Wix Ecommerce | Part 5 | Administrative Task | The Ultimate Guide To Building An Online Store in Wix

Hello, Wix eCommerce store owners, Michael Strauch from the Wix Training Academy. And today we're going to focus on creating administrative tasks in learning how to create the administrative functions in your Wix stores account. So we're going to talk about things like tax, shipping, setting up business information and connecting payment methods. And we're going to discuss how to go about these so that way you can create the most efficient store possible.

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Creating Administrative Functions In Wix Stores

So we're not actually going there. We're going to “Select Site”. And today what we're going to do is we're going to work in our Wix stores actual manager. So I'm going to show you how to manage stuff in the Wix stores app. So we've already seen Store Products right here. We were in store products, the other day when we were adding products, customizing them and also customizing collections. So that's where you access your products and then you see something called “Store Orders”.

So once you connect a payment method, all the orders that filter through your store that come through your store that are processed, that are made are going to show up right here and they're going to show up in a nice list. It will show who the customer was, show the details of the order. You'll be able to export those orders if you wanted to export CSVs of them. So it's very nice clean process in which has made it very user accessible as far as where to access it.

Wix Store's App

But the next thing we need to focus on is some “Apps”, right? So we need to manage our Wix stores app, and we could go to “Manage Apps” right there. And then we see “Wix Stores”. So if we go back to the “App Market”, you'll see that the, which stores app is right here. If we clicked “Open App”, it would open us in the products and the collections. And then what we would have to do is we got to come down here into “Settings” and we have to set up all of our information for the backend of the store.

So that little app section, that's just where it show you where the apps are at. That's where Wix stores app is. So in a last case scenario, if you didn't know to go to “Settings”, you just go to that “App” and then you click “Open App” and it would show your store product store collections, but to actually edit the administrative functions, this is where we're going to be.

So first things first, you're going to want to see a couple of different sections. You're going to see one “Store Tax” and “Store Shipping”. These are for your store, right? So we need to understand that. But before we understand that we need to also go to “General Info”, general info contains all of your business contact information. So these will show up on invoices from orders, and it will also show up on order information. So you're going to want to make sure you go through here and fill this in properly. You're going to want to input your business email, your business phone number. If you still have a fax number you're going to want to put your fax number. You're going to want to put the name of your business right here. Again, it'll show up on the invoice, a logo, a little description of your business. You know, what you do in case people are looking back at their, their invoices or their statements. And they look at what this was for.

And then it allows you to categorize your business and then sub categorize. And then this is where you can actually edit the “Favicon” for your website too, if you didn't know. So mine up here is this little Wix Training Academy logo. This is where you would update yours, but you must have a premium plan, which you will have because you're building an eCommerce store. That's where you would edit that and change the look and feel of that.

Once you have done that and added your basic business information, including your address and your location, which by the way, you can mark off “My business has a physical address”, meaning that if you're only online and you don't have a physical address for the business, you can mark that off. However, it may come back up in the future when you're doing stuff with orders or anything like that, if they need a return address, stuff like that. So you may want to include an address there. If you don't have an address for your business, get a PO box, get something of the source. So that way you have something that someone can return stuff to if needed, or even send business mail to if needed. So these are important functions.

Regional Settings

The next thing you want to edit right here is your “Regional Settings”. So obviously I'm in the United States, my language is English. And my currency is USD. My time zone, I'm currently in CST, the America Chicago time zone. And these will play a part because when you get paid, you'll be paid in USDs. And they know that shipping will be from the United States. We'll go into the shipping settings, shipping settings here in a second, but these are functions you need to make sure you have built up. So this is all of your basic business end of things, on the administrative spectrum.

Payment Settings

The next thing we need to do is we need to do is accept payments, right? So choose the best way for people to accept payments. Well, you want people to be able to accept, or you want to be able to accept Credit/Debit Cards for an online store. Typically you want to be able to accept PayPal. If you have both a physical location and an online location, maybe even Manual, allowing people to come pay you in cash or other forms of payment at your physical location. If that's an option that you're looking to give people it's always open to you AliPay, that's another one. This is a third party payment solution, this is for Chinese websites typically.

And then you also have the Square Card Reader So this is an omnichannel card reader, and it allows you to connect with the Square Car Reader on the go, so that's also convenient and practical. What you would do next is you would press “Connect Me”, right? And then it would come in here and it says, “Great! You've connected payment methods to your site”. So I've connected my PayPal. It took my business email address to actually connect my PayPal, right? So it actually connected via what my business address was.

