Ecommerce Documentation For SMB's

Categories Management Tutorial

Managing Categories

Categories are essential, as they enable you to group equivalent products. This helps customers find their way through the variety of your catalog, and narrow down their search when looking for a specific type of product. Categories also make it easy for the customers to find and compare them (thanks to Wcomm's product-comparison feature).

You should create a new category from the moment you have at least two products with equivalent attributes. Products in a category should be comparable, if not interchangeable. Keep this idea in mind when adding new products and creating new categories.

You may choose to not create any category, and have all products grouped into a single global category, "Home". But then customers won't be able to compare products.

You may also decide that you are not interested in the comparison feature, and would rather build your categories freely. In that case, you should disable the comparison feature: go the product preference page, and put 0 for the "Product comparison" option.

When creating a product category, you should focus on one thing: the products in this category must be comparable through their attributes (not their features). This is not only useful for your customers, but it is also a necessity for Wcomm's product-comparison feature.

Categories are managed in the "Categories" page of the "Catalog" menu. This page displays a table with the currently existing categories, with the main information displayed. In order to display sub-categories, click on the parent category or select "View" in the action menu.

Using the icon in the "Displayed" column of the table, you can indicate the ones you want hidden from the customer by clicking on the green check-mark icon, thus turning it into a red "x" mark.

All the categories are actually sub-categories of the "Home" category. To edit the "Home" category (or any currently selected category), click on the "Edit" button in the button bar when the table displays the root categories.

To create a new category (or a sub-category of an existing category), click on the "Add New" button from any level of categories

Translate your categories!

Make sure to translate each field in every language that your shop supports. In order to do that, click on the language button next to the field, and choose the language in which you wish to edit the text.

First of all, you must enter a set of general information:

• • Name. Give your category a name. Make it very short and descriptive, and choose your words wisely: your customers will rely on it when browsing your shop.
• • Displayed. Indicate if it is "displayed" (i.e., whether or not it will be available to your customers). For example, you may want to postpone displaying a new category to your customers because you have not quite completed it.
• • Parent Category. Does not appear when creating a root category. If you wish to create a subcategory belonging to a category other than the home page, choose the category under which it will appear.
• The form is the same when creating a root category or a sub-category. The only difference is that when clicking "Add New" from a sub-level of categories, Wcomm understands that you want to create a sub-category, and therefore sets the "Parent category" option accordingly.
• • Description. You should fill this field, because not only will it be useful to you or your employees, but some themes might also make use of it, displaying it to your customers.
• • Category cover image. Click on "Add file" to upload an image from your computer which will represent this category. It will appear on the category's page.
• • Category thumbnail. Displays a small image in the parent category's page, if the theme allows it.
• • Menu thumbnail. The category thumbnail appears in the menu as a small image representing the category, if the theme allows it.
• • Meta title. The title that will appear on the search engines when a request is made by a customer
• • Meta description. A presentation of your category in just a few lines, intended to capture a customer's interest. This will appear in search results
• • Meta Keywords. Keywords that you must define in order to have your site referenced by search engines. You can enter several of them, separated by commas, as well as expressions, which must be indicated in quotation marks.
• • Friendly URL. Enables you to rewrite the addresses of your categories as you wish. For example, instead of having an address such as
  id_category=3http://www.example.com/category.php?id_category=3, you can have
  http://www.example.com/123-name-of-the-category. In this case, all you would need to do is indicate in the field marked "Friendly URL" the words that you wish to see appear instead of "name-of-the-category" separated by dashes.
• • Group access. Restricts access to the category and its products to certain shoppers. To see these categories, your shoppers must belong to a user group. Check out the "Groups" page in the "Customers" menu for more information.
• • Root Category. Only appears when creating a root category. You might want to use this new category as the new root category, instead of "Home". If so, check this option that applies.
• The root category is very useful in multi-shop mode. Imagine you have 3 stores with different or partly different products and categories: you might want to use a different root category for each store.
• The root category thus reflects the "home" category of each store so if you do not want to have the same products in the homepage category of each store, you need different root categories.
  This way it is easier to assign categories to each store and you can have different products in the home category.

Once you have finished configuring your category, save it, and you are ready to fill it with products.

A new category will not automatically appear in your shop's menu. To display it, you should edit the menu with the "Top horizontal menu" module (when using the default theme), or any custom module you may have to manage the menu.

Navigating and editing categories

The "Edit" button in the button bar enables you to edit the parent category of the currently-displayed sub-categories. This means that when you are viewing the main sub-categories, clicking the "Edit" button will enable you to edit the "Home" category.

You can click on any category in the table: this will open that category, and display all of its sub-categories. In effect, this will change the context of the interface: clicking the "Edit" button will edit the current parent category, and clicking the "Add new" button will open the category creation form with the "Parents category" option set to the current parent category.

Importing and exporting categories

Besides the "Add new" and the "Edit" buttons, the list's button bar also features three buttons:

• • Export. Enables you to download the list of all categories, in CSV format.
• • Import. Opens the "Advanced Parameters > CSV Import" page, with the expect data type set to "Categories". Go to the "Understanding the Advanced Parameters" chapter to learn more about importing CSV files. You will need your CSV file to follow this format
• ID;Name;Description;Position;Displayed;
• 3;iPods;Now that you can buy movies from the iTunes Store and sync them to your iPod, the whole world is your theater.;1;1;
• 4;Accessories;Wonderful accessories for your iPod;2;1;
• 5;Laptops;The latest Intel processor, a bigger hard drive, plenty of memory, and even more new features all fit inside just one liberating inch. The new Mac laptops have the performance, power, and connectivity of a desktop computer. Without the desk part.;3;1;
• • The category identifier is the ID, not the category's name.
• • Refresh list. Reloads the list of categories with all the changes that you made.

More import options are available in the "CSV Import" page of the "Advanced parameters" menu.

Adding products to a category

In order to add a product in a category, you must open the product configuration page and go to its "Association" tab on the left. This is where you can set the categories to which the product belongs.

The "Home" category is a special category, where you can highlight/promote products from any other category by making them appear in the "Featured products" bloc. By default, you can only display 8 products in the homepage.

The "Featured products" block depends on the "Featured products on the homepage" module. If you want more (or less) products on the homepage, configure this module (from the "Modules" page in the "Modules" menu).

Note: you do not have to remove a product from its original category in order to put it on the homepage. A product can have as many categories as needed.

Catalog Management

Monitoring Your Catalog

The "Monitoring" page lists the sections of your shop to which you must pay the most attention in order to best manage your catalog, and make sure nothing goes out of control.

Four sections are shown:

• • List of empty categories. Gives you the categories that do not have any products. You should either delete these empty categories, or fill them with at least one product. This prevents customers from finding themselves in an empty category in your shop.
• • List of products with attributes and without available quantities for sale. Gives you which products are no longer for sale. If you do not see any good reason for them not being for sale, then put them back online
• • List of products without attributes and without available quantities for sale. Likewise, gives you which products are no longer for sale. Find the reason why, or put them back up.
• • List of disabled products. Gives you the products that have been disabled in the store and that aren't visible to your customers. Consider either enabling them (maybe after restocking them) or deleting them from your catalog.

The "Monitoring" page should be checked regularly in order to improve your catalog management.

Product Attributes Managements

Managing Product Attributes

Attributes are the basis of product variations (or "combinations" in PrestaShop's interface): you can only create variations of a product if at least one of its attributes changes.
You should think of attributes as properties of a product that may change between variations, while still keeping the same product name: color, capacity, size, weight, etc. You can use anything that varies between versions of the same product, except the price.

The difference between an attribute and a feature depends on the product itself. Some products might share the same property, one being an attribute built for building product variations, another one being simply an invariable feature.

For instance, a customer can buy an iPod variation based on attributes (color, disk space) but not on features (weight, size).

Likewise, another shop might sell t-shirts variations based on attributes (color, size, gender) but not on features (weight).

Attributes are configured on a per-product basis, from the "Products" page under the "Catalog" menu, but they must first be registered on your shop using the tool on the "Product Attributes" page under the "Catalog" menu.

This page presents a list of all your currently registered attributes. You can edit or delete each using the actions on the right of the table, or display their values by clicking on the "View" action, which opens a new table.

You can also set the attributes front office presentation order by clicking on the arrow icons, or by drag-and-dropping each row when the mouse hovers the "Position" column.

Creating a new attributes

To add an attribute, or in other words, to add a group of variation possibilities (colors, capacity, material, etc.), click on "Add new attribute". A new page appears.

Fill out the form:

• • Name. The exact description of the attribute. This needs to be short but precise, so as to not confuse it with another attribute.
• • Public name. The attribute name, as displayed to the customers on the product page. Since some attributes might have the same name for varying content, this field enables you to still present it correctly within the product's context, while being able to easily tell an attribute from another with a similar name but different meaning.
• • Attribute type. Enables you to choose whether the product's page should display this attribute's values as a drop-down list, a radio button list, or a color picker.

Three more options are available when you enable the Layered Navigation Block module. They are not strictly tied to the layered navigation: they provide a direct URL to each of a product's variations. This way, not only is the customer able to send a correct link to a friend, but this also helps enhance your search engine placement.

• • URL. The word to use in the URL. By default, PrestaShop uses the attribute's public name.
• • Meta title. The word to use in the page's title. By default, PrestaShop uses the attribute's public name.
• • Indexable. Whether search engines should index this attribute or not.

The customer can get the URL simply by clicking on an attribute from the product sheet: the URL will change to add a final detail, for instance #/color-metal or #/disk_space-16gb/color-green.

The layered navigation generator does make use of these too, hence the description text "Specific URL format in block layered generation" and "Use this attribute in URL generated by the layered navigation module".

Save your new attribute to return to the attributes list. You must now add values to your attribute

Creating a new value

Click on "Add new value". A new page appears.

Fill out the form:

• • Attribute type. From the dropdown list, select one of the available attributes.
• • Value. Give a value to the attribute: "Red", "16 Gb", "1.21 gigowatts"...

The next fields are only shown if the attribute is a color type.

• • Color. If the attribute is a color, you can enter its value in HTML color code (i.e. "#79ff52" or "lightblue"), or use the color picker to precisely show the correct hue.
• • Texture. If your product does not use a solid color but rather a textured one (i.e. tiger stripes), you can upload a small image file that will be displayed on the product's page. Note that this will replace the HTML color from the field above. Click on the "Save" button is order to start the upload.
  You can also use this option to let the customer choose color variety from a picture of your product rather than a color. How it is displayed on the front-end depends on the theme you are using...
• • Current texture. Once you have uploaded a texture file, it is displayed in this section as a reminder.

You can add more values for the same attribute type by saving your changes with the "Save then add another value" button.

Two more options are available when you enable the Layered Navigation Block module. They are not strictly tied to the layered navigation: they provide a direct URL to each of a product's variations. This way, not only is the customer able to send a correct link to a friend, but this also helps enhance your search engine placement.

• • URL. The word to use in the URL. By default, PrestaShop uses the value's name.
• • Meta title. The word to use in the URL. By default, PrestaShop uses the value's name.

The customer can get the URL simply by clicking on an attribute from the product sheet, and the URL will change to add a final detail, for instance #/color-metal or #/disk_space-16gb/color-green.

The layered navigation generator does make use of these too, hence the "Specific URL format in block layered generation" description text.

Once your attributes are in place and their values are set, you can create product variations (or "combinations") in each product's "Combinations" tab, from the "Products" page under the "Catalog" menu.

Product Features Management

Managing Product Features

Features are a product's intrinsic characteristic: they remain the same throughout the product's variations (or "combinations").
You should think of features the same way you think of product attributes (see above), with the notable difference that you cannot create product variations based on features.

The difference between an attribute and a feature depends on the product itself. Some products might share the same property, one being an attribute built for building product variations, another one being simply an invariable feature.

For instance, a customer can buy an iPod variation based on attributes (color, disk space) but not on features (weight, size).

Likewise, another shop might sell t-shirts variations based on attributes (color, size, gender) but not on features (weight).

Features are configured on a per-product basis, from the "Product" page under the "Catalog" menu, but they must first be registered on your shop using the tool on the "Features" page under the "Catalog" menu.

You can set the features' order using the arrows in the "Position" column.
The "Actions" column gives an Edit action, a Delete action and a View action which you can click to display the available values for this feature. From there, you can sort, edit and delete values if you need to.

Adding a feature

Click on "Add new feature". A very simple form appears. This is where you name the feature itself: for example, the types of headphones provided with a music player.

Give a name to this new feature, and save your new feature to return to the attributes list.

Three more options are available when you enable the Layered Navigation Block module. They are not strictly tied to the layered navigation: they provide a direct URL to each of a product's variations. This way, not only is the customer able to send a correct link to a friend, but this also helps enhance your search engine placement. The layered navigation generator does make use of these.

• • URL. The word to use in the URL. By default, Wcomm uses the attribute's public name.
• • Meta title. The word to use in the page's title. By default, Wcomm uses the attribute's public name.
• Indexable. Whether search engines should index this attribute or not.

The customer can get the URL simply by clicking on an attribute from the product sheet: the URL will change to add a final detail, for instance #/color-metal or #/disk_space-16gb/color-green.

Adding a value to a feature

Click on "Add new feature value". Another form appears.

Fill out the form:

• • Feature. From the dropdown list, select one of the available features.
• • Value. Give a value to the attribute: "5 lbs", "27 cm", etc.

..and save your feature value. You can add more values for the same feature type by saving your changes with the "Save and add another value" button.

Two more options are available when you enable the Layered Navigation Block module. They are not strictly tied to the layered navigation: they provide a direct URL to each of a product's variations. This way, not only is the customer able to send a correct link to a friend, but this also helps enhance your search engine placement. The layered navigation generator does make use of these.

• • URL. The word to use in the URL. By default, Wcomm uses the attribute's public name.
• • Meta title. The word to use in the page's title. By default, Wcomm uses the attribute's public name.

The customer can get the URL simply by clicking on an attribute from the product sheet: the URL will change to add a final detail, for instance #/color-metal or #/disk_space-16gb/color-green

Manufacturing Management

Managing Manufacturers

Unless you make your products yourself, you should always register your products' manufacturers in Wcomm.

In Wcomm, a manufacturer is the brand behind a product. If you sell your own products, you must at least create your company as a manufacturer: this helps your customer find what they are looking for, and this can bring some valuable search engine points.

On the front-end of your store, manufacturers are sorted alphabetically. You cannot change that order.

New manufacturers are automatically disabled. You must enable them in order to have them appear online – even if they do not contain any product yet.

By entering information about the manufacturers, your site's visitors can have rapid access to all of a given manufacturer's products. This makes navigating around your site easier for them. In terms of visibility, filling out these fields will improve your position in search engines.

Creating a manufacturer

Click on the "Add new manufacturer" button, and a creation form appears.

Fill out all of the fields:

• • Name. Indicate the name of the manufacturer in order to simplify your visitor's searches.
• • Short description. The description that will appear on the search engines when a user make a request. Limited to a 100 characters.
• • Description. Add a more complex description of your manufacturer and their activity and products.
  You can detail their specialties and promote the quality of their products. The manufacturer's description will be shown in your store among the others.
• • Logo. Having a manufacturer logo is essential: it leads the customers' eyes to trust your shop almost as much as they trust that manufacturer/brand.
• • The SEO fields (Title, Meta description, and Meta Keywords) provide the same functionality as they do in the categories.
  • 1. Meta title. The title that will appear on the search engines when a request is made by a customer
  • 2. Meta description. A presentation of your site in just a few lines, intended to capture a customer's interest. This will appear in search results
  • 3. Meta Keywords. Keywords that you must define in order to have your site referenced by search engines. You can enter several of them, separated by commas, as well as expressions, which must be indicated in quotation marks.
• • Enable. You can disable a manufacturer, even temporarily. This will only remove it from the manufacturers list on your shop's front-end.

Save your changes in order to be taken back to the manufacturers list. From there, you can:

• • Click on a manufacturer's name or logo, and get a list of all the products associated with it. If there are none, then you associate products to that manufacturer, working on a per-product basis, from the "Products" page under the "Catalog" menu, using each product's "Associations" tab on the left.
• The same result is achieved by clicking the "View" icon on the right of the current page. • Disable the manufacturer, by clicking on the green "Yes". Once disabled, a red "No" appears in its place: click to re-enable the manufacturer.
• • Edit/delete the manufacturer by clicking on the respective buttons on the right of the row.

Adding a Manufacturer's Address

At the bottom of the "Manufacturers" page is an "Addresses" section. Each manufacturer can have its own address registered with Wcomm. This serves mainly as a reminder for yourself: this way, you'll always have the contact address for a manufacturer available directly within Wcomm.

Click on the "Add new manufacturer address" button to open the creation form.

Make sure to choose the correct manufacturer, and to fill as many fields as possible.

Managing Suppliers

Having suppliers registered is optional if you already have manufacturer who directly supply you with their products. It all depends on your needs, but if your product supplier is not the same as the product manufacturer, then you should make sure to have both registered in your system, and associated with each product.

In Wcomm, a supplier is the company which provides you with a product.

Even if you sell your own products, you must at least create your company as a supplier.

Just as for manufacturers, your site's visitors can have rapid access to all of supplier's products. This makes navigating around your site easier for them. In terms of visibility, filling out these fields will improve your position in search engines.

Click on "Add new supplier", and a creation form appears.

Fill out all of the fields:

• • Name. Indicate the name of the supplier in order to simplify your visitor's searches.
• • Description. Add a more complex description of your supplier and their activity and products.
  You can detail their specialties and promote the quality of their products. The supplier's description will be shown within your shop.
• • The address fields (Phone, Address, Postcode, City, State, and Country). The "State" field only appears for relevant countries
• • Logo. Having a supplier logo is essential: it leads the customers' eyes to trust your shop almost as much as they trust that supplier/brand.
  • 1. Meta title. The title that will appear on the search engines when a request is made by a customer
  • 2. Meta description. A presentation of your site in just a few lines, intended to capture a customer's interest. This will appear in search results
  • 3. Meta Keywords. Keywords that you must define in order to have your site referenced by search engines. You can enter several of them, separated by commas, as well as expressions, which must be indicated in quotation marks
• • Enable. You can disable a supplier, even temporarily. This will only remove it from the suppliers list on your shop's front-end.

Save your changes in order to be taken back to the suppliers list. From there, you can:

• • Click on a supplier's name or logo, and get all the products associated with it. If there are none, then you should work on a per-product basis, from the "Products" page under the "Catalog" menu, using each product's "Associations" tab on the left.
  The same result is achieved by clicking the view icon on the right.
• • Disable the supplier, by clicking on the green check-mark. Once disabled, a red "X mark appears in its place: click to re-enable the supplier.
• • Edit/delete the supplier by clicking on the respective buttons on the right of the row.

Building Image Maps

Image maps was a feature that was introduced with version 1.1 of Wcomm, and available up to version 1.5 included.
New installations of Wcomm 1.6 do not have this feature available, but stores upgraded to version 1.6 can still use it.

If you have made a fresh installation of Wcomm 1.6 and you still want to use image maps, here's how:

• 1. Open the Administration > Menus page.
• 2. Click on "Add a menu"
• 3. In the form, give the page a name (a priori, "Image Maps), and type "AdminScenes" in the "Class" field. Leave the "Module" field empty, and choose "Catalog" for the parent page.
• 4. Save the form. The image maps page now appears in the chosen page.

Note that this feature is deprecated, and not supported anymore.

Image mapping consists of assigning multiple clickable zones to an image so that different product pages can be opened by clicking on one single image. This feature makes your site very attractive by easing your customers' navigation.

Before creating an image map, you must have an image which features variations of a product, or different products altogether.

Clicking on the "Image Mapping" menu option takes you to a new page, which lists the currently-registered image maps, if any.

To create a new map, click on the "Add new image map" button. You are taken to the creation screen.

• • Image map name. Enter a name for the image map.
• • Status. Whether the image map is available or not. You can choose to delay its availability until you are done settings all the links.
• • Image to be mapped. Select the image that you want to represent the image map, then click "Save and stay". The page will then reload, with the photo that you uploaded and many more options.

Now we are going to learn how to set up an image map. Click anywhere on your image and drag your mouse over one of the products presented, in order to highlight/cut out the part of the image you want to be clickable to the user.

Your selection will be clear and illuminated while the rest of the image will darken. Pay attention to carefully align the frame of your selection with the zone onto which your customer will be able to click.

Once this is done:

• 1. In the field just underneath the image, type the first few letters of the product associated with your selected zone.
  In our example, we would type "dress" and several choices would appear. We would then choose "Printed dress".
• 2. Confirm your choice by clicking "OK". Your image map is now created.

Repeat this process for all of the products on this image that you wish to make accessible with a click.

The clickable zones are visible thanks to the "+" icon. Hovering over the image with your mouse cursor, you can see a little window that presents the image's name, default image, short description, and price

If you have made a mistake on your clickable area, you can resize by grabbing its sides or corners.

If you wish to delete a clickable area, just select the area, and click the "Delete" button within the image.

Finally, you must assign your Image Map to a category. This is done by checking the boxes on the "Categories" table.

Once all of the modifications have been done, save all of your settings.

Your image map is now available on your store, in the chosen categories.

Tag Managements

Managing Tags

The tagging feature enables you to associate your products with keywords. Your customers can use the keywords to easily and quickly find the products they are looking for.

For instance, let's say customer wants to find a MP3 player in your shop. In order to find the product corresponding to his or her search, there needs to be a tag to associate "MP3 player" with "iPod Nano".

Products tags are not the same as page keywords: they have no direct impact on search engine placement.

To work on your search engine placement, open the "SEO" tab of each product's create sheet.

You have two ways to set up this feature.

First Solution: When Creating a New Product

Second Solution: Managing Tags

The "Tags" page under the "Catalog" menu enables you to create new tags and manage existing tags. Once you have given tags to your products, you will get a very important list of tags. The "Tags" page will help you manage them all.

To create a new one, click on "Add New", and a creation page appears.

This interface enables you to add tags to one or many of your products.

• • Name. Give your tag a name. It should be short and to the point, so as to actually help you customers find the associated products instead of hindering them.
• • Language. Indicate in what language the tag should appear on your shop. Wcomm is clever enough not to display keywords in Spanish to customers who chose to see the French version of the site, for instance
• • Products. Select the products from the right column to which you would like to apply the tag. Hold on the Ctrl key on your keyboard in order to select several products at once.

Once you save the page, the named tag will be applied to all the products listed in the list on the right.

To add the same tag for another language, just repeat the operation, only this time, change the language.

After saving the tag, you are redirected to the list of tags, where you can edit or delete them, or even bulk delete them using the button at the bottom of the list.
Next to the edit and trash icons, a number indicates how many products use the tag.

From now on, when your customers make a search query on your site, the results they will receive will also depend on the tags that you have associated with the products.

Managing Attachments

Wcomm enables you to make some files available to your customers before their purchase.

For example, let's say you sell electronics, and you would like to urge your customers to read a document on how a product works. You can upload a document for that purpose. You could also simply have the product's PDF manual directly available for download right on the product page.

Each product can have attachments, which can be individually set in their own "Attachments" tab on the left, as explained in the previous chapter of this guide, "Adding Products and Product Categories". That page gives you access to all the attached files of the shop: if you need to apply the associated one file with many products, you will thus only have to upload it once.

You can also upload attachments on their own, before associating them to products. This is done from the "Attachment" page, under the "Catalog" menu.

The process to register a new attachment to your shop is straightforward:

• 1. Click on the "Add new". A form appears.
• 2. Filename. Give your attachment a name, in all the needed
• 3. Description. Give it a quick description, also in as many languages as needed.
• 4. Click on "Add file" to select a file on your computer to upload.
• 5. Click on "Save".

You are then redirected the attachment list, where your file now appears. It is now available to all products, through their "Attachments" tab.

Now the "Download" tab will appear in your online shop and your customers can download that file if needed.

Order Mangement

Orders

The "Orders" page under the "Orders" menu enables you to see all of the information about all the purchases from your shop. All of your shop's transactions are available there, organized by date (by default, it is set to sort from newest to oldest).

You can filter the results and easily find the orders you're looking for by using the fields above. For instance, to identify Mr. Doe's orders, type "Doe" into the "Customer" field and then click "Filter".

YOU CANNOT DELETE AN ORDER. It is illegal to be able to remove payment or ordering information and/or invoice information from a business in Europe. Therefore, implementing a "Delete" button for orders would render Wcomm illegal in Europe.

To safely delete the default order, install the "Database Cleaner" module (which is available in the default installation since v1.5.4), open its configuration screen and check the "Orders and customers" box before you click on the "Delete orders & customers" button.

You can export a list of your orders by clicking on the "Export" button at the top.
You cannot import orders.

Creating an Order

One of the great features of Wcomm is the ability to create an order directly from the back office. For instance, this is tremendously useful when a customer wants to buy a product but does not succeed, and you need to take the hand and make the order while on the phone or during an e-mail conversation with the customer.

Clicking "Add new order" opens a new page with a single text field, labeled "Search customers". When creating a new order through the back office, your first task is to associate that order with a customer. Type the first letters of the customer first name, last name or e-mail address, and Wcomm will display the matching accounts.

If the customer you are creating this order for does not even have a user account already, you can create one on the fly: click the "Add a new customer" button to open a window with the main account details ready to fill. Once the account is saved, it becomes the chosen account for the order.

Note that you will also have to register the customer's address – a "Add new address" button is available at the bottom of the page, in the "Addresses" section.

Click the "Choose" button for the correct customer, and the whole order form appears. Its main section, "Cart", is where you will make all the necessary product decisions for this order. You can also choose to use a previous order from the customer, or a previously abandoned cart.

The "Search a product" field enables you to dynamically find products to add: type the first letters of its name and Wcomm will fill a drop-down list with matching products. Choose a product, select a quantity, and click "Add to cart" button. You can of course choose among the many combinations of a product, if any, in the "Combination" drop-down list that appears in that case.
Note that Wcomm gives you an indication of the remaining stock for a given product, which enables you to tell the customer that you are out of stock for said product right from the order form.

The page also enables you to see the previous carts and orders from that customer, if any. If it turns out you are dealing with a cart that a customer somehow cannot validate, you can use that cart for this order by clicking on the "Use" action button.

If needed, you can also grant that order a voucher/cart rule, and even create one on the fly by clicking on the "Add new voucher" button.

Finally, you need to specify to which address the order should be delivery (and possibly billed). Here, again, you can create new addresses on the fly using the "Add new addresses" button.

Viewing an Order's Details

In order to process the orders you receive, you have to view the information they contain. Click on the line containing the order, or click on the button to the right of the order.

The order detail sheet fills a full page.

At the top of the page is a quick summary of the order: date it has been validated, number of customer service discussions about it, number of products in the order, and total amount of money.

The detail sheet of the order gives you access to:

• • On the left, order information:
  • 1. The status and status history of the order.
  • 2. The shipping information: total weight of order and carrier chosen by the customer
• • On the right, customer information:
  • 1. Name of buying history.
  • 2. Shipping and invoice addresses (with a rough location map using Google Maps).
• • The method of payment that was used, the cost of the products, and the shipping costs.
• • Various details on the ordered products.

Changing the order

Orders are not definitive. There are many reasons why you would need to change an order before its products are gathered, packed and sent to their new owner: one of the product is out of stock, the customer changed his or her mind, etc.

Adding a product

At the bottom of the "Products" list, you can find the "Add a product" button, which adds a field to the order.

When adding a product, the products table gets a new row added with a handful of fields. The first text field is actually a small search engine: type the first letters of a product to see a list of corresponding products. Select the one you want to add, and the grayed-out field of the row becomes available.
If the product has combinations, you can select it in a drop-down list that appears below the name: the unit price update accordingly.
Set the quantity of products, and then click the "Add product" button: the product is added.

You cannot add more product quantity than there is of available product.

Removing products

To cancel a product, go to the product list, and either delete the product by clicking on the "Delete" action, or by clicking on the "Edit" action if all you need is to remove some quantity of a product.

• You can edit the quantity of many products at the same time.
• If a product's quantity reaches 0, it is removed from the order altogether.
• You cannot remove more than the quantity of product.
• Click the "Cancel" button to cancel your edit.

Editing the order details

Many sections of the order sheet can be edited, enabling you to update or correct some of the data provided by the customer.

Order Status

The first drop-down list in the order page enables you to change its status. It is a very important part of the whole order monitoring process, as with each status change, new functionalities and documentation will be made available for the order.

You can choose between the following statuses:

• • Awaiting bank wire payment.
• • Awaiting Cash on Delivery validation.
• • Awaiting cheque payment.
• • Awaiting PayPal payment.
• • Canceled.
• • Delivered.
• • On backorder.
• • Payment accepted.
• • Payment error.
• • Payment remotely accepted.
• • Preparation in progress.
• • Refunded.
• • Shipped.

In order to get a better view of the order's activity, every status change is recorded, and the log appears right below the status change drop-down list. Therefore, you should only change a status if it has been clearly confirmed: do not mark an order as "Delivered" when you have sent the package, use "Shipped"; do not use "Preparation in progress" when in fact you have only taken a quick glance at the order, etc.

Since version 1.6.1.0, you can resend the email for a given order status to the customer. To send this email anew, click on "Resend email" next to the order status. If you have edited the order at some point, it will send an updated email.

Actions Buttons

The action buttons change depending on the order's status. For instance, once the order is in the "Delivered" state, the "Add a product" and "Remove products" turn into two new buttons: "Return products" and "Partial refund".

Product return is not activated by default. To activate it, go to the "Product returns" page under the "Orders" menu, and activate the option in the option at the bottom of the page. This will apply to all products and all orders.

• • Standard refund. Available once the order reaches the "Payment accepted" status. Not available once the products have been sent.
  To be used when you need to refund the totality of the order, and can be done as long as the products are still in your warehouse.
  Click the "Standard refund" button and a new column will appear in the product list, titled "Refund". Set the amount and quantity for each of the affected products, choose one of the option at the bottom of the list (see below), and click the "Partial refund" button at the bottom of the table.
  
• • Partial refund. Available once the order reaches the "Payment accepted" status.
  To be used when you need to refund only part of the order and not the whole order, either because the customer returned the ordered product, or simply as a sign of goodwill for a damaged product that the customer chose to keep anyway.
  Click the "Partial refund" button and a new column will appear in the product list, titled "Partial refund". Set the amount and quantity for each of the affected products, choose one of the option at the bottom of the list (see below), and click the "Partial refund" button at the bottom of the table.
• • Return products. Available once the order reaches the "Shipped" status. Wcomm must be set to accept merchandise returns, which is not in the Orders > Merchandise Returns page, with the "Enable returns" option.
  To be used only when the customer has effectively returned products: once the returned product has been received, you can mark it as returned directly in the order form.
  Click the "Return products" button and a new column will appear in the product list, titled "Return". Check the box of the affected products, indicate the quantity of items that were returned, and click the "Return products" at the bottom of the table.

When you set a product as returned or to be refunded, four options are available below the list of products:

• • Re-stock products. When checked, Wcomm will consider that the returned product as available for sale again, and will therefore increase the stock for this product. You should not click this when a product is returned due to it being broken...
• • Generate a credit slip. When checked, a credit slip will be created for the selected items. A credit slip is an acknowledgment from your shop that merchandise has been returned and that a refund has been issued. The customer can then use it as a credit slip for his or her next purchase.
• • Generate a voucher. When checked, a voucher will be created for the amount of the selected items. A voucher takes the form of a discount code that the customer can enter during the checkout process.
  You can edit the customer's existing vouchers by viewing the customer's page: from the current order's page, click on the link under the customer's name in the "Customer information" section; once in the customer's page, reach the "Vouchers" section. You can edit each voucher by clicking on the "Edit" icon.

In Wcomm, vouchers are part of a special kind of discount feature: "cart rules". They can be created and edited from the "Cart Rules" page, under the "Price rules" menu. The cart rules creation process in the next chapter, "Creating Price rules And Vouchers".

• • Repay shipping cost. You can also choose to refund the shipping cost of the returned product, which is always an appreciated gesture.

If the customer paid the order using a credit card, the payment system should refund the cart automatically. If the order was paid using a check or a bank transfer, you have to issue the refund yourself, then mark the order as having been refunded manually in the back office (in the order's page).

Difference between a credit slip, a voucher and a cart rule

A credit slip is first and foremost a written proof that a product has been returned. Most of the time, the customer can use it as a voucher.

A voucher is a discount code which does not have to be tied to a merchandise return or a refund, and which can take more forms than a simple credit slip:

• • A discount on an order (percentage).
• • A discount on an order (amount).
• • Free shipping.

You can apply a voucher to all customers, or a group of customers, or a single customer; you can set its expiration date;

A cart rule is basically an advanced version of a voucher: in addition to what a voucher could do in Wcomm 1.4, the cart rules system introduced in Wcomm 1.5 enables you to:

• • Name the discount.
• • Allow the customer to use only a portion of the discount.
• • Assign priorities between cart rules.
• • Set the compatibility between cart rules.
• • Have the discount only work with some carriers.
• • Have the discount only work with a selection of products and/or categories and/or manufacturers and/or suppliers and/or attributes... or all of these at the same time if necessary!
• • Have the discount be applicable for free shipping and/or a discount on an order and/or a free gift... or all of these at the same time if necessary!

Documents

You can get many PDF documents out of the order page. When available, they are listed in the "Documents" section of the page.

By default, you can download the order itself as a PDF, by clicking on the "Print order" button on right.

You can get an invoice for the order by clicking on the "Generate invoice" button from the "Documents" section. The invoice is also generated once you put the order in the "Payment accepted" status.
Once it is generated, the "View invoice" button below gets activated the top-bar.

You can customize the invoice layout easily: the PDF template files are located in the /pdf folder. These .tpl files are actually HTML files with Smarty tags for dynamic data. You can change the invoice's layout by editing the file named invoice.tpl.

When you put the order in the "Preparation in progress" state, a delivery slip PDF is generated, which you can then download from the "Documents" section.

Shipping

The shipping details of the current order can be partly edited. More specifically, you can change the tracking number: in the "Shipping" section, click on the "Edit" icon in the "Tracking number" column, and enter the new number.

Shipping Address

The "Shipping address" section enables you to edit the destination address of the package your team is about to send. You can either use the drop-down list to choose another of the addresses that the customers has already registered on your shop, or you can use the "Edit" icon to edit the currently chosen address.

If you need to send the package to an address that is not already registered in Wcomm, you must first create it. To do this, go to the "Customers" menu, open the "Addresses" page, and click in the "Add new" button. Do not forget to put the correct e-mail of the customer, as this is the way Wcomm will know to associate that new address with your existing customer! Once done, go back to the order's page, and change the address using the drop-down list.

Note that a small map enables you to visualize the destination of the package on Google Maps.

Invoice Address

The "Invoice address" section enables you to edit the payment address of the order. Just as for the shipping address, you can either choose the drop-down menu to choose another of the addresses that the customers has already registered on your shop, or you can use the "Edit" icon to edit the currently chosen address.

If you need the payment to be tied to an address that is not already registered in Wcomm, you must first create it. To do this, go to the "Customers" menu, open the "Addresses" page, and click in the "Add new" button. Do not forget to put the correct e-mail of the customer, as this is the way Wcomm will know to associate that new address with your existing customer! Once done, go back to the order's page, and change the address using the drop-down menu.

Discount

In the "Products" section, at the bottom of the products listing, you the "Add new discount" button. This creates a simple discount, not as advanced as the vouchers/cart rules system but still useful

Clicking it will open a new form, with the following items:

• • Name. Give the discount a short name. This will be public to the customer.
• • Type. Choose the discount type: "percent", "amount" or "free shipping".
• • Value. For the "percent" or "amount" types, set the value of the discount.
• • Invoice. Select to which invoice from this order this discount should be applied. When there is more than one invoice, you can check the box to apply the discount to all the invoices.

The discount will be applied to the total before the shipping costs.

Attaching a message to the order

In the "New Message" section, on the right of the page, you can attach a comment on the order for your team.

You can also have this comment be sent to the customer, in order to give him or her information concerning the order, a delay, a surprise, or keep him or her informed on offers and specials. This is a key point of customer relationship.

There are two links available:

• • Click here to add a comment or send a message to the customer.
  • 1. You can add a message simply by writing in the message box and clicking "Send". The message will be stored in the client's profile in your Customer Service database, which you can access either by going to the client's page, or to the Customer Service page. The message can also be sent to the client's e-mail address should you choose to.
  • 2. Pre-written messages can be saved and used multiple times, saving you the hassle of writing them over and over again. If you would like to send one of these messages, select it from the drop-down list. You can then add further details to the pre-written message if needed. You can create more pre-written messages using the tool in the "Order messages" page, under the "Orders" page.
• • Click here to see all messages. This link will take you to the "Customer service" page of the "Customers" menu. This is fully explained in the "Managing Customers" chapter of this guide.

Invoice Management

Invoices

Each time an order from your shop is validated, an invoice is sent out to the customer. You can download the invoices for a single order from the order's page. The "Invoices" page under the "Orders" menu enables you to download a selection of invoices from past orders in PDF format, all at the same time (in the same PDF file).

You can get a PDF file containing several invoices depending on two main criteria:

• • By date. Very useful when you need to print all invoices for a given month or a given quarter. Select the start and end date, and click on the "Generate PDF file by date" button in the top bar.
• • By order status. A must-have when you need to print precisely which orders are canceled, refunded or on backorder. Wcomm helpfully indicates the number of invoices tied to each status in parentheses.

In both cases, the invoices are generated into a single PDF file, each with their own pages. You cannot get a single PDF file for each invoice of the given period or statuses using this page.

If you want to customize the look of your store's invoices, you must change its template files.

PDF template files are located in the /pdf folder. Open the invoice.tpl file and edit it to your likings: it is an HTML file with Smarty tags.

Invoice Options

You can choose whether or not invoices should available to your customers as soon as the order is made, as well as the Invoice Prefix and the invoice number you want listed on the printed version of the invoice. This feature can help you simplify the management of your account.

• • Enable invoices. When disabled, your customer will not receive an invoice after their purchase. You will be responsible for handling the invoices, if your customers ask for one.
• • Enable tax breakdown. New in 1.6. When enabled, the invoice lists all the various taxes that were applied to the order, instead of just one percentage.
• • Enable product image. New in 1.6.1. When enabled, it will add the product's image next to the product name in the invoice.
• • Invoice prefix. By default, Wcomm has language-adapted invoice prefixes: "IN" in English, "FA" in French (for "facture"), "CU" in Spanish (for "cuenta"), etc. You could choose to have language codes instead: "EN", "FR", "SP", etc. Of course, you can also choose to have a single prefix for every language, or to not have a prefix at all.
  Wcomm will then generate the invoices number according to you settings: "#IN000001", "#FA000002", etc.
• • Invoice number. If your business has already had orders and invoices before you started using Wcomm, you can use this option to start your invoice number from a higher number.
• • Legal free text. New in 1.6.1.0. This field allows you to add some extra content to the invoice, in case your local legislation require you to display additional information. On the invoice, it will appear below the payment methods summary. Of course, you can use this free text to display any text you deem necessary.
• • Footer text. You can use this to have a custom text at the bottom of all your invoices. The text will appear below the name of your shop in the invoice.
• • Invoice model. Depending on your themes, you might be able to use more than one style of invoice. Test them with a fake order, in order to choose the one you prefer. If you know how to code in HTML, you can add your own invoice models or edit the existing ones: they are located in the /pdf/ folder of your Wcomm installation.
• • Use the disk as cache for PDF invoices. You can choose to store generated invoices on Wcomm's server disk rather than in its server cache. While it saves on memory usage, it slows down the PDF generation itself, so use it knowingly.

Do not forget to save your changes.

When your customers ask for their invoices, you can redirect them to the "Order History" section of their user accounts, which keeps all of their invoices available for them.

Merchandise Returns

The "Merchandise Returns" page gives you a list of all the RMA process (Return merchandise authorization).

At the bottom of the page, you have the possibility of enabling customers to send products back to you ("Enable returns" option). Simply make a choice, indicate the number of days during which a return request can be made, and save your settings: customers now have the ability to ask for a return authorization. You can also edit the prefix for the return number, or chose not to have any.

Return process: how the customer sees it

Once you have activated the RMA option in your back office, the customer can choose to return an item (provided the order is still in the time of validity). In order to do this, s/he must do the following:

• 1. Access the "Orders History" section of his or her account.
• 2. Select the order from which he wants to return an item.
• 3. Select the product(s) that s/he wishes to return by checking the box next to its name(s).
• 4. (optional) Add an explanation, in order for the shop team to better understand why the customer wants to return this product.

When is it possible to return an order?

• 1. Returns have to be enabled ("Enable returns" option).
• 2. The order has to be in the time of validity.
• 3. The orders needs to have had at least the following statuses:
  • 1. At least two statuses of which one has the option "Set the order as paid" enabled and the other has the option "Set the order as shipped" enabled.Or
  • 2. One status which has both options ("Set the order as paid" and "Set the order as shipped") enabled.

Statuses can be edited on the "Statuses" page under the "Orders" menu.

Once the form is complete, the customer clicks on "Make an RMA slip", and the request is sent to the store manager (you). The request appears as "Waiting for confirmation" in the customer's "Return Merchandise Authorization" page, accessible from the account page.

