t@xandlegal.com. This site contains detailed explanations of how each country’s tax systems function, together with an intelligent system that guides you through a series of simple questions to provide you with tailored information relevant to your circumstances.
TecknaShop enables you to set up a generic discounting structure for your products. You will need to plan your discount structure, based on the following 3 methods.
x for y: for example, 3 for the price of 2
% over x: for example, 10% discount on orders over £50
Free Delivery over x: for example, Free delivery on orders over £25
You can also associate each discount with a date range. This provides a period of time during which a discount applies to a product. For example you can set up a specific discount that provides a shopper with 3 for the price of 2 discount only for the January sales. We recommend that you draw up a list of all of the discounts that you will need for your store before you start entering any products. More discounts can be added later if needed, and you can change which discount applies to a product at any time.
This area enables you to configure Click and Build, so that it can receive instructions as choices or free text, from your shoppers concerning the goods ordered. This could be as simple as choosing a colour or size of a product, but could equally be the shopper choosing a slogan for a T-shirt or greetings card. Decide what instructions you wish to use in your store and draw up a list before entering any products into your store. More instructions can be added later if needed, and you can change which instruction(s) apply to a product at any time. An example of the instruction are :
Wrapping Option– Choose from either Xmas, Coloured, Plain
Greeting Message – Free text entry
Slogan – Free Text entry
Preferred Delivery Day – Choose from Mon, Tue, Wed, Thur, Fri
For each of your products make sure that they are not illegal or subject to any import restrictions for all of your market locations. Check that the descriptions and variants of your products are meaningful and consistent for your markets as products like clothing and shoes vary widely in size types. Some of the most common variations of products are laided out in Appendix B. All weights and measurement units will also need to be understandable in all of your markets. For each product decide the content for the following parameters:
The short description to identify the product
The optional long description that fully describes the product, perhaps including a detailed manufacturers specification
The optional small image (thumbnail) to accompany the short description
The optional main image to accompany the long description
Its weight if you will charge for shipping by weight
Its dimensions if you will charge for shipping by volume
Its sale price
The use of images will enhance the visual appeal of your store as well as improving its functionality. The number, type and size of the images used within your store will have a significant impact on the apparent refresh speed of your store, especially for screens that contain numerous images.
Start by gathering together your images of products, logos, backgrounds, navigation buttons and any other images that will become part of your store. GIF, JPG and PNG image formats are supported. TecknaShop uses image descriptions for reporting purposes and by default, the file names are used as the descriptions. This can be changed if required, however, if you make your file names as descriptive as possible you will not need to change the descriptions. TecknaShop enables you to upload a Zip file containing many images. This speeds up the set up process in this area enormously as is recommended.
Working with GIF or JPG
images.
Use JPG files for images of higher resolution and colour depths such as
photographs. When saving JPG files, in a graphics application you will
have the option to adjust the compression setting. If you use a high compression
setting, the resulting file size will be smaller and faster to send to
the shopper’s browser, however, the viewed quality of the image will be
lower. Experiment to find the highest compression setting that retains
the level of quality needed.
Use GIF files for images with less than 256 colours such as logos, navigation buttons, charts and graphs etc. Removing data relating to unused colors can also optimise GIFs.
Keep the image size to a sensible minimum and crop your images so that there is no spare “white space” surrounding them. As TecknaShop is designed to be displayed on a screen set to 800 x 600 you will need to estimate how large your images will appear to your shoppers. Design tip: An image of 65 pixels wide will appear to be around an inch wide for shoppers using a 15” display.
We recommend that your product thumbnail images should be around 70 x 70 pixels and your main product image should be around 300 x 300 pixels.
Colour: Both the PC and Mac have a maximum number of colours that can be displayed at one time. The maximums for a PC are typically 256, 64,000 or 16 Million colours. Problems can occur when your PC or Mac is set to display 256 colours as each uses a different palette of colours. If either is called on to display a colour that is not in it’s palette it approximates the additional colour by a process called “dithering”. This results in an unpredictable and generally much poorer rendition of the original images. There are 216 common colours for both the PC and Mac, which are referred to as the “Web Safe Colours” as they not dither. These colours are displayed in Appendix E.
We recommend that composition of the text for use within the store is carried out in a word processor, so that spelling and grammar checks can take place before the text is entered into the store.
TecknaShop allows the addition of HTML formatted text to enable store builders to have more control over the page style. However, knowledge of HTML is not necessary need to produce a well-designed and functional store.
Much of the text contained in the store will be short and long descriptions for your products. Typically, the short description will be displayed on the brief product page alongside the thumbnail image. The short description and image together should give the shopper enough detail to identify the product. The optional long description should contain the full description or details on the product. The long description will be displayed together with the optional main product image.
Once the basic structure of your store is complete, you have three options for uploading details of your product inventory to your store.
If you choose to build on-line you will use TecknaShop’s Catalogue Administration to add a new product to any specific category(s). Enter the product's name, long & short descriptions, thumbnail & main images and details of the product's variants, price and stock levels. This method can be done from any PC connected to the Internet with no additional software.
If you have details of your product range held on an existing database or spreadsheet you may want to use your existing application to produce a Comma Separated Variable (CSV) file. This file can then be directly uploaded, populating your on-line store. The CSV file will need to follow the format described in Appendix A.
The Off-line Inventory Builder is a user-friendly and standalone method of producing your product inventory and a formatted CSV file respectively. Use this option if you have a larger inventory that you are creating from scratch. The program is available for your PC and it must be installed on a workstation with an Internet connection.
Consideration of other markets and terminology should be made throughout the build process. For example a more generic term such, as “Tax should be used instead of “VAT” or “GST” to describe your specific tax structure.
If you advertise your telephone number include the international dialing code (a table of which is given in Appendix C).
The display format of dates varies from country to country so we would recommend spelling out dates, rather than relying on a shorter numerical format.
To view the table of content when viewing this help file in an early browser version click here
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