Now with PayPal, you'll see a couple of things. You know that with PayPal, people can pay with both PayPal and credit and debit card, but you can also set up an account to activate credit and debit card separately, which I would recommend. And that goes through “Stripe” and you can “Create an Account” or you could “Connect Existing Account”. Now, if you're someone that does all business through PayPal, well, then that's totally fine. You could roll with PayPal because it allows your customers to also accept debit and credit cards. And as long as you have that ability, you're going to up your chances of finished sales and less cart abandonment. And you're also going to keep your customers happy because most people nowadays pay online with credit or debit cards, or they do use some type of a payment system like PayPal. Typically that's the biggest consumer version of online transaction platforms. So PayPal is definitely an option I would keep on your website.

But if you wanted to also add a credit and debit solution solely rather than integrated with PayPal, Stripe is the best solution to go with and you can then add payment methods from there. If you wanted to add either these additional three payment methods, it's that simple.

Once you get your payment method set up, you'll be activated, but you still need to make sure you upgrade your plan to the eCommerce plan on Wix. You can do that by clicking “Upgrade Now” and then it'll take you to the upgraded plans. You can see the most popular one here is the “Business Unlimited” it's $25 a month. It's the one I would personally recommend for your eCommerce plan. It's the easiest, most straight forward clear solution and $25 a month is actually cost-effective compared to most other platforms in their eCommerce plans. So keep that option open on your table.

Store Shipping and Rates

So now that we've connected our payment methods, we have to go in here and look at our “Store Shipping”, right? So we have to look at a couple of things. One, are we shipping only domestically and two, if we're not shipping only domestically, we're shipping internationally, but are we going to ship to all of the world? Are we going to select a region of the world? So you can see, you can add a specific destination here.

So if you only want to ship to the United States, Canada and Mexico, you would put in all United States, domestic is already in there, but you would put in here Canada, and you would put it in here Mexico. And then once you did that, let's just pretend we're doing that. So we've got Canada and we'll choose Mexico and that's got 32 States.

Now we have to determine what type of shipping this is going to be. Are we offering free shipping to all of our customers? If so you keep this right at “Free Shipping”. If not, you have quite a few different options here for shipping. You could charge “Flat Rate”, which means you charge one flat fee for shipping. Maybe it's $7.99 on all shipping, right? That is sometimes a deterrent to some people to say, you know if you're shipping, if you're selling like a $20 product, and then you add on like almost a $7 to $10 shipping rate, people are likely going to start to abandon the cart more often because they just don't expect to pay that much for shipping on a product that doesn't reflect the value, especially when the shipping is almost half the value the product. So you have to be careful of that thing.

So you can do flat rates, but make sure it's reflective of the value of the product. Not half the product, three fourths of the product. I mean, even a quarter of the product and shipping costs, I mean, you're fine and people will pay for it, but you just don't want to get too over aggressive with shipping. You want to cover your fees for shipping and that's it. You don't want to chop anything off the top to keep for yourself one that's I just don't really think that's right and two, it's not really necessary, ship what you need to ship for. But that said, you can solve that problem by some of these other methods.

So you can “Rate By Weight”, so based off of the weight of your product, which you have the ability to input in your product details, it can calculate the shipping based off of that weight. So that way it's very calculated. It's very understood what it's being calculated by. And people know this way is X, Y, and Z, and it's going to cost us much to ship. That's much more reasonable and people are able and likely to be more understanding of that.

The other way is to “Rate By Price”. So I just told you, you can calculate a certain percentage based off of the price of the product. So if you did rate by weight again, it would come in here. It would ask you the weight range. It would ask you what the rate would be. You have the option to choose what that delivery name is. So this shows up at the bottom of checkout. So you can say “Standard Shipping”, so people understand this is your standard shipping method with the estimated delivery time is, whatever that is with what you worked out with your delivery provider, whether it's UPS, FedEx, whatever that is, just understand what your delivery times typically are. But that's the rate by weight rate by price allows you to also do based off of the total price of the order. So you can choose the price range here and then add what the rate is.

Delivery Options

And then you could also add other delivery options. You could do the “USPS Calculated Rate”, which is also very nice. This is calculated 100% from USPS it's integrated in. So if you're using USPS as a shipping provider, this is a very good one to go with. In fact, this is likely the one I would choose because it's their real time rates and it makes it very clear and straight forward, what type of mail they're shipping with. So is it First-class priority, Priority Mail Express international. You then select a package type. Is it a box, an envelope, flat rate envelope, padded envelope, and then you do the shipping address. So your business address, where is it shipping from, So that way they can calculate the exact shipping setting.