Return process: how you see it

The return request appears in your back office. At first, the RMA has the "Waiting for confirmation" status.

The refund process can take several steps, which are indicated by the RMA status. There is just a handful of statuses, which can follow the whole RMA process:

• • Waiting for confirmation.
• • Waiting for package.
• • Package received.
• • Return denied.
• • Return completed.

It is now up to you to accept it or deny it:

• 1. Click on the name of the return request to see more details.
• 2. Change the status to continue with the return process or stop it.
  • 1. If you want to stop the return process (and deny the customer a refund), simply choose the "Return denied" status.
  • 2. If you agree with the product being returned and the customer being refunded, follow each step precisely:
    • 1. Choose the next step in the process: "Waiting for package". This will send an e-mail to the customer indicating that the product can be sent back to you.
    • 2. Once you have received the package, change the RMA's status to "Package received".
    • 3. Finally, once the whole process is over (either the customer has been refunded or you have issued a credit slip), change the RMA's status to "Return completed".
  • 3. Validate.

Refunding a customer

An order can be refunded, either partially or totally. This is done using two actions buttons located in the top bar of the order's page itself rather than in the RMA page.

The action buttons change depending on the order's status. For instance, once the order is in the "Delivered" state, the "Add a product" and "Remove products" turn into two new buttons: "Return products" and "Partial refund".

Product return is not activated by default. To activate it, go to the "Product returns" page under the "Orders" menu, and activate the option in the option section at the bottom of the page. This will apply to all products and all orders.

• • Return products. To be used only when the customer has effectively returned products: once the returned product has been received, you can mark it as returned directly in the order form. Click the "Return products" button and a new column will appear in the product list, titled "Return". Check the box of the affected products, indicate the quantity of items that were returned, and click the "Return products" button at the bottom of the table.
• • Partial refund. To be used when you need to refund only part of the order and not the whole order, either because the customer returned the ordered product, or simply as a sign of goodwill for a damaged product that the customer chose to keep anyway. Click the "Partial refund" button and a new column will appear in the product list, titled "Partial refund". Set the amount and quantity for each of the affected products, choose one of the option at the bottom of the list (see below), and click the "Partial refund" button at the bottom of the table.

When you set a product as returned or to be refunded, four options are available below the list of products:

• • Re-stock products. When checked, Wcomm will consider that the returned product as available for sale again, and will therefore increase the stock for this product. You should not click this when a product is return due to it being broken...
• • Generate a credit slip. When checked, a credit slip will be created for the selected items. A credit slip is an acknowledgment from your shop that merchandise has been returned and that a refund has been issued. The customer can then use it as a credit slip for his or her next purchase.
• • Generate a voucher. When checked, a voucher will be created for the amount of the selected items. A voucher takes the form of a discount code that the customer can enter during the checkout process.
  You can edit the customer's existing vouchers by viewing the customer's page: from the current order's page, click on the link under the customer's name in the "Customer information" section; once in the customer's page, reach the "Vouchers" section. You can edit each voucher by clicking on the "Edit" icon.
• • Repay shipping cost. You can also choose to refund the shipping cost of the returned product, which is always an appreciated gesture.

If the customer paid the order using a credit card, the payment system may refund the cart automatically, or you may have to do it yourself. If the order was paid using a check or a bank transfer, you have to issue the refund yourself, then mark the order as having been refunded manually in the back office (in the order's page).

Delivery Slips Managements

Delivery Slips

A delivery slip is a notification of delivery. It can also be called "delivery note" or "advice note". It is supposed to be put in the shipped package, along with the ordered products. It will have your shop's logo, and indicate the content. On receiving the package, the customer will be able to use the delivery slip in order to double-check the content of the package, see that nothing is missing from the order.

Getting a delivery slip is exactly like getting an invoice. Select the dates, as well as the options you would like, and then confirm them to create your documents.

You can get a PDF file of several delivery slips depending only by date, which is very useful when you need to print all delivery slips for a given day or a given quarter. Select the start and end date, and click on the "Generate PDF file" button.

Delivery Slips Options

The three options are the same as for the invoice options:

• • Delivery prefix. You might like to have language-tagged delivery slips: "DE" in English, "LI" in French (for "livraison"), "EN" in Spanish (for "entrenga"), etc. Or you could directly choose to have language codes: "EN", "FR", "SP", etc. Of course, you can also choose to not have a prefix at all.
• • Delivery number. If your business has already had orders and delivery slips before you started using Wcomm, you can use this option to start your delivery slip number from a higher number.
• • Enable product image. When enabled, it will display a product's image before the product name.

Wcomm will then generate the delivery slips number according to your settings: "#DE000001", "#LI000002", etc.

Do not forget to save your changes.

Credit Slip Managements

Credit Slips

Following your agreement on a product return, you should receive a package from the customer. Once you have received that package, you must create a credit slip from the order's page. It can also be called "credit note" or "credit memo".
Credit slips are not created in the "Credit Slips" page, but only listed there. This page is also used to generate a PDF of your credit slips

Delivery Slips Options

There is only one option on the page:

• • Credit slip prefix. You might like to have language-tagged delivery slips. Of course, you can also choose to not have a prefix at all.

Wcomm will then generate the credit slips number according to you settings.

Do not forget to save your changes.

Creating a Credit Slip

In your list of orders ("Orders" page), click on the order for which the customer is returning some items for more details – this will only work if have already indicated that the customer can send products back.

Below the "Products" table, do the following:

• 1. Check the returned item(s).
• 2. Check the box "Re-stock Products" if you wish to put the product back in your stock.
• 3. Check the box "Generate a Credit Slip."
• 4. To make a customer happy after committing an error in their order, consider giving him a voucher by checking the box next to "Generate a Voucher."
• 5. You can also reimburse his shipping costs by clicking next to "Include Shipping."

Once you have selected all the options you want, confirm by clicking on "Return products."

The credit slip is now created and will be available in the Order Details well as in the "Credit Slips" page.

From there, you can click the link to download the PDF file.The customer will see the slip in his or her "My Account" section.

If you have created a voucher, customers will see it in the "My vouchers" section of their account. If they click on it, it should look something like this:

The amount of the returned item(s) is added to the voucher. The customer can use the discount code (listed in the far left of the column) next time he or she places an order.

Status Managements

Statuses

Having different order or return statuses enables you to easily manage your orders and returns, and keep your customers informed of the evolution of their purchase.

The various available statuses are visible and editable in the "Statuses" page, under the "Orders" menu.

The page displays a list of the currently registered order statuses, along with:

• • Their distinctive colors: existing status have colors that help quickly decide if there's an issue with the order or if it all goes well.
• • Their icons.
• • Their ties to three Wcomm behaviors (more are available):
  • 1. Should the customer receive e-mail when the order gets this status?
  • 2. Is this a delivery status?
  • 3. Does this status allow the customer to download and view a PDF version of the order's invoice?
• • The name of their e-mail template: you can edit these templates, language by language, in the "Translations" page under the "Localization" menu. In the "Modify translations" section of that page, choose "E-mail template translations" in the drop-down menu, and then click on the language code of the language in which you wish to edit these templates.
• • Their action icons: "edit" and "delete".

The return status list features less information, because those statuses are merely labels with no impact on the order.

Creating a new order status

You can create a new status with the "Add New" button at the top. The creation form opens.

Fill out the form:

• • Status name. Keep it very short and distinctive.
• • Icon. You can use any 16*16 icon; for instance, the excellent and free FamFamFam Silk icon set: . http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/
• • Color. You should strive to have the status' color match the existing colors (if relevant). The default color usages are:
  • 1. Red/Orange: canceled or refunded orders,
  • 2. Crimson red: payment error,
  • 3. Blue: orders which are still awaiting payment,
  • 4. Light green: paid orders,
  • 5. Dark green: delivered orders,
  • 6. Purple: shipped orders
  • 7. Pink: backordered orders.
• • Options:
  • 1. Consider the associated order as validated. If enabled, this status marks all associated orders as "paid", and puts them in this same status.
  • 2. Allow a customer to download and view PDF versions of their invoice. If disabled, you will have to send customers their invoice yourself.
  • 3. Hide this state in all customer orders. This enables you to create internal statuses, for you and your team. Customers will never see this in their order status page.
  • 4. Send an e-mail to customer when his/her order status has changed. When enabled, a drop-down menu appears to let you choose which mail template to use.
  • 5. Set the order as shipped. Be careful: once an order is set as "shipped", it cannot be set back to the previous status.
  • 6. Set the order as paid. Same here: once an order is set as "paid", it cannot be set back to the previous status.
  • 7. Show delivery PDF. Displays the delivery PDF..

Creating a new return status

You can create a return status with the "Add New" button at the bottom. The creation form opens.

It only features two fields:

• • Status name. Set your desired status name.
• • Color. Set its color

Finally, save your creation.

Order Message Managements

Order Messages

When you have to send a message to your customers using the Wcomm interface (from the order page), you can choose to save this message in order to send it out again to other customers with similar questions, comments, or concerns.

To do this, go to the "Order Messages" page under the "Orders" menu. One default message is already saved: "Delay".

Creating a new message

To add other message, click on the "Add New" button. You can also edit the default message.

The form goes to the essentials:

• • Name. Give your message a descriptive name so that you can easily find it again later.
• •Message. Write out the content that you wish to send to your customers.

Once done, click on "Save".

You can create as many messages as needed.

Sending a message to a customer

Once you pre-written messages are all set, you can send them by going directly into a customer's order:

• 1. Select the pre-written message.
• 2. Edit it if needed, in order to tailor it to the order or the customer.
• 3. Enable the "Display to customer?" option.
• 4. Click "Send message".

Your customer will receive the message on the email address associated with this account. To follow-up on the conversion, go to "Customer Service" page, in the "Customers" menu.

Managing Customers

You have to take good care of your customers. That means making sure their profile contains all the information you need to have a package shipped to them, following up on their support requests, creating special discount groups, knowing which orders have been completed and which have been abandoned, and much more.

The "Customers" menu enables you to check on your customers' details, create groups to which you can apply discounts, view the current shop carts, handle customer service, etc

Customer Management

Your Customers

The first page under the "Customers" menu gives you a list of all the registered users on your shop.

This gives you a bird's eye view of your customers, with some details thrown in which you can use to sort and search accounts:

• • Title. Customers can declare their social title, which are matched with a genre and can help you better customize your customers' experience. There are three default social titles (Mr., Ms., and Miss), but you can create more in the "Titles" page under the "Customers" menu.
• • Age. Knowing the age of you customers can also help you better target your demographics, and choose to sell products that appeal more to them.
• • Enabled. Indicates whether the customer is active or not. You can disable an account by clicking on the green "Yes".
• • News.. Indicates whether the customer is subscribed to your shop's newsletter or not. You can unsubscribe from it by clicking on the green "Yes".
• • Opt.. Indicates whether the account has accepted to receive e-mails from your partners or not. You can unsubscribe it clicking on the green "Yes". Do not subscribe a user to these e-mails without their consent, as this is considered spam.
• • Registration date and last visit can always be useful when sorting user accounts.
• • Actions. You can edit the user's account, simply view it in full (with its messages, orders, addresses, vouchers, etc.), or trash it forever.

When installed for the first time with sample data, Wcomm has a default user, named John DOE.

You can use this fake user to test some of your shop's features, and generally browse your shop and see it the way a regular user would.

Before you open your shop to the public, make sure to delete this default user, or at least change its credentials! If not, malicious visitors could use it to make fake purchases and more.

Below the customers table is the "Set required fields for this section" button. It opens a form where you can indicate if a database field is necessary or not by checking the appropriate boxes: this way, you can make it so fields such as "newsletter" or "optin" are mandatory when a visitor is creating a customer account on your shop.

You can export a list of your clients by clicking on the "Export" button at the top.
You can also import customers using the "Import" button. You will need your CSV file to follow this format:

• ID;Title;Last name;First Name;Email address;Age;Enabled;News.;Opt.;Registration;Last visit;
• 2;1;Gorred;Francis;fran[email protected];-;1;0;0;2013-07-04 15:20:02;2013-07-04 15:18:50;
• 1;1;DOE;John;[email protected];43;1;1;1;2013-07-02 17:36:07;2013-07-03 16:04:15;

More import options are available in the "CSV Import" page of the "Advanced parameters" menu.

Creating a New Customer Account

To create a customer account manually, select "Add New". A form appears.

Fill out the customer's information:

• • Title. Choose between the ones available, or create another one in the "Titles" page under the "Customers" menu.
• • First name, Last name, E-mail address. Those are essential: the names are used in the confirmation e-mails that Wcomm sends, and the e-mail address is used for log-in.
• • Password. Choose a password, at least 5 characters long.
• • Birthday. This information can be used for birthday e-mails and temporary discounts.
• • Status. You may wish to create an account, but not have it yet active.
• • Newsletter. Can be used by the "Newsletter" module, for sending regular information to those customers who requested it.
• • Opt-in. Can be used by modules for sending regular partner promotions to those customers who requested it. Do not subscribe a user to these e-mails without their consent, as this is considered spam.
• • Group access. Having customer groups enables you to create group discounts. Many other Wcomm feature can also be group-restricted. You will learn more about group in the "Groups" section of this chapter of the Wcomm user guide.
• • Default customer group. No matter how many groups that customer belongs to, s/he should always have one main group.

If your customers are mostly companies, you should enable the B2B mode in order to get additional options: go to the "Customers" page of the "Preferences" menu, and choose "Yes" for the "Enable B2B mode" option.

The B2B mode adds a few company-specific fields:

• • Company. The name of the company.
• • SIRET. Its SIRET number (France only).
• • APE. Its principal activity code (Activité principale exercée - France only).
• • Website. Its website.
• • Allowed outstanding amount. The amount of outstanding money that the company is allowed.
• • Maximum number of payment days. The number of days that the company is allowed.
• • Risk rating. Your risk rating of this company: Low, Medium or High.

Viewing a Customer's Information

In the case where you would like to have more information on a given customer, you can click on the "view" button, located at the end of the row in the customer's list. A new page appears.

The various sections provide you with some key data on the user:

• • Customer information, first and last name, e-mail address, ID, sign-up date, date of last visit, rank.
• • Information regarding the subscription to the store's newsletter and subscription to ads from partnering companies, the age, date of last update, and whether or not the account is active.
• • Private notes from the store's employees (i.e. you or your team).
• • Messages sent by the customer to the shop's team (through customer service
• • The groups to which the customer belongs.
• • Summary of the customer's past purchases. Amount spent, type of payment, order status. For more information about each order, click on the icon in the "Actions" column.
• • Summary of the products that were ordered by a customer. Among other things, this enables you to know when a customer is very fond of a product, and maybe create a special discount for the 10th purchase. Clicking on a product directs to the order to which that product is tied
• • Registered addresses.
• • Available vouchers / cart rules.
• • Carts that the customers has created (but not necessarily validated) since sign-up. When your customer is currently on your shop, you can see what is being added to the cart in real time.
• • Previous connection to the shop.

Searching for a Customer

Searching for a customer on your Wcomm shop can be done two different ways.

The first method consists of entering the information you have into the Wcomm search bar, which is found in the top center of your back office. By selecting "everywhere", "by name" or "by ip address", you can perform a search based on:

• • ID. The numbers that is assigned to the customer in the database.
• • First or last name. Note that you cannot search for both: choose either "john" or "doe", as "john doe" won't work.
• • E-mail address.
• • IP address. You can search using the IP of the latest connection to your shop.

The results, if any, are then presented: the list presents you with the users' ID, social title, e-mail, birthday, registration date, amount of orders and whether or not the user's account is active. From there on, you can view the whole user's page, or edit its details.

The second method consists of going to the "Customers" page, and listing all of your customers.

On this page, you can complete the fields at the top of the list, in order to filter it according to the following criteria: ID, social title, first name, last name, e-mail address, age, account status (enabled or disabled), subscription to the newsletter, subscription to partnering ads, registration date, and last connection date. Enter your criteria and click the "Filter" button in the top right-hand corner of the table. You can then sort the list for some of the columns.

Click the "Reset" button to go back to the complete list.

Customer Address Managements

Customer Addresses

By clicking on the "Addresses" page, you will have access to the list of your customer's addresses (home, work, etc.). You can edit them using the "Edit" button, or delete them altogether.

Below the addresses table is the "Set required fields for this section" button. It opens a form where you can indicate if a database field is necessary or not by checking the appropriate boxes: this way, you can make it so fields such as "company" or "phone number" are mandatory when a customer is registering a new address on your shop.

Adding a new address

You have the possibility to create new addresses for a client yourself with the "Add new address" button. It opens a form with the kind of field you might expect.

Some fields, however, require special care:

• • Customer email. This field is essential: if you are adding an address for an existing customer, you MUST identify this customer using her/his email address. Otherwise, Wcomm will not know who to assign this address to.
• • Identification number. The national ID card number of this person, or a unique tax identification number. This field is of course optional.
  Note: the field's title gives a singular hint: "DNI / NIF / NIE". Those are Spanish acronyms: DNI stands for "Documento Nacional de Identidad", NIF stands for "Número de Identificación Fiscal" and NIE stands for "Número de Identidad/Identificación de Extranjero".
• • Address alias. A short description, in order to help the customer choose the correct address: "Home", "Office", "Aunt Beth's", etc.
• • Company. The name of the customer's company, if needed.
• • VAT number. The VAT identification number for the customer (or the customer's company).
• • Other. Some additional information that might be useful to the shipment.

Customer Groups

Wcomm enables you to give your customers certain privileges, by assigning them to Groups. You can create as many customer groups as needed, and assign a user to as many groups as you like.

This is all done from the "Groups" page, under the "Customers" menu.

By default, three special groups are available:

• • Visitor. All persons without a customer account or unauthenticated.
• • Guest. All persons who placed an order with the Guest Checkout – that option needs to be enabled.
• • Customer. All persons who created an account on your shop, and are authenticated.

These three groups cannot be deleted.

To create more groups, click the "Add New" button: you will get a creation form.

• •Name. Use a short and descriptive name.
• • Discount (%). The discount that you set for members of this group applies to all products on your shop. You may prefer to not set any discount value, and create cart rules. You can learn more about cart rules in the next chapter of this guide, "Creating Price Rules and Vouchers
• • Price display method. Wcomm is frequently used in the Business to Business (B2B) sector. You can create a group of customers who can buy products without paying the tax. The drop-down list gives you a choice between "tax included" and "tax excluded".
• • Show prices. By default, all users of your shop can view the prices. You may prefer some to not have access to your product prices. For instance, you could make it so users can only view prices if they have an account: from the groups list, click on the green "Yes" in the "Show prices" column for the "Visitors" group to turn it into a red "No".

Once these settings are in place, you can save the group as-is, or add per-category and/or per-module settings. In that second case, after the group has been saved, open it again: the form will load with two more options:

• • Category discount. Click on the "Add a category discount" to bring up a new window, which contains a list of all your categories. You can pick one, and apply a specific discount which will apply for that group of customers only, and to that category only.Note that:
  • 1. Only products which have this category as their default category will be affected by the discount. Products which have this category as a secondary category will not be affected.
  • 2. This category discount will replace any other discount that members of this group would otherwise enjoy on this category.
  • 3. You can add as many category discounts for this customer group as you need – thereby enabling to entirely give this group a whole set of different discounts if you feel the need.
• • Authorized modules. This section enables you to block members of this group to access and use some of your shop's modules. For instance, you might prefer some customers to not be able to see your top-sellers or to your specials.

You can add a customer to a group of your choice by editing the customer's details: from the list of customers (in the "Customers" page under the "Customers" menu), click on the Edit button on the customer's row. Then, in the "Group access" table, select the group(s) to which you want your customer to belong. If you assign the customer to more than one group, remember to set their main group with the "Default customer group" option.

Shopping Cart Management

Shopping Carts

Wcomm contains some very powerful marketing features that enable you to see the products that customers are adding to their carts in real time. There are two ways to achieve this:

• 1. Go to the "Clients" page in the "Clients" menu, find the customer you are looking for, and view his or her customer profile. In that profile, scroll down to the "Shopping carts" section, where you can see all the carts created by this customer.
• 2. Go to the "Shopping carts" page in the "Clients" menu. The carts are sorted by ID. Find the customer you are looking for.

In both cases, you can click the "View" icon to see the content of your client's cart, and use this information to improve your commercial performance.

In the cart's page, the most important information is in the "Cart Summary" section, where you can see what products the customer chose to purchase, the price of each item, the quantity they put in their cart, and the total value of their cart.

Managing abandoned carts

Cart abandonment often means that a sale has been lost. The "Shopping cart" page indicates the carts that have not been turned into proper orders, and it is up to you to remind the customer that they can still come back to finish their purchase.

Abandoned carts (or "ghost carts") will have a delete link at the end of each row, while carts without delete links are processed carts, i.e. the purchase has been confirmed and you are supposed to send the products.

By default, it is up to you to contact the customer about his abandoned cart. You can install the Customer Follow-up module, which is available in the default installation and enables you to send vouchers to those who have abandoned their shopping carts, or to those who you want to thank for their order, to the best clients to thank them for their purchases and for being faithful... Note that this can lead to abuse: some customers might abandon carts on purpose in order to receive a voucher...

Customer Service Managements

Customer Service

Wcomm enables you to centralize all the customers' request within its confines. This helps you keep track of which discussion threads needs answering, rather than having to check with all the recipients of the mail to see if someone did answer it.

In practice, the contact form of your shop, available under the "Contact us" link at the bottom of your front office, presents the customer with two contacts by default: "Webmaster" and "Customer Service". The customer only has to choose who to contact, and then fill the rest of the fields. The message is then recorded in Wcomm's customer service tool.

Discussion threads are only included in the customer service tool if the contact has the "Save Message?" option enabled. You can change this setting, or add more contacts, by going to the "Contact" page, under the "Customers" menu. This page is explained in detail in the next section of this chapter of the Wcomm User Guide.

If the option is disabled for the contact that the customer chooses, the message is simply sent to the contact's e-mail address, and is not stored in Wcomm.

You also need to properly configure your IMAP settings, so that Wcomm can retrieve the customer's answers to e-mail that were sent from the customer service tool. This is done in the "Customer service options" section, at the bottom of the screen.

On this page, each contact has its own box, where you can quickly see if a there are new messages (meaning, those that have not yet been read). By default there are two, and adding more contacts will move the "Meaning of status" and "Statistics" boxes further to the left and down.

These two last boxes are handy when you need to handle new messages daily:

• • Meaning of status. A simple reminder of the color codes that your team can apply to a discussion thread.
• • Customer service: statistics. An overview of the global activity of your customer service since the beginning.

Further below is the list of received messages, both old and new.

You can edit a couple options at the bottom of the page, which apply to all contacts:

• • Allow file uploading. Whether the customer can attach a file to the message. This can be useful in case of visual issues on the front-page, as the customer can send you screen captures.
• • Pre-defined message. The default template for your employees' answer. Keep it simple, so that it can adapt to many situations, even if it needs a little editing for each case.

Finally, the bottom of the page features the "Customer service options" section, where you can set many options pertaining to your mail (IMAP) server.

Handling Customer Service Messages

Each conversation with a customer can be entirely handled through Wcomm's complete interface, without having to use an e-mail client such as Outlook or Thunderbird.

In the conversation list, click on a row to view the conversation's details:

• • You can apply a handful of actions to a discussion, in order to quickly sort them and thus handle them quicker. There are 4 available actions:
  • 1. Mark as "handled" or "Re-open". Changes the discussion's status to "Closed" or "Open".
  • 2. Mark as "pending 1" and Mark as "pending 2". These two statuses are internal: their meaning is up to your team. You may even choose to not use them, and only rely on "Closed" and "Open".
  • 3. Forward this discussion to another employee. From the moment an employee has started replying to a customer message, he becomes in charge of the customer's request. If during the discussion it turns out another employee should handle it instead of you, you can use that button to attribute it through a drop-down list. That other employee will receive a notification about it. If the person you want to forward this discussion to is not available in the list, choose "Someone else" in the dropdown list and two options will appear, enabling you to indicate the email address of the recipient and a comment about your message
• • Reply to the next unanswered message in this thread.

Essential details are available:

• • Customer name and email, which you can click on to access the customer's information
• • Number of orders, total amount spent and date of registration for the customer.
• • Time and date of the message.
• • Finally, the message itself.

To reply to this thread, simply use the form with your default message (as set in "Contact options" section of the "Customer service" page), and click "Send".

At the bottom of the page, the "Orders and messages timeline" gives you a clear chronological view of the events pertaining to this discussion thread.

Customer Service Options

This section basically enables you to precisely configure Wcomm's access to your e-mail server through its IMAP interface. You should make sure all fields are filled in order for the customer service tool to work properly. Most of this information should be provided by your webhost.

• • IMAP URL, IMAP port, IMAP user and IMAP password. Essential details to access the e-mail server using the IMAP protocol
• • Delete message. If enabled, messages on the server will be deleted as soon as Wcomm has retrieved them. Use with caution: this would make your messages unavailable to other e-mail clients.
• • /norsh. If enabled, the connection to your e-mail server will not pre-authenticated. Not recommended.
• • /ssl. If enabled, the connection to your e-mail server will not be encrypted. Not recommended.
• • /validate-cert. If enabled, Wcomm will force the validation of the server's TLS/SSL certificate.
• • /novalidate-cert. If enabled, Wcomm will never try to validate the server's TLS/SSL certificate. Essential for servers with self-signed certificates.
• • /tls. If enabled, Wcomm will force use of StartTLS to encrypt the connection. Servers that do not support StartTLS will be rejected.
• • /notls. If enabled, Wcomm will not use StartTLS to encrypt the session, even with servers that support it.

Wcomm Your Contacts Managments

Your Contacts

To facilitate communication with your clients, you can create multiple contact accounts. For example: customer service, technical support, sales department, etc. This feature allows your customers to directly contact the right person according to their needs.

Creating a new contact

In order for the message to be redirected to the intended recipient, you must configure the contacts in your shop.

By clicking on the "Contacts" page under the "Customers" menu, you can access the existing list of contacts.

Click the "Add new" button to access the contact creation form:

• • Title. The name of the contact: either a person's name, or the name of the service itself. You could also choose to use a phrase, such as "I have a problem with my order", "I want to return a product" or "I want to become a partner".
• • E-mail address. The address can be the same as another contact. In fact, all contacts can share the same address if you don't really have a team – customers will never know, but having many contacts helps them trust your shop, as it means there are many people working for your shop.
• • Save messages?. Indicate if the e-mail is to be saved in the "Customer Service" tool, or simply sent to the e-mail address. If disabled, Wcomm will not help you handle customer service for this contact. This might be useful for "Partner e-mail", as you might not want your customer service employees to have access to these.
• • Description. Make it short, no more than a single line, as it is displayed to the customer in the contact form.


How the customer can contact you

To contact the appropriate team of employees from your shop's front office, the customer clicks either on the "Contact" link at the top of the page, or on the "Contact Us" link at the bottom of the page. The contact form appears.



The customer is then asked to choose the service to contact, enter the e-mail address and then complete the message. A drop-down menu makes it possible to choose which order is being discussed, and even which product from that order.

Social Titles

The social title tool helps you better define your customers: in the customers list, you can choose to only display customers having a given social title. Modules may also rely on social titles for certain features.

Clicking on the "Add new" button brings you to a form:

• • Social title. You can choose anything, from the very common ("Sir", "Lady", "Gentleman", etc.) to the very unusual ("Jedi", "Magnificent One", "Money carrier"...). The important thing when departing from the commonly accepted titles is to reflect your shop's true identity.
• • Gender. Some titles may apply to both male and female customers, or to neither. In that last case, be sure then to set that option to "Neutral".
• • Image. A 16*16 image file representing the title. Classic gender symbols are the Mars and Venus ones (♂ and ♀), but there are many other possibilities. Wcomm enables you to characterize your creation with a unique image.
• • Image width and Image height. Wcomm works best with 16*16 image, and will resize your image if it bigger than that. Nevertheless, you might feel necessary to use bigger images, and these two options enable you to set the exact size required by your image. If you enter "0", Wcomm will simply use the image's original size.

Outstanding Reports

This page is only available when you enable Wcomm's B2B features. To do that, go to the Customer Preferences page, and choose "Yes" for the "Enable B2B mode" option.

This page displays the outstanding report for some of your customers, meaning the amount of money you are allowing them to buy your products before they have to actually pay you.

Enabling the Outstanding feature

When the B2B mode is enabled (Preferences > Customers page), three fields are added to the customer creation form:

• • Allowed outstanding amount. The maximum amount of money this customer can use as an outstanding.
• • Maximum number of payment days. The maximum number of days the customer can go before having to pay his outstanding.
• • Risk rating. The risk factor for this customer: None, Low, Medium or High. It is up to you to decide if a customer is a risky benefactor of your outstanding feature, or if he will assuredly pay on time.

You should fill these fields for all professional customers.

Current outstanding screen

Once a customer with outstanding allowance buys from your shop, it appears in the Customers > Outstanding page. This enables you to get an overview of your current outstanding invoices.

Creating Price Rules and Vouchers

Vouchers play an important role in your daily relationships with your customers. Typically, customers like two things when shopping:

• • Feeling special, unique.
• • Getting good prices.

Both can be achieved with personalized discounts, and this is precisely where vouchers come into play – or more precisely, price rules.

"Price rules" can take two forms:

• • Cart rules. These are actually the successors to vouchers, as they were known in previous versions of Wcomm.
  Basically, it enables you to create per-customer voucher codes, but also much more.
• • Catalog price rules. Enables you to assign price reductions by category, manufacturer, supplier, attribute or feature.
  For instance, you can set a rule that would say that for Spanish customers belonging to the "Good clients" group would get 10% off on your Electronics category and all Sony products for the first week of July.

Cart Rules

The "Cart rules" page gives you access to an advanced tool that succeeds and builds upon the voucher system from Wcomm 1.4. Seasoned users of Wcomm will not be surprised with the features that were added, but will have to adapt to the new name: when this guide mentions vouchers, we are actually talking about cart rules – which, in themselves, are quite different to credit slips.

Differences between a credit slip, a voucher and a cart rule

A credit slip is first and foremost a written proof that a product has been returned. Most of the time, the user can use it as a voucher.

A voucher is a discount code which does not have to be tied to a merchandise return or a refund, and which can take many more forms than a simple credit slip:

• • A discount on an order (percentage).
• • A discount on an order (amount).
• • Free shipping.

You can apply a voucher to all customers, or a group of customers, or a single customer; you can set its expiration date.

A cart rule is basically an advanced version of a voucher: in addition to what a voucher could do in Wcomm 1.4, the cart rules system introduced in Wcomm 1.5 enables you to:

• • Name the discount.
• • Allow the customer to use only a portion of the discount.
• • Assign priorities between cart rules.
• • Set the compatibility between cart rules.
• • Have the discount only work with some carriers.
• • Have the discount only work with a selection of products and/or categories and/or manufacturers and/or suppliers and/or attributes... or all of these at the same time if necessary.
• • Have the discount be applicable for free shipping and/or a discount on an order and/or a free gift... or all of these at the same time if necessary!

In this user guide, "cart rule" and "voucher" are synonymous and interchangeable.

The "Cart rules" page lists the currently existing cart rules, which you can enable or disable by clicking on the icons in the "Status" column.

Creating a New Cart Rule

A voucher can be created automatically after a product return, but you can create a new voucher at any time manually, and be very specific about its properties.

The creation form has three tabs, enabling you to precisely build new rules and vouchers.

Information Tab

The first tab, "Information", contains the rule's identifiers and main settings.

• • Name. The name is public, so you should keep it casual.
• • Description. The description is not public. It helps your shop employees understand why the rule was created.
• • Code. Give your rule a unique code. You can either create one manually (and therefore use readable words, like 1VOUCH4JOE), or have Wcomm generate one unique string by clicking the "Generate" button. Of course, you can also use any other string generator such as http://www.random.org/strings/
  Note that if no code is set, the rule will apply to any customer fitting the other conditions:
  • 1. If there is a code, then customer have to enter it during the ordering process.
  • 2. If there is no code, then the rule is automatically applied to benefiting customers.
• • Highlight. If enabled, Wcomm will let the user know that a voucher corresponding to the items in the cart is available and can be added.
• • Partial use. If disabled, the rule/voucher can only be used once, even if it is not completely used. If enabled, a new voucher is created when the current one is not completely used.
• • Priority. If a customer (or group of customers) is eligible for more than one voucher, or if more than one voucher can be applied to an order, then Wcomm applies said voucher one by one in the alphanumerical order. You can change that order by placing a lower priority to you voucher. By default, they all have a priority of 1. If you set it to a higher number, the voucher will be applied after vouchers with a lower number.
• • Status. You can disable and enable a rule whenever you feel is necessary.

Conditions Tab

The second tab, "Conditions", contains a large set of possibilities, enabling you to precisely target who should be able to benefit from this rule.

• • Limit to a single customer. This is where you indicate that the voucher you are creating is for one customer only. For instance, if you had a delivery delay and you want to make a gesture of goodwill, you can create a voucher for this customer that only he or she can access. To quickly find the customer, type in the first few letters of their first name, last name or e-mail in the text field.
  If empty, Wcomm will understand than any customer can use it... unless you have added a customer group as a further condition (see "Customer group selection" check-box below).
• • Validity. The default validity is one month, but you can reduce that to one week or even one day.
• • Minimum amount. The minimum order amount from which the voucher is applicable. Your voucher will only be applicable if the customer's order is above the given amount. You can choose if that amount should include taxes and/or shipping costs.
• • Total available. Set a quantity of available vouchers: either "1" if it is intended for a single customer, or any number if the voucher is for whoever uses one first.
• • Total available for each user. You can set the number of times a voucher can be used for each user. That number must be at least equal to the quantity of available vouchers above ("Total available" field).
  • 1. If that number is inferior to the total quantity of available vouchers, then one single customer will not be able to use all of them.
  • 2. Keeping it to "1" makes sure that each of your customers can only use the voucher once. In that case, make sure the voucher applies to a group rather than a customer...

The check-boxes at the bottom of the section are very important, as they help you further filter to what or to whom the rule is to be applied.

• • Carrier selection. You can make it so that the customer will have a discount if he or she chooses a specific carrier for the package delivery.
• • Customer group selection. This is very useful. Thanks to Wcomm's group creation tool, you can create discount that apply to a range of users, and build other conditions on top of that discount thanks to the cart rule creation tool.
• • Compatibility with other cart rules. By default, an order can benefit from any number of cart rules. With this option, you can tell Wcomm that this rule cannot be combined with a selection of other rules. This option only appears if you have more than one cart rule.
• • Product selection. Another very useful tool, which enables to create automatic vouchers for cart which contain specific products. The tool is explained in more detail below.
• • Shop selection. By default, a cart rule applies to all your stores. With this option, you can make it so that rule only applies to a selection of your stores.

The "Product selection" option brings a whole new form, and enables you to create not only per-product vouchers, by also per-categories, per-manufacturers, per-suppliers and even per-attribute. As a bonus, you can combine all these in order to specify your customer target as much as possible.

For instance, you can create automatic vouchers for your customer in the form "Buy at least 3 Apple product, get free shipping!"
This is really a tool within the cart rule too, and its configuration is quite specific. You can add as many product selections as needed, following this path:

• 1. Click the "Product selection" link to add a new section.
• 2. Indicate the number of products needed for the discount to activate.
• 3. Add at least one rule, of the type you want: products, attributes, categories, manufacturers, suppliers. You can add as many rules per product selection as you want, even one for each type if necessary.
• 4. Clicking the "OK" adds a new line in the selection. For each type, you must give details on the content the rule applies to. Click the "Choose" link and a window opens, listing the content available for this type (products, categories...). Move the content from the left panel to the right one by clicking on the "Add" button, and close the window by clicking on the "X" at the top right. If only one content is selected, the content field will give its name; otherwise, it will indicate the number of selected content.

You can add as many rules within a selection as necessary. These rules are cumulative: either they all apply, or the discount is not granted.

Product selections are independent: you can add as many as needed, and they will not influence each other. This enables you to create a whole range of products to which the cart rule will apply.

Actions Tab

The third and last tab, "Actions", is where you choose what the discount actually consists of.

• • Free shipping. The rule treats benefiting customers to free shipping
• • Apply a discount.
  • 1. Percent (%). The rule applies to a percentage of the order total. For instance, let's say the order is valued at $200 before taxes. The rule has a value of 15%. Customer who benefit from this rule will only have to pay $170 (before taxes and shipping costs).
  • 2. Amount. The rule applies a monetary discount on the order total. For instance, let's say the order is valued at $200 before taxes. The discount offers $20 off the purchase. Customer who benefit from this rule will only pay $180 before (before shipping costs). You can choose whether taxes are applied to the discount or not.
  • 3. None. The rule does not offer any discount on the order. Choosing this option makes the next section, "Apply discount to", disappear.
• • Apply discount to.
  • 1. Order (without shipping). The discount applies to the whole order.
  • 2. Specific product. You can choose to which product the discount should apply: type the first letters of the product, and choose in the list of matching names.
  • 3. Cheapest product. Only available for the "Percent (%)" option.
  • 4. Selected product(s). The customer can choose on which products the discount should be applied. Only available for the "Percent (%)" option.
• • Send a free gift. You can choose to offer a gift for some conditions (and skip the discount altogether). A field appears: type the first letters of the product, and choose in the list of matching names.

Once everything has been saved, you can send your voucher code to your customers, or let the system handle the cart rules automatically, depending on your settings.

Your voucher will appear in the "Cart Rules" page, under the "Price rules" menu. You can delete or edit it at any time. If the voucher was set to a specific group or customer, then it will appear in the front office, in the customer's "Vouchers" section of his account as well as in the cart (if you chose to), where they can choose which one to apply to their order.

Cart rules that are set to apply to all customers do not appear in the customer's "My vouchers" page: he or she has to know about them in order to use them. It is up to you to let them know about these public discounts.

In order to apply the cart rule, the customer needs to visit his cart and enter the voucher in the "Vouchers" field and click "Add". The customer will not be able to apply the voucher if the check-out is already validated.

Once applied, the cart summary displays the voucher's impact on the order's amount.

Catalog Price Rules

Catalog price rules enable you to assign price reductions by category, manufacturer, supplier, attribute or feature. As its name implies, this type of rules applies to a range of products; it cannot be used for a single product. If you need a discount applied to a single product, you must create a cart rule instead or create a specific price (in the "Price" page of the product's edition page).

For instance, you can set a rule that would say that for Spanish customers belonging to the "Good clients" group would get 10% off on your Electronics category and all Sony products for the first week of July.

The "Catalog price rules" page lists the currently existing rules, which you can edit or delete by clicking on the icons in the "Status" column. If you need to disable a rule, simply change its end date to the day before.

Creating a New Catalog Price Rule

The creation form page has two sections, enabling you to precisely build new rules.

Specific price rules

The first form is easy to understand.

This is where you set who should benefit from the rule, what the discount should be, and other details.

• • Name. The name is public, so you should keep it casual.
• • Shop. Multistore mode only. The rule applies to customers who buy through a specific shop. Only available if you have at least two shops.
• • Currency. The rule applies to customers who set to pay with a specific currency.
• • Country. The rule applies to customers from a specific country.
• • Group. The rule applies to customers who belong to a specific customer group.
• • From quantity. The rule applies the order has at least a specific number of matching products.
• • Price (tax excl.). The new price for the product. Here you can set the public price of the product that matches the rules that you are putting in place. By default, the rule applies to the base price.
• • From and To. The rule applies in this time frame.
• • Reduction type. The discount can either be an amount of money, or a percentage of the order total.
• • Reduction with or without taxes. The discount can either include the tax, or leave the tax as is.
• • Reduction. The value of the reduction. Depending on the "Reduction type" above, putting "10.0" in the field can either mean "$10 off" (depending on the default currency) or "10% off".

You can of course combine all of these rules.

Conditions

The "Conditions" section is where you set the products to which the category price rule applies. You only appears if you click on the "Add a new condition group" button.

Conditions are built around condition groups, meaning that your data from the "Specific price rule" section above can be applied to many different ranges of products.
Conditions are grouped in an inclusive manner: all conditions of the group have to apply for the catalog price to apply. Hence the "AND".
Meanwhile, condition groups are exclusive: only one group has to apply for the catalog price to apply. Hence the "OR".

The default condition group is empty. You can add conditions to it using the drop-down menus in the lower part of the section:

• • Choose a category or any other type of selection, and then click on the "Add condition" button.
• • The condition will appear in the condition group. You can put many conditions in a condition group.
• • Once a group is completed and you want to create a new condition group, click on the "Add new condition group". A new group will then appear, which you can fill in the same way.

By default, new conditions are added to the condition group that was created last. If you need to add conditions to a previous group, click on that group to highlight it, and then add your conditions.

You cannot currently delete a condition group.

Front office Positions

A modules can have to views: one on the back office (its options, or even a configuration screen), and one on the front office. The front office view is how and where the module is displayed within your shop's theme.

The position of a module in your theme can be changed, because you might want one module's block to be placed much higher (or lower) in the page that others. In Wcomm's parlance, this is called "transplanting", and is done using the tool available in the "Positions" page, under the "Modules" menu. In effect, this enables you to attach a module to one of the many available hooks in the current theme, without writing any code.

