Ilisys E-commerce Support will install osCommerce onto your account with a preconfigured set of default settings. These presumes that your shop is in Australia for shipping and GST purposes and also provides some example categories and products to help you understand how the shopping cart works. You will need to delete those and upload your own products and manage the categories.

Your shop can be accessed at: http://www.yourdomain.com/catalog/

Your admin area can be accessed at: http://www.yourdomain.com/catalog/admin/

Almost all setup for your shop is down through this URL. The inital username and password for this will be the same as your primary FTP username password. You can change this if desired.

The first step, after logging in, is to click on the Configuration menu.

The first of the Configuration menu items, My Store, sets some very basic but important settings. At the very least, you need to set the Store Name, the Store Owner, the Email Address (of the store owner) and the Email From address, which may be the same as the owner's Email Address.

You may also want to change the default Country and Zone (state) settings.

You should also change Store Address and Phone option, which controls what is displayed on your site.

You should now work your way through the other Configuration menu items, and set what seems appropriate, depending on the characteristics of your shop and the products you will be displaying.

For example, under Images you can set the size of images that you will display against products and categories.

Under Customer Details you can set what optional customer details you ask for from your customers.

Under Shipping/Packaging you need to set your postcode so the Australia Post shipping module will work correctly. You can also set some other global shipping options.

Under Product Listing you can set what characteristics your products have, like Manufacturer, Model No, etc.

The Stock menu item allows you to set whether you want osCommerce to track your stock in hand. This is most useful if your shop is totally online. If you also have a physical storefront, you may find it problematic to update stock levels in your online shop with sales from your physical shop.

osCommerce handles online delivery of virtual products such as images, documents or software. If you are selling these types of products, then set this up in the Download section.

Column Controller is the key module for controlling the layout of your shop. osCommerce operates on a three column model, where the centre column contains the product or category listing content, and the left and right columns contain navigation, information, log in, search or other ancilliary boxes. You can control where these boxes appear, and indeed whether they appear throught the Column Controller module.

The Center Shop menu item controls the layout of the shop as a whole on the browser page. You can control whether to have a fixed width layout or to scale to the browser maximum width and how to align the shop on the browser window.

The final item in this section is Website Maintenance. You can have your shop automatically display a 'Down for Maintenance' notice to customers while you are busy making large scale changes or if you ever need to go off the air for any reason.

Note, under normal circumstances. you should not change the settings under Logging, Cache, Email Options, GZip Compression, Sessions, or WYSIWYG Editor as incorrect settings here may prevent certain parts of your shop from operating correctly. If you need assistance with these options contact E-commerce Support.