Congratulations! You’ve just made a life-changing decision to expand your handmade business, taking you to a higher level of development! You’ve opened your store on HANDIEU, and now the real fun begins ?
Since we offer you a free subscription plan for the start, you have a great opportunity to familiarize yourself with our platform with very little outlay. Please, use this time to get acquainted with all the functionalities of HANDIEU, to create your perfect store, to fine-tune product photos and complete all formalities. I am sure you will thank yourself for this well-used time in the future! When your products reach a wide audience, you will be able to focus only on your hand-made creation, not on formalities or improvements.
Here I’ve prepare you a list of things you should focus on even before you present us your very first product in your store:
1. Seller’s panel.
To find your seller’s account, with all the settings to be set, you should first (after you log in the store) choose the “little man icon” in the upper right corner of the view, and then you’ll find “Seller’s Account” on the left.
Here you can find your dashboard, which looks like this:
A. Notification Board: here you can find all your notifications – they are mostly coming from the system or HANDIEU, informing you about the changes/approvals/orders for your shop.
Inquiry
B. Board: it serves communicating with customers. If they have a question to you they will ask you through an “Ask a question”.
C. Announcements: here you will find updates and news from the platform, e.g. information about marketing campaigns or useful tips for sellers.
D. Knowledgebase: if you are new on the platform, you can use the knowledgebase to find advice on how to use the platform.
E. Profile Manager: Here you can add main information about you – your avatar, your social media addresses, and here you can also change your account password and add your EU-VAT number and the story of your business.
2. Settings.
Since you already know the navigation of your dashboard page, let’s move on and complete the settings of your HANDIEU store!
First, you have to fill in all the information about your shop – the name, contact details, store brand setup and a short description. When choosing your logo and banner photos, you should remember that they have to be compressed accordingly – when you hover over the ‘question mark icon’, you will get a hint about the maximum resolution of the photo. Remember, that this is important to put all of the banners (store, mobile and store list) – just to be sure that your shop looks good on the mobile version of HANDIEU website.
Next step is to supplement the address data of your company (if you are an entrepreneur) or your place of residence (if you are selling as a person).
3. Connect your account with Stripe.
After choosing “Connect with Stripe” button, you are redirecting on a registration page on Stripe – Stripe is a payment platform, dedicated for processing all the finance operations within HANDIEU. You have to make an account there, giving many important details about you – all this to check your credibility and connect with your bank account, to proceed payments in the future easily. ? If for some reason you do not link your account with Stripe, our HANDIEU system will not allow you to make purchases in your store – you must remember that! Only verified stores can sell actively
4. Shipping.
There are two types of shipping applicable for handcrafts – per weight (e.g. when you sell heavy products and your shipping company calculates it per kilogram) or simply per country.
You have to fill in the forms and apply your own rules. It is good to have already a pricing offer from some delivery company ready. By default you can choose from EU countries. Remember to set prices to all of them or use option “Everywhere else” and set the price for all other countries not mentioned before. This is important, not to exclude any EU country as citizens of all of the should have equal access to the same products. It doesn’t mean that the shipping prices should be the same, but product and it’s availability yes.
Talking about shipping by country, you should remember about setting up “default shipping price“. When you set it, it will be a fixed cost regardless of the selected country. If you want to differentiate the delivery price depending on a specific country, then just add the appropriate amount to it.
As shown in the picture: we want the delivery to Austria to be 12 euros. If we have a fixed default shipping price of 10 euros, then in Austria we add only 2 euros.
You can also apply a free delivery option, e.g. when the order exceeds the value you set, or for some specific product. Everything is up to you and your strategy! If you’re not sure what shipping policy you should adopt, you can get inspired here ?
5. Store policies.
I am aware that many people do not know what should be included in the store policy, thinking it is unnecessary…. Nothing could be more wrong! I wrote about it before here on the blog!
By writing your general terms of purchase, you are able to describe all the terms of the contract between you and the buyer – payment date, delivery date, complaint conditions, etc. Moreover, if you also describe the most frequently asked questions in the shop policy and answer them, you will save your time to respond to dozens of customer messages asking for the same thing. Writing a policy may take a while, but it is really worth doing!
I know that all these store settings may take you a while… But if you do it properly once, you will never come back to rewrite this ? and please remember, that HANDIEU staff is reeeeeally helpful, so if you have any problems or doubts, you can always let us know here and we will try to help you!
Good luck and… see you on HANDIEU ?
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