The "Positions" page displays all the available hooks, and their attached modules. Many are empty by default, but some of the most useful ones have a dozen of modules (the displayHeader hook has 33 modules by default).

At the top of the page, a drop-down menu enables you to only display the hook in which you are interested.
By default, this page only displays the hooks on which you can position functions. Checking the "Display non-positionable hooks" box below displays all the hooks, even those where you cannot position something.

The header of the table for each hook displays the hook's name, its technical name (and for some, a quick description), and its number of attached modules. The table lists the modules that are attached to that hook.

The modules are displayed in the order in which they appear in the hook.

Moving a module within a hook

You have two ways of changing a module's position within a hook:

• • Click the up or down arrow. The page will reload and display the new order.
• • Drag and drop the module's row itself:
  • 1. Place the mouse cursor on the position number to have it change into a "move item" cursor.
  • 2. Click and hold while moving the cursor over the row/position where you want the module to be: the module's row changes position accordingly.
  • 3. Release the mouse button: the current position for the module is saved.

For most modules, transplantation can easily be done directly via the back office. Some modules require you to alter their code in order to transplant them.

Attaching a module to a hook: Transplanting

In Wcomm, "transplanting" is the action of attaching a module to a hook. You can add a module to more than one hook.

Two things to know before transplanting a module:

• • Some modules are written to only be attached to a given set of hooks.
• • Some hooks are written to not accept some specific kinds of modules.

Therefore, be aware that you cannot always transplant any module to any hook.

Make sure to disable the cache when testing the effect of a new module on the front-end. You can do this in the "Preferences" page, under the "Advanced parameters" menu.

The transplanting process has its own interface:

• 1. Go to the "Modules" menu, and its "Positions" page.
• 2. Click the "Transplant a module" button at the top right. The transplanting interface appears.
• 3. In the "Module" drop-down list, select the module you want to transplant.
• 4. In the "Hook into" drop-down list, select where you want to transplant the module to. There are many available hooks. You can change your setting later if needed.
• 5. In the "Exceptions" field, type the name of the file(s) of the pages in which you do not want the module to appear.You can perform a multiple selection simply by clicking on the file names while keeping the Ctrl key pressed. You can deselect files in the same manner: Ctrl+click.
• 6. Do not forget to save your changes.

The "Hook into" drop-down menu gives you a good idea where module can be placed.

Even though the "Hook into" drop-down list gives a comprehensive overview of the available hooks, it might not always be clear which is the one to which you want to attach your module. Do not hesitate to try another hook if the result of your selection if not what you expect. The list gives some detail: some hook have a description after the hook's name, for instance "Add fields to the form 'attribute value'" for displayAttributeForm. Peruse them all in order to choose your hook correctly.

Editing an attached module

Each module has two icons on the right side of its row: one to edit its settings, the other to delete the module.

Editing a module's setting uses the same interface as the one used for the transplanting a module. The major difference is that you cannot change the "Module" and "Hook into" settings, as they are disabled, and thus grayed out. You can only edit the exception setting, which works just as described in the "Attaching a module to a hook" method above.
While you cannot edit the "Module" and "Hook into" settings, they can serve as a handy reminder of their current position, should you want to put them back there later on.

If you want to move a module to another hook, you must use the transplanting interface:

• 1. Click the "Transplant a module" button at the top right. The transplanting interface appears.
• 2. In the "Module" drop-down list, select the module you want to move to another hook.
• 3. In the "Hook into" drop-down list, select where you want to transplant the module to.
• 4. In the "Exceptions" field, type the name of the file(s) of the pages in which you do not want the module to appear.
• 5. Save your changes. The hook list appears.
• 6. Go to the hook where you have transplanted the module: it should appear in there. Change its position if necessary.
• 7. Go to the hook where the module first was, and click the trashcan icon in order to remove it from that hook. This prevents you from having the same module appear twice.

Always check your front-office to make sure the module is indeed where you intended it to be.

Removing a module from a hook

There are two ways to remove a module from a hook:

• • Removing a single module: click the trashcan icon on the right of the module's row.
• • Removing a batch of modules: select the modules by checking the box on the right of their row, and then click the "Unhook" button, found at the top and the bottom of the list of hooks.

Moving a module visually: Live Edit

Another way to move modules around on the shop's homepage is the Live Edit mode, which embeds said homepage into a tool that lets you visually decide where to place your modules. You can access it from the "Position" page, by clicking the "Run Live Edit" button.

When clicked, Wcomm opens the homepage in a new browser windows/tab, with the Live Edit script on top:

• At their top right side, they have two icons:

• 1. A "move" icon: click on it to start moving the module around.
• 2. A "trash" icon: click it to remove the block from the home.

At the top of the Live Edit mode, a toolbar presents you with two buttons: "Close Live Edit" and "Save".

The first one is quite self-explanatory; the second one cancels all changes you might have made to your modules' position during this live-editing session.

Once you have removed a module, if you want to bring it back, you will have to go to the "Positions" page and use the "Transplant a module" form.

Where to move modules?

Modules cannot be moved just about anywhere: it depends on both the theme's hooks, and each module's hook support (as seen in the above section). Therefore, you mostly can only move modules within their understood context: column modules can be moved within a column as well as from one column to the other (right to left, for instance), while regular homepage modules (the ones at the center) can only be moved within their specific column.

In order to give you a visual hint about where a given module can be moved, it will display an empty green block if the location is correct, and an empty red block if not.

Transplanting a module by modifying its code

This is for experts only: you must have a good knowledge of PHP and HTML before attempting anything with the code of a module.

Some modules cannot be transplanted into other sections of the front-office simply because they lack the necessary code.

For example, the "Quick Search" block (/blocksearch) contains templates for both column display and header display, whereas the "Currencies" block (/blockcurrencies) only has one template file which only works with the header section. Likewise, the default "Featured Products" block (/homefeatured) can only be placed in the center content section of the main page.

If you want to display simple modules such as the "Currencies" block in a position for which it was not built, you will have to edit its template files.
More complex module, such as the "Featured" block, can also be made to be displayed in other sections of the page, but they might have to be partly rewritten in order to have their design work with that new location.

To customize the transplantation ability of a module, you must give it the correct PHP function for the new target hook. For example, the "Currency" block has this function:
function hookTop($params)
{
...
}

In order to transplant the "Currency" block into the right column, for instance, you need to add the hookRightColumn() function:
function hookRightColumn($params))
{
...
}

Afterwards, you must write the code that displays the content on the front page. At best, that means copy/pasting the content of the hookTop() function; at worst, you need to rework the content of hookTop() function into something that will work for the new location.

Payment Settings

With Wcomm, you can accept your customer's transactions using several different payment methods, such as checks, bank wire, cash on delivery, and through several partner modules such as PayPal, Moneybookers, HiPay, etc.

In the "Payment" page, you can see the following sections:

• • Modules list. Basically, a shortcut to "Payments & Gateways" section of the module list, in the "Modules" page. You can install modules directly from this page.
• • Three "restrictions" sections:
  • 1. Currency restrictions. Choose with which currencies your installed payment modules should work.
  • 2. Group restrictions. Choose with which user groups your installed payment modules should work.
  • 3. Country restrictions. Choose with which countries your installed payment modules should work.

Installing a Payment Module

Installing a payment module is fundamentally no different from installing a regular module: simply click the "Install" button, and all that is left to do is to configure the module.
You should pay a lot of attention to the settings, and make sure they do point to your address or bank account. Configuring payment modules often means you must first be known by the payment service provider, meaning having an account on their service.

Payment Module Restrictions on Currencies

Depending upon the payment, the customer's choice of currency can differ. You can limit the choice of available payment methods depending on the available currencies: you may want customers to be able to pay with any currency when using PayPal, but those paying Moneybookers should only pay using dollars, for instance.

By default, only your shop's default currency is available. If you need more, follow this process:

• 1. In the "Localization" page under the "Localization" menu, import the localization pack for the country which has the currency in which you are interested. For instance, USA for US Dollars, United Kingdom for UK Pound, etc.
• 2. In the "Currencies" page under the "Localization" menu, enabled the currencies you just imported.

If you need to restrict payment module usage according to the user's currency, simply check the boxes that apply and click on the "Save restrictions".

Note that currency restrictions work in different ways depending on the payment module:

• • For some, such as Cash on delivery, you cannot change their default setting.
• • For others, such as Bank wire, Payment by check, Skrill, Ogone, etc., you can change any of their currency settings, except for the "Customer currency" and "Shop default currency", which stay at their default state.
• • Then, for other modules such as Hipay or PayPal, you can change any of their currency settings, but you can choose only one option between "Customer currency" and "Shop default currency", not both.

The customer can set his or her currency using the drop-down menu at the top of each front office page.

You can set the shop's default currency in the "Localization" page, under the "Localization" menu.

If you change the default currency after having configured some first products, you will have to reset the price of all these products. You should set the default currency once and for all before adding any product.

Payment Module Restrictions on Groups

You can limit the choice of available payment methods depending on the group of customers: you can have a set number of customer groups where people can have access to more payment methods then regular customers.

For instance, you could choose to have regular customers pay with PayPal, Skrill and Hipay, while professionals would only be able to pay by bank wire. Depending on the type of customers and on your choices, customers will only pay using the methods that match with your decisions.

Payment Module Restrictions on Countries

You can limit the choice of payment methods according to your customer's country of origin. For instance, you could choose to accept all payment methods for customers from France, Spain and Germany, while customers from Italy, the United Kingdom and Switzerland would only be able to pay by bank wire.

The table lists all the known countries. If one is missing, you can add it using the "Countries" page, under the "Localization" menu.

Here again, just as with currency limitations, the available options vary depending on the payment module:

• • For some, the only option is your own country.
• • For others, the only options are the set of countries supported by the service: Austria, Belgium, France, etc.
• • All the others native payment modules should work with all countries.
• Find the country you are looking for in the alphabetical list, and check the boxes to select or unselect the payment methods you want to make available to customers from that country. Once all of your settings have been configured, click on the "Save restrictions" button, found at the bottom of the table.
  By default, all installed payment methods are enabled for the shop's country.

Making the Native Modules Work

This chapter explores the configuration process of all the default modules in Wcomm 1.6.

There are more than 130 native modules available in 25 sections. Module sections are only displayed if they actually contain at least one module.

Some modules have configuration pages, which give you access to a couple of tools and information pages.

In every configuration page, generic buttons are gathered at the top of the screen:

• • Disable. Deactivates the module while keeping its current settings for later use.
• • Uninstall. Deactivates the module end delete its current settings.
• • Reset. Wipes the module's current settings to set them back to default.
• • Check and update. Checks whether a new version of this module is available (either in the Wcomm repository or in the Addons online store), and if so, updates the module
• • Manage hooks. This link is a shortcut to the "Positions" page, from the "Modules" menu. From there, you can change the location of the module's interface on the front-end of your shop, or launch the Live Edit tool. The "Positions" page is configured so that you only the hooks available to the current module are displayed.
• • Back. A link back to the module list.

At the bottom of the screen, the Manage translations selector contains shortcuts to the "Translations" page for installed modules. From there, you can update the module's translation for the selected language. For instance, you might want to change the wording in order to better fit your use.

Some modules will not be installed from files on your server, but downloaded from the Addons webnexs website. It helps ensure that you always have the latest version of a module.

Advanced EU Compliance

New in Wcomm 1.6.1.0.

The Advanced EU Compliance module helps merchants make their shops compliant with the recent, more restrictive EU regulations.

This is must-have module for European stores.

Most of its options are meant to provide more transparency to the final customers, with:

• • More detailed price labels (“From” price, tax, shipping fees and delays, product weight, etc.)
• • Advanced checkout page
• • Legal content attachment for emails

Not all of its option will be useful in all countries, but they all help make your store more respectful of the EU e-commerce laws.
The default settings are the recommended settings; you are free to enable or disable options as you see fit

Label options

Make sure to translate all text fields in all your available languages.

• • Estimated delivery time label (available products). Indicates the estimated delivery time for your in-stock products. Leave the field empty to disable the option. Default text is "Delivery: 1 to 3 weeks".
• • Estimated delivery time label (out-of-stock products). Indicates the estimated delivery time for your out-of-stock products. Leave the field empty to disable. Default text is "Delivery: 3 to 6 weeks".
• • 'Before' Base price labe. When a product is on sale, displays the base price with a 'Before' label.
• • Tax 'inc./excl.' label. Displays whether the tax is included next to the product price ('Tax included/excluded' label).
• • Shipping fees 'inc./excl.' label. Displays whether the shipping fees are included, next to the product price ('Shipping fees included / excluded').
  Once enabled, make sure the "Shipping and Payment" option is associated with a CMS page in the "Legal Content Management" section, further down in the configuration screen. The label will link to this content.
• • Product weight label. Displays the weight of a product (when information is available and product weighs more than 1 kg).
• • Product weight precision. Helps you select precision level for product weight display (e.g: 1 kg / 1.01 kg). The value cannot be negative.
• • Revocation Terms within ToS. Includes the content from the "Revocation Terms" CMS page within the Terms of Services (ToS). Once enabled, make sure the "Revocation Terms" option are associated with a CMS page in the "Legal Content Management" section, further down in the configuration screen. The label will link to this content.
• • Revocation for virtual products. Adds a mandatory checkbox when the cart contains a virtual product. Use it to ensure customers are aware that a virtual product cannot be returned.
• • 'From' price label (when combinations). Displays a 'From' label before the price on products with combinations. Since prices can vary from one combination to another, this label indicates that the final price may be higher.
• • Upper shopping cart text. Adds a custom text above the shopping cart summary.
• • Lower shopping cart text. Adds a custom text at the bottom of the shopping cart

Feature options

• • Enable 'Tell A Friend' feature. If enabled, the "Send to a Friend" module allows customers to send to a friend an email with a link to a product's page.
  This option makes sure you comply with your local legislation before enabling: the emails sent by this feature can be considered as unsolicited commercial emails.
• • Enable 'Reordering' feature. If enabled, the "Reorder" option allows customers to reorder in one click from their Order History page.
  This option makes sure you comply with your local legislation before enabling: it can be considered as unsolicited goods.
• • Enable "Advanced checkout page". Replaces the standard checkout process with a more legally (EU of course) compliant one. This option only works with the default-bootstrap template or other compatible templates and with compatible payment methods (many modules already adapted).
  Once enabled, the advanced checkout page displays the following sections: payment methods, address summary, ToS agreement, cart summary, and an "Order with Obligation to Pay" button.
• • Proportionate tax for shipping and wrapping. Instead of assigning a tax rules group to carriers and gift wrapping, the average tax of the products in the cart is used to compute the tax of gift wrapping and shipping. This is very useful in Germany.
  Once enabled, tax for shipping and wrapping costs will be calculated proportionate to taxes applying to the products in the cart.
  In effect, this means that the customer will get a definitive "with tax" price at the beginning of the checkout, and the shipping and wrapping taxes will be calculated all along the checkout process and taken on your margin.

Legal content management

Several options of this module need the system to “know” what some CMS pages are for. If no page is available for some needed page association, then you have to create them.

Email content inclusion

With this interface, you can choose which documents to include at the bottom to any of the standard e-mails sent by the shop – for instance, your shop's "Terms and Conditions" textual content can be included at the bottom of all invoices sent.

The content is chosen from the settings in the "Legal content management" section of this module. If no option is set, then you cannot choose a content to send.

Cron tasks manager

This module provides you with a cron-like tool: you can create jobs which will call a given set of secure URLs to your Wcomm store, thus triggering updates and other automated tasks.

CSV Export for Newsletters

This module was built to export a CSV file of the e-mail addresses that your customers registered in your system.

Your customers can give you their e-mail address either by entering it in the Newsletter block located on the homepage or by checking the "Yes" box to subscribe to the newsletter when they register. You need these e-mail addresses in order to do some marketing.
Upon registration, your customers have two choices related to the newsletter: The first one to subscribe to the newsletter, the second to receive offers from your partners (Opt-In).

Export Newsletter Subscribers

This first section enables you to export all the e-mail addresses recorded from the Newsletter block on your homepage. After clicking the "Export .CSV file" button, a notification appears, asking you to click on a link to download the file containing the addresses.

Four pieces of information will be present in this file: the customer id, e-mail address, the day of registration, and the IP address. If you use this data with software such as Microsoft Excel, you can sort the information as you wish.

Export Customers

This second section enables you to filter your customers' e-mail addresses before you export a CVS file of their data. For instance, filtering by country is particularly useful for sending newsletters in the right language and for adapting your offers.

You therefore take more information into account when exporting the e-mail addresses. Use the "Newsletter subscribers" selector to select one of the following three items:

• • All customers. Enables you to select all the e-mail addresses of your customers who open an account on your shop. That is to say, those who do want to receive information from your part, as well as those who do not. Be careful what you did with it, then.
• • Subscribers. Enables you to select only those customers who do want to receive a newsletter from you.
• • Non-subscribers. Enables you to select only those customers who do not want receive a newsletter from you.

Next is the "Opted-in subscribers" selector, where you can filter the contacts based on their desire to register for messages from advertising partners. Similarly, three choices are available:

• • All customers. Enables you to select all the e-mail addresses of your customers who open an account on your shop. That is to say, both those who do and do not wish to receive information from your part.
• • Subscribers. Enables you to select only those customers who do want to receive a newsletter from your partners.
• • Non-subscribers. Enables you to select only those customers who do not want receive a newsletter from your partners.

Once you have filtered the e-mail addresses to export, click the "Export .CSV File" button to retrieve all addresses. A notification appears, asking you to click and download the file. This file contains six types of information: the customer ID, last name, first name, e-mail address, IP address, and date of registration. You can then use this information to send your marketing campaigns.

Database Cleaner

This module is very useful when you are done exploring Wcomm for the first time, and you are ready to start adding your own content: you must first remove all the demo data that was installed along with Wcomm: products, categories, client, orders, etc.

The configuration page has three sections:

• • Catalog. This will erase all the data from the current catalog, even the items that you added yourself. Check the box and click the "Delete catalog" button to start the process.
• • Orders and customers. This will erase all the currently registered orders and clients, even the ones that you created yourself. Check the box and click the "Delete catalog" button to start the process.
• • Functional integrity constraints. This will check your database and make sure that everything is correctly set, and will try to fix what is not.
• • Database cleaning. This will help reduce storage space and improve disk access efficiency.

Be very careful: any action triggered by clicking on one of these buttons is irremediable. Be sure to have a fresh backup of your database available first.

Email alerts

Wcomm enables you to alert you and your clients by e-mail in certain cases:

• • Your clients: when a product is out of stock.
• • You: when a new order is placed in your shop.
• • You: when a product's stock is below a certain threshold.
• • You: when a product's coverage is below a certain number of days.

Customer notifications

There is only one setting in this section:

• Product Availability. When you enable this setting, a field appears on the product page of your shop when the product is out of stock. It asks your customers to leave their contact information so that they may be contacted when you shop will have this product back in stock.

Merchant notifications

There are several settings for merchants:

• • New order. Enable this setting if you wish to be alerted of each new order
• • Out of stock. Enable this setting and set the "Threshold" field with the value at which you wish to be alerted (default is 3).
• • Coverage warning. Enable this setting and set the "Coverage field with the value at which you wish to be alerted (default is 0).

Merchant mail alerts can be sent to multiple addresses at the same time. To do so, list each e-mail address that will receive the notification (one e-mail address per line).

Google Analytics API

This module enables you to tie your Wcomm store with your Google Analytics account.

First, you must choose the API version you want to use:

• • The 1.3 version will require you to enter your Google Analytics e-mail, password and profile.
• • The 3.0 version will require you to enter your Google Analytics Client ID, Client Secret and profile.

We recommend the 3.0 one, since the 1.3 one is deprecated. In order to have the 3.0 version work, you must enable OAuth access by following these instructions:
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/config/mgmt/v3/mgmtAuthorization

Image watermark

This module enables you to add a watermark to all the product images on your shop. This limits their circulation on the Internet – and hopefully deter people from stealing them.
If you intend to export your products on Google Shopping, know that on this service, the usage of promotional text / logos and watermarks in the images is not allowed. You may only upload images which are free of any added watermarks / logos. Learn more about the Google Shopping policy here:
https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/2700371?hl=en&ref_topic=2701481

The configuration page notifies you right away of which settings are currently missing.

• • Watermark file. The chosen image must be in GIF format.
• • Watermark transparency (0-100). 100 amounts to a non-transparent image, which means that your logo will be very visible, but it will also completely hide part of the whole picture. The default setting, 60, is usually a good compromise.
• • Watermark X align. Select where your watermark should appear on each of your images, here on the horizontal axis.
• • Watermark Y align. Select where your watermark should appear on each of your images, here on the vertical axis.
• • Choose image types for watermark protection. The type of images to which the watermark should be applied. You really only need to choose the biggest sizes, as these are the ones most likely to be stolen.

Once you have saved your settings, the configuration is completed but the watermarks are not yet added to your shop's pictures. Go to the "Preferences" menu, and open the "Images" page. There, click the "Regenerate thumbnails" button, near the bottom of the page. Wcomm will process all your pictures (as selected in the configuration), and your watermark image will appear on the types of pictures that you selected.

Merchant Expertise

This module was specifically designed to help Wcomm users keep track of their progress as e-merchants, see how much they’ve grown and progressed over the days, months and years. It is installed by default.

This module adds a system of badges and points, broken down into three levels, all of which are integral to your success in the e-commerce world:

• • Features. Tracks your use of key e-commerce features such as Site Performance, Catalog Size, Employees and SEO.
• • Achievements. Tracks your completion of specific key e-commerce goals such as number of Customers, Orders and Revenue.
• • International. Tracks your presence in key International markets such as the Americas, Oceania, Asia, Europe, Africa and Maghreb.

The more progress your store makes, the more badges and points you earn. There is no need to submit any information or fill out any forms. We know how busy you are; everything is done automatically. Use this tool to drive your business, view your progress and reflect on your great achievements.

NVD3 Charts

NVD3 (http://nvd3.org/) is JavaScript library that was built specifically to generate beautiful charts using D3.js (http://d3js.org/)a JavaScript library built to manipulate documents based on data.

This module enables the NVD3 charting code for your own uses, providing you with ever so useful graphs.

OnBoarding

The OnBoarding module greets first-time users to their Wcomm back office: through a small playful interface, it shows the user how to launch his/her shop in several easy steps.

Simple HTML table display

Allows the statistics system to display data in a grid.

Advertising and Marketing

Advertising block

This module will display a block on the front office of your shop, containing the image of your choice, with a link to any URL you choose. This is a very easy way to promote another site: your blog, another store of yours, a friend or partner site, etc.

In the configuration page, you can load an image, set the target URL, and add a title to the image. Save and the image will appear to all your visitors.

Customer follow-up

This module enables you to create e-mail alerts for your customers. It gives you a way to automatically send discount vouchers to some of your customers.

There are four types of event that can trigger the sending of a voucher:

• • Canceled cart: generate a discount when a cart does not become an order.
• • Validated order: generate a discount when an order is validated.
• • Frequent customer: generate a discount when the customer reaches a certain number of orders.
• • Lost customer: generate a discount when a customer, who has already ordered once, has not come back to your site since

Please note that the "Canceled cart" and "Validated order" options can dangerous. For instance, a customer might quickly notice he receives a discount every time he abandons a cart, and thus choose to frequently abandon his carts in order to receive a voucher...

This module will only work if you put a new cron task in place: it should daily call the URL that is indicated at the top of the screen.

Alternatively, you could call that URL manually every day – but this would quickly get tedious.

At the bottom of the screen, you will find two sections:

• • General: has a single option, "Delete outdated discounts during each launch to clean database". If enabled, its action is triggered every time the URL is called.
• • Statistics: displays the number of discounts set during the last 30 days.

LoyaltyLion

Add a loyalty program to your store in minutes. Increase sales and customer happiness by offering points for sign ups, reviews, visits, referrals and purchases

Referral program

This module gives you all the tools to turn your current customers into promoters of your brand among their friends. Using a referral system, you can win new customers while making your customers happier.

The configuration screen has two sections. Here are the options in the "Settings" section

• • Minimum number of orders a sponsored friend must place to get their voucher. Fill in the field with the value of your choice. Until this number is reached, your clients cannot take advantage of the discount.
• • Number of friends in the referral program invitation form. Fill in the value of your choice.
• • Voucher type. You can give two types of reduction, either in percentage or amount. Select the one you prefer, then specify the value of the discount you want to apply in the various currencies supported by your shop.
  • 1. Percentage. Default voucher is 5% of the order.
  • 2. Voucher amount. Default voucher is 5 of every currency.
• • Voucher description. Enter the name for the coupon, in all the supported languages.

Once the setup is complete, click the "Save" button.

The "conditions of the referral program" is where you enter the rules of your referral program, which is a new CMS page where you can set some limits to the voucher, such as " The voucher is valid for 1 year".

Understanding the referral process

To fully explain how the referral program works, you can write a description in the "Referral Program Rules." Once the conditions are completed, click the "Update text" button.

When your customers register and want to view the benefits they can reap from this program, they must go to the "Referral" section of their account. A new screen will appear.

Your customer can then enter the name and email address of the person he wishes to refer to your site. After he clicks "Confirm," the persons he entered will receive an email.

In "Pending Friends", the referral tool displays to the customer which of his referrals did not make a purchase after the email was sent. They may choose to resend an email by selecting the name and clicking "Refer my friends". Friends will then receive an email inviting them to register and submit an order.

The last tab in "my referrals", named "Friends I have sponsored", enables customers to see who among those to whom they sent a referral message, did accept the invitation and ordered an item on the shop. When registering, the referees must indicate the email address of the person who referred them, so that they in turn may benefit from the discount.

Search & Merchandising Prediggo

Prediggo increases your conversion rate and average basket value thanks to their innovative eMerchandising solution. Using an exclusive technology, Prediggo builds a profile for every visitor to your webshop and then recommends the appropriate product in real time.

SendinBlue (formerly MailinBlue)

France only.

Easily manage your Marketing campaigns, Transactional Emails, and SMS messages all in one simple and powerful platform.

Once you have an account, you can connect to the service through the module, and follow the instructions.

Yotpo Social Reviews

Yotpo is a plug and play social reviews solution for e-commerce websites. Yotpo is focused on providing the best social.

Once you have an account, you can connect to the service through the module, and follow the instructions.

Youstice

Youstice is a revolutionary way for companies to handle complaints. Companies and customers communicate via an application that engages with a friendly structured dialogue

Analytics and Stats

Most of these create a new section in the "Stats" page of your Wcomm installation. Many are installed by default. Therefore, if some of Wcomm's statistics are not useful to you, you can disable them here. Note that stats are also resource-consuming tools; therefore, if your server is slow or has little disk space, you should limit your stats options to the bare essentials.

Many of these modules are described in detail in the "Understanding Statistics" of this user-guide. In this section, we will only describe the ones that are not enabled by default (that is, two modules among the 25 in this section).

Best manufacturers

This module adds a "Best Manufacturers" option to the list of available statistics.

In effect, the module enables you to have a better view of which manufacturer's product are the best-selling on your shop. In return, you might want to more frequently restock with the products from the best manufacturers.

Google Analytics (ganalytics)

This module makes it easy for you to install a Google Analytics script on your shop. You will then be able to enjoy the statistics tools offered by Google.

You must have a Google Analytics account to make this module work. You can create one on
http://www.google.com/analytics/.
Once you have one, follow the Analytics instructions to create a profile for your shop. You will receive a unique identifier. Use it in the module's "username" field and save it. Google Analytics will start gathering statistics about your visitors.

Do read all the instructions provided by the module.

PrestaStats

PrestaStats is the leading Business Analytics dashboard & Abandoned Carts Monitor enabling you to see business critical data from your Wcomm store on any device, at any time, and as far back

Billing & Invoicing

Avalara - AvaTax

Sales Tax is complicated. AvaTax makes it easy.

Doing sales tax right is simple with Avalara. They do all of the research and automate the process for you, ensuring that the system is up-to-date with the most recent sales tax and VAT rates and rules in every state and country, so you don't have to. As a cloud-based service, AvaTax eliminates ongoing maintenance and support. It provides you with a complete solution to manage your sales tax needs.

European VAT Number

This module enables your customers to fill in their VAT number in their details. The VAT can be fetched through a web service, based on your country.

The configuration screen is therefore quite straightforward:

• • Your country. Choose your shop's country.
• • Enable checking of the VAT number with the WebService. Tell Wcomm that you want to retrieve the VAT for your country.

The VAT field appears only when the customer enters his or her company name in the address field.

Dashboard modules

Dashboard Activity

Adds a block on Wcomm's Dashboard, with an overview of the current activity on your store.

Dashboard Goals

Adds a block on Wcomm's Dashboard, with your store's forecast.

Dashboard Products

Adds a block on Wcomm's Dashboard, with a table of your latest orders and a ranking of your products.

Dashboard Trends

Adds a block on Wcomm's Dashboard, with the evolution of your stores main numbers (along with a graphic).

Front Office Features

Many of these are installed by default. Therefore, if some of Wcomm's functionalities are not useful to you, you can disable them here.

Banner block

Displays a banner at the top of your store's home page (depending on your store's settings).

Make the banner very wide while keeping the content centered, so that the banner can adapt to all device sizes.

Cart block

Displays the products that your customers added to their carts; on all the pages. Visitors can then see their choices while shopping, change the quantity of product they are ordering, and delete or add a coupon. By clicking on "Shopping Cart", they see the "Shopping cart summary" of all products added to their cart, and their quantity.

You can configure the cart to use Ajax, which means that any change that the uses makes to his shopping list will apply immediately instead of reloading the page. The Ajax setting is not compatible with all themes, be sure to test it thoroughly with your own theme.

You can also set the maximum number of products that your cart should display.

Categories block

Displays a list of your product categories on your shop.

You have a few configuration possibilities:

• • Maximum depth. If you have a great number of categories, or with long names, you might prefer to not break your design and limit the number of sub-levels that should be displayed.
• • Dynamic. When enabled, sub-categories are hidden by default, and the customer can choose to display them. This is great for preserving space and avoiding clutter: if disabled, this module displays all categories and all their sub-categories.
• • Sort. Most of the time, you should keep the category sort to alphabetical, for easier perusing. But the "By position" sort enables you to choose which categories should be at the top, and thus promote these.
• • How many footer columns would you like?. Enables you to choose the number of columns in the "Category" block of your footer.

CMS Block

Adds a block with several CMS links.

The first section, "CMS Block configuration", has one option:

• • CMS blocks. You can have your CMS content be displayed either in the left column of your shop, or the right column. You can edit the content of the existing page by clicking on the 'edit' icon on the right of its name, or add new blocks of content on either side by clicking on the "Add new" button.

The second section, "Footer's various links configuration", has four options:

• • Display various links and information in the Footer. You can choose to not display any CMS page in the footer, simply by unchecking this setting.
• • Footer links. The CMS pages linked from this section appear at the bottom of the site. This is where shop owners tend to place informational pages: legal notice, terms & conditions, etc.
• • Footer text. You can add one line or paragraph of text below the list of CMS pages in the footer. Write it in as many languages as needed.
• • Display "Powered by Wcomm". Adds a line with a link to wcomm.com. Note that this line is located between the links and the footer text.

When you delete the footer text, Wcomm might give you this error: "Please provide footer text for the default language".

This is because when you first enter a footer text, Wcomm replicates it in all the available languages. When you delete the text, you must therefore delete it from all the available languages: first delete the text from the default language, then click on the language selector next to the text field, choose another language, and delete the content of the field again. Do this for every language. You can then save your changes, and Wcomm will not display the error anymore.

Contact block

Allows you to display extra information about customer service:

• • Phone number. This should be a dedicated customer service/support number, not a way to contact the sales section or the partnership program (if any). If you do not provide customer service by phone, leave this field empty.
• • E-mail. Again, this should be a dedicated customer service/support e-mail address.

This information appears in the footer by default.

Contact information block

Adds a block to add some information about contacting the shop:

• • Company name. Your company's name might be different from your shop's name. Indicating the full name brings trust to your brand.
• • Address. Your headquarters' address, or if it applies, your main shop address. Do not give your own personal address, as you certainly do not want customers to come knock at your door. If you do not want people visiting or sending your letters, leave this field empty.
• • Phone number. Your business phone line. Again, do not give your personal number here. If you do not have a dedicated business line, leave the field empty.
• • Email. Your business e-mail address, where you want to receive any correspondence (often including support requests).

This information appears in the footer by default.

Cross-Selling

Displays a "Customers who bought this product also bought..." block on each product page. You can set the number of products to be displayed (default is 10).

Currency block

Adds a little interface feature where customers can choose which currency will be used to display prices, as well as how the customers will pay for their orders. The block appears in the header (top part) of your shop, and only displays the installed currencies. To add a currency or configure the existing ones, go to the "Currencies" page, under the "Localization" menu.

Custom CMS information block

Adds a block containing information for your customer, retrieved from your CMS pages.

You have two custom blocks by default, each with an edit button. Click that button will give you access to and a text editor, where you can enter the basic information for your home page. That editor features an "HTML" button, which makes it possible to enter specific HTML tags, and using custom classes and such, which you can then style with CSS.

Customer data privacy block

Adds a block to display a message about customer data privacy. The configuration screen simply presents you with a big text area. It is up to you to fill it up with your data privacy policy.

This is an important text, as people online are more and more worried about privacy. Providing a clear policy of how you handle their private information brings trust to your brand – and also ties you legally to respect it. You should never copy/paste a policy from another site, but write your own, based on your country's privacy laws.

Customer reassurance block

Adds a block to display more information to reassure your customers. This block appears in the footer of the default theme. It was previously called "Bloc reinsurance".

The default sample pages are:

• • Money back guarantee. Says Wikipedia, "A money-back guarantee is essentially a simple guarantee that, if a buyer is not satisfied with a product or service, a refund will be made."
• • In-store exchange. The text should explain that the customer can bring any unwanted product to your physical store in order to make an exchange with another model, or get a refund. If you do not have a store, you certainly should delete this page.
• • Payment upon shipment. The customer only pays for the order once it has been shipped. It is not recommended for smaller shops.
• • Free shipping. This is where you indicate your shipping policy. All shipping can be free, or you can choose to have it be free starting with a certain amount, for instance.
• • 100% secured payment processing. Typically, because you rely on third-party payment services such as PayPal or Moneybookers, you trust them with your money exchanges, and so should your customers. You can paste information about each payment service in this page.

These are only sample pages: they do not have any content by default. It is therefore up to you (and your legal team) to fill it with the proper text. If some of the sample policies do reflect your business, you should delete them.
Click on the 'edit' icon at the right in order to add text that fits your shop's trust features. You can remove or add pages as you see fit.

Facebook Like Box block

Displays a new block on your home page with a link to your store's Facebook page, a Like button, and photos of people who liked your page.

Facebook sharing block

Adds a block to display a link "Share on Facebook" on product pages. Clicking the link directs the customer to his or her Facebook page, with a pre-filled link to the product.

Favorite Products

Adds an "Add this product to my favorites" link on each product page, only visible to logged-in customers. They can then access their list of favorite products by going to their account page and clicking the "My favorite products" link.

Featured Products on the homepage

With this module, you can choose which products to highlight by placing them on your homepage. In the configuration page, you can set the number of products you want to show. Once this value is saved, go into the configuration page of a product of your choice ("Catalog" menu). Select "Home" as the category into which the product appears, in addition to its current categories (do not remove its original category). Save your change, and you product will appear on your shop's home page.
Repeat for all of the products that you want to place on the home page.

FIA-NET Sceau de Confiance

France only.

Turn your visitors into buyers by promoting trust in your site.

FIA-NET is a French third-party e-commerce trust partner: it protects both customers and online shops against credit card frauds and other malevolent activities.

You have to be a FIA-NET partner in order to use the module. Ask for more information here: http://www.fia-net-group.com/form_partenaires_fianet.php?p=185 Once you have your account details, you can configure the module with them, and the FIA-NET logo will be displayed on your front page. This logo is well known in France, and lets visitors know that your shop is trustworthy.

When configuring the module, you can choose to use the Test mode or the Production mode. The Test mode enables you to perform some test purchases and see how the FIA-NET system reacts.

Home Editorial

Adds a block to the central column of your homepage, with an image above a text, both of which you can edit by configuring the module.

You can move the block around in your design using the Live Edit tool.

The homepage is the first thing your visitors experience when they discover your shop. Therefore, be sure to make it pleasant and efficient, and to update it regularly. Make sure to translate the text in as many languages as your shop supports.

Image slider for your homepage

Adds a slider block on your homepage's central column, where you can define a set of images that will be displayed one after the other, with a sliding motion.

The module's configuration screen presents you with two sections:

• • Settings. You can set the size of the block, the time to wait between two images, and whether the slide should loop or not.
• • Slides list. You can visually arrange the images' order by drag-and-dropping their individual blocks.
  Three icons at the right of each block enables you to enable/disable the image, edit its settings, or remove it from the set altogether.

Adding/editing an image

Make sure that all the images have the exact same size, and that this size is reflected in the block's own size (in the "Slider configuration" section).

Clicking the "Add Slide" link brings you to a new screen.

• • Select a file. Note that you can have text on the image, and indicate the language of that text using the language selector.
  Additionally, this means you can have a different image for each language. But be aware they these images will be tied: same position, inability to delete one without deleting the others, etc.
• • Title. The title appears in the "Slides configuration" section, and helps you sort the images.
• • URL. You can choose to send the customer to a given page of your shop when he or she clicks the image. This is useful when the image promotes a certain product, category or manufacturer.
• • Caption. The alternate text to be used if somehow the image cannot be loaded. This is essential for accessibility.
• • Description. The text appears when the mouse pointer hovers over the image.
• • Active. You can disable an image whenever needed, for instance when the discount it promotes ends.

Language block

Displays a block of the available languages at the top of the homepage. This block enables the customer to choose the language in which he or she wants the shop to appear. If you do not want the customers to be able to change the shop's languages, then uninstall this block.

Layered navigation block

Displays a block with layered navigation filters. Layered navigation enables the customer to define cumulative criteria to filter category products, little by little providing more details in order to reduce the number of displayed products. This is a great tool for customers who know the details of what they want (color, condition, price range...), but are unsure how to find it

When configuring the module, you are presented with 4 sections:

• • Indexes and caches. This module heavily relies on database index and its own content cache.
• • Existing filter templates. A filter template is the kind of navigation to which the customer has access to.
• • Build your own filter template. You can build various templates, which will serve as the basis for what the customer sees.
• • Configuration. You can further detail the way this module operates.

Indexes and caches

In order to work properly, layered navigation needs to be kept up-to-date with your latest products, product attributes and product prices – unless these never change. You should therefore regularly re-index the data, using the buttons provided here. They each have specific actions:

• • Index all missing prices. Only adds to the index the prices that were not indexed before. Much faster than the next button.
• • Rebuild entire price index. Adds to the index all the prices, whether they were already indexed before or not. Much slower than the previous button when you have many products.
• • Build attribute index. Adds to the index all the product attributes.
• • Build url index. Adds to the index the URLs for all the products.

You should update your indexes every time your products' data changes. As this can prove pretty painstaking or even boring, Wcomm enables you to trigger the indexing automatically, using cron tasks. Add the provided URLs to your crontab, and you will not have to handle this yourself anymore. If you do not know about cron and crontab, ask your webhost about it.

Existing filters templates

Layered navigation is based on templates, or groups of criteria. There is one by default, named "My template", which makes use of all the available filters. You should create templates more adapted to your content or needs.

You can have as many templates as needed. This section enables you to edit and delete them when necessary.

Build your own filters template

The template builder enables you to specify what kind of filters your customers should have access to.

Creating a new template requires only three easy steps:

• 1. Select categories. You can either create filter for the whole site, or on a per-category basis.
  You could for instance have the whole site display the price filter, while some categories can have additional filters.
  When choosing "Specific categories", a small window opens where you can choose in which categories this filter should be available.
  Note that filters do not automatically apply to sub-categories of the selected category: if there is no product on your "Home" category, then the layered navigation will not appear there.
• 2. Selected filters. The number of available filters depends on the content of your shop. Six default filters will appear here: price, weight, condition, manufacturer, available stock and sub-categories. Along with these are the attribute groups for all products in the selected categories (with the number of products). Check a filter's box to move if from the "Available" section to the "Selected" one. You can move the filters up and down with your mouse cursor, which will influence their display in the front-page.
  Each filter has a two drop-down menu included:
  • 1. Type of display. You can choose how the filter is displayed to the customer. The visualization depends on the type of the filter.
    •  Numerical (price & weight): check-box, radio button, drop-down list. Note that only the check-box setting allows for multiple selection.
    •  Alphabetical (all others): slider, inputs area, list of values.
• 3. Name your template. Customers will not see the name, but it will prove very useful to you when you have to edit one template among the dozen or hundred you may create in the lifespan of your shop.

Note that saving the filter will not save the whole configuration: you have to save the filter first, then click on "Save configuration".

Configuration

Two options are available:

• • Hide filter values with no product is matching. If disabled, you will still see filters, even if they are useless because of the lack of matching product (which can make the layered navigation over-crowded with options).
• • Show the number of matching products. Displays the number after the name of the filter, between brackets. If there is no matching product, it will display "(0)".
• • Show products from subcategories. The filter applies to more than just the current category.
• • Category filter depth (0 for no limits, 1 by default). If the above option is enabled, you risk having too many products taken into account, and lose the interest of layered navigation. The depth is of 1 by default, but you can use even deeper sub-categories.
• • Use tax to filter price.
• • Allow indexing robots (google, yahoo, bing, ...) to use condition/availability/manufacturer filter. These four filters help you define whether search bots should be able to browse your navigation and index it. This can prove beneficial for SEO (search engine optimization).

These options apply to all templates and filters.

Link block

With this module, you can add links to the sites you want, or to pages of your shop.

The configuration page is divided in three sections:

• • Add a new link. Enables you to specify the link's name and URL, and whether it should open in a new page or not.
  When adding a link, do not forget the "http://" part. For instance http://www.mywcomm.com.
  Note that it is often said that opening a link in a new page is bad practice. At the very least, you should keep your shop's own page in the same window.
• • Block title. Enables you to rename the link block itself, and even link to a page from the block's title.
• • Settings. Enables you to sort the links. By default the links are ordered by most recently added link. If you want to invert this setting, select instead "by oldest links" from the drop-down list.

At the bottom of the page, you will find all of the links that you have entered. If you would like to modify the links, click the edit icon. To delete a link, click the trashcan icon.

Manufacturers block

Displays a block of manufacturers/brands.

The block's content can be displayed in two ways: either as a list of links, or as a drop-down list. It can even display both, with the text links being limited in number, whereas the drop-down list gives access to all the manufacturers.
Manufacturers are displayed alphabetically.

My Account block

Displays a block containing links to the logged customer's various account pages: previous orders, package tracking, product returns, registered addresses, available coupons, etc. Once the client is connected, this block is displayed.

My Account block for your website's footer

This is the equivalent to the "My Account block" module (see above), but specifically designed to be used in the theme's footer.

New products block

Displays a block presenting the recently added products, in order to make them more visible. With this block, you can drive more traffic to your new products. You can set the number of visible links by configuring this module. By default, a product is considered as new if it has been added to the shop's catalog in the last 20 days. You can change that setting in the "Products" page under the "Preferences" menu. If you do not have recent product, displaying this block will hint that you do not renew your catalog much. Therefore, it is not recommended to enable the "Always display block" option for this module.

Newsletter block

Displays a block which invites your shop's visitors to subscribe to your newsletter.

In the configuration screen, you can set several options:

• • Would you like to send a verification email after subscription?. This is important, as it prevents unsuspecting people to be subscribed without their knowledge.
• • Would you like to send a confirmation email after subscription?. Likewise, a customer should always confirm they he or she chose to be subscribed to your newsletter. This way they cannot say you are sending them spam without their consent.
• • Welcome voucher code. You can thank new subscribers with a voucher code. For instance, you can offer them 10% off their next order.
  To create a new voucher code, go to the "Cart rules" page under the "Price rules" menu. See how to create a voucher in the "Creating Price Rules and Vouchers" chapter.

Payment logos block

Adds a block to display all payment logos.

The module's configuration page enables you to choose where to display these logos. Therefore, you should first create a CMS page where you would put the payment logos and descriptions for all the payment services you support, then link to that page from the module's configuration page.

Permanent links block

Adds a block on the front-end which displays permanent links to your CMS pages, such as sitemap, contact, etc.

Product Comments

Enables logged-in customers or visitors to leave a message on your product page. Comments will appear in a new tab right on the product page, next to the "More info" section. They can also rate your products, between 0 and 5 stars.
You can also manage comments from this module, such as moderate them or delete them.

Logged-in customers can also report spam or useless comments to you: when a comment is displayed on a product page, it has two options:

• • "Was this comment useful to you?" If the customer clicks "No", other visitors will see this.
• • "Report abuse". If the customer clicks this button, the comment goes to the "Reported comments" queue.

The configuration screen gives you access to several sections:

• • Configuration.
  • 1. All comments must be validated by an employee. This makes sure that no spam or insult ever appears on your live site, which could ruin your content. Note that in some countries, validating content is akin to publishing them yourself, and therefore can make you responsible for their content.
  • 2. Allow guest comments. You can allow non-logged visitors to publish comments too. Be careful, as this can greatly increase spam comments.
  • 3. Minimum time between 2 comments from the same user. This prevents spam bot to fill your inbox with comments – or at least limits the impact.
• • Moderate Comments. If you chose to have comments validated by your staff before they are public, they will be displayed in this section, and can choose to put them offline if you feel they are detrimental.
• • Reported Comments. Customers can click a "Report abuse" link on any comment, which will bring it to your attention here. You can choose to dismiss the report and accept the comment, or remove the comment altogether.
• • Add a new comment criterion. You can motive your customers to leave comments by providing them with criteria, or "themes": text fields with a title indicating what the comment should be about, such as "scent", "taste", "robustness". This helps your customers come up with ideas for their comment.
  • 1. Name. The name is visible to your customers, so choose a short and specific one.
  • 2. Apply to. You can choose to have the chosen criterion field appear on all products ("Valid for the entire catalog"), or on a set of products. If you choose to restrict the criterion to a subset of your catalog (either some categories or some products), a new section will appear after saving your criterion: "Manage criterions scope". See below.
  • 3. Active. You can disable a criterion at any time.
• • Manage criterions scope. This section only appears when you have at least one criterion that is restricted to a subset of your catalog. In the drop-down list, choose the criterion for which you want to set the scope. The page will reload with a table of all your categories or products (depending on the scope choice). Check the boxes for all the items that apply, and validate.
• • Manage Comments. This is where all the public comments appear. You can choose to delete them by clicking on the Delete icon, either one by one or in batch.

Product Payment logos block

Displays payment logos right on the product page. The configuration page makes you choose an image – which you have to build yourself by combining the logos of the payment methods you accept.

Products category

On each product page, displays suggestions of other products that are in the same category. This module is particularly useful for discovering what your shop has to offer.

In the configuration page, you can choose whether to display the other products' prices or not.

Product tooltips

Displays live notifications on your shop. This module helps the visitors know what is happening on your shop in real time. Whenever a visitor visits a product's page, three kinds of notification can be displayed over the content at the top right of the page:

• • The number of people who are currently also watching this page. In effect, it displays the number of people who have been on this page in the last 30 minutes, 30 being the default value, which you can change using the "Lifetime" option.
• • The last time this product has been bought.
• • The last time this product has been added to a cart.

The first option is always a nice thing to have. The other two are a bit trickier: on a successful product, it can be nice to see it has been recently bought; on the other hand, less-successful products will be seen as failures if they have not been bought for a long period of time.
This is why the "Do not display events older than" option is important: make sure not to change it to double-digit number, or you will without doubt make fewer sales of already-disappointing products.

RSS Feed (RSS products feed)

Enables you to generate a RSS Product feed for your shop's catalog. A RSS feed is a website content syndication format, which enables anyone to display the latest content from a website on another.
With this module, loyal customers will be able to get regular updates about products added to your catalog, by adding this feed to their own feed reader, without the need to subscribe to your newsletter. Also, other websites will be able to display your new products on their page. Finally, search engines may use it to discover your new content.

In case of a multistore installation, you can display the new products from one shop, right in the sidebar of another of your shop using its RSS Feed Block module.

If you would rather not have your content be available to anyone online, disable this module.

RSS feed block

Adds a block displaying an RSS feed. A RSS feed is a website content syndication format, which enables anyone to display the latest content from a website on another.
With this module, your visitors can stay informed about news from a site that you specify in the field provided in the module configuration. The RSS feed will then appear on the front of your shop in a block. Visitors can sign up for the RSS feed in this block.

This module has three configuration options:

• • Block title. Give the block a comprehensible name: you might not want your visitors to think that the content displayed is from your own website.
• • Add a feed URL. Do not put your shop's address in this field, as it could create an error.
• • Number of threads displayed. Usually, a RSS feed contains 10 to 20 of the latest articles from the source website. You could limit that to 5 or fewer, in order to not clutter your homepage with content other than your products.

Send to a Friend module

Displays a "Send to a friend" link at the bottom of every product pages. Clicking it opens a window where the customer can enter the name and e-mail of the person who he wants to tell about this product. The e-mail sent contains a simple link to the product's page.

This module can be important, because as a shop owner, you want to give your customers the opportunity to spread knowledge of your products and your shop.

Social networking block

Allows you to add extra information about social networks where your customers can find you. Specifically, you can indicate your account URLs for:

• • Facebook. Avoid using your own userpage! Try to create a page for your shop/company instead.
• • Twitter. Likewise, use your company's user account, not your CEO's.
• • Your RSS feed. A RSS feed is a special file that is generated automatically by your shop, and can be used by RSS readers tools (such as Google Reader) to send your latest news to your customers. While it is not a social network, it is an important aspect of sending regular news out there. Note: you must have the "RSS products feed" module installed in order for this to work.

Store locator block

Displays a block with a link to the store locator. If you do not have any physical location where customers can buy or at least retrieve products, then be sure to disable this module.

Your list of physical stores is available in the "Store Contacts" page, under the "Preferences" menu. By default, there are a handful of sample stores lists, which you should delete in order to replace them with your own.

The configuration page simply enables you to choose a picture to display as the link to the store locator.

Suppliers block

Displays a block of suppliers.

The block can display two types of content: either as a list of links, or as a drop-down list. It can even display both, with the text links being limited in number, whereas the drop-down list gives access to all the suppliers.
Suppliers are displayed alphabetically.

Tags block

Each of your products can have tags added to its description page. Basically, they help create on-the-fly categories of products which have the same tags, but this module makes tags even more useful by adding a block in one of the theme's columns, where the most popular tags are displayed in order of importance, with the most prominent ones using a bigger font.

In the configuration page, indicate how many keywords should appear.

Theme configurator

Helps you configure some aspects of your theme.

The configuration page for this module serves two purposes.

First, it gives you direct links to the most usual front-office settings: from this module, you can enable and disable a dozen of features, such displaying social buttons or the Facebook block. You can also access the Live Configurator (Live Edit) from here.

Second, the Theme Configurator itself makes it possible for you to easily attach images with links on specific home page hooks: home, top, left, right, footer. Each available language has its own tab with its own hooks that you can edit from here.

Top-sellers block

Adds a block displaying the shop's top selling products.

The configuration page enables you to set if the block should be displayed even when there is no product or even no product sale yet.

The block is not present in the default theme at first. You will have to hook it to a location, for instance the right column.

To hook the module to the right column, go to the module's configuration page, then:

• 1. Click the "Manage hooks" link at the top. You are taken to the "Positions" page.
• 2. As you can see in the "Positions" page, the module does not appear in any hook. Click the "Transplant a module" button at the top right to hook the module.
• 3. In the hooking tool, select "Right column blocks" from the "Hook into" drop-down list.
• 4. Save your change, then reload the homepage to see the module's block appear. You can then change the module's location by using the Live Edit tool.

Top horizontal menu

Adds a new horizontal menu to the top of your store.

This is an important module: it adds a whole new block at the bottom of the header, where you can display links to the various categories and pages of your shop.
This is very useful, as it helps your customer quickly find their way through your shop. You can have simple links or menus with sub-menus, thus enabling customers to have a good bird's eye view of your content.

The "Menu top links" section of this module helps you build your menu with links to a selection of pages, categories or to individual products.

User info block

Adds a block that displays information about the customer:

• • Link to his or her cart, with a quick view of its content.
• • Link to the customer's account.
• • Link to log out of the shop.

Viewed products block

Displays the latest products that a customer has recently consulted. You can set the number of products shown using the "Products to display" field.

Wishlist block

Adds an "Add to my wishlist" link on all product pages. Logged-in customers can then build a wishlist of products from your shop, and send it as a link to their friends. A customer can have many wishlists.

The module also adds a "Wishlist" block on every pages of the shop, which only the customer can see. The block is there so that the customer knows exactly what is in it, and can review it regularly. The block features a "My wishlists" link to access the wishlists management tool.

The module's configuration page enables you to view your customers' lists: simply select a customer in the drop-down list to have the page reload with the chosen customer's lists, then choose a list to display.

Pricing and Promotions

Loyalty Program

Wcomm's loyalty module offers an advanced tool for building automatic vouchers depending on your customers' purchases and reward points.
Your customers get a certain amount of loyalty points depending on the amount they spend at your shop.

The configuration screen enables you to be very specific about the generation of vouchers:

• • Ratio and 1 point =. Basically, the conversion rate of money spent in reward points, and of reward points in money won. The module uses the default currency of the shop.
  The Ratio field indicates how much money the customer should spend in order to get 1 reward point.
  The 1 point = field indicates how much money the customer gets for each reward point. By default, the settings are 10 and 0.20, which means that the customer wins $2 for each $100 spent on your shop.
• • Voucher details. This is simply the name of the voucher. It will appear in the customer's account page.
• • Minimum amount in which the voucher can be used. You can set a limit in order to keep customers from using vouchers as soon as there is the smallest sum of money on it. By default, it is set to 0, which mean that they can use the voucher whenever they want.
• • Apply taxes on voucher. You can choose to have the voucher be part of the tax calculation in the invoice, or exclude it from that calculation.
• • Points are awarded when the order is. By default, the reward points are awarded only when the product is delivered. But you might prefer to have them awarded at any other order status, for instance as soon as it is paid.
• • Points are canceled when the order is. Points can be canceled if the order reach a given status, for instance if it is canceled.
• • Give points on discounted products. Choose whether or not the customer get points when buying discounted products.
• • Categories. You might want the awarded vouchers to not work in some specific categories. Choose which ones are okay using this form.

Loyalty points progression. This section contains the messages that are displayed to the customer. You might want to change the phrases to better fit your shop's "attitude". Also, make sure to translate the phrases in all your supported languages.

Specials block

This module adds a block to your shop's home-page, where the customer can discover the current specials, as configured in your catalog. You can add more products to the "Specials" by giving them a discount: go to the product's catalog page, open its "Prices" tab on the left, and in the "Specific prices" section, click the "Add a new specific price" button to open the creation form

SEO

Google Sitemap

This module helps you build a sitemap for your shop, and keep it up to date.

In order to optimize your SEO, it is essential to have a sitemap, which is a XML file that lists all the products and pages on your shop. This file will enable search engines to index all pages easily and efficiently. Your products will then appear perfectly in the search engines when a visitor conducts a search. You can create a sitemap for Wcomm, and be indexed by all the search engines that support the file format (Google, Yahoo, Bing...), using tools such as Google's Webmaster Tools.

The configuration page has few options: indicate how often your store (including the catalog and the CMS page) is updated on average, check the boxes of the page you do not want to include in the sitemap, and click the "Generate Sitemap" button.

Once you have finished configuring the module, click on "Update sitemap file". You are then given the Sitemap's address (e.g., mywcomm.com/sitemap.xml). Copy this URL to save it to your Google Webmaster Tools account. The module will then show you the file size and the number of pages indexed. Remember to update it regularly so that search engines index your content perfectly.

The last part of the configuration page gives a cron link. A good sitemap is an updated one, and unless you are willing to click on the "Update sitemap file" button every time there is a change on your shop, you might want to have your server do the work for you. Create a cron task with the given URL, and never worry about this again.
If you do not know what a cron task is, ask your web host.

Search and Filter

Quick search block

This module installs a block with search field in your shop front-end. The search block can display results as soon as the first letters are typed.

The module is installed and enabled by default, and you should leave it enabled to facilitate visitor's navigation.

Shipping and Logistics

Carrier Compare

This module enables the customer to compare carrier possibilities before continuing with the checkout process.

This module is very straightforward: just install it to display its option on your front office.

All the available carriers must have their fees properly set. This is done at the bottom "Shipping" page, in the "Fees by carrier, geographical zone, and ranges".

The module configuration page only has one option, "Refresh carrier list method". This enables you to display a carrier either only when all the information is set, or at any time.

Date of Delivery

This module displays an approximate date of delivery during the checkout process.

The configuration page has two sections:

• • Carrier configuration. The module relies on indications from your carriers. You must therefore add rules for each of your carriers, by clicking on the "Add a new carrier rule" link.
• • Settings:
  • 1. Extra time when a product is out of stock. Estimate the time it might take for your team to re-stock products. This is only useful if customers can order out-of-stock products (the option for this is in the "Products" preference page, in the "Products stock" section).
  • 2. Extra time for preparation of the order. Estimate the time it might take for your team to prepare an order.
  • 3. Preparation option. If your packaging team also works on weekends, indicate it, as the module takes this into account.
  • 4. Date format. The format in which the expected delivery date is displayed. It uses PHP date() format: each letter has a meaning, as explained in the indicated link. The default, "l j F Y", means the date will be displayed in the format "Saturday 21 January 2012". There are many more parameters that you can use to build the date format as you see fit: see http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.date.php

Adding a new carrier rule is pretty straightforward:

• • Carrier. Choose the carrier for which you want to add the rule. If the wanted carrier is not there, you must create it in the Shipping > Carriers page.
• • Delivery between. Set the timeframe in which the chosen carrier promises to deliver products. You have to gather this information from the carrier itself.
• • Preparation options. Some carriers also prepare their packages on weekend days, so as to send them first thing on Monday morning. Be sure to indicate it if so.

Fedex (fedexcarrier)

Offer your customers, different delivery methods with Fedex

• Globkurier
• Poland only.

GlobKurier.pl is one of the biggest national leaders in delivering shipments. We provide domestic and international services to more than 200 countries. Our main aims are competitive price, speed and security. With GlobKurier.pl you can be sure that your shipments always come on time. Moreover we offer convenience of using our services.

GoInterpay

Bring over 200 payment methods to your checkout with one simple integration

Kiala Advanced (Kiala contract holders only)

This module makes it possible for your customers to have their parcels delivered in a Kiala collection point. Kiala points are widely available in France, and also in other select European countries.

You must have a Kiala account in order to use this module. You can reach the sign-up form here: http://www.kiala.com/
Then, configure the module with all the information about you and your shop in the form in the "Kiala Module Status" section.

The "Country settings" section further down helps you indicate in which countries you want to make Kiala delivery available for your customers.
Finally, the "Kiala advanced settings" section adds a few more options:

• • Export folder. The local folder where the module will save its export, containing a lot of useful information.
• • Prefix for order and parcel number. You can have a shop-specific prefix for your shop, which make it look more personalized for your customers.
• • Export on each order?. You may prefer to have several order-specific export files rather than a big one.
• • Parcel tracking criterion?. Should the parcel be tracked on a per-customer or a per-order basis? If you are unsure, keep it to per-order.

Once the settings are in place, your customers will see the "Kiala" option appear in the shop's front office as part of the available delivery methods.

Mondial Relay

This module enables you to display rates for delivering in Mondial Relay points. This service is available in France, Luxembourg, Spain and Belgium.

You must have a Mondial Relay account in order to use this service. You can reach the sign-up form here: http://www.mondialrelay.com/ Then, from the module's configuration page, click on the "Account details" icon and enter the necessary information, as provided by Mondial Relay: Webservice Enseigne, Code marque, Webservice Key, Etiquette's Language and Weight Coefficient. The Etiquette's Language can only use the languages that are enabled on your shop; you can enable more language from the "Languages" page, under the "Localization" menu. Click "Update Settings" in order to connect your shop to the Mondial Relay webservice, and from there on, follow the module's instructions in the "Shipping" and "Advanced settings" screens.

Once the settings are in place, your customers will see the "Mondial Relay" option appear in the shop's front office as part of the available delivery methods.

So Colissimo

This module enables you to display rates for deliveries via SoColissimo, a service by La Poste, France's historical postal service. This service is available mainly in France

You must have a SoColissimo account in order to use this module. This is done by calling La Poste from a French phone, using this number: 3634.
Then, configure the module with your SoColissimo information: ID So, key, preparation time, overcost, URL So, Fancybox, Supervision and Supervision URL. A full documentation is available (in French) as a PDF file, which you can find under the "Documentation" link on the configuration page.

In order to finalize the installation, copy/paste the two final URLs in your SoColissimo back office.

Once the settings are in place, your customers will see the "SoColissimo" option appear in the shop's front office as part of the available delivery methods.

TNT Express France

France only.

This module enables you to display rates for deliveries via TNT express services. This service is available worldwide.

You must have a TNT account in order to use this module. You can reach the sign-up form here: http://www.tnt.com Then, configure the module with your TNT login, password and account number, all in the "Account settings" tab.
From there on, you can keep configuring the module using the "Shipping Settings" and "Service Settings" tabs. This last tab enables you to be very specific about the delivery service you want to make available for your customers, as well as any additional charge you might require depending on the package's weight.

Once the settings are in place, your customers will see the "TNT Express France" option appear in the shop's front office as part of the available delivery methods.

Tracking - Front office

This module completes Wcomm with an integrated affiliate program feature, which enables your affiliates to access their own statistics.

The affiliate program tool is located in the "Referrers" page, under the "Stats" menu. Once you have installed the "Tracking - Front office" module, these affiliates can access their statistics by going to http://www.example.com/modules/trackingfront/stats.php

To create a new affiliate, click the "Add new" button, and in the creation form, add the affiliate account username and password, then specify the fee they receive per click, per order and per percentage of sales.

Click on the header of the "Help" section to display instructions on how to set up the referrer URLs.

The "Technical information - Expert mode" enables you to use regular expression instead of plain text URLs.

UPS

Offer your customers, different delivery methods with UPS

USPS

Calculates shipping rates for United States Postal Service for Domestic shipping within the USA

Site certification & Fraud prevention modules

Certissim

FIA-Net is a French third-party e-commerce trust partner: it protects both customers and online shops against credit card frauds and other malevolent activities.

You must already have a FIA-Net account in order to use the module. You can ask for one here:https://www.fia-net.com/marchands/devispartenaire.php?p=185
Then, configure the module with your login, your password, and your Site ID, and finally choose whether you want to use the module in Production mode or not. You must also indicate the global business type of your shop.
Additionally, you should indicate the business type of each of your categories, the carrier type of each of your carriers, and what kind is your default carrier.

Once the settings are in place, a FIA-Net logo will appear on your homepage, and your orders will be analyzed by FIA-Net to make sure no fraud is happening.

Wcomm Security

Wcomm Security is a service provided by Wcomm in order to protect the security of your shop against fraudulent payments.

If you do not have an account, you can create one directly from the module: fill in the first field with your e-mail, and check that the second one does contain the correct URL for your shop, then click "Create Account". You will have to agree with the terms and conditions of the module.

If you do already have an account, change the top selector accordingly in order to make the full configuration form appear. Fill the various fields with the exact details of your shop, along with your Shop ID and Shop KEY (as provided by Wcomm Security).

Once the settings are in place, orders will be analyzed by the module to make sure no fraud is happening.

Riskified

Riskified is a turnkey fraud prevention solution that reviews, approves and guarantees your orders.

Smart Shopping

Shopping Feed

This module makes it possible to list your shop and its products on hundreds of price comparison sites and marketplaces (mostly French), through the Shopping Flux service
(http://www.shopping-flux.com)

You must have a Shopping Flux account to make this module work. You can request one using the form at the bottom of the module.
Then, configure the module with your login and token, and set the various options to your likings.

Twenga Price Comparison

This module makes it possible to list your shop and its products on Twenga. Twenga is an online open shopping platform that aims to bring together "all online products and shops in one place". This module exports your list of products to their service, and helps you track your sales through them.

You must have a Twenga account to make this module work. You can reach the sign-up form here by clicking the "List my website on Twenga" button.
Then, configure the module with your hashkey, login and password. The module will take care of sending your catalog to Twenga, and you should be listed within 72 hours.

Each visitor who comes to your website from Twenga will cost a few cents. You can view the pricing grid by clicking on the "Twenga Prices" link at the bottom of the configuration page.

Taxes & Invoicing modules

European VAT number

Enables you to enter the intra-community VAT number when creating the address. You must fill in the company field to allow entering the VAT number.

Translation

Textmaster

Adds support for Textmaster's translation features, which provides you with translation for the content of your store (CMS pages, product description, category names, etc.)

You must have a Textmaster account in order make this module work. Note that translations are not free.

Managing Shipping

How you choose to ship your products is a key element to the management and success of your store. You must account for the great variety of available methods, which can mix carriers, regional and international taxes, package weight and the price of a product itself. Luckily, Wcomm makes it easy for you to handle it all in just a few screens.

A product's shipping price is basically calculated using either of two methods: the total price of the order, or the total weight of the order. This is how most carriers calculate their shipping fees, and this is why you should fill-in the weight setting when creating a product in the catalog, and also why you absolutely must indicate the per-weight and per-price costs for each carrier in the "Carriers" page.

Wcomm computes shipping price according to a system of either weight ranges or price ranges. That system can only work for one or the other of these types of range

The shipping settings work closely with the local settings of your Wcomm installation. While in Wcomm 1.4 some of these settings were also found in the "Shipping" menu, since version 1.5 all local settings have been moved in a new menu, named "Localization". This is where you will be able to edit geographical zones, countries, currencies, etc. Therefore, make sure to have a serious look at the "Localization" menu, which is explained in the next chapter of this guide, "Understanding Local Settings". For instance, in order to create a complete carrier in Wcomm, you must have clearly defined your geographical zones before; this is done in the "Zones" page under the "Localization" menu.

Shipping Management

Managing Carriers

You must have carriers added to your Wcomm installation – that is, a clear indicator of who will deliver your products. It might be just yourself or your shop (for instance if you are selling downloadable products, or only work locally), but as soon as you are actually sending packages using stamps and a 3rd-party delivery such as your local postal service, or FedEx, UPS and such, then you must have their details added to your shop's database. This will enable your customers to better choose which carrier to use, based on their delivery ranges, fees and dates.

The "Carrier" page presents you with a list of all your current carriers. From there, you can directly change their status, indicate that why of shipping is free or not, and change their position when presented to customers.

By default, you have two carriers in your database:

• • Your own shop: This represents your physical store, where customers can supposedly come and pick up their products themselves. It has no price range or weight range set.
• My carrier": This is a sample carrier and should not be used in production. It has one price range (from $0 to $10,000) and one weight range (from 0 kg to 10,000 kg).

It is up to you to remove these default carriers and add new ones for your customers. At the very least, you should edit the "My carrier" carrier and replace its data with that of a real carrier: name, details, and ranges. We do recommend that you delete the "My carrier" carrier, and that you use an existing carrier module in order to register you shipping partner in Wcomm.

New carriers are added by first clicking on the "Add new carrier" button. This opens a new page with two options:

• • Use one of our recommended carrier modules. It is highly recommended to register carriers by installing a carrier module: this will make the process much faster, and the settings will be much more accurate.
• • Add a new carrier. If you cannot find a module for your shipping partner, either in the native modules or on the Wcomm Addons marketplace, then you should register your carrier yourself using the Carrier Wizard: click on "Add new carrier" to open this tool.

This is a new screen that was added in version 1.6.0.7 of Wcomm. It helps you decide whether you can install a carrier module, or have to configure your own carrier using the Carrier Wizard.

Creating a New Carrier using the Carrier Wizard

In this section, we are going to create a complete carrier, from A to Z, using the Carrier Wizard. You can create as many carriers as you wish.
If one carrier has different shipping services, you should create as many carriers in Wcomm, and differentiate them with their names:

Many of the details asked by Wcomm's forms should be provided by your carriers once you have set up an account or are under contract with them directly. Check with them in order to make sure everything is configured correctly.

To create a new carrier, click on the "Add new" button in the "Carriers" page. This will open the Carrier Wizard on the first of its four panels.

Panel 1: General settings

This is where you describe the carrier, giving information that the customer will need in order to recognize and choose the carrier he prefers.

Let's examine all of the information you need to enter:

• • Carrier name. The name is public, so you should use the official name. If you have create one Wcomm carrier per shipping services from a single carrier, the name will help you differentiate them.
  You could also add a description of the service. For instance, you could fill in "PrestaShipping – 500 lbs and over".
  You must add a name in order to
• • Transit time. The estimated time it takes this carrier to deliver your products, written in plain language. This is displayed to customers during checkout. It will help them select their carrier according to the amount of time they are willing to wait to receive their shipment. Customers can often accept to pay more for a faster carrier.
  You must fill this field in all the available languages, especially the default one.
• • Speed grade. Since the "Transit time" field can contain any text, it cannot be used to compare the carriers' transit times. The "Speed grade" setting enables you to give the carrier a grade, from 0 (very slow) to 9 (very fast). This is then used to sort carriers by their speed grade, and help customers choose the one they prefer.
• • Logo. Having a logo helps customers choose between different carriers more easily. Wcomm will resize your image in order to fit in the order form.
  The logo will appear in each panel of the Carrier Wizard, as a reminder of which carrier you are editing/creating.
• • Tracking URL. This field must be filled with the tracking URL provided by your carrier (if there exists one). For example, France's postal service (La Poste) offers this URL: (http://www.colissimo.fr/portail_colissimo/suivreResultat.do?parcelnumber=@) When customers finish their purchase, they will receive that URL with the "@" replaced by the tracking number provided by the carrier, making it possible to click that link and see where the delivery process is at.

Click "Next" to reach the second panel.

Panel 2: Shipping locations and costs

First, this panel presents a handful of settings:

• • Add handling costs. Include or exclude shipping & handling costs in this carrier's price, as set in the "Shipping" page.
• • Free shipping. If enabled, you will not be able to indicate shipping prices. If disabled, you will be able to edit the ranges and per-country costs in the form below.
• • Billing. When billing the customer, Wcomm can apply one of two behaviors, which you have to set depending on how you carrier handles billing (so make sure to check their documentation about this):
  • 1. According to total price. Billing depends on the total price of the order.
  • 2. According to total weight. Billing depends on the total weight of the order.
• • Tax. Indicates if this carrier requires a local tax in order to deliver, and if so, which one. The tax must already exist in Wcomm (which can be done in the "Taxes" page of the "Localization" menu).
• • Out-of-range behavior. In case the chosen carrier has not set shipping cost for the required zone or weight, you can indicate how Wcomm should react. You have two options:
  • 1. Apply the cost of the highest defined range. Wcomm will take the most costly range and apply its conditions.
  • 2. Disable carrier. Wcomm will not suggest this carrier, since it probably cannot deliver this order.

Then comes the important part: the creation of the carrier's range. This is a very important step, as Wcomm needs this information to present the customer with carriers which can actually deliver the ordered package. Indeed, depending on the order's total price or total weight, some carrier options will not be available while others will only appear at a certain value. You must be very precise when filling these values, and preferably those suggested by each carrier's documentation.

This is where the whole Carrier Wizard takes its name. Here, you will build your carrier's price or weight ranges (depend on your choice for the "Billing" option above), one range after the other, applying your prices for each zone along the way.

For each range, you only need a couple of steps:

• 1. Fix the lower and upper limits of the range you are creating. Depending on the "Billing" choice, it will display either "Will be applied when the price is" or "Will be applied when the weight is" for the lower limit, and either "Will be applied when the price is" or "Will be applied when the weight is" for the upper limit.
• Note that the lower limit inclusive (>=) whereas the upper limit is exclusive (<). This means that a range's upper limit can have the same value as the next range's lower value, as the two will not overlap.
• 2. Fill in the prices. As soon as both lower and upper limits are filled, Wcomm makes the "All" field available to edit. This is a special field: any value you enter in it will be copied into the field for all the available geographical zones, without any action on your part. You can then edit the value of each zone field separately.
  Check the checkbox for each zone the carrier delivers to at this range. If this carrier does not make deliveries in a given geographical zone for this current range, make sure to uncheck its checkbox.
• 3. Create the range. Click the "Add new range" button. Wcomm will add a new column of zone fields. Start again by fixing the lower and upper limits of this range, then filling the prices per zone.

The weight and price units are the default ones for your Wcomm installation, and the ones your products use. You can change these units "Localization" page of the "Localization" menu.

Click "Next" to reach the third panel.

Panel 3: Size, weight and group access

This panel presents two sets of options:

• • Maximum package height/width/depth/weight. You can now indicate the minimum and maximum package height and weight, which are an essential part of choosing a package carrier. The value is to use the default weight and dimension units, as set in the "Localization" page of the "Localization" menu.
• • Group access. You might want only some user groups to be able to use a carrier. This option serves this purpose.

Click "Next" to reach the fourth and final panel.

Panel 4: Summary

This last panel gives you an overview of your settings for this carrier.

If some settings are wrong, you can go back to any previous panel by either using the "Previous" button, or directly clicking on the panel's tab.
If you want to save this carrier as a draft for now then come back to it later, disable the carrier using the "Enabled" option at the bottom of this final panel.
Either way, click on the "Finish" button to save your work, and create the carrier.

When using Wcomm in multistore mode, another panel is available, and the panel order changes slightly:

• 1. General settings
• 2. MultiStore
• 3. Shipping locations and costs
• 4. Size, weight, and group access
• 5. Summary

All the panels are as described above. The new one, "MultiStore", makes it possible for you to limit this carrier to a selection of your stores.

Adding a Carrier using a Carrier Module

Wcomm comes with a host of free modules, amongst which you can find a handful of carrier modules which you can install right away, for the major worldwide and domestic carriers.
The available carriers depend on the initial settings of your shop: if you have set your shop as being located in France, you will not get the same modules as if you set your shop in the USA!

In the "Add new carrier" screen, you can choose between creating a carrier using the Carrier Wizard, or using one of our recommended carrier modules. It is highly recommended to register carriers by installing a carrier module: this will make the process much faster, and the settings will be much more accurate.

Depending on the module, you can either click on the "Install" button and let Wcomm do the work, or click on the shopping cart button. In that second case, you will be taken to the Addons marketplace, where you can buy the module. Once you have bought the module, you can install it and configure it.

Shipping Preferences

The more general settings of you shop's shipping configuration are found in the "Shipping" page, under the "Shipping" menu.

This page provides handling charges settings:

• • Handling charges. Enter the per-order handling expenses, which will be added to the final purchase price. This is separate from your shipping costs: it is really the cost of you or your employee having to fetch the products, package them and have them shipped. If there is no such cost, leave it at 0.
• • Free shipping starts at (currency) and Free shipping starts at (weight). Enter the price or weight after which your customers will receive free shipping. For instance, you might choose to offer free shipping when the order exceeds $250. A message will appear to your customers indicating how much more money they need to spend in order to receive free shipping.
  If you do not want to offer free shipping and you do not want this message to appear, leave these values at 0.

The "Carrier options" section gives you access to 3 settings, which impact the front office in order to help the customer make a choice:

• • Default carrier. If you have more than one carrier in your system, you might want to promote one to your customers. Besides the carriers themselves, this drop-down list has two contextual options:
  • 1. Best price. Depending on the amount of the order, on its weight and its delivery zone, Wcomm will choose the cheapest price for the customer.
  • 2. Best grade. Speed grades make it easier to identify the fasted carriers. Wcomm will display the carrier which, within the context of the order, will have the shortest shipping delay.
• • Sort by. When customers are presented with a choice of carriers, you can choose to either sort the list by shipping price or by their position, as set in the carrier list on the "Carriers" page.
• • Order by. This enables to set the order in which the carriers are sorted:
  • 1. If sorted by shipping fee and with an ascending order, then carriers will be displayed from the cheapest to the most expensive.
  • 2. If sorted by position and with a descending order, then carriers will be displayed from the top position of the list, to the bottom position.

Understanding Local Settings

As obvious as it might seem, this is the Internet, and people from all over the world will certainly visit your shop, and order your products. As a shop owner, you must cater for as many customers as possible. This means having your website fully translated in as many languages as necessary, with local taxes, weights and currency units, local geographical zones, etc.

The "Localization" menu appeared with Wcomm 1.5, and brings together many local settings and tools that used to be scattered in other menus in previous versions.

Localization

The main page under the "Localization" menu enables you to configure the units used for your products.

Import Localization Pack

This section provides you with an extensive list of existing localization packs which you can import. Not only does it set your Wcomm install with your proper local units, but it also adds many other data:

• • States. When shipping product to a country, knowing which state it is sent to can prove important, as this might have an impact on local customs and taxes. The added states can be viewed and edited in the "States" page under the "Localization" menu.
• • Taxes. The real importance of localization is local taxes, and they can be numerous and varied depending on the country or the state. Wcomm provides you with a basic support for the major taxes and tax rules. The added taxes and tax rules can be viewed and edited in the "Tax" and "Tax rules" pages under the "Localization" menu.
• • Currencies. Foreign customers will appreciate to be able to convert the prices on your shop into their own currency. You should at least have US dollars and Euros available along of your country's own currency (if not one of those two). Once added, you must activate a new currency using the "Currencies" page under the "Localization" menu, and make sure the conversion rate is correct. The added currencies can be viewed and edited in that "Currencies" page.
• • Languages. All the public fields on your shop can be created in multiple languages, and it is important you do so for your products name and description, at the very least. Note that importing a language also imports its date format (d/m/Y, m/d/Y, d.m.Y, etc.), among other things. The added languages can be viewed and edited in that "Languages" page under the "Localization" menu.
• • Units. Weight, dimension, volume, distance: these units are essential in order to correctly describe a product to your customer, and for your own packaging information. They can be viewed and edited on this very page, in the "Localization" section.
• • Change the behavior of the taxes display for the groups. This is not data to import but a setting that you can change when doing the importation.

As you can see, these additional data are optional: you can choose to import the currency and language for a given country, and not its taxes, for instance.

While you should not add too many local data for fear of overwhelming both yourself and your customers with it, it may be useful to import the localization pack for your most visited countries (according to your stats).

Apart from the default units,you cannot automatically remove all the data for a given country; if you need to remove data, you will have to do so manually, in their respective pages under the "Localization" menu.

Configuration

This section groups four default local settings, of prime importance:

• • Default language. This is the main language for your shop. This setting will influence your back office's language (including the main language for your products), as well as the front office. Note that the front office's language might adapt to the setting of the customer's browser.
• • Default country. The location of your business. If you have headquarters in many countries, use your main or original country.
• • Default currency. The currency in which your product's prices are first set. Currencies are added by importing and activating a country's currency. Note that if you change currency after having already set a few product prices, you will have to manually update all the existing prices. Make sure to set that value once and for all.
• • Time zone. You own time zone. This is useful for daily discount for instance: you know exactly when it starts and ends.

Since version 1.6.0.10, the "Default language" and "Default country" settings each have an additional setting:

• • For "Default language": Set language from browser. Wcomm will set the store's language depending on the language of the visitor's browser's locale code (for instance: fr_CA gives French)
• • For "Default country": Set default country from browser language. Wcomm will set the store's country depending on the territory of the visitor's browser's locale code (for instance, fr_CA gives Canada).

Local units

The physical units presented in this section (weight, distance, volume, dimension) are used both in your product sheets and for your own packaging needs – and ultimately, is essential in your relationship with your carrier.

These values can be set when you import the localization package for a country, but you can edit manually them afterwards. For instance, if you would rather have centiliters instead of liters for the volume unit, change the default "L" to "cL".

The values should be unit symbols from the International System of Units
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units)

Advanced

This last section asks you to set your server's local language and country, as ISO code:

• • For the language: ISO 639-1 code (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes).
• • For the country: ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 code (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2).

These values can be set when you import the localization package for a country, but you can edit them manually at any time.

Languages

Wcomm comes multilingual out of the box: there is one default language (the one you used to install it), and many more are available to download.

The "Languages" page manages the languages you will see in your back office and your shop.

The page displays the languages already installed on your shop, along with some information: ISO code, language code, date format (short and full). You can enable or disable a language by clicking on the icon in the "Enabled" column.

Adding a new language is simply a question of importing the localization pack from a country which uses that language (in the "Localization" page). If it turns out this does not work, or that you need something customized, you can add a new language manually, using the form behind the "Add new" button.

Creating a New Language

Creating a new language means you will have to translate all of the text for Wcomm's front-end, back-end, modules, etc., or risk using the default English strings. Translation is made using the tool in the "Translations" page, under the "Localization" menu.

You can also create a new language in order to cater for a language pack that you would have downloaded from the Wcomm site.

In order to create a new language, you must fill as many of the form's field as possible:

• • Name. The name is public. If you are creating that language for regional purpose, you may indicate that in the name: "French (Quebec)", for instance.
• • ISO code. Enter the adequate 2-letter ISO 639-1 code. See (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes ) for more information. If you are importing a language pack, this code should exactly match the one for the pack.
• • Language code. Enter the adequate 4-letter language code, in the form xx-yy, xx being the language ISO code (same as above), and yy the country ISO code, using ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2 ) See (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IETF_language_tag)
• • Date format. Countries do not always share the same date representation (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country ). Hence, when your shop display 02/08/12, a customer from France will understand "August 2nd, 2012" whereas one from the US will understand "February 8th, 2012" – and a japan customer might even read it as "August 12th, 2002". This is why it is important to indicate the date format tied to your language. The letters used should be that of PHP's date() function: (http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php. )
• • Date format (full). Same as the date format above, but including the hour-minute format.
• • Flag. Upload an image of the flag which best matches the language you want to add. It should be 16*11 pixels. You recommend you use the free FamFamFam Flags image set: (http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/flags/. )
• • No-picture" image. Upload an image which will be displayed when a product does not yet have a picture. That image is simply a blank image, with "No image" or "No image available" in this language. The picture should be 250*250 pixels. You can find existing "No-picture" images in the /img/l directory of your Wcomm installation.
• • Is RTL language. Some languages are written from right to left, most notably those using Arabic script or the Hebrew alphabet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-left. ) When a Wcomm theme is well coded, it is able to handle RTL languages - provided it is clearly set as such.
• • Status. You may disable a new language until you are ready to translate everything
• • Shop association. You can make the language only available to a selection of your shops, for instance shops that target a specific locale.

Once your language is saved and enabled, you can import its language pack. This is done in the "Translations" page, under the "Localization" menu. Use the "Import a language pack manually" tool.

Finally, make sure everything works: go to your shop's front-office and click on the flags at the top. Similarly, customers can now select an additional language by using these icons.

Zones

Wcomm's zones are a list of the world's subregions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subregion.)

If needed, you can create more zones: click on "Add New" to display the creation form.

All you need is a name and a status, for instance indicating that you do not allow deliveries in Oceania.
When in multistore mode, you can also associate a zone with a selection of stores.

Countries

Your Wcomm installation must know all existing countries in order for your customers to clearly indicate where in the world they live.

There are roughly 200 countries in the World, but Wcomm has 244 registered. This is because some countries include overseas regions are part of the country proper.
For instance, the French departments formerly known as DOM (Guadeloupe, Martinique, Mayotte, Reunion, and French Guiana) nowadays have equals status as the French metropolitan region. Likewise, Alaska and Hawaii are US States proper.
Still, sending a package to Guadeloupe does not mean sending it to France, if only for the shipping fees. Therefore, the list of countries in Wcomm actually separates the country from the mainland.

Be default, only your own country is enabled. You should enable them one by one, as needed for your customers. If you are unsure which to enable, check your stats to see the countries with most visitors.

At the bottom of the list, the "Country options" section to only display on your front office the countries that your carriers cover. We recommend that you enable this setting, as it prevents customers from having to scroll through all the country names to find their own.

Adding a New Country

Normally, Wcomm comes with all current countries in the database. But in the case new ones are created, you would need to add a new country.

• • Country. The official name of the country that you would like to add, in all supported languages. Check the country's Wikipedia page if unsure about the name.
• • ISO code. The country's ISO-3166 code, which you can find on the official ISO page: (http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes/iso_3166_code_lists/country_names_and_code_elements.htm )
• • Call prefix. Its international call code, which you can find on this Wikipedia page: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_country_calling_codes )
• • Default currency. You can use your shop's default currency (as set in the "Localization" page, under the "Localization" menu), or one of the other installed currencies. Remember that if needed, you can add a new currency to your shop using the "Currencies" page.
• • Zone. The world's subregion to which this country is attached. If necessary, you can add new zones using the "Zones" page, under the "Localization" menu.
• • Does it need zip/postal code?. Indicates whether a user living in this country must give a zip code or not when signing up to your shop.
• • Zip/post code format. You may also give more detail on the format of the postal code (or zip code). If you do not put anything, Wcomm will not verify the validity of the zip code when given a new address for this country.
  Use the following codes for the postal code: "L" for one letter, "N" for one number and "C" for the country's ISO code (the one which you entered in the ISO field above).
  If you do not know the country's postal code format, you can rely on this Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_postal_codes ) Make sure you do NOT copy/paste the notation from Wikipedia, but to adapt it! For instance, Wikipedia indicates "AAA 9999*" for Malta, so the notation for Wcomm becomes "LLL NNNN" (without the final *).
• • Address format. Give details about the address layout, when displaying it to customers. You can click on the various helper links on the side of the text-field in order to add more fields. In live usage, they are automatically replaced by Wcomm with the data from the customer's account.
  Your changes are only saved when you save the whole page. If you have made a mistake, you can make use of one of the four helper buttons at the bottom of the form, depending on your situation.
• • Active. A disabled country will not be suggested as an option when a visitor wants to register and create a new account.
• • Contains states. Indicates whether the country has "states" or not. This adds a new field to the Wcomm address form. Note that "states" can be regions, provinces, departments... anything that makes sense to that country's postal service.
• • Do you need a tax identification number? and Display tax label (e.g. "Tax incl."). A Tax Identification Number is an identification number used by the country's revenue service in the administration of tax laws. Not every country needs of even has such a number for business. Inquire about this with the country's revenue service.
• • Shop association. You can make the country only available to a selection of your shops, for instance shops that target a specific locale.

States

By "States", Wcomm calls first-level administrative divisions of a country. In the United-States, they are called states; in Italy, it is regioni (singular: regione); in France, it is régions; in the United-Kingdom, it is regions.
By default, Wcomm provides you with a set of states: 54 US states and territories, 31 Mexican estados, 13 Canadian provinces and territories, 34 Indonesian provinsi, 24 Argentinian provincias, 47 Japanese todōfuken, and 110 Italian province (singular: provincia).

Having states properly defined in your database helps better represent the delivery possibilities of your carriers. These states can also be essential for tax rates calculation, depending on the country. It is therefore important to enter all of a given country's administrative divisions if they are important to your carriers. You can find a list of such divisions on this Wikipedia page: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_administrative_divisions_by_country )

The Wcomm address form currently only lists states which are available for the customer to choose. Therefore, make sure to use a sensible list when adding content to your states list. That is the reason why, for instance, the list contains Italian province (second-level administrative divisions) rather than regioni (first-level administrative divisions).

Adding a New State

Let's create a new state. Click the "Add New" button to get to the creation form.

• • Name. The name of the state, as it should be displayed on invoices and the package. It should therefore be in the language of the state's country.
• • ISO code. The state's ISO-3166-2 code:
  • 1. Go to this Wikipedia page: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2 )
  • 2. Click the state's country two-letter code (in the "Entry" column of the main table),
  • 3. On that page, find the state's code (it should be in a list on the page, or in the text for the smallest countries),
  • 4. If there is one, remove the country's prefix in order to keep the code under 4 characters. For instance, the full ISO 3166-2 for Devon, in the United Kingdom, is "GB-DEV". Simply use "DEV" as the state's ISO code – it already is attached to the country using Wcomm's "Country" drop-down list (see next step).
• • Country. Indicate its country using the drop-down list.
• • Zone. Indicate its geographical zone using the drop down list. Pay attention not to use the wrong zone, as this can mix up Wcomm's country and zone settings.
• • Status. A disabled state will not be suggested as an option when a visitor wants to register and create a new account.

Currencies

Wcomm can accept a large number of currencies. By default, there is only one standard currency: the one for your country. However, you must add and configure new currencies depending on your customers' needs. Indeed, customers will appreciate the ability to display your shop's prices in their country's currency.

The two sections at the bottom of the "Currencies" page are very simple yet essential, as relate to your currencies exchange rates (or "conversion rates"). To quote Wikipedia, "In finance, an exchange rate between two currencies is the rate at which one currency will be exchanged for another. It is also regarded as the value of one country’s currency in terms of another currency." Rates change daily, sometimes drastically depending on current events, and your shop should always be updated to the latest values.

In order to change the default currency, you must go to the "Localization" page of the "Localization" menu, and use the "Default currency" option from the "Configuration" section. If the currency you want to use is not available in this option, you must import the currency from one of the countries which use it, using the "Import a localization pack" section of the "Localization" page.

Updating the Currency Rates

In Wcomm, there are two ways to update your conversion rates:

• • Manually. In the "Currency rates" section, click on the "Update currency rates" button. This will download the update file from the Wcomm.com servers using Wcomm web-service.
• • Automatically. This is the recommended way. Instead of having to click on the "Update currency rates" button once or thrice a day, you can create a cron task that will trigger the rate file download as often as you feel necessary. Add the provided URL to your crontab file in order to activate automatic update. If you do not know what a cron task or a crontab file is, contact your hosting provider.

Note that the rates are provided as-is: the Wcomm team does pay attention to have correct rates in these file, but might slightly differ from the actual ones, if only because these rates can fluctuate greatly in a short time.

Adding a New Currency

The easiest way to add a country's currency is to import its localization package. This is done in the "Localization" page, under the "Localization" menu. Once import, you must go the "Currencies" page to enable it.

You might need to add a currency not featured in any the localization packages. In that case, you can use the creation form.

• • Currency. The name of the currency, preferably in English that as many customers as possible can read it.
• • ISO code. The currency's three-letter ISO 4217 code. See this Wikipedia page: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_4217 )
• • Numeric ISO code. Its three-digit code ISO 4217 code. Same Wikipedia page as above.
• • Symbol. The currency's symbol, if any. See this Wikipedia page: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_sign )
• • Exchange rate (or Conversion rate in earlier version). This rate is to be defined according to your shop's default currency. For example, if the default currency is the Euro and this currency is dollars, type "1.31", since 1€ usually is worth $1.31 (at the time of this writing). Use the converter here for help: (http://www.xe.com/ucc/ )
• • Formatting. Set up how you want your price to be displayed. The X corresponds to the currency's symbol. You have five possibilities.
• • Decimals. You can indicate whether your shop should display decimals. While you may choose to have all your prices be a round number, discounts and other price variations might warrant decimals. You can prevent them with this option.
• • Spacing. Once you have chosen the currency's formatting, you can choose whether to have a space character between the symbol and the price itself. Some languages require this. For instance, Spanish people would use "50€" whereas French people would use "50 €". Choose whichever you feel is best.
• • Enable. Any currency can be disabled at any time, both from its own edit page, and the currencies table on the "Currencies" page.
• • Shop association. You can make the currency only available to a selection of your shops, for instance shops that target a specific locale.

Taxes

Taxes are a complex subject, which should be fully understood as it can have a significant impact on your product prices or your shipping fees. While this user-guide is not meant to teach all the ins-and-outs of taxes, we will try our best to give you pointers.

Taxes are "compulsory contribution to state revenue, levied by the government on workers' income and business profits or added to the cost of some goods, services, and transactions". In short, every product you sell is subject to sales taxes, which depend on your state's tax laws. In effect, you contribute to your state or government functioning (public goods and services) with a percentage of all your sales, as defined by local tax rates.

There are hosts of tax rates in the World, and they vary considerably from one country to another, and even within a single country if it has federal states (USA, Germany, Spain, Russia...). You should therefore make sure to strictly conform to your country's tax laws, and even those of your state or town if they apply to you. Check with your local tax representative as soon as possible in order to get all the official details.

By default in Wcomm, a tax applies to all countries/states/zones. If order to apply a specific tax rate for a single country or a set of countries (and not some others), you must create a tax rule. The tax rule is then applied on a per-product basis, during the creation of the product ("Prices" tab).

You cannot directly apply a tax to a product; you can only apply tax rules. Therefore, you must first register all relevant taxes, and then create a tax rule for that tax in order to specify the countries the tax applies, and finally set the tax rule to the product.

Tax Options

At the bottom of the page is the "Tax options" section. These options apply to the whole shop, and all of the orders.

• • Enable tax. Whether or not taxes are included in each purchase.
• • Display tax in shopping cart. You might prefer the customer not to be aware of the taxes that are applied to the order. In that case, disable this option
• • Based on. The customer can choose to have the product not delivered at the same address as the one the order invoice should be sent to. This can have a great impact on taxes. By default, Wcomm bases its tax rates on the delivery address, but you can choose to have them based on the billing address.
• • Use ecotax. The ecotax refers to "taxes intended to promote ecologically sustainable activities via economic incentives". It is a tax that shop owners pay in order to "feel the social burden of their actions". Learn more about ecotax on this Wikipedia page: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecotax. )
  Once you have enabled the use of ecotax, all your products' back office page will feature an "Eco-tax (tax incl.)" field in their "Prices" tab. You should fill that field with the exact value of the tax, which depends on your country's tax laws (it is probably based on the product's price).

If you decide to enable the ecotax after having added products, you will have to edit them all in order to set the tax properly for each product.
Note that if you have set ecotaxes for your products already, and that you choose to disable ecotax, then all your products will lose their ecotax settings. Re-enabling the ecotaxe will mean having to set all your products' ecotaxes again.
The ecotax will also appear to the customer, on the product's page.

Adding a New Tax

Adding a new tax is very easy, because tax rules take out all the burden of having to specify the countries where the tax applies. The tax creation form is therefore very short:

• • Name. Be very specific, as this will help you build tax rules faster. It is a recommended to add reminders within the name, such as the country/group/zone the tax applies to, and its rate. This greatly helps you remember which tax is to be used in a tax rule.
• • Rate. The exact rate, in the XX.XX format.
• • Enable. You can disable and re-enable a tax at any time.

Tax Rules

Tax rules make it so that taxes are only applied to select countries.

By default in Wcomm, a tax applies to all countries/states/zones. In order to apply a specific tax rate for a single country or a set of countries (and not some others), you must create a tax rule. The tax rule is then applied on a per-product basis, during the creation of the product ("Prices" tab).

You cannot directly apply a tax to a product; you can only apply tax rules. Therefore, you must first register all relevant taxes, then create a tax rule for that tax in order to specify the countries the tax applies, and finally set the tax rule to the product.

A few sample taxes rules are already in place, which depend on the country you chose for your shop during the installation of Wcomm. The tax rules are set for each tax: the rules actually serve as a kind of country filter, limiting the use of that tax to a specific set of countries.

You should edit a couple of the presented rules in order to get a better grasp of how tax rules can be set.

Adding a New Tax Rule

You can add as many tax rules as needed to your Wcomm installation. Not only that, but you should make sure that all of the needed tax rules are registered in your shop.

Creating a new tax rule is done in two steps:

• 1. Create the tax rule:
  • 1. Click on the "Add new" button.
  • 2. In the form that appears, name the rule. Use a telling name: use the tax rule's country code, its name, maybe even its rate, so as to find it again easily. If Wcomm already has tax rules for the target country, use their name as inspiration so as to have some consistency.
  • 3. Select whether the rule should be enabled from the get-go or not. You can enable it later if needed.
  • 4. Click the "Save and stay" button. The page reloads, with a table header at the bottom.
• 2. Specify the country and behaviors:
  • 1. Click on the "Add new tax rule" button.
    • 1. A new form appears. Fill in the fields:
    • 2. Country. The target country for the rule you are creating.
      • 3. State. Some countries have federal states registered in Wcomm (see the "States" page, under the "Localization" menu). In that case, you can make the tax even more specific, or choose to have it applied to the whole country. You can select more than one state by pressing the Ctrl key when clicking on state names.
    • 4. Zip Code range. Whether the country has registered states or not, you can further specify the tax application using the customer's zip code. This field enables you to define zip codes in which the tax should be applied: either enter a single zip code, or define a range using the dash. For instance, use "75000-75012" to create a range for all zip codes between these two.
    • 5. Behavior. Some customers might have an address that matches more than one of your tax rules. In that case, you can choose how this tax rule should behave:
      • 1. This Tax Only. Will apply only this tax, not any of the other matching taxes.
      • 2. Combine. Combine taxes. For instance: 100€ + (10% + 5% => 15%) => 115€.
      • 3. One After Another. Apply taxes one after another. For instance: 100€ + 10% => 110€ + 5% => 115.5€.
    • 6. Tax. The tax to be used for this tax rule. That tax must already be registered in Wcomm. If not: choose "Not tax", disable the tax rule, save it, go create a tax in the "Taxes" page, then come back to edit the tax rule.
    • 7. Description. You may add a short text as a reminder of why this tax rule exists for this country.
  • 3. Click on "Save and stay". The country is added to the table below, and you can start adding another country using the new-empty fields.

Note that the default rate applied to your products will be based on your store's default country.

Translations

Wcomm provides you with full translation tool for your shop. This helps you add and edit your pages translations. This way, you are the master of your shop, and can handle your translated strings without having to wait for official translators to publish their corrections.

Even if you do not want to correct the translators' work, you might want to change the wording they chose to use (less formal, less wordy, etc.), and customize the various available text, thus tailoring your website to your audience; for instance, a hip-hop clothing shop might be better off using different expressions from that of a luxury watches shop.

The process of adapting a program to foreign languages is called internationalization and localization, or i18n and L10n for short.
Internationalization is the first step, where developers choose a mechanism for the translation of the software. All the strings of the software are then converted to make use of this mechanism. Localization is the second step, where bi- or multi-lingual users of the software actually translate the original strings into their own language. Localization may also include providing local data in order to further improve the software for local users.
You can learn more about i18n and L10n at this Wikipedia page: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalization_and_localization )

Modifying a Translation

The most important tool of the "Translation" page is in the "Modify translations" section. This is where you can choose to edit a translation, and completely customize each and every sentence if you wish so.

Select the part of the current translation that you wish to edit:

• • Front Office translations. The text visible to your customers when browsing your store.
• • Back Office translations. The text visible to you and your team from your store's administration panel.
• • Error message translations. The error messages that may appear on the front-office.
• • Fields Names translations. The name of the fields in both the front-office and back office.
• • Module translations. The terms used by the installed modules. Note that modules which are available but not installed will not appear in the tool.
• • PDF translations. The terms used in the generated PDF files: invoices, delivery slips, etc.
• • E-mail template translations. The terms used in the default e-mail templates.

Some categories have a second drop-down list, which lists the available themes. Wcomm themes have their own strings, but can also have their own modules, PDF templates and e-mail templates. The drop-down list therefore enables you to choose which theme you want to work with.

Once your selection is done, click the language code of the language in which you wish to edit that category of translation.

A long page then appears. It contains the hundreds of available strings for that category, sometimes split in tens of fieldsets.

By default, only the fieldsets which have untranslated strings are open. If you wish to open them all, click on the button on the top left twice: once to close all of them, once more to expand them all. You can open and close fieldsets one by one by clicking on its title.

Editing a translation is easy:

• • Open a fieldset,
• • Edit its content,
• • Click on either the "Update Translations and stay" button to save while and keep translating more for this category, or on the "Update translation" button to save and return to the main "Translations" page.

Wcomm 1.5 introduced a new syntax where strings can contain placeholders, such as %s, %d, %1$s, %2$d, etc.

When you find a string with such placeholder, it means that Wcomm will replace it with an actual dynamic value before displaying the translated string.
For instance, in the string "Your order on %s is complete", %s will be replaced by the shop's name. Therefore you should keep it in your final translation; for instance, in French, the translation would be "Votre commande sur %s a bien été enregistrée."

Technically, having placeholders prevents strings from being split in parts. Thereby, in previous version of Wcomm, "Your order on %s is complete." would have been split in two: "Your order on" and "is complete.". While the literal translation of these worked for some language, it made translation nearly impossible for many other languages, none the less RTL languages such as Arabic or Hebrew. Thanks to the placeholders added in Wcomm 1.5, such strings are now fully translatable in any language.

Some strings might have a warning icon to their right. This indicates strings with placeholders. You can click on the icon to get more information.
In case of a string with a placeholder, you should make sure that the content of that placeholder will be placed in the correct flow of the sentence, and avoid literal translation.
Numbered placeholders (%1$s, %2$d, etc.) enable translators to rearrange the order of the placeholders in the string while maintaining the information each is replaced with. This way, a French translator could choose to translate "Order #%1$d from %2$s" into "Commande n°%1$s du %2$s" or "Le %2$s, commande n°%1$s".

Specific features

Most translation categories present their strings in the same way: the category's strings are grouped into fieldsets that you can close or expand by clicking on their title. The title indicates the number of expressions that the fieldset contains, and when needed, the number of missing expressions, in brackets and in red.

This is true for most categories, except three:

• • Error messages. Strings are not group into many fieldset, they are all presented together.
• • PDF templates. There is only one fieldset, "PDF".
• • E-mail templates. Strings are split into fieldsets, but they are not simple text fields anymore. Each e-mail has two templates: a HTML one, which is styled and colored, and a text one, when is plain and simple. While the plain text one can be edited directly in the textfield, the HTML one can only be edited by clicking on the "Edit this e-mail template" button at the bottom of the preview. That click turns the preview into a WYSIWYG textfield (what you see is what you get), with a complete editor at the top (based on TinyMCE: (http://www.tinymce.com/)In addition to editing the text, you can change the design as you see fit, for instance you can change the colors in order to adhere to your shop's design.
  Note that the e-mail templates feature placeholders, such as {lastname} or {shop_name}, which Wcomm replaces with the actual values when sending the e-mail. Make sure to keep them in both your translation.

Add / Update a Language

Wcomm translations are available in packs, which combine all the different translation categories into a zip file. Many language packs are available freely for you to download and install, directly from the Wcomm.com servers. Wcomm will take care of downloading the language pack, unpacking it and creating the correct sub-folder in your installation's /translation folder.

You can also update the currently installed languages, likewise directly from the Wcomm.com servers, but be reminded that any change that you might have made to your own translations will be lost once you update it.

Import a Language Pack Manually

In the case where you do not want to use an official Wcomm translation pack, but rather a custom one (either provided by someone you know, or one that you exported from another Wcomm installation), then this tool is for you.

Select the Zip file, select the theme to which you want that pack to be applied to, then click the "Import" button, and it will install the pack in the /translation folder.

If there is already a language folder with the same ISO 639-1 code, it will be replaced by the files from the pack you are importing.

Export a Language

You can create your own language pack using this tool, either as a way of making a backup of your customizations, or in order to share your translations with other Wcomm installation – your own or someone else's.

Simply choose the language and the theme of the translation you wish to export, and click the "Export" button.

Note that the pack will contain the theme that your translation is supposed to support.

Copy

You can copy the content of one language to another. This is especially useful when you wish to replace a theme's language with the same language from another theme.

Choose the source language and theme, then the destination language and theme, then click the "Copy" button. In most case, the language should remain the same in both drop-down lists.

If there is already a language folder for this language in the destination theme, it will be replaced by the files from the language and theme you are copying.

You might prefer to first create a new language for the destination theme before copying the source language to it.

Understanding the Preferences

The "Preferences" menu enables you to configure and fine-tune some of your shop's details. These include a lot of different aspects of the shop, from technical settings to the customer's shopping experience. Therefore, all of the Preferences options should be carefully examined, and you should consider each option, as enabling or disabling any of them can have a real impact on your shop, and ultimately, your sales.

General Preferences

The "General" preference page features a handful of specific settings that could not fit in the other menus. They are nonetheless essential:

• • Enable SSL. SSL means "Secure Sockets Layer", and includes TSL (for "Transport Layer Security"). Both are cryptographic Internet protocols which secure Web communications. You can read more about these protocols on Wikipedia: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Sockets_Layer)
  Providing an SSL connection to your shop is not only excellent for any Internet exchanges, but also a great way to reassure your customers about the safety of their own data (authentication, credit card, etc.) on your shop, as modern browsers now display visual cues showing that the connection is secured. If your hosting provider does support SSL, make sure to activate Wcomm's SSL support, by clicking on the link. This will reveal a selector, where you should choose "Yes".
• • Increase Front Office security. This adds security tokens to your shop in order to improve its security. In effect, each URL is specific to a customer's session, and cannot be used as-is on another browser, thus protecting whatever information they might have stored during that session.
• • Allow iframes on HTML fields. The option enables you to put iframes in text fields, such as product description. Iframes are HTML elements that make it possible to load an external content into the page's own content. We recommend that you leave this option disabled unless necessary.
• • Use HTMLPurifier Library. Customers can send information to your shop using text fields (for instance, product descriptions or customer information), but hacker can also try to use these fields to send malicious code in order to try and hack your shop. This option guarantees that any data sent to your shop is safe. You should only disable it if you know very well what you are doing.
• • Round mode. Once taxes and discount are applied, a price can feature too many decimals, such as $42.333333333. The round mode is used throughout Wcomm, in the front-office price display as well as during the price calculation process (taxes, discount, etc.). In and off themselves, they change little to the way things are calculated, but the impact is much bigger once taken into account in the invoice total, when many items are added up to taxes and discounts.
  There are six modes:
  • 1. Round up away from zero, when it is half way there. This is the recommended mode. 42.55555555 becomes 42.56.
  • 2. Round down towards zero, when it is half way there. 42.55555555 becomes 42.56.
  • 3. Round towards the next even value. 42.55555555 becomes 42.56.
  • 4. Round towards the next odd value. 42.55555555 becomes 42.56.
  • 5. Round up to the nearest value. 42.55555555 becomes 42.56.
  • 6. Round down to the nearest value. 42.55555555 becomes 42.55.

For versions below 1.6.0.11

The rounding option got heavily reworked for version 1.6.0.11. Before that version, there was only one option:

• Round mode. Once taxes and discount are applied, a price can feature too many decimals, such as $42.333333333. The round mode is used during the price calculation process (taxes, discount, etc.). There are three modes:
  • 1. Superior. Rounding up: 42.333333333 becomes 42.34.
  • 2. Inferior. Rounding down: 42.333333333 becomes 42.33.
  • 3. Classical. It rounds the value up or down depending on the value: up when above .5, down when below .5.
• • Round type. This option enables you to choose the type of rounding, which can greatly impact the calculation of the total. There are three available types, in progressive order:
  • 1. Round on each item. Each item price will be rounded before calculation of the total. If there are more than one of the same item, each of those will be rounded separately before calculation.
  • 2. Round on each line. Each line of items will be rounded before calculation of the total. If there are more than one of the same item, the rounding will be done on their total value.
  • 3. Round on the total. The rounding will only be done on the final calculation, after the values of all items have been added up.
• • Number of decimals. You can choose the number of decimals that the value should be rounded to. For instance, if you choose "3", 42.333333333 becomes 42.334.
• • Display suppliers and manufacturers. Enable the suppliers and manufacturers pages on your front-office even when their respective modules are disabled.
• • Display best sellers. Enable the best-sellers pages on your front-office even when the Top-Sellers Block module is disabled.
• • Enable Multistore. This little option has major implications: it turns your single-shop installation of Wcomm into a multiple stores installation. This gives you access to the new "Multistore" page in the "Advanced parameters" menu, and every administration page can be contextualized to apply its settings to either all stores, a specific group of stores, or a single store.
  You can read more about Wcomm's multistore feature by reading the "Managing multiple shops" chapter of this guide.
• • Main Shop Activity. You might have set the wrong shop activity when installing Wcomm. You can choose the correct activity here.

Orders Preferences

The settings from the "Orders" preference page apply to the orders that your customers make, but also to some other details, such as gifting.

General preferences

• • Order process type. By default, the customer has to go through 5 steps in order to complete the checkout process, each on a different page. However, you can choose to have it all done in a single page. The page will be longer, but some customers might prefer this approach.
• • Enable guest checkout. Allows non-registered visitors to place an order, without having to create an account.
• • Disable reordering option. If set to "Yes", customers will not be able to reorder something in one click by going to their order history (this is requirement in some European countries: you must disable this option – and thus put this option on "Yes").
• • Minimum purchase total required in order to validate order. Indicates the minimum amount that must be in the shopping cart to submit an order. If the amount in this field is not reached, your customer cannot complete their purchase. If you do not want to set a minimum amount, enter "0" in the field.
• • Delayed shipping. If you enable the "Allow ordering of out-of-stock products" option (in the "Products" preference page), you can allow order items to be dispatched as they become available, in as many shipment as needed (depending on how you team sees it fit). Initially, Wcomm will split the order in two: the available items are sent right away, while the other items become a second order, waiting to be validated.
• • Terms of service. Makes your customers have to accept your terms of service before they can validate an order.
• • CMS page for the Conditions of use. Your shop's "conditions of use" are to be stored in a static page (a "CMS page"). Select which page to use so that Wcomm can point to it correctly.

Gift options

• • Offer gift wrapping. Have Wcomm suggest gift-wrapping to customer, and the possibility of adding a printed a message. It is always a nice feature for people who want to send gifts through your shop.
• • Gift-wrapping price. Sets the price of your gift-wrapping service.
• • Gift-wrapping tax. If needed, indicates to which local tax the gift-wrapping is tied. You can add more taxes in the "Taxes" page, in the "Localization" menu.
• • Offer recycled packaging. If you can offer this service, many customers will appreciate it.

Products Preferences

This page contains a few preferences pertaining to how your products are to be handled and displayed by Wcomm.

General preferences

• • Catalog mode. Enabling catalog mode turns your shop into a simple gallery of products, with no way to buy the items whatsoever
• • Product comparison. Set the maximum number of products that can be selected for comparison.
• • Number of days for which the product is considered 'new'. When you add a product in your shop, it is considered new and it is reported back through the "New products" block and the "New products" page. The field allows you to specify how many days the product will remain visible on the block and page. With this feature, you choose how to display and updated your shop's news. The "New products" page is usually most accessed by your regular customers.
• • Redirect after adding product to cart. You can either redirect the customer to the previous page, or to the cart summary.
• • Max size of short description. Your product has two descriptions: a "short description" one and a regular one. The short description, which appears in search engines and in the category description for your product, is limited to 400 characters by default, but this option enables you to change that limit. 0 means that there is no limit.
• • Quantity discount based on. This settings indicates upon what Wcomm should base quantity discounts: per-product, or per-combination (which can feature multiple products).
• • Force update of friendly URL. By default, the friendly URL of a product page is generated from the product title, and it stays the same even though the product title changes – because in order to be well referenced, your URLs should be stable. By enabling this option, Wcomm will update the friendly URL every time you change the product's name or page's title.

Pagination preferences

• • Products per page. Indicate how many products are displayed on the pages of your categories.
• • Default order by. Indicate the order of products in your shop's categories. 6 choices are available:
  • 1. Product name.Displays your products based on the alphabetical order.
  • 2. Product price. Displays your products according to their prices.
  • 3. Product add date. Displays your products according to the date it was added to your shop.
  • 4. Product modified date. When you edit a product, its modification date is changed. This option makes them appear in the order of modification date.
  • 5. Position inside category. Displays your products as they are positioned in the categories in your catalog. The position of the products can be modified directly in the catalog of your shop using the position arrows. This way you have your product in the most attractive fashion for your customers.
  • 6. Manufacturer. Displays your products in alphabetical order of their manufacturers' names.
  • 7. Product quantity. Displays your products based on their available quantity.
  • 8. Product reference. Displays your products based on their reference number
• • Default order method. The above options can be sorted by ascending or descending order.

Product page preferences

• • Display available quantities on the product page. By enabling this feature, your visitors can see the quantities of each product available in stock. Displaying this information can be used to stimulate sales in the case where the quantity in stock is low. The quantities displayed are the selected attributes and combination.
• • Display remaining quantities when quantity is lower than. You can choose to display an alert when the remaining available stock for a product gets below a certain level. This option is particularly useful for promoting purchases. The text and placement of the alert depend on the theme; in the default theme, it is "Warning: Last items in stock!", and is placed directly below the "Quantity" field.
• • Enable JqZoom instead of Fancybox on product page. By default, at the click of the mouse, a bigger version of the product image is displayed as an overlay of the page. Once you activate this feature, visitors will still be able to click on the image in order to get the zoom, but a zoom will also appears whenever the mouse hovers over the product's image
• • Display unavailable product attributes on product page. Your products can be composed of many different combinations or attributes: color, size, capacity, etc. Attributes can be edited in the "Attributes" page of the "Catalog" menu. Read the chapter titled "A Look Inside the Catalog" to learn more about attributes, and how to use them When one or several attributes are not available anymore, you have two possibilities:
  • 1. First possibility: Leave this preference active. Example: The "iPod Shuffle" is no longer available in "Blue" in our shop. By keeping this option enabled, the product's combination will remain visible in the shop. A message will indicate that the product is no longer available in the chosen option, and invite customers to choose another combination. If you enabled the "Allow ordering of out-of-stock products" option (see below), then they will be able to add the unavailable combination to their carts.
  • 2. Second possibility: Disable this preference. If the "Blue" combination of the "iPod Shuffle" product is no longer available, that selection is not displayed the front-office and the customer cannot select it. This feature helps to clearly display the availability of your products.
• • Display the "add to cart" button when product has attributes. This option prevents customers from adding a product to their cart directly from the category page, if that product has combinations. This forces customers to visit the product's page and pick a combination, instead of only adding the default one to the cart. Note that products with no combination will still have an "Add to cart" button in the category page.
• • Separator of attribute anchor on the product links. Choose the separator, between "," and "-".
• • Display discounted price. When using the volume discount board, show the discounted price rather than the discount percentage.

Products stock preferences

• • Allow ordering of out-of-stock products. If a product does not have any available stock anymore, the customer can still order it.
• • Enable stock management. This option gives you access to basic stock management options and features: you can set the current quantity of product, and have Wcomm lower it for each order, and "re-stock" for each canceled or returned order.
  By default you should leave this feature enabled, as disabling it affects the entire inventory management of your shop. Only if you do not have any physical inventory should you disable it – for instance, if you only have virtual products.
• • Enable advanced stock management. Another little option which has major implications: it adds a new menu called "Stocks", which makes it possible to manage very precisely your stock, on a per-warehouse basis if necessary. You can see all the details about your stock: movement, coverage, re-stocking orders, etc.
  You can read more about Wcomm's advanced stock management feature in the "Managing Stock" chapter of this guide.
• • New products use advanced stock management. If enabled, new products will automatically use the advanced stock management feature. The default warehouse is the one indicated in the next option.
• • Default warehouse on new products. If new products use the advanced stock management feature, you have to indicate their default warehouse here.

Customers Preferences

The "Customers" page bring together specifically customer-related options, most notably the B2B mode.

• • Registration process type. You can let visitors create a new account without any immediate obligation to register an address, or force them to register an address as soon as they create their account. The first option makes it quicker to create account, which is great, but this will add a new mandatory screen once they want to validate an order, which can turn them off.
  On the other end, the second option makes account creation longer, but at least they will already have an address registered when they want to validate an order.
• • Phone number is mandatory. Likewise, you can require your client to register a phone number, or not. Having a phone number can prove invaluable to you, as this makes it possible to contact a client directly, but some client resent giving this kind of information. If you select "No", the "Phone number" fields will still appear in the address creation form, but they will no longer be mandatory.
• • Re-display cart at login. If the customer had a cart that was not checked-out, display it once he or she logs back in.
• • Send an email after registration. You can have Wcomm send an e-mail to any newly-created customer with a summary of his account information (email, password) after registration.
• • Password reset display. You can choose to limit the frequency at which a customer can generate a new password for his or her account. By default, it is set at 360 minutes – 6 hours.
• • Enable B2B mode. The B2B mode brings a handful of new features to your store. Customers are no longer considered as individuals but as companies, and therefore some new options appear:
  • 1. The customer profile has new fields related to professional information (Duns number in the USA, SIRET number in France, CNPJ number in Brazil, etc.),
  • 2. Prices can be masked to specific groups,
  • 3. Prices can be managed on a per-customer basis for the whole catalog or per category,
  • 4. Invoices can be generated manually,
  • 5. etc.

SEO & URLs Preferences

The tools on this page help you improve the presence of your Wcomm site on web searches, and therefore reach more potential customers.

SEO means "search engine optimization". It represents a set of techniques and best practices aimed at improving the visibility of a website on search engines. You can read more about this at Wikipedia: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization)

URL is short for "uniform resource locator", or simply put, the online address of a web page. You can read more about what a URL is at Wikipedia: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL)

As you can see in the second example above, both categories and products can have a friendly URL: in the example above, id_category=2 becomes 2-music-players, and id_product=27 becomes 27-ipod-nano-green. While the ID number cannot be removed by default, the words can be either generated from the category/product name, or written by hand. This is done directly in the configuration page for the product or the category (in the Catalog menu): the "Friendly URL" field can be found directly in the main configuration page of a category, and under the "SEO" tab of the configuration page of a product.

There are other individual pages in your Wcomm install that would certainly benefit from friendly URLs: CMS pages, user account pages, pages with automatically generated content... The "SEO & URLs" page presents you with a list of these pages, and enables you to edit their friendly URLs as well as their meta tags (title, description, keyword).

Friendly URLs only work with a server setup that supports URL rewriting (through the Apache Web Server mod_rewrite feature, for instance). Make sure to check that your server does (ask your hosting provider!), as it can make your shop completely unavailable to customers if you enable friendly URLs and the server does not support it!

Homepage SEO settings

In order to change the homepage meta tags, you simply need to open the "SEO & URLs" page, open the "index" page's settings, and there you can freely edit some important SEO information.

A few tips:

• • The default homepage title is the name of the store, and therefore the index' title field is empty. If you put content in the field, the homepage's full title will be 'your content – the name of the store'.
  The name of the store itself is set during the installation of Wcomm, and can be changed from the "Store Contacts" preference page, using the "Shop name" option of the "Contact details" section.
• • Keep your description short: a paragraph of text is enough.
• • To add a tag, click in the "Add tag" field and validate by pressing return. You can remove tags by clicking the cross.
• • You do not have to add a rewritten URL if there is not already one.

Note that if your store has already been indexed by Google or any other search engine, it might take a while for your changes to appear in the search results. Please be patient.

At the bottom of the "SEO & URLs" page are three sections with additional options: Set up URLs, Set shop URL and Robots file generation. See below for an explanation of these.

Adding a New Friendly URL

Friendly URLs are to be set in the configuration page of each product, category, CMS page... This creation page is only useful for some automatic pages, and most of the time you won't have to worry about these.

Make sure to fill the fields for all the available languages on your shop: not only is it immensely useful to local users, but some search engines can even make use of this local information.

Click the "Add New" button to reach the friendly URL creation form. It has a handful of fields:

• • Page. The drop-down list gives you all the pages that can benefit from a friendly URL.
• • Page title. The title that will appear in search engines when a request is made.
• • Meta description. A presentation of the page in just a few words, intended to capture a customer's interest. It will appear in search results.
• • Meta Keywords. Keywords that you must define in order to have your site referenced by search engines. You can enter several of them: type the words, press the Return key, and see how the tag gets encapsulated in a yellow block, with a tiny cross icon to delete it.
• • Rewritten URL. This is where you set the friendly URL. Make it short and descriptive, use only letters and numbers, and replace spaces (" ") by hyphens ("-").

Set up URLs

The main options for friendly URLs:

• • Friendly URL. Change this option if you know that your server can support URL rewriting. If not, leave it at "No".
  You may see a message such as "URL rewriting (mod_rewrite) is not active on your server or it is not possible to check your server configuration. If you want to use Friendly URLs you must activate this mod". In this case, Wcomm cannot detect your server settings, but that does not mean the feature will not work. You must test it yourself.
• • Accented URL. Wcomm is now able to produce URL with special characters, for products with non ASCII names. You can disable that option here.
• • Redirect to Canonical URL. A given Wcomm page can have many URLs, most often when there are parameters to consider: for instance,
  http://example.com/product.php?id=5&option1 and http://example.com/product.php?id=5&option2 point to the very same product, only one difference. Since you want your product to have a single URL and not many duplicate ones, you should enable Canonical URLs. Canonical URLs are a way to eliminate self-created duplicate content – which can dramatically bring your search engine rank down, as this is considered spam. To avoid search engines thinking you are spamming their index, Wcomm uses standard rel="canonical" link tag to indicate which is the one base URL for a given content. While it is highly recommended to enable this option, it also depends on your theme actually implementing correctly the header tag. Ask the theme designer for more information.
  There are three options:
  • 1. No redirection. You might get duplicate URLs.
  • 2. 301 Move Permanently. Returns the HTTP 301 status code, pointing to the main URL and notifying search engines that this is the only URL to take into account.
  • 3. 302 Moved Temporarily. Returns the HTTP 302 status code, pointing to the main URL and notifying search engines that the main URL might change later.
• • Disable Apache's MultiViews option. Apache is the most popular web server, and is most likely the one your web host uses for your site (although you should check this for yourself). Multiviews is a content negotiation system: when enabled, the web server tries to serve the user a page in what it thinks is the best matching language version, under the same URL. Unfortunately, this might bring trouble to Wcomm's friendly URLs feature. If this is the case, you can try to disable multiviews with this option.
• • Disable Apache's mod_security module. mod_security is a module of the Apache web server, which acts as a firewall, protecting your server from intrusions. It can however block some key features, or even produce errors in some configuration. In such case, disable that firewall here.

In previous version of Wcomm, you had to manually generate a new .htaccess file after having enabled friendly URLs. This is no longer the case since version 1.5: the .htaccess file is now silently managed by Wcomm, and you do not have to worry about it.

Set shop URL

In this section, you can view and edit some of the default server settings:

• • Shop domain. Your store's main domain name or IP address.
• • SSL domain. Your store's secure domain name (https://) or IP address.
• • Base URI. The folder where you installed Wcomm. If it is at the root of the domain, use

Most of the time, you should not touch these fields without knowing exactly what you are doing. One mistake could break your shop.

Schema of URLs

New in 1.6.

You can change the way friendly URLs are generated, by changing the route to a resource on your shop.

For instance, the default route to display a product's page is {category:/}{id}-{rewrite}{-:ean13}.html, which results in /summer-dresses/7-printed-chiffon-dress.html You could change that route to {manufacturer:/}{id}-{rewrite:/} to obtain /fashion-manufacturer//7-printed-chiffon-dress/

8 fields are available by default, and each is accompanied with a list of available keywords. Some keywords are mandatory, and are indicated with a *.

Once you have updated your fields, do not forget to save your changes, then on the "Save" button in the "Set up URLs" section in order to regenerate your .htaccess file, which is necessary for your friendly URLs.

Robots file generation

A robots.txt file enables you to block specific automated bots and web spiders which crawl the Web in order to find more web pages to add to their company's servers. Some bots you want to have full access to your website, such as Google's or Yahoo!'s, and some others you would rather not, such as spam bots, content thiefs, e-mail collectors, etc. Note that the worst of bots do not respect this file's directives, as it is purely advisory.

Wcomm's robots.txt generation tool simply creates a file with exclusion directives for files and directories that are not meant to be public, and should not be indexed. These directives apply to all bots, good or bad: the generated file uses the "User-agent: *" string

Clicking on the "Generate robots.txt" button replaces any existing robots.txt file with a new one. Therefore, if you want to add your own rules, do it after Wcomm has generated its version of the file.

CMS - Managing Static Content

Wcomm enables you create content pages as easily as you would create product pages, using its CMS tool. The pages will appear to customers in the "Information" block on your homepage and in the site menu. You can add CMS pages in the top menu using the "Top horizontal menu" module (which you can configure from the "Modules" page).

The "CMS" page presents you all the content pages that were previously created on your shop, for the currently selected category (by default, the home page is the only category).

Do not forget to create one version of each page for each of your supported languages! As usual, click on the language selector for each field in order to change language.

Creating a New CMS Category

Click the "Add new" button to create a CMS category – actually, a sub-category of the root category, "Home". You can create as many categories as needed.

The form is quite basic:

• • Name. Make sure to use a short and straightforward word.
• • Displayed. Whether the category and its pages are available to the public, or hidden.
• • Parent CMS category. The category under which this category is placed. By default, "Home". You can have an unlimited number of levels of sub-categories.
• • Description. Do fill this field in all languages, as some theme can display that information to customers.
• • Meta title. The name of the category, as displayed in the browser.
• • Meta description. Used to describe the content of this category for search engines.
• • Meta keywords. Used by search engines to understand what type of information the category is composed of.
• • Friendly URL. Makes it easier for search engines to index your content, and for visitors to understand what they will find in the category. This field is automatically filled as you enter the category name, but you can still edit it manually.

When you save the category, Wcomm takes you back to the tables, this time using the newly created category as its base. Therefore, you will not see any sub-category or sub-pages in here unless you create some.
In order to go back to the root category, click on "Home" in the "Current category" section at the top. You can then edit each pages from the root category and move them into your newly created category if you feel like it.

In order to create sub-categories, simply change the "Parent CMS Category" option from "Home" to the wanted parent category for the category you are creating.

Creating a New CMS Page

Click the "Add New" button to reach the content creation form:

• • CMS Category. The default category is the home-page of your shop. If you want to have this page in another category, you must first have created.
• • Meta title. The name of the page, as displayed in the browser.
• • Meta description. Used to describe the content of this page for search engines
• • Meta Keywords. Used by search engines to understand what types of information the page is composed of.
• • Friendly URL. Makes it easier for search engines to index your content, and for visitors to understand what they will find in the category. This field is automatically filled as you enter the category name, but you can still edit it manually.
• • Page content. This is the main content of your page. In this WYSIWYG editor, you can put as much text as necessary, even images or videos using the "Insert Image" or "Insert Embedded Media".
• • Indexation by search engine. Indicates whether search engines should register this page or not.
• • Displayed. You can choose to have you page public only once you are done proofreading it, and keep it as a draft for the moment. A draft is invisible to the public.

Once all the fields are filled out, click on "Save." If activated, you can then view the result directly on your online shop.

Images Preferences

The "Images" preference page enables you to configure the various image sizes that your customers will see on your shop.

When you upload an image on Wcomm, Wcomm automatically generates various sizes of this image, including thumbnails and a mobile version (depending on what this image will apply to). Therefore, you only have to upload one "master" version of your image, big enough to be resized into all the images sizes.

If you want to make sure your image is correctly resized, you should upload an image that fits the size ratio of the various image sizes. If your uploaded image does not have the same width-to-height ratio than the settings in place, you are taking the risk to see whitespace on the resized image.

You can enable image size for specific types of content, directly in the image sizes list.

In the "Products" page under the "Preferences" menu, you can choose to have a zoom appear when the cursor hovers over a product's image.

Add a New Images Size

You can easily add a new image size, and even set to which type of content it applies.

Click the "Add new" button, then:

• 1. Type the size's name, width and height.
• 2. Choose to which type of content it applies.
• 3. Validate.

Images preferences

• • Image format. You have the choice between two of the major file formats: JPEG and PNG Both are well established among browsers. JPEG has a good compression ratio, but can result in visible artifacts. PNG's compression algorithm is not as good as JPEG's, but there are comparatively fewer visible artifacts; nonetheless, older browsers might not recognize this format.
  Choosing between one and the other is often a matter of taste. That being said, JPEG remains the recommended choice. If you would rather prevent information loss because of a format change, choose the second option, "Use PNG only if the base image is in PNG format".
• PNG format is not compatible with the "Watermark" module.
• • JPEG compression. Do not choose anything below 80 or at worst 75, for fear of visible compression artifacts.
• • PNG compression. Do not choose anything over 6 or at worst 7, for fear of visible compression artifacts.
• • Generate images based on one side of the source image. This feature allows you to position the product image in its pre-established space:
  • 1. Choose "height" in order to fill the frame height (the width is then recalculated to maintain the same height/width ratio as in the file of origin).
  • 2. Choose "width" so that the image fills the width of the frame (the height is then recalculated to maintain the same proportion).
  • 3. Choose "auto" so that the width and height are calculated to maximize the space it can occupy in the frame.
• • Maximum file size of product customization pictures. Your customers can upload pictures for customized products. By default, Wcomm sets this value to the PHP maximum setting – this can mean several megabytes: for instance, 8,388,608 bytes means 8 Mb. You can expand this value if necessary, but make sure that your PHP installation is able to take file uploads of this size.
• • Product picture width. By default, customers can upload image with a maximum width of 64 pixels.
• • Product picture height. By default, customers can upload image with a maximum height of 64 pixels.
• • Generate high resolution images. The most recent screens with high pixel density (Retina and similar technologies) require high resolution images. You can enable this feature to make sure your images will display correctly on this kind of screens. It will generate a new file for each of your images, with a resolution twice higher. This will double your number of image files, so use it wisely if you have limited storage space.

Regenerate Images

You may be dissatisfied with your shop's current thumbnails size. This section makes it possible for you to regenerate them all – or only those for a specific type of content:

• 1. Change the image size settings in the table at the top of the "Images" preference page.
• 2. Select which content's images should be regenerated.
• 3. Indicate whether the previous thumbnails should be kept or not.
• 4. Click "Regenerate thumbnails".

Manually-uploaded thumbnails will be erased and replaced by automatically-generated thumbnails.

Store Contacts Preferences

Wcomm provides a complete physical store locating tool for your customers, with detailed contact information.

Customers can reach the Store Locator page from the front office.

Obviously, this feature is only useful if you do have physical stores, where customers can come buy products.

You cannot disable this feature, but you can make it inaccessible to customers:

• • Delete all the stores listed in the "Store Contacts" administration page. The Stores block will not appear anymore on the front-page.
• • Go the "Modules" page from the "Modules" menu. Find the "Store Locator" module and disable it.
• • Disable the link in the footer: in the "Stores Contacts" administration page, choose "No" for the "Display in the footer" option.

If you do have stores in your database but you do not want the Stores block to be displayed in the front-page, either temporarily or permanently:

• 1. Go to the "Positions" page in the "Modules" menu.
• 2. Find the "Right column blocks" section, and delete the "Store locator block" from the list, either by click its trashcan icon, or by checking its checkbox and clicking on the "Unhook the selection" button at the top of the page.
• 3. Reload the front-page: the Store Locator block should not be here anymore. If it is still here, it might be because of the cache: go to the "Performance" page of the "Advanced parameters" menu, disable the cache and force the theme compilation temporarily. Once all this is done, reload the front-page.

You can put the block back in the right column from the "Positions" page:

• 1. Click on the "Transplant a module" button at the top right of the page.
• 2. Choose the "Store locator block" module in the list.
• 3. Choose the "displayRightColumn (Right column blocks)" hook.
• 4. Save the page. Reload the front-page: the Stores block should be back in the right column.

Store list

You can choose how these stores are displayed in the front office. The customer can access them through the "Our stores" link (depending on the theme)

All your stores are listed in a handy list, giving every store's information as well as an indicator telling whether the store is currently active or not – you might for instance want to gather the information for a new store in advance, in order to have its page ready for the launch.

Adding a new physical store

As usual, click "Add New" to reach the store creation form.

Fill as many of the fields as possible, as they will be displayed to your customers within the map.

One very important field is the "Latitude/Longitude" one, as this is what Wcomm uses to indicate the location of your store. You can use Steve Morse's online tool to get the lat/long coordinates of a given address: (http://stevemorse.org/jcal/latlon.php)

Make sure to add a picture of the store front, as this is how your customers will be able to find it once in the street.

Finally, the business hours are an essential part of any physical store, and you should be as precise as possible about them.

Parameters

• • Display in the footer. By default, Wcomm displays a link to the store locator, titled "Our stores", in your shop's footer. In the default theme, it appears in the "Information" block, below the special product listing pages (best sellers, new products, specials, etc.). You can choose not to have that link appear here.
• • Display in the sitemap page. You can choose to add the "Our stores" link in your shop's sitemap page, which lists all the pages on your site (not to be confused with your Google Sitemap file, which is for SEO purpose).
• • Show a simplified store locator. The store locator presents itself as an interactive map with a search field. You can choose to make that interface much simpler by only displaying a list of stores.
• • Default Latitude and Default longitude. The default starting position of your map. Very useful when you have many stores and you would rather primarily point customers to a specific area.

Contact details

This section enables you to give the main details of your company, rather than those of a specific shop. You should fill all the fields with information on your headquarters, as this is certainly the address customers will use to contact you, or even visit you.

These fields should be carefully filled:

• • Shop name. The name of your store. Keep it short, as it will be used in all your correspondence and page titles.
• • Shop email. The official contact address for your business. Use the general contact e-mail address that the customers should see when they receive an e-mail from your shop
• • Registration. Indicate your company's legal registration numbers, which depends on your country's legal system (Duns number in the USA, SIRET number in France, CNPJ number in Brazil, etc.). This shows that you are a fully registered business, thus giving a more reassuring opinion of your shop to your potential customers.
• • Shop address line 1 / Address line 2 / Postal code/Zip code / City / State / Country. Use the official contact address of your business. The "State" option only appears when the selected country has states set in your database (through the "States" page in the "Localization" menu)
• • Phone. The official contact phone number for your business. If you'd rather customers not call you, do not put anything in there.
• • Fax. The official contact fax number for your business.

Do not use a colon (":") in your store's name, as it might prevent some features from working (for instance, e-mail sending might fail).

You can replace the colon with a dash if you need to have two sections in the title. For instance, use "MyStore – The best place for items to buy" instead of "MyStore: The best place for items to buy".

Search Preferences

The "Search" page enables you to configure your shop's search features.

Aliases list

When customers make a request using your shop's internal search engine, they may make mistakes in spelling. If Wcomm does not display the right results, the "alias" feature can address them. You will be able to take words containing spelling errors, and point them to the real products sought by customers.

To create a new useful alias, you should first find the spelling errors most often typed by your users:

• 1. Go to the "Shop search" tab of the "Stats" page, under the "Stats" menu. You can see the words typed by your customers as well as the most frequent errors.
• 2. Take the most frequent ones, and add them to your list of aliases, in order to point user to the correct products.
• 3. Click the "Add new" button on the "Search" preference page.

The creation form is very straight forward: indicate the typo you want corrected, and the correct word it should lead to.

For instance, let's say your visitors frequently type "player" as "palyer" and "plaier". You can create an alias for each of these typos, which will match the word "Player". Your aliases can be used as soon as they are saved.

We also invite you to consult the sections of this guide on product and category meta tags, to better understand how to display products based on words typed by your customers. See the "Adding Products and Product Categories" and "A Look inside the Catalog" chapters.

Indexing

This section provides information on the number of products that can be searched through your shop's search function, and compares it to the number of products present in the database.
If the values do not match, you must click the "Add missing products to the index" link. Only the new products will be indexed.
If you have made several changes to already indexed products, you might prefer to choose to re-build the whole index. The "Re-build entire index" process takes more time, but it is more thorough.

Wcomm also gives you the URL to let you create a cron task for regular re-building of the index. If you do not know about cron and crontab, ask your web host about it.

Finally, the "Indexing" option enables you to have a product be indexed as soon as it is created/modified, thus rending the above links and cron link useless.

Search options

This section enables you to configure the behavior of your shop's search function:

• • Ajax search. Enabling it displays a list of 10 results from the moment your customers type a few letters into the search bar, right under the search bar.
• • Instant search. Enabling it displays a list of results from the moment your customers type a few letters into the search bar, directly within your shop's main content area. This setting is disabled by default, because visitors are not always used to have their whole content changed just be entering a few letters in the shop's search bar. Therefore, use with caution.
• • Search within word. This option improves search by allowing you to make queries that do not only match the start of the search word; for instance, "lou" for "blouse".
• • Search exact end match. With this option you can give results that will match exactly the end of the search word. For instance, if you search "book", you will see "notebook", but not "bookcase".
• • Minimum word length. You can choose the minimum size at which a word may be registered in the search index and found by your customers. This feature allows you to eliminate short words in the search, such as prepositions or articles (the, and, of, etc.).
• • Blacklisted words. You can choose the terms that must not be found by your visitors. Enter them directly into the field, separated by "|" ("pipe" character, not lowercase L). By default, Wcomm fills the list with common short words.

Weight

Wcomm enables you to prioritize certain data when a search is performed on your shop.

As indicated in the section, the search "weight" of a product represents its importance and relevance for the ranking of the products when customers try a new search. An item with a weight of 8 will have 4 times more value than an item with a weight of 2.

For instance, by default "Product Name Weight" is at 6, "Tags weight" is at 4, and both "Short description weight" and "Description weight" are at 1. This means a product with "ipod" in its name will appear higher in the search results than another product which has "ipod" only in its tags. Meanwhile, a product which only has "ipod" in any of its description will have the lowest rank in the search results.

You have many factors that you can assign a weight to: short description, category, tags, attributes, etc. You will find that the display order of results can be reversed because you changed the weight of the various fields. Fine-tuning these settings will be more visible on a large catalog with many references.

Once your changes are saved, they take effect immediately.

Maintenance Settings

This very simple preference page will be invaluable when you want to make changes to your shop without your customers noticing. For instance, when you are adding several new products at once, or when you want to change the theme and make several tests before making it available to the world.

This page only has two options:

• Enable Shop. You can use this option to disable your shop temporarily, for instance when you need to perform maintenance on your shop.

The webservice will still be active, so your data will still be available to those with a key. If you want to also disable the webservice, go to the "Webservice" preference page, in the "Advanced parameters" menu.

• Maintenance IP. The maintenance IP allows people to access the shop even if it is disabled. This means that you can prevent everyone on the Internet from accessing your shop, but still allow access to the computers used by your team-members and yourself. To discover the IP address of a machine, go to (http://www.whatismyip.com/)from that machine. Click "Add my IP" if you only want to add the IP of your current computer. If you want to add more IP addresses, separate them with commas ",".

Geolocation Preferences

Geolocation is "the identification of the real-world geographic location of an object, such as a radar, a mobile phone or an Internet-connected computer" (read more on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolocation)In our case, geolocation is used to discover the location of a visitor, using his or her computer's IP and other tools. One of the uses of geolocation is to block visitors from certain cities/countries

As indicated the first time you open the "Geolocation" page, in order to use geolocation, you need download a special file first: (http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLiteCity.dat.gz) This file is the GeoLite City database from MaxMind, an accurate database of cities and locations. Download it by clicking on the link, and then decompress it into the /tools/geoip/ directory of your Wcomm installation.

Once the file is in place, enable the "Geolocation by IP address" option, and you are set.

Options

You can choose which countries can access your shop (by default, all of them), and set Wcomm's behaviors for restricted and unrestricted countries (or "other" countries). You choose between these three options:

• • Visitors cannot see your catalog.
• • Visitors can see your catalog but cannot make an order. In effect, you shop is in "Catalog mode".
• • All features are available (only for unrestricted countries).

You can select or deselect all countries at once by checking the box at the top of the list. When selecting countries that can access your online shop, make sure to not block any country by mistake, as you would lose all potential sales to its inhabitants!

Whitelist of IP address

This section enables you to accept specific IPs address despite a blockade. It can be useful in case of spammers, bots or attacks. It is already filled with a list of known good IPs. Add as many as needed, one per line, and click "Save".

Configuration Information

This page serves as a handy reminder of your Wcomm configuration: version, server info, PHP version, a MySQL version. All these prove really useful when you need to report an issue to the Wcomm developers, or simply your webmaster or web host.

There is one last section, titled "List of changed files". Right after you have first installed Wcomm, the only thing that this section displays is "No change has been detected in your files". But after you've installed some modules and a couple of themes, made advanced changes to some override classes or deleted files altogether, this list will show the difference between your current installation of Wcomm and what it used to look like in its pristine state. This helps you see what changes have been made to your installation... and therefore what to take into account if you want to update your store manually, or if you are moving files to a new server.

Even with a fresh installation, this section might indicate ".gitattributes", ".gitignore", "CONTRIBUTING.md", "CONTRIBUTORS.md" or "README.md" as missing files. These are Git-specific files, and Wcomm does not use them, so you should not worry about them.

Performance parameters

This page combines many tools and tips that might help you improve your shop's performance server-wise – not sales-wise, although a server that performs well is able to serve more customers, and therefore make more sales.

Smarty

Smarty is the name of the template language used by Wcomm's themes. You can learn more about it at (http://www.smarty.net/)

There are two options:

• • Template cache. For better front-end performance, Wcomm caches your HTML pages.
  • 1. Never recompile template files. The normal behavior: HTML pages are compiled and cached, then displayed as-is, even if the theme has changed in the meantime.
  • 2. Recompile templates if the files have been updated. Wcomm is able to see when a theme file has changed.
  • 3. Force compilation. Only enable this if you are making edits theme, and need to see your changes every time you reload your page.
• • Cache. This option makes it possible for you to disable all file caches, and not just the one pertaining to template files. Only disable this if you debugging a theme or a module for Wcomm. Otherwise, you should leave it enabled.
  The "Clear Smarty cache" makes it possible to delete the cache in a single click instead of having to go delete files on your FTP server.
• • Caching type. By default, Smarty uses a file-based caching mechanism. You can choose to have it use MySQL as the storage resource for Smarty's output caching.
• • Clear cache. Depending on how often your store changes, you might want to either never clear the cache files, or clear them every time your store is modified (either products or design).

Debug mode

New in 1.6.

When in debug mode, you can choose to lessen the impact of certain features on Wcomm, in order to best pinpoint where an error comes from:

• • Disable non Wcomm modules. Wcomm's own module are heavily tested and should present no issue whatsoever. If you enable this setting, you will be able to tell if the problem comes from Wcomm's own code (core or module), or from a third-party module.
• • Disable all overrides. Many features in Wcomm can be overridden. If you enable this settings, all overriding code will be disabled, and you will be able to tell if the problem comes from Wcomm's own code, or from a third-party override.

Optional features

Some Wcomm features can be disabled if you do not use them, as they can slow down your shop.

If your catalog currently has products which make use of these features, then you will not be able to disable them. You will have to delete some data before you can turn them off.

You can disable the following features:

• • Combinations. Product combinations enable you to have a whole product line out of a single product: varying size, colors, capacity, etc.
• • Features. Product features enable you to indicate the product's specific information: weight, material, country of origin, etc.
• • Customer groups. Customer groups enable you to group customers in order to give them certain privileges and restrictions: discount, module restrictions, etc.

Combine, Compress and Cache (CCC)

CCC is a set of tools aimed at minimizing server load and theme loading time.

It does what it says: it combines textual files of the same type into one bigger file, which makes for fewer files to download; it then compresses the file using the common Zip algorithm, which makes for faster downloads; finally, it caches the compressed file, so that the server does not have to do this process every time a page is loaded, which relieves the burden on the server's processor.

Your theme must completely compatible with at least Wcomm 1.4, otherwise CCC will not work as expected. This is why most options are disabled by default.

• • Smart cache for CSS. CSS files are text-based, and can be safely combined and compressed.
• • Smart cache for JavaScript. JavaScript files are also text-based, but their combination can sometimes prove problematic. Make sure to test everything before leaving that setting enabled.
• • Minify HTML. The HTML code generated by Smarty can be minified, meaning that Wcomm will remove all whitespace in order to save a few bytes. This is mostly safe.
• • Compress inline JavaScript in HTML. Some themes have JavaScript code directly within. You can either leave it alone, or have them compressed. Again with JavaScript compression, make sure to test everything before leaving that setting enabled.
• • Move JavaScript to the end. Placing your theme's JavaScript code at the bottom of the HTML file is the recommended way to speed up 'above the fold' page rendering.
• • Apache optimization. This setting will change your web server's configuration file in order to make it more efficient for CCC.

Media servers

This section enables you to redirect part of your traffic (image and video files, for instance) to other servers under your control, through other domains or sub-domains – most often, the files are hosted on a CDN (Content Delivery Network). By default, Wcomm supports up to 3 media servers.

Putting your store's domain name in those fields is not the proper way to get fantastic performance. That being said, it is easy to set up a media server, and the benefits are real and almost immediate. Here is how:

• 1. Open an account at a new host, preferably one who is specialist of distributed content. The most popular are Akamai (http://www.akamai.com/), Amazon (with its AWS services, among which is CloudFront: (http://aws.amazon.com/).You should also ask your own host, maybe it has a CDN service you can subscribe to.
• 2. Copy your media files to that host's server. This means that the CDN server must contain an exact copy of the following folders from you store's main server: /img, /themes and /modules.
  Reminder: you must make it so that these folders are always synchronized: even if you add new products or change your theme, the CDN server must contain the latest version of all these files.
• 3. Once the CDN server is in place, add the web address (as given by your CDN host) in the first field, "Media server #1". If that host allows for more web addresses, add them.

In case you would rather that your files are still visually downloaded from your domain name rather that from an unknown domain name, follow this process:

• 1. Create a subdomain for your store's domain name, for instance http://cdn1.example.com (the way to do that depend on your host, ask him about it).
• 2. Put a .htaccess file at the root of the subdomain. That file should contain a single line: Redirect Permanent / http://cdn-adress.com
• 3.Replace the http://cdn-adress.com with the one from your CDN server. This way, you are creating an automatic redirection from your subdomain to your CDN server.
• 4. Once the subdomain is in place, add it in the first field, "Media server #1". If that host allows for more web addresses, create as many subdomains to your store's main domain name.

Even if you do not have a CDN server, you can use the media server feature to have the customer's browser download more files at a time, thus making the whole page loading process faster:

• 1. Configure your web server to have virtual subdomains, such as images1.example.com, images2.example.com, and images3.example.com, pointing to Wcomm's main folder.
• 2. In your back office's Performance page, set each "Media server" field to these virtual subdomains.

Once this is in place, Wcomm will load your images from either of these subdomains. In effect, images will come from the some folder (the main one), but the browser will open several more connection threads to your web server than it would by default, thus making the whole page load faster.

Ciphering

Ciphering means encrypting data so as to render it unreadable to unwanted eyes. Your costumers' account details, as well as your own, are protected by cyphering.

Here you can choose the algorithm you prefer:

• • Use Rijndael with mcrypt lib. Default choice. Fast and secure, but requires you to have the Mcrypt extension installed with PHP.
• • Keep the custom BlowFish class. Better security, but performance takes a toll, as it takes more time to validate the authentication, for each page load. Your customers might appreciate the added security, but might not like the time spent waiting for the page to load – although the time difference is really unnoticeable to most.

Therefore, choose wisely. If you change this configuration, all cookies will be reset.

Caching

Your server's cache stores static versions of your dynamic web page, in order to serve these to your customers and thus reduce server load and compiling time.

Most of the time, you should first check with your web host about this setting, as it requires special settings on the server.

This section enables you to choose to enable caching, and then choose the caching method:

• • File system. The static files are simply stored as any other file, on your server. This displays a field set to "1" by default. This is the file-system directory depth. Only change this value when you know what you are doing.
• • Memcached. A distributed caching system. Very effective, above all with multiple servers, but you need to make sure that your servers/hosts support it – most probably, if your PHP configuration features the Memcached PECL extension, you are good to go (you can download it here: http://pecl.php.net/package/memcache). You can add Memcached servers by clicking on the "Add server" link.
• • APC. Alternative PHP Cache is free, open and robust, but only works with one server – which is the usual case when you start your online business. Again, check for the availability of the APC PECL extension on your server: http://pecl.php.net/package/APC)
• • Xcache. Xcache is a new cache system, which is specific to the Lighttpd server – hence, it will not work with the popular Apache server. Read more about it at http://xcache.lighttpd.net/)

E-Mail Parameters

Your shop sends many messages throughout all the steps of registration and placing an order. Here, you can configure how these messages will be sent, and what are the messages that were sent.

Wcomm Cloud user?

If you are using Wcomm Cloud for your online store, there are some specific information you need to know about your email configuration.

E-mail

The first section of the page presents you with a list of all the e-mails that were sent from Wcomm, with the recipient, the template used, the language of the message, the subject of the e-mail and the status of the action.

Email

This is where you decide how your emails are sent and received.

The form has three sets of options:

• • Send email to. This is a front-end setting. At the end of the checkout process, a client can leave a message to your staff. You can choose to whom this message will be sent by selecting from the drop-down list.
• • Email parameters: how emails are technically sent. Choose among the three. See below for more information.
• • Email format: how email are visually sent. Choose among the three. See below for more information.
• • Log Emails. Disable if you no longer want to keep track of the emails sent by your shop, as shown in the Email section above.

Technical configuration

Configure Wcomm to send emails to your customers. We strongly advise you that you consult your web host to determine which settings to use for this feature. The options are:

• • Never send e-mails. Keep this setting for testing purpose. Once your shop is public, you should never use this setting.
• • Use the PHP mail() function. This option is recommended by default. In the event that this does not work, then use the SMPT option below.
• • Set my own SMTP parameters. In this case, a new section appears, with more fields. The information for these fields should be provided by your web host: mail domain name, SMTP server, SMTP user, etc. Make sure to transcribe exactly what your web host provides you with.

The SMTP configuration information can be provided to you either by:

• • Your system administrator,
• • Your host,
• • Your ISP,
• • Your e-mail provider.

Your web host can tell you whether or not your username is mandatory, as well as the password information, and the encryption to use.

For example, in the case of Gmail (the e-mail service offered by Google), you might have to enter information such as the following one:

• • SMTP server: smtp.gmail.com
• • User: [email protected] (example)
• • Password: RT22UE87 (example)
• • Encryption: SSL
• • Port: 465

Visual configuration

There are two formats available for e-mails: HTML is great to look at, but might not work everywhere; text is dull to look at, but work everywhere.

You can choose to use only one of the two, or both. Both is the recommended way.

Test your email configuration

Once you have configured your e-mails using one of the two available methods, enter your own e-mail address in this section, then click the "Send an e-mail test" button.
Now check the inbox of the address provided to verify that you indeed have received the test e-mail, in the correct format. If you have not received it, update your configuration with the correct information.

Multistore Parameters

This page is only available when you enable the multistore feature.

Turning your single-shop Wcomm installation into a multi-shop one is very simple:

• 1. Go to the "Preferences" menu and select the "General" page.
• 2. Find the "Enable multistore" option, select "Yes".
• 3. Save your changes.

The "Advanced Parameters" menu will now feature the "Multistore" page, which is presented in details in the "Managing multiple shops" chapter of this guide.

CSV Import Parameters

The CSV import page enables you to easily fill your product catalog when you have a very large amount of products, or to import data that you exported and converted from another e-commerce tool.

CSV is an acronym of "Comma-separated values". It is a popular plain-text format when there is a need to import, export or simply store data in a non-proprietary format. Almost all data handling tool support CSV format, in various incarnations. You can read more about the CSV format on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_values)

The import process requires preparation, and starts with a form made of primary settings:

• • What kind of entity would you like to import?. Entities are the types of data that you can import. The "Available fields" on the right updates when you choose an entity, so that you know the kind of data that your CSV file should contain. Wcomm enables you to import the following types of data:
  • 1. Categories,
  • 2. Products,
  • 3. Combinations,
  • 4. Customers,
  • 5. Addresses,
  • 6. Manufacturers,
  • 7. Suppliers,
  • 8. Aliases,
  • 9. Supply orders (if Advanced Stock Management is enabled),
  • 10. Supply order details (if Advanced Stock Management is enabled).
• • Select a CSV file to import. You can import more than one file at a time, but make sure that they all contain the same type of data.
  You can download sample files for each type of data from the "Download sample CSV files" section on the right. This helps you compare these sample files with your own files, so that you can make sure that the files you are about to import are indeed ready to be imported to Wcomm. These files are actually stored in the /docs/csv_import folder of your installation of Wcomm.
• • Language of the file. Data can only be imported for a single language at a time. If your data exists in more than one language, you should split it into as many files.
• • ISO-8859-1 encoded file?. By default, the import files should use UTF-8 encoding. But if your files use ISO-8859-1 and you would rather not convert them, you can check this box.
• • Field separator. Not all CSV file use commas to separate their values: some use tabulations, others semicolons, etc. You can indicate what your files use in this field.
• • Multiple value separator. When an attribute can support more than one value, these values need to be separated with a specific separator. After reviewing your files, indicate your separator here.
• • Delete all ___ before import. This option will erase all previously existing entries of the type of data you are importing. Thus you will start with a clean slate.
• • Use product reference as key. Product import only. You can choose to have the product key be determined by Wcomm, or instead use the product's reference as the ID. In this case, make sure the file does contain references for all your importer products.
• • Skip thumbnails regeneration. Category and product import only. You can choose to have Wcomm regenerate the thumbnails that are linked from your CSV file (in the "Image URL" or "Image URLs" fields).
• • Force all ID numbers. You can either keep the imported IDs, or let the importer auto-increment them.

When changing the Entity setting, the section on the right, titled "Available fields", changes to present the expected data fields. Although the importing tool helps you by taking care of matching your file's fields with Wcomm's, you should strive to make your data more import-friendly by following the naming scheme and order of the presented fields. If not, the import will be more tedious, but not impossible.
Some fields have a little information popup available (represented by a "i" logo), which you can display by hovering the mouse cursor over it. They mostly pertain to Wcomm's multistore or advanced stock management features. Make sure to read them all in order to better build/edit your data files.

Data format

Imported data file must be in text-file, using a CSV-based format and the accompanying .csv file extension. We recommend using a semicolon ";" as a field separator. If you textual data (product description and such) contains semicolons, you should either remove them, or choose another separator in the "Field separator" option.

You can create a CSV file using any text editor (we recommend Notepad++: http://notepad-plus-plus.org), but we do advise you to use a spreadsheet program, then save your work in the CSV format. Using a spreadsheet program enables you to have an easier and more visual grasp of your data, in comparison to the plain text file. You can use the commercial Microsoft Excel (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/)or the free OpenOffice.org http://www.openoffice.org/ )Calc.

Here is a sample import file, with a list of products: Download CSV Files Now

"Enabled";"Name";"Categories";"Price";"Tax rule ID";"Buying price";"On sale";"Reference";"Weight";"Quantity";"Short desc.";"Long desc";"Images URL" 1;"Test";"1,2,3";130;1;75;0;"PROD-TEST";"0.500";10;"'Tis a short desc.";"This is a long description.";"http://www.mywcomm/images/product1.gif " 0;"Test 02";"1,5";110;1;65;0;"PROD-TEST2";"0.500";10;"'Tis also a short desc.";"This is a long description too.";" http://www.mywcomm/images/product2.gif "
1;"Test 03";"4,5";150;1;85;0;"PROD-TEST3";"0.500";10;"'Tis a short desc. again";"This is also a long description.";" http://www.mywcomm/images/product3.gif "

Note that this is only a regular sample files built for this demonstration; it is purposefully not optimized for Wcomm importation. If you need a sample file you can learn from, use the ones you can download from the "Upload" button's form.

The first row should be a descriptive name for the data column (you will be able to skip it during the import process). There must be the same number of columns on each row.

You should remember that:

• • The price column will use your store's default currency.
• • Categories are to be specified using their existing IDs (so you should have imported them first), and separated with a comma (by default).
• • The URL of the image must be an absolute link. In other words, it should be the link that may be used in a web browser in order to display the image.
• • The file's character encoding should be UTF-8. If not, use ISO-8859-1 and check the "ISO-8859-1 encoded file?" option.
• • Dates use the ISO 8601 format, without a time zone designator (the time zone is the one for your store): 2013-06-21 15:07:27.

Uploading the file

Once you have all your data in CSV format, you can upload them to your store's database using the form in this page.

You have two ways to register files to import:

• • Using your browser: click the "Add file" button, find your file then validate. Do this as many times as necessary to list all your import files.
• • Using your FTP client: upload the files in the /admin-dev/import folder of your Wcomm installation. Reload the import page: the "Choose from history/FTP" button should now indicate a number. Click the button to display the list of available files (including the ones you previously uploaded using the browser), then click the "Use" button for the file you wish to import.

Once your files are all listed in the "Select your CSV file" section, you can proceed with the rest of the form:

• 1. Select the type of data contained in your file, using the drop-down list named "What kind of Entity would you like to import?". Once you have selected the type of data, the list of the available fields appears on the right, which helps you refine your CSV file – at least for the order of the columns, which will soon prove handy.
• 2. Select the language of the imported content. If the target language is not available, you must install it first, in the "Languages" page under the "Localization" menu.
• 3. Select the file encoding. Simply indicate if the file uses ISO-8859-1 or not. If not, then it is assumed the files use UTF-8.
• 4. Select the field separators. We suggest that you leave the default values ("field separator" with a semicolon ";", "multiple value separators" with a comma ","). But obviously, if your CSV file is built differently, you should change these values accordingly.
• 5. If you want to remove all the products in your catalog before importing, select the appropriate option.
• 6. Once all your choices have been made, click "Next step".

All import files are uploaded directly in the admin folder's /import sub-folder. If the CSV File drop-down menu gets too crowded, you can delete old imports directly using your FTP client.

When clicking the "Next step" button, the page reloads with the data mapping tool. This interface helps you map you file's data columns with the ones required by Wcomm.

Presented in this table are the rows from your CSV file, placed under arbitrary columns matched to Wcomm's database needs. It is up to you to make sure that all the columns from your CSV file are matched with the correct column header, using each header's drop-down selector, so as to import your content correctly.

For instance, with our sample file:

• • First column. We marked it as "Enabled", Wcomm presents "ID" as a header. Click on the header's drop-down menu, and select "Active (0/1)".
• • Second column. Marked "Name", header indicates "Active (0/1)". Let's change the header for "Name *".
• • Third column. You get the idea...

The screen cannot contain more than 6 columns, so click the ❯ and ❰ buttons to see the other columns, and make sure to match them all correctly

In our example, we used the first row as for column names. Since we do not want these imported, enter "1" in the "Lines to skip" text-field.

Once you are done matching your columns, click the "Import .CSV data" button (bottom right-hand corner of the screen), and Wcomm will start the importing process. When the process is done, you are sent to the main screen, which should either confirm that everything has indeed been imported, or give you a notice of all the encountered problems. In this second case, you should review your CVS file and make sure to correct everything.

Mapping configurations

The mapping process can be a tedious task if you cannot customize your CSV files columns order according to that used by the Wcomm importer, and even more so if you have to do that repeatedly or frequently. That is why Wcomm includes a small tool to save the current mapping order that you have set up using all the headers drop-down selectors.

The tool is a simple field at the top of the matching tool. You can do the three basic actions (only one if there is no mapping configuration saved yet):

• • Saving. Enter a descriptive name in the field, and click "Save". The interface updates to feature the saved configuration in its drop-down list.
• • Loading. Select a mapping configuration in the drop-down list, and click "Load".
• • Deleting. Select a mapping configuration in the drop-down list, and click "Delete".

DB Backup

A backup is the action of saving the content of your database into files that you store in a safe place. The point is that you can revert to them in case your database fails on you.

You must perform regular backups of your shop, so that in case of a crash, you can reboot your shop quickly and in the best conditions. The database contains all the information in your shop, many of which are indispensable for Wcomm to work correctly – including your products, categories and other data you added since the installation, but not your images for instance.

The more often you perform backup, the safer you are. Once a week is a minimal frequency.

To create database backups of your shop, you have several solutions. You can use tools such as phpMyAdmin (reserved for advanced users), or use the one integrated into Wcomm: the "DB backup" page.

The page starts with two big notices. You should read both completely in order to have a better idea of what the page does:

• • The "Disclaimer" section gives you a series of reminders about backups, which you should read every time you make a backup. The section ends with the "I have read the disclaimer, please create a new backup" button, which you have to click in order to create a backup. Once created, the backup appears in a new "Download section" at the top of the page (click the button in order to download the backup file to your computer), and in the list below the notices.
• • The "How to restore" section gives you tips on how to get your data back into Wcomm in case of failure. You should commit this to memory, or at least save this information somewhere in case a database crash makes it impossible for you to access the Wcomm administration – and thus the DB backup page – again.

The table below the notices lists all the backups that have already been made, indicating the date of creation, age, file name and size.
At the right of each row are the available actions:

• • View. Enables you to download this backup.
• • Delete. Enables you to delete this backup. Be careful, there is no turning back.

After each backup process, you should download the generated backup file by clicking on its "View" icon, or simply by using the link in the notification box at the top. Put your backup file in a safe place, for you might need it at any given time. Furthermore, you can find these backups directly on your server, in the /backup folder, under your custom-named /admin folder.

Your database is saved using the standard SQL format and its .sql file extension, and compressed using the BZip2 algorithm (simply put, a variant of the popular Zip format. Read more (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bzip2) and its .bz2 file extension. That gives a file archive with the .sql.bz2 file extension

Backup Options

At the bottom of the screen, two options are available:

• • Ignore statistics tables. Wcomm stores your site's statistics in a handful of database tables, and these can grow big quite quickly. While it can be sound to keep your stats in a safe place, they also make for huge files to download, while you are probably more interested in a backup of your products, categories, customers, orders, etc. By default, Wcomm backups all tables, but if you are short on disk space on your web server, change this option to "Yes".
• • Drop existing tables during import. When importing a backup file, the system can either overwrite the existing live tables with the content of the ones that were backed up, or delete all existing in order to replace them with the content of the backup. The first case can result in doubles, which is why this option is enabled by default.

SQL Manager

The SQL manager is a complex feature, which should be reserved to technical people who know how to explore a database using the SQL language. In return for this complexity, it can be extremely powerful and prove immensely useful to those who master it.

This tool enables you to perform SQL queries directly on the Wcomm database, and save them for use at any later time. Indeed, Wcomm presents its database data in many ways, but you might need something more, or more simply, something rawer than Wcomm's clean interface. Using the SQL manager you can perform complex queries which build upon tables of data in the way YOU need them.
For instance, using this tool and your knowledge of SQL, you could create a reusable query giving you an updated list of the clients who are subscribed to your newsletter, or get a list of products in HTML or CSV format.

For security reasons, some types of queries are not allowed: UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE TABLE, DROP, etc. In short, you can only read data (SELECT query).

Also, secure keys or passwords are hidden (***********).

Creating a new query

As usual, the "Add New" button leads to the creation form. It has two main fields:

• • SQL query name. Make the name as long and descriptive as necessary.
• • SQL query. The SQL query itself. You are free to perform JOINs or other intricate selections.

Additionally, the "List of MySQL Tables" section helps you explore the database, and makes it easier for you to build your queries. It gives you a handy and clickable selector of all the currently available database tables. Select a table to make Wcomm display its attributes and types, then click "Add attribute to SQL query" to send its name into the "Request" field.

Saving the form sends you back to the main page, with its list of queries.

Starting a query

Each saved query in the table has four icons to the right of its row:

• • Export. Performs the query, and has it downloaded by you in CSV format.
• • View. Performs the query, and has it displayed in an HTML table, right within the Wcomm interface.
• • Edit. You can edit a query as often as necessary, in order to refine it and get better results.
• • Delete. Once a query is not used anymore (or simply because it does not work), you can delete it by clicking this button and confirming your choice.

Settings

There is only one setting at this time:

• • Select your default file encoding. You can configure the character encoding of the downloaded CSV file. The default, UTF-8, is recommended, but you can select ISO-8859-1 if need be.

Some sample queries

The possibilities are endless, but here are a few sample queries to help you build your own.

Listing all the e-mails address of all the customers

SELECT email FROM ps_customer

Listing all the e-mails address of all the customers who are subscribed to your newsletter

SELECT email
FROM ps_customer
WHERE newsletter = 1

Listing all the products which are active and have a description in French (id_lang = 4)

SELECT p.id_product, pl.name, pl.link_rewrite, pl.description
FROM ps_product p
LEFT JOIN ps_product_lang pl ON (p.id_product = pl.id_product)
WHERE p.active = 1
AND pl.id_lang = 4

Listing all the orders, with details about carrier, currency, payment, total and date

SELECT o.`id_order` AS `id`,
CONCAT(LEFT(c.`firstname`, 1), '. ', c.`lastname`) AS `Customer`,
ca.`name` AS `Carrier`,
cu.`name` AS `Currency`,
o.`payment`, CONCAT(o.`total_paid_real`, ' ', cu.`sign`) AS `Total`,
o.`date_add` AS `Date`
FROM `ps_orders` o
LEFT JOIN `ps_customer` c ON (o.`id_customer` = c.`id_customer`)
LEFT JOIN `ps_carrier` ca ON (o.id_carrier = ca.id_carrier)
LEFT JOIN `ps_currency` cu ON (o.`id_currency` = cu.`id_currency`)

Logs Parameters

Errors happen. Most of the time, you are not aware of them because Wcomm handles them silently. But you might want to know about them, in order to be able to correct the most regular ones, and ensure a better stability for your shop.

The "Logs" page is where you can have a look at the PHP errors which plague your shop. They are listed in the page's central table, and are presented in 4 levels:

• • 1: Informative only. Run-time notices. Indicate that the script encountered something that could indicate an error, but could also happen in the normal course of running a script.
• • 2: Warning. Run-time warnings (non-fatal errors). Execution of the script is not halted.
• • 3: Error.
• • 4: Major issue (crash)!. Fatal run-time errors. These indicate errors that cannot be recovered from, such as a memory allocation problem. The execution of the script is halted.

These explanations are the official ones from the PHP manual. Read more:
(http://www.php.net/manual/en/errorfunc.constants.php

Logs by e-mail

The error levels also serve as values for the "Logs by e-mail" feature. Wcomm adds one last value, 5, which indicates that the administrator does not want to receive any notification, either for minor or major errors.

The error logging tool enables you to receive an e-mail notification when an error occurs. Notifications are sent to the shop owner's e-mail address, and you can configure the degree of importance at which you should start receiving such e-mails:

• • "1" if you want to know about everything, even the tiniest information.
• • "3" if you only want to know about issues (errors and major issues).
• • "4" if you only want to keep the major issues.
• • "5" is the default, meaning that no notification is sent.

Webservice Parameters

In this page, you can enable your shop's webservice, so that third-party tools can access your data. This potentially makes it possible for interesting tools to help you or your customers make better use of your shop (such as mobile applications).

A web service is a method of communication between two electronic devices over a network. It relies on a known set of methods, formats and access rights, so as be able to use the webservice's content on any other authorized tool, and build upon the original content. Read more about it on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_service

The page starts by listing the currently existing webservice keys in a table, if there is any. A webservice key is a unique access that you grant to a developer, which can be used to tie a tool to your shop. Share them sparingly, as you might not always want everyone to access your data.

Not any app can access your shop through the Wcomm webservice: you decide which can, and what they are allowed to do. Every app has a unique connection key, with specific access rights.

Adding a new key

The "Add new" button takes you to the webservice key creation form:

• • Key. A unique key. You can either create your own, or choose to use a generated one, for instance by clicking the "Generate" button or by using any online key generator. Generated keys are most of the time safer, because they are harder to guess.
• • Key description. A reminder of who that key is for, and what it gives access to.
• • Status. You can disable a key anytime. This enables you to only temporarily grant access to your data from a certain key.
• • Permissions. You do not have to share ALL your data with each key. You can choose among a wide array of permissions, either by section or by type of access. You might want some applications to only be able to view a handful of items, while some others (for instance, ones that you would use to manage the shop remotely) should be able to edit and delete just about everything. Choose wisely.

Configuration

For security reasons, make sure your shop's server supports secure SSL connection!

The configuration is pretty easy:

• • Enable Wcomm's webservice. If you do not want anyone to access your shop through third-party tools and applications, just keep it disabled.
• • Enable CGI mode for PHP. The CGI mode is a special setting for the Apache server, where you tell it to use PHP as a CGI script rather than an Apache module. While the CGI mode has a reputation of being more secure, it has been found to have a security flaw as recently as May 2012. Ask your web host for advices.

Administering the back office

The "Administration" menu contains a special set of preference pages: rather than giving options that impact the customer or your front-end, they are all about the inner workings of your shop, and even your business itself. In effect, these pages enable you to set how the Wcomm software will work for you, and how you and your team will be able to use it.

Administration Menus Configuration

Wcomm's back office menu organization is not set in stone: while the default arrangement is built in order to have the most useful pages readily available, you might have a different opinion, and may want to change the organization, in part or in full.

This administration page enables you to move, edit, disable and even create pages.

Moving menus

Menus can be moved directly from the list. You can either click on the arrows in the "Position" column, or drag the row itself and drop it in the position you want it to have. As soon as you drop the row, Wcomm saves the location automatically. You can drag the row when the mouse cursor is over the "Position" column.

You can disable a menu simply by clicking on the green "Yes" in the "Enabled" column. Note that this will disable the menu for all back office users. If you want to hide a menu from a specific set of users, edit their profile's permissions, in the "Permissions" administration page.

Moving pages

To access a menu's pages, click the "Details" action in the action menu. A new list appears with the pages in that menu, with the same columns.
Pages can be moved within a menu directly from the list. You can either click on the arrows in the "Position" column, or drag the row itself and drop it in the position you want it to have. As soon as you drop the row, Wcomm saves the location automatically. You can drag the row when the mouse cursor is over the "Position" column.

You can also move a page to a different menu altogether. This cannot be done directly from the list; you must open the page's editing form, where you will find the "Parent" option. Change that option to another menu name, save your changes, and when returning to the "Menus" page, the page will have moved menu.

You can disable a page simply by clicking on the green "Yes" in the "Enabled" column. Note that this will disable the page for all back office users. If you want to hide a page from a specific set of users, edit their profile's permissions, in the "Permissions" administration page.

Creating a new page or menu

Click on the "Add New Menu" button to reach the page creation form.

This form has a handful option, some of which might prove complicated:

• • Name.Give it a unique name, because it will serve as an internal identifier.
• • Class. In short, a Wcomm back office page is based on specific internal PHP files, which are called "admin controllers", and are most often stored in the /controllers/admin folder of your Wcomm installation. When creating a new page, you must know which controller to target, and most importantly the name of its class – which is the name of its PHP file.
  For instance, if you want to create a page displaying Wcomm's backup administration page, you must first find its controller name (in this case, AdminBackupController), and copy it in the "Class" field.
• • Module. In some cases, the administration controller for which you want to create a page comes from a module. In that case, you must also indicate the identifier for the module (in most cases, its folder name) and copy it in the "Module" field, in lowercase. This way, Wcomm will know that it should not look for the controller in the /controllers/admin folder, but rather in the /modules/NAME-OF-THE-MODULE/ folder.
• • Status. You can disable a page at any time, but do note that it affects all the back office users.
• • Parent. You can choose any menu, but for consistency's sake, make sure to pick one to which the page you are creating is relevant.

If you want to create a new menu page, choose "Home" as the parent.

Administration Preferences

The "Preferences" administration page contains general options and settings on the way Wcomm itself works. It has four sections.

General

This section is for the more general settings:

• • Automatically check for module updates. You can ask Wcomm to regularly check if there are new versions of your modules available from the Addons website. If so, the "Modules" page will display a "Update it!" button for installed modules, right next to their "Uninstall" button.
• • Check the IP address on the cookie. This is an added security measure: you can tell Wcomm to check that the user comes from the IP stored in his or her browser's cookie.
• • Lifetime of the Front Office cookie. By default, the longevity of a Wcomm cookie is 480 hours (20 days). You can reduce it if you feel your security needs it.
• • Lifetime of the Back Office cookie. By default, the longevity of a Wcomm cookie is 480 hours (20 days). You can reduce it if you feel your security needs it.

Upload quota

This page helps you define the authorized size of uploaded files from your own team – not from your customers.

There are three options, one being general and the two others being more specific:

• • Maximum size for attachment. The default value is directly taken from your server's settings, but you can lower it if necessary.
• • Maximum size for a downloadable product. If you sell virtual products (services, booking and downloadable products), this setting can limit the size of the files your team can upload – and thus the size of the final product. Plan in advance so that you never leave one of your team members blocked.
• • Maximum size for a product's image. Likewise, you can limit the size of image that you or your team can upload to your shop. This can serve as a handy reminder that team-members should strive to reduce the size of image, as it is often not useful to upload anything more than 600x600 (which is roughly 200 kB when correctly compressed). See the "Images" preferences page for the image sizes your shop is set to use. This has the added benefit of saving on both server space and bandwidth usage, as well as processor power (since Wcomm resizes uploaded image to give you thumbnails and more).

Help

This option has been removed in Wcomm 1.6.0.11.

To help you with your everyday usage of Wcomm, the development team has added many tips & tricks within the interface.

You can have them displayed using one of these two options:

• • Back Office help boxes. This will display yellow help boxes below some of the more obscure form fields.
• • Hide optimization tips. This will display a box with configuration tips on the homepage of the Wcomm back-office

Notifications

Notifications are numbered bubbles that are displayed at the very top of any administration page when you have loaded it, right next to the shop's name. They display the number of new items since the last time you clicked on them.

You can choose not to receive them for some content types:

• • Show notifications for new orders. Clicking it display a larger bubble containing the name of the customers that registered since last time. From there on, you can either open any customer's single page, or open the "Customers" page to get the complete list.
• • Show notifications for new customers. Clicking it display a larger bubble containing the numbers, amounts and customer names for the order that were last placed on your shop. From there on, you can either open any order's single page, or open the "Orders" page to get the complete list.
• • Show notifications for new messages. Clicking it display a larger bubble containing the e-mail of the persons who last sent you a message using the contact form on your shop. From there on, you can either open any message, or open the "Customer Service" page to get the complete list.

Employee Profiles

Wcomm enables you to assign specific duties and rights to each employee who helps you manage the online shop. For example, the administrator will have access to the entire store, without restriction, while an employee can only have access to the catalog or orders.

By default, Wcomm has 4 profiles ready to use:

• • SuperAdmin. The highest rank. It has all the rights and can access everything on the Wcomm installation.
• • Logistician. Those in charge of packing and sending orders. Can only access the orders, shipping and stock management pages, and part of the catalog and customer pages.
• • Translator. Those who are tasked in translating your shop's textual content. Can access products and categories, CMS content and the "Translations" page.
• • Salesman. Your salespersons, if any. In addition to the translator's access rights, can also access the customer pages, the modules and webservice, and some stats.

You can see the details of the access rights by reviewing each profile in the "Permissions" page (see below).

The SuperAdmin profile cannot be deleted, only renamed.

There should be at least one employee with a SuperAdmin profile.

Adding a new profile

You can add as many profiles as needed.

Adding a new profile is pretty straightforward: simply click the "Add new" button, enter a unique name for the new profile, and save.

The more complex part comes when setting the new profiles access rights. This is done in the "Permissions" page.

Employees Accounts Configuration

The "Employees" administration page lists all the user accounts that have access to your shop's back office. By default you will find the account that was created during the store's installation, which is automatically set as SuperAdmin. The SuperAdmin has access to all of Wcomm's features without restriction.

You should make sure to create a new employee account for every actual employee that has anything to do you with your online business. This means that you should never have a general use account that everyone can use, because you need to keep track of who did what on your shop. Indeed, employees can edit orders, accept payments and refund customers, and you need to know who did what. Having a personal administration account for each employee is a good way for you to ensure that your team manages your shop responsibly.

Adding a new employee

The "Add New" button takes you to the employee creation form.

It has a dozen settings:

• • First name and Last name. The name does not appear to customers, but is very helpful when you need to know who did what on your shop.
• • Email address. If allowed to, the employee will receive customer's e-mails and Wcomm's notifications on this address. It is also used as the account's login identifier.
• • Password. Try your best to not make it obvious. You do not want an employee's account to be used by unknown people.
• • Subscribe to Wcomm newsletter. Subscribe to Wcomm newsletter to receive tips and tricks from the Wcomm team.
• • Default page. You can decide which page the user sees right after logging in. This could be the Stats page for SuperAdmins, or the Orders page for salespersons.
• • Language. The default language, since your business might be done in English, but your logisticians might be from another country. Make sure to add the necessary languages, using the "Languages" page under the "Localization" menu.
• • Theme. The back office of Wcomm can use a different theme than the default one. You can choose which one to use here.
• • Admin menu orientation. Each employee can set his own way of displaying the menu: at the top of the screen, or on the left.
• • Active. You can temporarily and definitively disable an account. This enables you to create temporary accounts, for instance when you need help during the holidays or the shopping season.
• • Permission profile. It is very important that you assign a correct profile to each employee account. A profile is tied to a set of permissions and access rights, and you should get to know the existing ones, listed in the "Profiles" page under the "Administration" menu (see below for more information). The profile determines which part of your shop's back office the employee has access to; for instance, when the employee logs in, only the pages/menus that have been configured as accessible to his or her profile will be displayed. This is a very important setting.

Employees options

The section at the bottom of the "Employees" page, right below the employees list, has two options available:

• • Password regeneration. Enables you to set the frequency at which an employee can change his or her password.
• • Memorize the language used in Admin panel forms. If "Yes", enables employees to save their own default form language.
• • Memorize the language used in Admin panel forms. If "Yes", enables employees to save their own default form language.

Merchant Expertise

This page is generated by the module of the same name. It was specifically designed to help Wcomm users keep track of their progress as e-merchants, see how much they’ve grown and progressed over the days, months and years. It is installed by default.

This module adds system of badges and points, broken down into three levels, all of which are integral to success in the e-commerce world:

• • Features. Your use of key e-commerce features such as Site Performance, Catalog Size, Employees and SEO.
• • Achievements. Your completion of specific key e-commerce goals such as number of Customers, Orders and Revenue.
• • International. Tracks your presence in key International Markets such as the Americas, Oceania, Asia, Europe, Africa and Maghreb.

The more progress your store makes, the more badges and points you earn. There is no need to submit any information or fill out any forms. We know how busy you are; everything is done automatically. Use this tool to drive your business, view your progress and reflect on your great achievements.

Profile permissions

Permissions are the central part of Wcomm's profiles. They enable you to see very precisely what an employee account can and cannot do on your shop.

The "Permissions" administration page is built using tabs:

• • On the left of the screen, as many tabs as there are available profiles.
• • On the remaining right of the screen, Wcomm display the clicked profile's permissions. This tab contains two tables side by side.

When you click any profile (except SuperAdmin), the two tables appear to give you access to their criteria:

• • On the left, menu-related permissions: you can decide what the profile can do with menus. In effect, you could prevent a profile from editing the content of a page, or even hide the menu entirely.
• • On the right, module-related permissions: while you might allow some profiles to see the available modules, you might prefer that only the most trustworthy employees should be able to configure some key modules. Since version 1.6.0.11, you also indicate if they can uninstall a module.

For each of the menu criteria, you have 5 options:

• • View. Employee can view information.
• • Add. Employee can add new information.
• • Edit. Employee can change information.
• • Delete. Employee can delete information.
• • All. Enable all the above options for the current row.

Meanwhile, the module criteria have only 2 options:

• • View. Employee can view the module's configuration.
• • Configure. Employee can configure the module.
• • Uninstall. New in 1.6.0.11. Employee can uninstall the module.

The SuperAdmin permissions cannot be changed: the profile simply has all the rights for every criterion.

Setting permissions for a new profile

For this example we will create a new profile, "Order Preparer". First create the profile in the "Profiles" page, by filling the "Name" field. As soon as it is saved, it appears in the list of profiles.

Then you need to assign permissions to this new profile. Go to the "Permissions" page, and click on the tab for the new profile: the list of criteria appears. By default, a new profile has access to none of the back office pages, and can only view the impact of some modules on the back office (for the pages he or she has permissions to view).

You have two ways to fill the criteria, depending on the limits or freedom you want the profile to have:

• • Click the permission checkboxes one by one until it has enough access rights to get the job done.
• • Have all the checkboxes checked, then remove permissions one by one until it has only the ones necessary.

You have two ways to have checkboxes checked in batches:

• • Per column: at the top of each column, a checkbox makes it possible to have all of the column's checkboxes checked at once. Unchecking it unchecks all the currently checked boxes.
• • Per row: if you click on the "All" checkbox for a given row, all the checkboxes this row will be checked. Unchecking it unchecks all the currently checked boxes.

You can then uncheck selected rows rather than spending time checking each needed rows one by one.

To avoid mistakes during the configuration of your permissions, Wcomm automatically saves your settings every time you make a change. This means you do not have to click any "Save" button. Once you have assigned the profile its rights, you can return to the "Employees" administration page and start assigning that new profile to the employees who need it.

Quick Access Configuration

Wcomm has handy shortcuts to your most important pages, which can be accessed through the "Quick Access" menu, at the top right of every page of the Wcomm back office (right next to the username).

The "Quick Access" administration page enables you to create customized shortcuts, and make your navigation within the administration area even more relevant to you and your team

The page displays all the shortcuts that have already been created. By default, they are:

• • New category. This special link takes you directly to the category creation form.
• • New product. This special link takes you directly to the product creation page.
• • New voucher. This special link takes you directly to the voucher/cart rule creation page.

Pages that open in a new tab/window will have a green "Enabled" in the "New window" column.

You can create as many shortcuts as needed – just do not overdo it, obviously, since this would render the "Quick access" menu slower to read.

Adding a new link

Let's create a shortcut the order creation page, from which you can create a new order, and even add new customers and their addresses on the fly.

As usual, clicking the "Add New" button takes you to the creation form:

• • Name. Give the shortcut a unique name. Make it short and descriptive.
• • URL. Indicate the page's address. Here is how you can use even pages with complex links as quick links:
  • 1. While keeping the link creation page open, go to the "Orders" page under the "Orders" menu in a new browser tab.
  • 2. Copy its web address from the browser's address bar. For instance, http://www.mywcomm.com/admin8945/index.php?controller=AdminOrders&token=f326b0419984706791c03f7e96599147.
  • 3. Remove the whole &token=xxx part and keep the specific bits (i.e., do not keep the domain and /admin8945 folder). In our case: index.php?controller=AdminOrders.
  • 4. Paste the result in the "URL" field of the creation form.
• • Open in new window. Indicate whether you want to have this tab open in a new window or not. In general, link to the back office should be kept within the same tab/window, and links leading outside of the back office (front office, other site altogether) should open in a new window/tab.

Note that you can create links to other websites, for instance your PayPal account or your webmail. Simply paste the complete URL in the "URL" field, including the http:// prefix.

Understanding Statistics

One of the greatest aspects of Wcomm is its unrivaled power in digging up information on customer behavior. Let's see how this is done.

Contrary to the popular saying, statistics are not akin to "lies and damned lies". The numbers Wcomm provides you with are rock-solid information which you can count on to improve your shop, change the way products are presented or adapt their prices, remove products that do not sell or simply push forward those that do. All this and more can be deduced from the data that Wcomm automatically gathers for you, and which is presented in a dozen of entries, with graphics and data tables helping you making decisions.
The point to all this is to help you make a solid decision when you need to target your audience.

In addition to this, Wcomm has a built-in referrer management system, which makes it possible for you to easily create affiliate campaigns.

Statistics

This section presents in details the usefulness of the various available statistics. By clicking on each of the categories at your disposal in the sidebar of the "Stats" page, the main page reloads with the most current numbers.
For some of the stats, a complete explanation is given, helping you understand the data given to you so that you can use the information to improve your shop and its conversion rate.

Main interface

By default, the page displays the Stats Dashboard, an overview of the main numbers gathered by Wcomm stat system since you launched your online shop.

At the top of the page is a single bar which helps you choose the period of time for the currently displayed statistics. Three sets of options are available:

• • Current day, month or year.
• • Previous day, month or year.
• • Precise date selection.

The dashboard contains 8 sections:

• • The main statistics. This truly is the heart of your statistics. Within a single table, Wcomm gives an overview of the most important numbers that were gathered for the selected period of time: visitors, new registrations, new orders, number of items bought for all orders combined, percentage of registration per visitors, percentage of orders per visitors, amount of used coupons, amount of all sales combined.
  You can change the granularity using the drop-down selector, at the top right of the section. The available period sizes are: daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly.
  The three lines at the bottom of the table are not affected by the selected period: total, average and forecast numbers enable you get a better estimate of where your shop is headed to.
• • Conversion. This section gives you an idea of how much a visitor or a registered customer are worth on your shop, based the number of orders they place, basically. It is a nice indicator of how your shop is doing.
  Note: the difference between a "cart" and "full cart" is that a cart is a visitor's cart, with products and not much else, while a full cart is a cart with products AND a shipping address AND a chosen carrier -- in short, the cart has been almost fully through the checkout process, all that's left to do is actually pay for it all.
• • Payment distribution. This section presents which payment methods are most often chosen by your paying customers. Based on these figures, you may wish to adapt your shop or your business in order to better cater for the most popular methods, or to push forward a specific method that you would prefer that your customers choose.
  Using the "Zone" drop-down selector at top right of the section, you can limit the numbers to a specific geographical zone, and thus see which method works best or worst depending on the region.
• • Category distribution. This section gives category-specific information. For each category, it presents you with useful numbers: products, sales, percentage of global for the whole shop, percentage of sales for the whole shop, average product price. If you notice that a category is way more successful than others, you might want to push your promotion efforts on it. On the other hand, you could try bolstering the numbers of disappointing category by releasing vouchers or other doing other promotional actions... Using the "Zone" drop-down selector at top right of the section, you can limit the numbers to a specific geographical zone, and thus see which category is most successful depending on the region.
• • Language distribution. You customers can choose their preferred language when registering, and you can see the language distribution with this section. Make sure to have all your products correctly translated for at least the two most popular languages.
• • Zone distribution. You can filter other section by zones, and this section directly gives you a per-zone run down of your number of registered customers and placed sales (and their respective percentages).
• • Currency distribution. If you accept more than one currency, this section helps you see which one is the most used by your paying customers.
  Using the "Zone" drop-down selector at top right of the section, you can limit the numbers to a specific geographical zone, and thus see which currency is most successful depending on the region.
• • Attribute distribution. This is more of an internal statistic, enabling you to see which attribute and attribute group is the most used within your products.

Navigating the statistics

Most of the statistical data can be downloaded as CSV files, by clicking on the "CSV Export" button.

• • Available quantities. This section gives you an overview of the value of your current stock.
• • Best categories. This section presents your shop's performance by category. You can find out how many products in each category have been sold, the revenue generated, and the number of pages viewed. Make sure to regularly check the consistency of your results between different categories in order to adjust your shop's cohesiveness.
• • Best customers. This section lists the best customers in your shop. It displays their e-mail address, as well as the number of time they have visited the website, and how much they have spent so far. Keep an eye on this page in order to keep track of, and take care of, your best customers. By clicking on the buttons at the top of the columns, you can choose how you would like to sort this data.
• • Best suppliers. This section gives statistics on your suppliers by providing the quantities sold and the revenue generated.
• • Best vouchers. This section displays the most popular coupons, vouchers, cart rules and catalog price rules that you created and distributed, whether personally or through a promotional campaign. The table also displays the turnover, and the number of coupons used.
• • Best-selling products. This section displays your best performing products. You can view the turnover achieved, the average daily sales, number of page views, and the quantity left in your current stock. With this table, you can identify your core products and decide whether to perform actions such as increasing or decreasing your prices or giving discounts on a specific product.
• • Browsers and operating systems. This section informs you of the web browsers that visitors and customers use to browse your shop. You should verify that your shop is perfectly compatible with these browsers, or at least the three most popular ones. It also tells you if visitors are browsing your shop from their mobile devices (such as a smart-phone). If this number is significant, you should think of having a mobile version of your shop.
  Finally, you can see what operating systems your visitors are using. Make sure that your shop is fully compatible with all of your visitors' platforms.
• • Carrier distribution. This page indicates which carriers are used most by your visitors. You can filter all results by order status. If you learn that a carrier is not often used, despite being fast and efficient, it might be appropriate to display it more prominently during checkout, to increase customer satisfaction.
• • Catalog evaluation. This section gives an overview of your catalog's performance. You can find out if each product is active, or if its description is correctly entered in all of your shop's active languages. You can also see if all your products have enough images, their sales performance, and current stock status. The overall score for each product is displayed using a colored icon. You can define your criteria by filling in the table at the top of the page, then saving your settings.
• • Catalog statistics. This section contains practical information on the products sold in your online shop, and your catalog as a whole. The figures can be filtered by category using the drop-down selector at the top right of the section. You can act on your catalog's performance by considering the following indicators:
  • 1. Products available. The amount of available products in this category (by default, all categories).
  • 2. Average price (base price). Average product price in the selected category.
  • 3. Product pages viewed. Number of pages that were visited by your potential customers. Compare this data between different categories to see which has the most product views, or on the contrary which ones do not attract many customers. Use this information to make some improvements in your catalog.
  • 4. Products bought. The amount of products purchased in each category.
  • 5. Average number of page visits. The global number of visits for the products in the selected category.
  • 6. Average number of purchases. The global return for the product sales in the selected category.
  • 7. Images available. Indicates how many images are tied to the selected category's products. A quick way to know if some products lack images is when there are fewer images as there are products.
  • 8. Average number of images. Number of images divided by the number of products in the selected category.
  • 9. Products never viewed. Some of your products might never have been viewed by visitors. Check their pages to try and understand why.
  • 10. Products never purchased. Some of your products have never been bought by customers. This is a serious issue, and you should take time to understand why.
  • 11. Conversion rate. Indicates the relationship between the number of visitors and the number of purchases. It is important that this value be as high as possible.
  • 12. A table at the bottom of the page tells you what products in this category have never been purchased. You may want to consider changing their price or writing a more attractive description.
• • Customer accounts. This page displays a graph with the number of customer accounts created in your online shop. With this information, you can measure the impact of your marketing campaigns. You can see the number of visitors who subscribed but actually never purchased anything, as well as the number of customers who created an account and bought an item immediately after registering.
• • Newsletter. This page displays newsletter subscription statistics. You can use this database to keep customers informed. The newsletters usually help increase traffic to your shop. If you want to improve subscription, consider adding coupons/voucher/cart rules codes to each newsletter. You can see all of your subscribers' addresses via the "Newsletter" module, in the "Modules" page.
• • Pages not found. This page tells you which pages of your catalog people have attempted to access but could not find (resulting in what is called "HTTP 404" errors). This is useful for finding potential technical problems that may hinder your sales.
• • Product details. This page shows you all the products in your shop by the reference number, name, and available stock. You can sort your results by selecting from the drop-down menu above the product category you want to view. Click on a product to access its statistics. You can then view a chart with two sets of data: sales made and number of visits to the product page. The conversion rate of the product will also be displayed.
• • Registered Customer Information. This section is divided into 5 charts.
  • 1. Gender Distribution. You can see how your customers are distributed among the various social titles that you have set – by default, Mr., Ms. and Miss, but there can be many others, such as Dr. or Sr. Therefore, you cannot trust this graph to show you the gender distribution... unless you have reduced your social titles to just two gendered ones.
  • 2. Age Ranges. You can learn about the distribution of your customers according to their age. If you see that the age range of your customers is not what you imagined it would be, think about adjusting your marketing approach.
  • 3. Country Distribution. You can quickly consult in which countries your customers are living. This can help you focus marketing efforts on a single country.
  • 4. Currency Distribution. You can see what currencies are used to shop for items in your shop, and in what proportions.
  • 5. Language Distribution. You can see in what languages your shop is consulted most often, and thus decide whether or not you should improve your shop's translations in a given language.
• • Sales and orders. Those two graphs present the evolution of your shop's sales and orders. They can be filtered by country, using the drop-down menu at the top right.
  • 1. The first graph indicates the total number of valid orders, as well as the total number of products ordered. With this graph, you can analyze which periods gave you the biggest return in terms of quantity of orders.
  • 2. The second graph helps you visualize your sales graphically. It can analyze the periods of time when you had the greatest sales. This enables you, for instance, to have a better idea of when to start your marketing campaigns.
• • Search engine keywords. This page tells you what keywords typed into a search engine brought visitors to your online shop. This enables you to know which terms make your shop easily identifiable. Conversely you can see which keywords are absent from this list, and are thus not effective.
• • Shop search. This section presents two indicators.
  • 1. The first one is a chart which shows the distribution of keywords typed into your shop's search bar. This allows you to see which products your visitors are most looking for – and therefore, the one you should have plenty of stock of.
  • 2. The second is a table summarizing your visitors' searches. You can see which keywords are being used, how often they were typed, and how many results were available. It is important that all of your customers' requests get a result. To improve your shop, be sure to add the products that meet the customers' demands (searches) or add additional tags to your products that are easily identifiable.
• • Stats Dashboard. This is the stats homepage itself. It presents a bird's eye view of you shop's stats. Clicking this last option simply takes you back to the global stats dashboard.
• • Visitors online. This section indicates the number of visitors currently on your shop. You can see their names and the pages that they are currently looking at. The data is updated live, as visitors browse your shop.
• • Visitors origin. This page uses a graph to give you the top ten sites and search engines that have sent visitors to you. Usually, search engines play a very important role. If you create a marketing campaign by publishing articles on other sites, you can see what impact it had on your shop. Below the graph are the names of the sites that brought you your audience, with the number of visitors from each on the right hand column.
• • Visits and Visitors. This page gives you statistics on visitors to your shop and the number of times they visit. The larger the number, the more popular your shop is. The graph helps you understand the behavior of your visitors. Basically you will see how many visits your shop gets, and you can compare it to the number of visitors (Wcomm can recognize when the same person visits your shop multiple times, hence why the number of visits will be much higher than the number of visitors). The greater the difference between the two numbers, the more you are succeeding in creating a faithful base of core customers.

Search Engines

A lot of you visitors will come from search engines. In order to know what they were looking for, and how you can improve your shop for their search queries, you need to know their queries.

This page presents a table of all the search engines that your installation of Wcomm supports – meaning that Wcomm is able to recognize it, and to extract the query that the visitor from that a given search engine used to find your shop.

While Google has the biggest share of search engines users, there are many other search engines that people could use to find your website. Therefore, you have to be able to retrieve their search requests too. When an unknown search engine is starting to bring regular visitors, it is high time that you add it to your database – otherwise, those visitors would be marked in your statistics as coming from "Other search engines", which is not helpful at all.

Adding a Search Engine

It is very simple to add a new search engine to your list.

Let's say you want to add DuckDuckGo, a search engine that emphasizes its respect for data privacy:

• 1. Get the full referrer URL for the search. For instance, http://duckduckgo.com/?q=kids+shoes
• 2. Take the domain name, which is specific to that search engine, and put it in the "Server" field. In our case, "duckduckgo".
• 3. Find the query variable:
  • 1. Find the query string. It should be a set of letters, followed by an "=" sign, followed by the query itself, closed by a "&" or the end of the string. In our case, it is "q=kids+shoes".
  • 2. The query variable is the set of letters before the "=" sign. In our case: "q". Put that in the "$_GET variable" field.
  • 4. Click the "Save" button, and from now on, Wcomm will be able to recognize visitors from DuckDuckGo.

Referrers

A referrer means a website that brings you at least one visitor. This website features a link to your shop, and thus it helps you build an audience and eventually make more sales.

Some referrers are more important to you than others: you might have partners that have links to your shop on their own website, and both you and your partners would certainly want to know how many visitors those links brought you. You could even pay your partners to display a link to your shop, depending on how much you value your traffic.
This, in effect, is called affiliation, and the "Referrers" page helps you build a complete affiliate program, to which even your partner can connect to see the number of visits and sales their links have generated. Registered affiliates generate traffic to your shop, you want to reward them for those visitors, and the affiliate program is how both of you can access the figures the reward is based on.

Wcomm's referrer tool can be likened to that of a statistical dashboard open to others than only your staff members. When you create an affiliate campaign for a site, you can grant that site access to all of the activity it will have made for your site, through a password-protected URL

In the list of referers, the Click, Base and Percent values are calculated depending on the actual clicks, sales and percent of sales from the referer site.

Adding a new referrer

The affiliate space enables you to create privileged access for your partners. They will have access to all statistics on the flow of visitors from their site to your online shop. To create their privileged space, you need to create their account in your affiliation program, then define how you will pay based on traffic and sales generated.

To create a new affiliate partner, click on the "Add new" button, which will take you to the affiliate creation form.

Each section is important:

• • Affiliate. The account of the partner in your affiliation program.
  • 1. Name. To connect to your affiliation back office, your partner needs a login name; you can use a simple name or an e-mail, but make sure to use something both you and your partner can remember easily.
  • 2. Password. The first time you create the account, Wcomm saves the password along the login name. When you need to edit the account (for instance, when needing to change the commission), the password will be blank. This does not mean there is no password; if you fill the blank field when editing the account, it will change the password.
• • Commission plan. This is where you indicate the fees of your affiliate – meaning the money you will owe your partner for actions of visitors from their site.
  • 1. Click fee. This defines how much you estimate a visitor from this partner's site is worth. Every time a visitor from your partner's site comes to your shop by clicking on their link, the partner earns the marked amount.
  • 2. Base fee. You can also reward your partners if visitors from their sites do buy one of your products. Note that this is only valid if the purchase is made during the browsing session that follows the click on the partner's link.
  • 3. Percent fee. In addition to the base fee, or as a replacement, you can reward partners with a percentage of the sales made during the browsing session of visitors from their sites.
• • Technical information - Simple mode. This is very important, as this is what will make the system differentiate this partner from other referrer links. Once configured, you should make a couple of test in order to make sure that you are indeed tracking the affiliate correctly.
  • 1. HTTP referrer. In the "Include" field, set the partner's domain name that you want to track as your affiliate domain.
  • 2. Request URI. In the "Include" field, set the last part of the query string. The system will track referrers that use a special query string. For instance, you can track referrers that use the ?prestaff= argument in their URL. This can help you further differentiate referrers.
• • Technical information - Expert mode. While the simple mode matches words using MySQL's "LIKE" function, the expert mode enable you to use MySQL regular expressions. This can prove very powerful but also very hard to maintain. Be sure to master the subject of regular expressions before putting anything in these fields.

The "Help" section gives you some precious indications on how to best configure your affiliate. Read it through.

Settings

The referrer settings are mostly tools to help you make the best of your affiliate program.

There are three possibilities:

• • Indexing. You must click once on the "Refresh index" button when you add a new referrer and you want to analyze your past traffic for this new referrer.
• • Cache. Wcomm caches the data it gathers. You can use the "Refresh cache" button to regularly refresh your data cache.
• • Save direct traffic?. Direct traffic represents visitors who arrive on your shop directly, by typing your URL in their browser. While these are important because they are visitor who really know about your shop and are interested in your products (contrary to visitors with referrer, who might have simply stumble upon your shop by chance), saving this traffic can put a huge toll on your database. This is why this traffic is not saved nor analyzed by default. Only enable this option if you know what you are doing.

Advanced Stock Management

Wcomm features a complete stock management feature: more than just merely listing how much of a specific product you have currently available, this menu enables you to list warehouses and get a proper view of your stock, its movement, your coverage, your stock orders, etc.

Not all merchants will have a need for this feature. It is therefore optional, and the classic "available quantity management" tool is still available.

You can enable the advanced management menu by going to the "Products" preferences page, at the bottom of which is the "Products stock" section. Select "Yes" for the "Enable advanced stock management" option.

General Concepts

In order to avoid confusion with the classic stock management feature from version 1.4 of Wcomm and see the possibilities offered by the advanced management feature introduced with version 1.5, you should picture two distinct concepts: product quantity available for sale, and physical products.

Product quantity available for sale

This is the same as the stock management feature from Wcomm 1.4.x. It is the product quantity that is displayed in the shop for each product and product combination. This is the quantity that defines whether the product can be ordered or not (unless the "Allow ordering of out-of-stock products" option is enabled). That quantity can be manually changed for each product and product combination.

Since Wcomm 1.5.x, that quantity can be automatically set according to the physical stock of the affected product. In a multistore scenario, the quantity is to be defined for each shop.

Consequently, what used to be called "stock" in Wcomm 1.4.x is called "quantity of product available for sale" since Wcomm 1.5.x.

Product stocks (physically stored)

This is the physical management of the stored products from a warehouse (or more). This is the new concept introduced as "stock" in Wcomm 1.5.x.

This new stock management feature includes stock movement, stock valuation, stock transfer between warehouses, integration in the multistore feature and supply order management.

It also makes it possible to take into account the notion of actual stock. At a given time, a product can be available as a physical stock, but not available for sale because some client orders are still waiting for shipping. That same product can also have a supply order in progress, and thus not yet accounted for in the physical stock.

Real stock is therefore made of stock that is physically available in a warehouse, to which we add the quantity presently ordered from suppliers, and from which we subtract the quantity presently ordered by clients and which have not yet been shipped.

Using the new stock management feature

Do I have to use the new stock management feature?

There is no obligation to use the new stock management feature, just as there is no obligation to use the "quantity available for sale" management feature.

To activate both the "quantity available for sale" management feature and the stock management feature, go to the "Products" preference page, scroll down to the "Products stock" section, and choose "Yes" for the two stock management options. You have to first enable basic stock management in order to enable advanced stock management.

The advanced stock management feature, or even the standard stock management feature and your warehouses, is independent from the multistore feature. Consequently, no matter which shop you are administrating in the Wcomm back office, when you use the "Stock" menu, you are always managing the stock in a global way.

I do not want to change anything to my settings in Wcomm 1.4.x/15.x. What should I do?

If you would rather not use the new advanced stock management feature from Wcomm 1.5, and simply are satisfied with the "classic" way that Wcomm handles product quantity management, you just have to enable the old-style stock management manager, and not the advanced stock management feature: go to the "Products" preference page, scroll down to the "Products stock" section, and choose "Yes" for the "Enable stock management" option, leaving the "Enable advanced stock management" option set to "No".

The "available for sale quantity" management feature is now centralized in the "Quantities" tab from the product sheet: create a new product or edit an existing one, and the "Quantities" tab is available on the left, among the other tabs.

Does the new stock management feature apply to my needs?

The new stock management feature enables you to manage a stock of products. This feature applies to your business if:

• • You manage a stock of products which you sell on your shop(s).
• • You use at least one storage place (warehouse) which you manage yourself.
• • You order most or all of your products to one or more suppliers.
• • You need statistics about the state of your stock and of your warehouse(s).

This feature does not apply to your business if:

• • You do not manage your stock of products yourself.
• • You already use a stock management system/tool/program that you are satisfied with, and you wish to keep using it without changing anything.

Advanced Stock Management

If you wish to use the advanced stock management, you must:

• • Associate your products with warehouses.
• • Associate your warehouses with carriers.
• • Associate your warehouses with the appropriate shops.

Stock management within Wcomm runs through several screens, and can use one of two levels.

These levels are:

• • No stock management: there is no product quantity, Wcomm assumes that a product's stock is infinite. Use this if you only sell virtual products (files, services, etc.).
• • Simple stock management: for every product you sell, you can indicate the currently available quantity (including product combinations). Use this if you have few products or a simple storing location.
• • Advanced stock management: for every product you sell (and its combinations), you can indicate where the available quantity is located in an unlimited number of warehouses (with varying carriers and valuation methods). You can also see your stock movements, the current status of your stock, you stock coverage, and you can place an order to your product suppliers.

These screens are:

• • Preferences > Products > Products stock: this is where you enable the feature.
  • 1. Enable stock management. This option gives you access to basic stock management options and features: you can set the current quantity of product, and have Wcomm lower it for each order, and "re-stock" for each canceled or returned order. By default you should leave this feature enabled, as disabling it affects the entire inventory management of your shop. Only if you do not have any physical inventory should you disable it – for instance, if you only have virtual products.
  • 2. Enable advanced stock management. Another little option which has major implications: it adds a new menu called "Stocks", which makes it possible to manage very precisely your stock, on a per-warehouse basis if necessary. You can see all the details about your stock: movement, coverage, re-stocking orders, etc. You can read more about Wcomm's advanced stock management feature in the "Managing Stock" chapter of this guide.
  • 3. New products use advanced stock management. If enabled, new products will automatically use the advanced stock management feature. The default warehouse is the one indicated in the next option.
  • 4. Default warehouse on new products. If new products use the advanced stock management feature, you have to indicate their default warehouse here.
• • Catalog > Products > product's page: one to two tabs are added to the creation/edition page of a product.
  • 1. Quantities:
    •  In Simple mode: you can manually indicate the quantity of each product.
    •  In Advanced mode: quantities are handled from Wcomm's "Stock" menu.
  • 2. Warehouses: in Advanced mode, you can indicate the location of a product or is combinations within a warehouse.
• • Stock: in Advanced mode, you can make use of all the stock management pages (warehouse creation, stock movement, stock status, stock coverage, supplier order).

The following section describe these pages one by one.

Stock management from the product sheet

Quantities management

In Wcomm 1.4, you could manually set the quantity of product available for sale.

In Wcomm 1.5 and 1.6, you can still set the quantity manually for each product. But once advanced stock management is also enabled, you can also automatically set the quantity depending on the current quantity status of the physical product. Note that it is possible to enable advanced stock management globally, yet only use it for one product or just a few.

When the "Enable stock management" option is enabled (in the "Preferences > Products" page), all the products get a new tab in their administration page, called "Quantities". This clear and simple interface enables you to manage the available quantities for sale on your shop(s) for a given product, and any potential combination.

With only this option enabled, you can manage the product quantities for individual products, one by one.

If you prefer to have all your product quantities managed directly from Wcomm's advanced stock management feature rather than on a product basis, you have to enable another option from the "Preferences > Products" page: "Enable advanced stock management".

The "Quantity" tab opens with an explanatory section, which we urge you to fully read. That section is followed by the quantities management interface itself, which opens with three options:

• • I want to use the advanced stock management system for this product.
• • The available quantities for current product and its combinations are based on stock in your warehouses.
• • I want to specify available quantities manually.

By default, the third option is ("I want to specify available quantities manually") is enabled. As long as you haven't check the first option ("I want to use the advanced stock management system for this product"), quantities are managed the same way they were in version 1.4 of Wcomm, which means that you have add the quantities manually, and Wcomm will remove quantities for each sale.

If you'd rather synchronize the available quantities with your warehouse stock (or that of several warehouses), you have to change the quantities management method:

• 1. Check the "I want to use the advanced stock management system for this product" box in order the change method.
• 2. This makes the second option, "Available quantities for current product and its combinations are based on stock in the warehouses", finally available. Select it in order to synchronize the available quantity for this product with your warehouse stock.

As soon as you have selected the second option, the table's "Quantity" column cannot be edited anymore: quantities are now directly handled from the advanced stock management feature rather than from each product's "Quantities" tab.

Product packs are a special case. Since it is not yet possible to add product combinations to a pack, the Wcomm developers have decided that when necessary, Wcomm would use the default combination when decrementing the physical stock.

Also, a notice indicates the recommended maximal number of packs.

The rest of the tab explained in the "Managing the Catalog" chapter of this guide.

Supplier management

You can now set more than one supplier for a given product. For each supplier associated to a product, you can set the supplier's reference number and a default purchase price for that product as well as its combination. This information is used when making an order to the supplier.

Warehouses management

If advanced stock management is enabled, a "Warehouses" tab appears in the product sheet, where you can indicate which warehouse(s) the product and each of its combinations can be stored in. You can even indicate the location for the product and its combinations.

You must first create at least one warehouse (see below) before associating a product to it and setting the product location in it. This step is essential: it is important to at least set one warehouse in which a product can be stored. This will have considerable impact on the order preparation in the multi-shipping context.

Warehouses management

The advanced stock management feature makes it possible to create one or more warehouses. In order to create one, go to the "Warehouse" page under the "Stock" menu.

Once you start creating a new warehouse, you must fill in the following fields:

• • Reference and Name. The warehouse's unique reference identifier and name. Make sure to use something recognizable: you must be able to easily differentiate to warehouses from a drop-down list.
• • Address, Postcode/Zip Code, City and Country. The warehouse's physical address. This information will be used on the purchase order to suppliers.
• • Manager. A person in charge of the warehouse, chosen among your shop's registered employees. If the employee's account is not yet created, you must create it first.
• • Carriers. The carriers who you authorize for orders shipping from this warehouse. Maintain the "Shift" key pressed while clicking to select more than one carrier.
• • Management type. A method of accounting valuation, based on your country's regulations. See the "Stock management rules" part of this chapter for more information.
• • Stock valuation currency. A valuation currency for this warehouse's stock (among the registered currencies).

It is not possible to change a warehouse's valuation method and currency once it has been set. If you need to change that information, you will have to recreate the warehouse, and delete the wrong one. You can only delete a warehouse if it does not contain any product anymore.

Be careful of the carriers you choose to authorize, as this will a huge impact on the order preparation in the multishipping scenario.

In the situation where you manage more than one shop, you will also have to associate each shop to one or more warehouses. This enables you to set from which warehouse the client orders for a given shop can be sent.

Once the warehouse has been created, you are taken back to the list of warehouses. Click the "View" icon on the right of its row to access a bird's eye view of its information, including the references of all the products stored in it, the sum of all the available quantities, a global accounting valuation, details of the stored products, and the history of the stock movements for that warehouse.

Each warehouse page also contains two links at the bottom:

• • See product details. Takes you to the warehouse's "Instant Stock Status" page.
• • See warehouse's activity details. Takes you to the warehouse's "Stock Movement" page.

Stock management

Now that you have created one or more warehouses, you have to set stock for each of them. To that end, go to the "Stock Management" page under the "Stock" menu.

All available products from your catalog are listed in this interface. If you have any combination of product, you can manage them from the "Details" action.

In your daily activities, you can use this interface in order to manually:

• • Add stock. This button adds stock for a specific product in a given warehouse.
• • Remove stock. This button removes stock for a specific product in a given warehouse.
• • Transfer stock. This button transfers stock from one warehouse to another.

The last two actions only appear if there already is some stock of the chosen product in any warehouse.
The "Transfer stock" only appears if you have at least two registered warehouses.

Adding stock to a warehouse

To add more stock to a product, use the "Add stock" action (up arrow) for said product or product combination. A new page opens, containing a form where the most important information is displayed in order to help you identify a product with certainty (reference, EAN13 and UPC code, and name). This information cannot be changed from this form, therefore it is grayed out.

You must then set:

• • Quantity to add. This must be a positive number. You cannot remove stock by using a negative number.
• • Usable for sale?. Whether that quantity of stock is usable for sale, or simply stored until you make a decision about it. In the second case, it is considered "reserved".
• • Warehouse. The warehouse where the stock is to be added. The form lets you add product stock to only one warehouse at a time. If you need to add stock for this product in more than one warehouse, you must make the entire adding process again for each warehouse.
• • Unit price (tax excl.). The unit price for the product at the time of the addition. This is for valuation purpose.
• • Currency. The currency of the unit price. If the currency is not available, you can create one from the "Currencies" page, under the "Localization" menu, or import from the "Localization" page under the "Localization" menu, by importing the localization pack of the country whose currency you want to use.
• • Label. A label for the stock movement that you are generating, for future reference. This is purely informational.

When hovering the "Quantity to add" and "Unit price (tax excl.)" fields with the mouse cursor, the interface will display a reminder of their values the last time you added some stock.

Removing stock from a warehouse

When you want to remove a certain quantity of product stock, you must use the "Remove stock" action (down arrow, available only when there already are products in stock). A new page opens, containing a form where the most important information is displayed in order to help you identify a product with certainty (reference, EAN13 and UPC code, and name). This information cannot be changed from this form, therefore it is grayed out.

You must then set:

• • Quantity to remove. This must be a positive number. You cannot add stock by using a negative number.
• • Usable for sale. Whether this quantity should be removed from the usable quantity or from the whole physical quantity (including the reserved one).
• • Warehouse. From which warehouse that quantity should be removed. The form lets you remove product stock from only one warehouse at a time. If you need to remove stock for this product in more than one warehouse, you must make the entire removing process again for each warehouse.
• • Label. A label for the stock movement that you are generating, for future reference. This is purely informational.

Transferring stock from one warehouse to another

The stock transfer enables you to transfer stock from one warehouse to another, or from one status to another (usable in store / reserved) within a single warehouse. Click on the "Transfer stock" action (sideways arrows, available only when there already are products in stock). A new page opens, containing a form where the most important information is displayed in order to help you identify a product with certainty (reference, EAN13 and UPC code, and name). This information cannot be changed from this form, therefore it is grayed out.

You must then set:

• • Quantity to transfer. This must be a positive number.
• • Source warehouse. The warehouse from which you want to transfer some products, or where you want to change the status of some of the stock.
• • Is this product for sale in your source warehouse?. Whether the quantity to remove from the "source" warehouse should be from the "usable for sale" stock or the "reserved" stock.
• • Destination warehouse. The warehouse to which you want to transfer some products. If you simply want to change the status of some of the stock from your source warehouse, make sure to select the same warehouse in this form.
• • Is this product usable for sale in your destination warehouse?. Whether the quantity to add to the "destination" warehouse is usable for sale or reserved. This is also the option to use when you simply want to change the status of some of the stock in the source warehouse:
  • o If you do not want to change status while moving warehouses: make sure both "Use for sale?" option are set alike.
  • o If you do want to change status, whether within the same warehouse or while moving warehouses: make sure both "Use for sale?" option are set differently.

For these operations, all that is related to valuations is run automatically according to the management method chosen for each warehouse. Currency conversions work the same.

Stock Movement

This interface enables you to view the stock movement history. You can display all of the stock movements, or only those tied to one warehouse. Filters can be applied to refine your search.

When the "Filter movements by warehouse" drop-down list is set to a warehouse, you can make a CSV export of the obtained list.

Instant Stock Status

This interface enables you to have an instant overview of your stock, either globally or per warehouse. The numbers are current.

For each product or product combination in stock, the following indicators are available:

• • Unit price (tax excluded).
• • Product valuation depending on the physical quantity of stock. The sum (for all prices) is not available for all warehouses, please filter by warehouse.
• • Physically available stock.
• • Stock that is usable for sale.
• • Real quantity (physical usable quantity - client orders + supply Orders).

As appropriate, and depending on the chosen valuation method, the breakdown of the unit prices and of the associated valuations is available by clicking on the "Details" action.

Moreover, for a given warehouse, you have two ways to export the current list in CSV format:

• • Export the indicators tied to the quantities.
• • Export the indicators tied to the valuation (prices).

Stock Coverage

This interface enables you to overview the coverage of your stock. The coverage indicates how many days your current stock can last. This information is very useful, as it helps you predict the necessary restocking. Coverage is calculated according to previously registered stock movements.

You can get the stock coverage for all the warehouses, or for a single warehouse.
You can also set the time period (one week, two weeks, three weeks, one month, six months, a year) of registered stock movement which is to be taken into account when calculating the coverage.
Finally, you can highlight the stock coverage which is below a given number of days. This will highlight the relevant products, helping you identify them quicker.

In order to view the stock coverage of product combinations, you have to click the "Details" action of the product.

It is possible to receive notifications of the stock coverage for a product. The e-mail notification module (mail alerts) can take product stock coverage into account. It is thus possible to set a number of coverage days below which you will receive a notification. See the configuration for this module.

Supply orders

One of the major features of the stock manager is the ability to place orders to suppliers so as to better manage your restocking.
This interface enables you to manage all your supplier orders, as well as reusable order templates.

The order template creation process is the same as the order creation process (except for the "Expected delivery date" field). We will therefore only explain the order creation process.

Creating a new order

The creation of an order for a supplier can be broken down in two steps: creating the order, then adding products to it.

So, the first step is to define the order's headers:

• • Set the unique reference number. This is an administrative number; do not put any seemingly unique number.
• • Select the supplier. If the supplier you want is not in the drop-down list, you must create it in the "Suppliers" page, under the "Catalog" menu.
• • Select the warehouse which will take delivery of the order. You must have created at least one warehouse.
• • Select the currency in which the order will be formalized. If needed, you can create or import a currency using, respectively, the "Currencies" or "Localization" page under the "Localization" menu.
• • Select the language in which the order will be formalized. If needed, you can create or import a language using, respectively, the "Languages" or "Localization" page under the "Localization" menu.
• • If needed, set the global discount on the order (in percentage). You can just leave it at "0" if you do not have a discount on this order.
• • If needed, set the physical quantity of a product below which all the products have to be restocked, and are therefore to be added to the order automatically. Each pre-added product will be ordered with a quantity equal to the entered quantity, minus the already available quantity.
• • Set the expected delivery date.

The second step consists of adding actual products to the order. To make that second step, you can either:

• • Click on the "Save order and stay" button.
• • Click on the "Save order" button. You are taken back to the list of supply orders: click on the "Edit" action for the order you just created.

The interface of the order creation form has been updated with a second form below the previously-filled fields. You must use that second form to add products to your order, using the integrated search engine. The products that you add appear in a new list.

For each product, you must set or update the unit purchase price (tax excluded), the quantity to order, any applicable tax rate, and any product-specific discount.

Once the order is created, it appears in the list with the "Creation in progress" status. This status enables you to view and edit the information that were previously entered as well as add products to the order. You will not be able to change the order once you change its status to "Order validated".

You can never delete a supply order: you can only cancel it.

You need to follow through for the whole order process, always indicating its status change in Wcomm's interface. This is what the first action button of the list ("Change state") is for: click on it to reach the status changing form. See the "Changing the status of a supplier order" section below for more information on the available statuses, and see the "Registering the reception of products" to understand how to follow through on a supply order.

The "+" icon in the supply order list displays the order's history, which enables you to see who did what and when.

Order template creation

The whole point of creating a template is to serve as a basis for new orders.

The supply order template creation process is the same as the one for a real order, except that:

• • You do not have to set a planned delivery date.
• • The "Automatically load products" value will be the quantity to order for the loaded products, not the stock/typed value difference

Moreover, contrary to an ordinary supply order:

• • A template does not have a status.
• • A template can be deleted.
• • A template has no edit history.

Once you have created your template, you only need to use the "Use this template to create a supply order" action from the template list (the "two windows" icon) to start creating an order.

Changing the status of a supply order

Each order has many available actions (in the "Actions" column of the order list). One of them enables you to edit the status: the "Change state" one. There are six possible default statuses, but you can add your own (see the "Configuration" section of this chapter).

An order's status helps you understand your stock movements at a glance thanks to their color code. Here is the significance of the six default statuses:

• 1. Creation in progress. This is when you are in the first step of the creation step, where you can edit everything.
• 2. Order validated. This status validates the order and freezes the information it contains (purchase prices, quantities, etc.). At this step, a new action appears in the "Actions" column, which enables you to edit the invoice that is sent to the supplier in PDF format.
• 3. Pending receipt. As soon as the supplier has received and validated your invoice, you have to change the supply order's status to "Pending receipt".
• 4. Order received in part. As soon as a delivery is made, you must switch the order to this status. There can be multiple deliveries, and a delivery history is logged for each product. The restocking is made with each delivery.
• 5. Order received completely. Once an order is completely delivered, or partially because of a partial cancellation, it should be switched to this status. Stocks are unaffected in this case, and it is possible to perform actions on the order.
• 6. Order canceled. This status is to be given to canceled orders, whatever the reason. Stocks are unaffected in this case, and it is not possible to perform actions on the order.

With each status change, the status drop-down selector evolves in order to present only the possible status changes, in regard to the current status. The unavailable statuses are grayed out.

Details of a supplier order

Clicking the "View" icon from the list of supply orders enables you to get a synthetic view of your order.
You can also download the invoice generated as a PDF file (provided the order is validated by you) from the list of orders or from the status change page.

The "Details" action enables you to display the status change history for the current order.

Registering the reception of products

You must change the status of your supply order within Wcomm as soon as actions are taken in the real world. This is done using the "Change state" action in the "Actions" column from the list of orders. The form in this page always preselects the next logical status, but you are free to choose any of the other statuses available.

While you are preparing the supply order, keep its status to "Creation in progress". Once you are done preparing the order, switch it to "Order validated", then print the invoice PDF and send it to your supplier. As soon as your supplier confirms the reception of the invoice, change the status to "Pending receipt".

During the "Pending receipt" and "Order received in part" statuses, a new action is available in the "Actions" column. Using the "truck" icon, the "Update ongoing receipt of products" action enables you to register the reception of products for a given order during the current day.
The form that opens after clicking that "truck" action enables you to see how many items were expected, and to indicate the quantity of product delivered for each product that day. Click the "Update selected" button to mark the selected products as received with the number of items you indicated in the "Quantity received today?" field. The checkbox on the left of each row must be checked for Wcomm to take that line into account.

This step can be done as many times as necessary, and it is possible to receive and incorporate more stock than planned.

If you receive less stock than expected, Wcomm automatically changes the order's status to "Order received in part".

For each product, a reception history is available ("+" action), as well as an indication of the received quantity, the expected quantity, and the remaining quantity. If the "received quantity" is equal to the "expected quantity", the corresponding row is highlighted in green. If you received more than expected, it is in red.

When all the products from the order have been received, you must manually change the supply order's status to "Order received completely". This ends the supply order process, and a new "Export" action appears, which you can use to download a CSV file of all the information pertaining to that order.

CSV export

Using the supply orders interface, you can filter the list of orders or the details of these orders so that you may export it, according to the current filters (reference, supplier, etc.)
Moreover, you can choose not to display the orders that are completed or canceled, using the appropriate checkbox.

Configuration

The configuration page enables you to customize the way certain parts of the advanced stock manager work:

• • The available statuses for a supply order.
• • The labels for the stock movements.
• • The default statuses for some stock movements which are used throughout the solution.

Adding a new default order status

You can add custom statuses corresponding to your business line. You cannot delete a default status.

The list on the main page enables you to get a better perspective of the available statuses, and how they can impact an order.

Click the "Add new" button to reach the creation form.

A status has a label, a color, and enables you to define whether:

• • The order can be edited. As long as the order is editable, it cannot be sent to the supplier.
• • The order delivery note can be generated.
• • Product reception is ongoing, meaning that you have not yet received all the ordered products.
• • Product delivery is still pending, meaning that you are still waiting for any product to arrive.

Adding a stock movement label

It is possible to add more labels to stock movements. Click the "Add new" button from the "Stock movement labels" section to access the creation form.

You simply have to set a name for the label, and indicate whether it pertains to stock increase or decrease. Those labels can be used when adding/removing/transferring stock manually (as explained earlier).

Changing default supply order labels

It is possible to choose the default stock movement labels in the following standard cases:

• • Increasing stock (manually).
• • Decreasing stock (manually).
• • Decreasing stock following the shipment of a client order.
• • Increasing stock following the delivery of products from a supplier's order.

Stock Management Rules

In this section, we will explain the management rules that are automatically applied to stock management.

Each stock entry and exit must be valued. That is why each unit product stock must be associated with a tax-excluded unit price (either purchase price or production cost), whether through supplier order, or manual entry. Each product exit must also be valued.

There are three main valuation methods that you can choose, depending on your business activity or on the tax laws of each warehouse's country or origin:

• • FIFO (first in, first out).
• • LIFO (last in, first out).
• • AVCO (Average Cost, or Weighted Average Cost per Unit).

With the FIFO and LIFO methods, each unit product from the stock has a purchase price that has been fixed when it entered the stock. This way, for a given reference available in 100 units, 40 units can have a purchase price of X, and 60 can have a purchase price of Y. When an order is made, and depending on the chosen method, you know which product to use and with which purchase price, which enables you to precisely manage a potential order return and put the products back into stock with their original purchase price.

The table below gives you an example of the FIFO method of stock valuation. In this example, you have a two-input table (price and quantity per type of stock movement). You add more columns as we receive new products with new prices.

The stock value during the instant state in this case is 6,900.

The table below illustrates how the LIFO method can be used to value stock. We use the same entry and exit values as in the previous example. The principle remains the same as in the FIFO example, except that during exits, we primarily use the units that were the last to be entered in the stock.

The stock value during the instant state in this case is of 6,700.

The third most frequently used method for stock valuation is Weighted Average Cost (AVCO). The AVCO calculation is done after each new entry in the stock.

For a given product, the AVCO calculation is done using this formula:

AVCO = (QS * previous AVCO + QA * UP) / (QS + QA)
Unless QS is negative or null, in which case AVCO = UP.

With:

• • QS = Quantity of products currently in stock, or initial stock.
• • QA = Quantity of products to be added to stock.
• • UP = Unit Price (tax-excluded purchase price, or production cost).

The table below illustrates the evolution of the AVCO with the example of a product initially with 20 units in stock, and purchased at a price of 2. The new entry/exit will be valued as follows:

*: Calculation details: ((8 remaining product in stock * 2) + (20 products to add * 3.4)) / 28 total products = 3.

At the Y date, we calculated the AVCO according to the number of products added in the stock their unit prices. Therefore, all products in stock now have a reassigned unit value, which depends on the new AVCO.

Managing Multiple Shops

One of the great features of Wcomm is called "multistore", meaning the ability to manage multiple shops from the same back office.

Thanks to this feature, you can manage many customized shops, which share many common elements. For more efficiency, you can even create groups of shops.

How to decide if you need the multistore feature

You may find yourself wanting to use the multistore feature, when in fact it is not necessary. For instance, if you want a multilingual shop, or if you need to use more than one currency, or if you would like to have a different graphic template for each category.

Here are two questions that you should ask yourself before deciding to enable the multistore feature:

• 1. Do you want your shops to have a different price for the same product (besides special discounts for a client or group of clients).
  If the answer is 'yes', then you need to use the multistore feature.
• 2. When a client buys from one shop, would you want him or her to not have access that shop's order history and invoices from the other shop (even if the client have the same login credentials on both shops).
  If the answer is 'yes', then you need to use the multistore feature: the shops will not share their carts and orders, and customers putting items in their cart for shop 1 will not see these items in their cart for shop 2.

If the answer is 'no' to both questions, then the multistore feature is not for you.

Enabling the multistore feature

Turning your single-shop Wcomm installation into a multi-shop one is very simple:

• 1. Log-in to your shop's administration.
• 2. Go to the "Preferences" menu and select the "General" page.
• 3. Find the "Enable multistore" option, select "Yes".
• 4. Save your changes.

There you go: the multistore feature is now in place, starting with the addition of the "Multistore" page under the "Advanced parameters" menu. This is the page were you will manage the various shops created with this Wcomm Development.

Managing your stores

The "Multistore" page comprises three mains sections:

• • Multistore tree. Gives you a bird's eye view of your shop groups, their shops, and even the various URLs tied to a single shop.
  By default, there is only one shop, in the default group: the main shop.
• • Shop groups table. Lists the available shop groups. You can edit them by click on the 'edit' icon on the right.
• • Multistore options. Lists the available options for the existing shops.
  • o Default shop. The default shop is the one which will serve a central hub for all the other ones, shares its details with other shops (products, carriers, etc.), and is the one that appears when you log in the administration.

One back office to rule them all

When the multistore feature is enabled for your Wcomm installation, many aspects of Wcomm become customizable on a per-shop or per-shop-group basis.

To help you understand which shop your changes are applied to, Wcomm adds a dropdown selector at the top of each screen, where you can choose the scope of application of your changes:

• • Apply to all of your shops on this installation of Wcomm.
• • Apply to only the shops of the selected shop group.
• • Apply to only the selected shop.

This shop selector helps you know on which shop(s) you are currently working.

That being said, once the multistore mode is in place, many of the regular settings can only be changed on a global (all shops) scale (most notably the settings pages: localization, preferences, advanced preferences, administration) and will therefore present the options as disabled in any other selection. Still, you can choose to edit those settings on a more local (per group shop or even per shop) scale if it is needed.

Indeed, settings pages will look regular when the shop selector is on "All shops", while in any other selection (shop group or single shop) they get additional options:

• • A "Yes/No" option at the top of each section of the settings page.
• • A check box next to each option.

They both serve the same purpose: letting you enable the options that would otherwise be disabled in the current shop context. You can pick the options that you want to enable, or you can enable all the options of the section by switching the Yes/No option. Once enabled, it is up to you to change the value of each options: clicking the checkbox or switching the Yes/No option does not change any settings, it just allows you to change it in that context.

Nevertheless, some options cannot be edited on a local context: they will display "You can't change the value of this configuration field in the context of this shop."

The following table indicates whether the item can also be customized for a single shop, for a group of shops, or for all shops at once.

Notes

• Categories: A product can only appear in a given category of a shop if it has been associated to this category in that shop's context. In other words: if shop A and shop B have the C category in common, we can associate the P product to the C category for the A shop's context, and P will not appear in category C on shop B.
• Carriers: You can manage the carriers association on a per-shop basis, a per-shop-group basis or for all shops; but you cannot customize a carrier on a per-shop basis. You must duplicate the carrier if you want to use the same carrier with different price ranges on two shops.
• Warehouses: While advanced stock management can only be used for a single shop at a time, warehouses can be used with shop groups, and you can simply manage the warehouses in order to have advanced stock management.

For each shop, you can set specific price for every products, share part of the catalog or the whole of it, change product images, etc.

You can choose to share the customer accounts between your shops, enabling your customers to use the credentials between all shops, and even be transparently signed-in to each.

With advanced stock management, you can do a fine-grained management of the associations between yours shops and your warehouses

Add New Shop Group

Having shop groups enables you to share certain characteristics between the shops in that group: catalog, employees, carriers, modules, etc. It allows you to manage a set of shops as easily as you would a single shop, while still being able to fine-tune the details of each shop manually. Applying new parameters to all the shops in a group only requires a single action. When in multistore mode, a drop-down menu is available on most of the administration pages, and enables you to filter your changes by shop or shop group.

Technically speaking, when selecting a shop group in the multistore drop-down menu, the displayed entities reflect the union of the entities pertaining to the shops in that group.

Generally speaking, parameters are applied to all the entities belonging to the selected entity in the multistore drop-down menu. This is explained in details later in this chapter.

Clicking the "Add new shop group" button brings a form with few options but a lot of text: you should make sure to read each description from beginning to end, as they help you make a decision about these options. Since some are non-reversible (you cannot disable them once they are enabled), it is important to know exactly what you enable.

The available settings are:

• • Shop group name. The name is private, customers will not see it. Still, make sure to use a telling name: the more shop groups you will have, the more you will need to be able to find a given group quickly. You can edit the name at any time.
• • Share customers. Once enabled, you cannot disable this option. This is great when you want to allow your customers to use the same login credentials on all shops of this shop group.
• • Share available quantities to sell. You can have different quantities of the same product for sale on your shops. With this option, all the shops from this group will share the same available quantity of products. This can make it easier to manage said quantities.
• • Share orders. Once enabled, you cannot disable this option. This option can only be enabled if both "Share customers" and "Share available quantities to sell" options are enabled. With this option, customers who are logged on any shop from this group will be able to see their order history for all the shops in the group.
• • Status. Choose to enable this group right away, or later. You can enable/disable a shop group at any time.

Two shop groups cannot share customers, carts or orders.

Existing shop groups can be edited from the shop groups list on the "Multistore" front page: simply click on the 'edit' icon on the right of the shop's row to open the form. As expected, you cannot edit the "Share customers" and "Share orders" options.

Creating a new shop

The shop creation tool, located in the "Multistore" page, enables you to simply and precisely define both the front office appearance of your shop (namely, its theme) and the elements you wish to import from your main shop into this new one.

Clicking the "Add new shop" button opens brings a form with two sections. The first one has 5 options:

• • Shop name. The name is public: customers will see it in many places, such as the site title or the e-mail references. Make sure to make it clear that it describes this specific shop.
• • Shop Group. A shop can only belong to one shop group. Also, it must belong to a group: it cannot exist outside of a shop group – even if it's the only shop in that group. Note: you will not be able to move the shop to any other group if you create it within a shop group which has any of its three options enabled ("Share customers", "Share available quantities to sell" or "Share orders").
• • Category root. While your main shop has the catalog root as its category root, any other shop can either use the same root, or use any category of the catalog as its root – in effect using a sub-set of the main catalog as its own catalog.
• • Associated categories. In addition to being able to limit a shop's catalog to a sub-set of the main catalog (see the "Category root" option above), you can choose to only make some sub-categories of the main category available in this new shop.
• • Theme. You can use any of the available themes as the theme for this shop. In effect, this makes it possible for you to have the very same catalog available in two completely different shops, with a different theme, URL or even prices.

The second section, "Import data from another shop", is where you define which data of the main shop you want to use as the data of this new shop.

It has two options:

• • Import data. If disabled, your shop will not share any data with any other shop, and the section will close itself. While this is helpful when you want to manage two entirely different shops with a single installation of PrestaShop, this also means you will have to configure both shops from A to Z, whereas sharing data means you would not have to recreate carriers, currencies or modules, for instance. Make sure to think your choice through, as you will not be able to revert back.
• • Choose the shop (source). If you do wish to import data, you must indicate from which of the existing shops you want to import that data. If you already have defined a sub-shop of the main shop, this can help you make a "copy" of that sub-shop, instead of having to set the various import options again.
• • Choose data to import. This is where you decide what kind of data you want to import from the source shop. At the very least, you should import all the modules, even if it means disabling some, as the whole front office is displayed through modules and some major parts of the back office also rely on modules.

When you create a product in a new shop and that product already exists in another shop, PrestaShop will try its best to suggest the existing product, so that you will not have to recreate everything.

Setting a shop's URL

Each shop can have its own web address (URL) – or even several addresses – entirely independent from the main shop (the first shop that you have installed). You must define at least one web address for each shop.

Two shops cannot share the same address. If you try to give a new shop an address that is already in use by another shop, Wcomm will display an error. On the other hand, you can have as many shops on one domain name as you want:

• • Using subfolders: http://www.example.com/men/, http://www.example.com/women/, http://www.example.com/kids/, http://www.example.com/pets/ etc.
• In the case of subfolder stores, make sure to create two URLs for each store: one with the "www.", one without it!
• For instance: http://www.example.com/men/,and http://example.com/men/,
• Otherwise, customers trying to access your secondary store without the "www." in the URL will be redirected to your main store.
• • Using subdomains: http://men.example.com/, http://women.example.com/, http://kids.example.com/, http://pets.example.com/,etc.

Do not create any subdomain or subfolder yourself, either on your server or your computer: Wcomm takes care of creating the path for you on your server. When the customer requests this path, Wcomm will recognize the shop and serve the files and data for the correct store automatically.

Of course, a shop can also have its own domain name.

Using a domain name

In case you want to use a different domain name for your supplemental shop rather than a subdomain/subfolder, you must configure your domain to point to the folder where Wcomm is located. The URL rewriting is then done by Wcomm itself.

Alternatively, you can create an alias for your domain name that redirects to absolute URL where your installation of Wcomm is located. The way to achieve this depends on the control panel and options that your hosting company provides you with: "Alias" for Plesk, "Forward" for CPanel, "Aliasdomain" for ISPConfig, etc.

To add a URL to shop, select the shop in the "Multistore tree" selector, and then click on the "Add new URL" button. Wcomm will load a screen with two sections and eight options:

• •URL options.
  • 1. Shop. A reminder of the shop to which you are adding a URL. You may also simply switch to another shop.
  • 2. Main URL. By enabling this, you indicate that you want all the other URLs for this shop to redirect to this main URL (this will switch any other Main URL to be a normal URL).
  • 3. Status. You can disable and enable a URL at any time.
• • Shop URL.
  • 4. Domain. The shop's domain name itself. It does not have to be limited to the domain name: you can indicate a sub-domain if you need to. Just make sure to not add 'http://', or any '/'. Example: www.example.com or kids.example.com.
  • 5. Domain SSL. If your SSL domain is different from your main domain, be sure to indicate it in that field. Example: www.example.com or kids.example.com.
  • 6. Physical URI. Here you must set the physical path to your actual installation on your server. If the shop is at the root of the domain or subdomain, leave this field empty. Example: / or /kids/.
  • 7. Virtual URI. You can make the shop transparently available to customers using this option: through the power of URL rewriting, you can have your shop be displayed without the need to create a sub-folder. Of course, URL rewriting must be enabled in Wcomm (meaning Friendly URLs, see the "SEO & URLs" page of the "Preferences" menu). Example: /shoes/. Note that this only works for subfolder shops, not subdomain shops.
  • 8. Your final URL will be. Gives you the impact that your URL settings above will have on the complete web address to your shop.

Sample Usages and Specifics

Managing a catalog in multistore mode

In multistore mode, some of the Wcomm administration pages feature a prominent drop-down menu, titled "Multistore configuration for". This menu gives you the context of what you are doing: it enables you to set the shop or shop group to which the changes you are making are to be applied.

For instance, when creating a new product, the selection in this menu will determine whether the product will be available for all shop, only one shop group, or a single shop.

When editing a product, Wcomm displays notifications to help you understand the scope of your changes. For instance, when editing a product while in the "Shop A" context, the notification will say "Warning, if you change the value of fields with an orange bullet, the value will be changed for all other shops for this product", with said orange bullet appearing on all the implicated fields, such as "Type of product", "Reference", the package's size, etc.

Likewise, if you change a product while in the "All shops" context or in the context of a shop group, some fields will be disabled: since they have a global impact, you cannot edit them. If you really need to edit this content, each field has a box that you can check to edit that field in all the shops under this context.

If you edit a disabled field, the product is created in all the shops of the context which do not already have it in their own catalog. Make sure to double check your context.

Data exchange between stores

Duplicating data between stores

Duplicated data in Wcomm are set during the setup of any individual shop, by importing all or some of the content from an existing shop into the new one. The content that can be imported is varied: products, categories, employees, modules, cart rules, suppliers, etc. Data importation is done once and for all: once a store has been created, you cannot easily import data again from another store.

Sharing data between stores and store groups

Stores can share data. Shared data are fundamentally handled at the store group level: one of the important things to understand when dealing with Wcomm's multistore mode is that all the stores within a store group can share the same details share data – or more precisely, three types of content: customers, available quantities, and orders. Once the store group is set, the sharing of data between its stores is mostly finished: while you can change the setting for the available product quantities, you cannot change the customers and orders settings anymore as soon as any store within the group as at least one customer or one order.

Sharing products and categories

When you create a new store within a group, you can choose to have all or some of the categories in the new store be exact duplicates of the categories in any other store on your installation of Wcomm.

When creating a category, either for a specific store or for all the stores in the Wcomm installation, Wcomm registers the category for all the stores – it is simply hidden from any store where it has not been set.

By associating the new stores with a given category, any change in this category will impact all the stores which are associated with it, even if the stores are from different store groups. You can therefore change the category's content once and for all from one place, including its products.

Sharing customers and customer groups

As indicated above, stores within the same store group can share clients: all you have to do it set the proper option when creating the store group.

Groups are less detailed: if you change one of the default customer group in one store, the change is applied to all the other stores, regardless of the store group.

If you want to have different customer group for each store, you must create a new group and use the "Multistore configuration for" selector to associate the group with the current store or store group.

If the option "Share customers" has been disabled, then your customer list will need to be empty before you can enable this.

If you'd rather keep your customer list you can do the following:

• • Go to your database management software such as phpMyAdmin.
• • Search for the table ps_customer. It might be different, depending on your database prefix.
• • Export this table.
• • Empty the table. Dot NOT drop it. If you do want to drop it, make sure you recreate the table afterwards.
• • Go back to the multistore settings for the shop group.
• • Enable the "Share customers" option.
• • Import the table.

Sharing customers between the shop group has now been enabled without the loss of customer information.

Sharing orders

It is possible for stores within the same store group to share orders: all you have to do it set the proper option when creating the store group.

If the option "Share orders" has been disabled, then your order list will need to be empty before you can enable this.

If you'd rather keep your orders you can do the following:

• • Go to your database management software such as phpMyAdmin.
• • Search for the table ps_order. It might be different, depending on your database prefix.
• • Export this table.
• • Empty the table. Dot NOT drop it. If you do want to drop it, make sure you recreate the table afterwards.
• • Go back to the multistore settings for the shop group.
• • Enable the "Share orders" option.
• • Import the table.

Sharing orders between the shop group has now been enabled without the loss of order information

Using a different theme for each shop/shop group

To install a theme on Wcomm, you must use the "Theme Import/Export" module to import the theme's zip file. Once that file is uploaded, the module will ask you some module-specific questions. When in multistore mode, it will also ask you whether you want to enable this theme with all stores in your Wcomm installation, only some store groups, or only some specific stores – with the current stores being already selected. The theme will still be available for the non-selected stores, but will be disabled.

This setting can be changed: once a theme is installed on your Wcomm, you can use the "Themes" page in the "Preference" menu to change the theme of the current store, or of the current store group, depending on how the "Multistore configuration for" selector is set.

Using specific settings for each shop/shop group

"Multistore configuration for" selector is the go-to option when you want your changes to have an impact on a given store or set of stores. It should even be the first option to look at when an administration screen opens up, as Wcomm will change the available options depending on the context you are in: store, store group or all stores.

This makes it possible for you to:

• • Using different image formats for each shop/shop group
• • Activating/configuring a module on a per-shop basis
• • Positioning/displaying front office blocks on a per-shop basis
• • ...and so much more!

Managing CMS pages in multistore mode

When viewing the list of CMS pages in the "All shops" context, all the CMS pages from all shops are displayed. Likewise, when in a shop group context, the pages for all the shops in that group are displayed.

When creating a page in a shop group context, all the shops in this group will display this page, yet the page will be unique: editing it in one shop will apply the changes in all the shops from this group.
On the creation page, a section appears with a list, indicating which ones will be impacted.

Managing discounts in multistore mode

When creating cart rules or catalog price rules in a multistore context, an additional condition is available, with which you can choose the shops on which the rule should be available.

Web-service and multistore

Access to the web-service is also highly configurable, both at the shop level and at the shop group level. When creating a web-service key, you can choose to associate it to all shop, some shop groups, or select shops.

Megamenu sample

Demo 1

Demo 2

Menu tree management

The menu tree management system allows you to: update/delete any menu item, change menu item position, create new menu item, view and create new widget that can be assign to column or row in megamenu.

Front-end appearance

1. Create new menu

Click the "Add new menu" button then add the info for the menu item.

The module supports multiple menu type:

2. Create new widget

You can load any widget to display in column, row in Megamenu live editor. To create new widget, click on "View widget".

Click on "+" button on the top right corner to create new widget. Select widget type the add info required of the widget.

Create Images of categories

1.Create Images of categories

Config Images of categories widget

Megamenu live edition tool

View front-page

Megamenu live edition tool

In the main module configuration, click on "Live edit tools" to open the visual megamenu configuration that allows you configure megamenu easily.

Now configure the Megamenu.

Some steps to create megamenu.

• 1.Enable sub-menu
• 2.Configure size of sub-menu
• 3.Align sub-menu: left, right, center or justify
• 4.Add/remove row and column
• 5.Assign widget to row and column.
• 6.Configure row/column: size and class to style the row/column

1. Column/row settings

Select the column you want to configure, assign one more many widgets for the clumn then configure the size by set the span number and add class suffix to style for the column if you want.

2. Sub-menu setting

You can create sub-menu for sub-menu item. You can group the menu's sub-menu.

3. Megamnu tools

Parameter explaintation.

• Create widget: add widget that can be assigned to any column/li>
• Preview on livesite: view how megamenu looks like in front-page
• Reset configuration: reset/remove all megamenu configuration.
• Save: save megamenu settings

View front-page

Slideshow sample

Demo 1

Demo 2

Module configuration

Open the configuration panel of webnexs Slider layer to configure.

1. General settings

Parameter explaintation.

• Add new group: you can create unlimited groups, each group includes multiple slideshow items.
• Manage group: all created groups will be listed here, you can edit any group and manage sliders in each group
• Choose file: you can browse an back-up file to import
• Override group or not: when you import a group, if the group duplicate with any group, you can select to override or not.

2. Group settings

Each group can have different settings, open the group and browse to the setting panel.

Group general setting

Parameter explaintation.

• Group title: add title of group, it's to manage groups easily.
• Active: enable this option to publish the group so that you can get the group displayed in front-page
• Show in hook: select hook the module will be displayed in
• Auto play: select whether to auto display slideshow items
• Delay: set the delay duration for the auto play
• Slideshow with mode: select mode to display slideshow: boxed, fullsize, fullscreen
• Medium and Large Desktops Width: set the width size of slideshow in medium and large desktop layout
• Small tablets width: set the width size of slideshow in small tablet layout
• Touch mobile: if enable, touch option will be enabled in mobile layout for slideshow
• Stop on hover: enable this option if you want to pause the auto play when user hover slideshow
• Shuffle Mode: enable or disable shuffle mode

Css settings

Parameter explaintation.

• Shadow type: select shadow type for slideshow.
• Show timeline: select to show/hide the timeline of slideshow
• Timeline position: select position to display timeline in slideshow
• Margin: set margin for slideshow (in pixel)
• Padding: set padding for slideshow (in pixel)
• Background color: select background color for slideshow
• Background image: enable this option if you want to show background image
• Background URL: add the url of image that you want to display as background image
• Group class: add class to hide slideshow in specific responsive layouts, tick on the responsive layouts and the class will be auto generated to the field.

Navigator settings

Parameter explaintation.

• Navigator type: select navigator type: thumbnail, bullet.
• Arrows: select arrow for Navigator
• Style: select style for navigator: round, navbar, spuare ...
• Offset horizontal/vertical: set the offset for navigator (in pixel), it's to help to locate navigators in slideshow
• Always show navigator: if you enable this option, the navigator will be always shown. If not, it will be shown when you hover slideshow.
• Hide navigator after: set duration to hide navigator (in seconds)

Front-end appearance

Image settings

Parameter explaintation.

• Image cropping: enable this option if you want to crop slideshow image to fit the slideshow block
• Image width/height: configure size of slideshow image (in pixel)
• Thumbnail width/height: configure size of thumbnail image
• Number of thumbnails: set number of thumbnails to be displayed

Front-end appearance

Slider setting

In the general setting, click on Manage Sliders of group that you want to configure.

1. Slider list

In the setting panel, it lists out all sliders of the group. You can select to configure/delete/duplicate any slider. You can create new slider by clicking on the "+" button on the right top corner.

2. Slider setting

Parameter explaintation.

• Slider title: add slider title
• Active: enable to publish the slider and it can be displayed in front-page
• Transition: select transition for the slider, it supports many transition types
• Slot amount: set number of slots for slider when transitioning
• Transition rotation: set rotation for transition
• Transition duration: set duration for transition
• Enable link: enable link so that you can add link for slider.
• Link: add link for the slider
• Thumbnail: you can browse any image to be displayed as thumbnail for the slider.
• Video: you can enable video embed for slider, it supports 2 video types: vimeo and youtube.

3. Slider element content/effect setting.

Parameter explaintation.

• Set backgroun color or image
• Add elements to the slider: image, video, text
• Configure the added element, add content for the element, set effect
• Layer collection: each element in slider is a layer, set the delay time for each layer to appear (in milliseconds)

Backup and restore

You can export any slideshow group, in the module setting panel, select the group you want to export then hit the Export button