These are “Backup Settings”. So if the real time calculations aren't possible, you would put a backup weight of the product and what that shipping rate would be. But this is probably your most accurate, most easy way of going about it, because this gives you the straight up exact rate. So you don't have to worry about losing money off of shipping because you undercut the shipping rate. You also don't have to worry about charging way more for shipping because you up to shipping rate, because you really didn't know what it was. So this is the most user friendly method for shipping. And I would utilize this if possible, unless you're using some other shipping service like UPS or FedEx, but again, this is the one that I would utilize.

But there is one more method which is “Store Pickup Only”. So if you have a physical shop or location, you can have it so that the user has to pick it up in store. Again, if people are shopping online, they're likely not going to want this method unless you build an online community for your physical store and that people are in your area and are willing to come pick it up. That's when I would apply this method, but otherwise I would definitely choose some of those other shipping methods I mentioned which if we go back here.

You can actually offer a free delivery after a customer pays a certain amount. So if you want it to be like, if you spend $50 or more on our website, you get free shipping, you would simply put $50 here and it'll give a free shipping option after they spend $50 on the store. So that's actually a nice added bonus and is a great way to upsell because people love free shipping.

So if you can find a way to implement free shipping some way into your website and the cost balance out for you, and you're still profit first on your eCommerce store, then do it. If that's $50, if that's $75, and even if it's a hundred dollars, depending on the products you're selling, that may be a reasonable amount to be like, if you spend this much on our store, if you spend a hundred dollars on our store, you get free shipping on anything over and above, so that's a good option to look for. And it's great to implement that when possible the ultimate best is to offer free shipping always.

But you would have to make sure your cost of the product reflects that in the physical price to the eCommerce buyer. What I mean by that is you want to make sure if you do free shipping, that you may be bumped the price of your product up a little bit, just to reflect a shipping cost. So it's almost like a silent method. Technically speaking, you're not charging shipping fees, but in a way you're adding it to the price of the product, because you still need to maintain profitability. Because if you don't, then you start to lose money on each product you sell. And that's not the goal of an online store. That's not the goal of any store. That's not the goal of any business. The goal is to be profitable. So you want to make sure if you do offer free shipping, that everything balances out and you still earn profit at the end of each transaction, that's the ultimate goal here.

You can Add a handling fee to every order. So if you could have to go through a strenuous handling process to do this, you can charge on some extra money unless you really have to do this. And it is a strenuous process to handle and ship this product. I would not add a fee here as it does turn off people again, hidden costs at checkout does turn people off. And that's why cart abandonment strikes up so high. So you got to try to avoid that when possible. So I'm going to click that off.

You can allow both a shipping option and a “Allow Store Pickup” option, so that's your other way of doing it. If you have a local store, you can offer both store pickup and a shipping option. So that's something to look into.

Store Tax

Last but not least guys, our “Store Tax”. We'll cancel that. We'll cancel and discard changes store tax. This is our very last one. Taxes on eCommerce, one, you need to determine the rules and policies for your state in your country. I believe in the United States, certain states tax online eCommerce stores but you'll notice there are some like bigger name companies like Amazon and stuff like that, that you won't always see a tax. So it depends really on how you want to play this game right now in United States tax. Technically this is a bit of a gray area. Again, what I know is some States do make businesses charge an online tax for transactions online, some do not.

So you're going to have to research the tax information for your state and your country. If you're watching this from internationally, I'm speaking from the United States portion here. But you know, it just depends. Obviously if you don't have to charge a tax, I wouldn't. People don't like to pay as a sales tax on items. If they can find a place that does not charge a sales tax, they're going to go to it. Because obviously they just don't want to pay that additional tax money. But if you do have to pay tax if you can get a decent amount like a percentage that's not outrageous on there or if you'd want to play it safe and you do want to add tax, but at a small percentage, you can do that as well.

Unless your state really dictates it, it is a bit of a gray area, and this is an interesting conversation to have, but you want to make sure you just play within the confinements and guidelines of your country and your state. That's what you have to make sure of. So I'm not here to give you legal advice. I need to advise that right now. So please do not use this video as legal advice for your tax information on your store. I don't want anybody coming back and saying, you said not to charge tax. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying, please make sure you verify with your state and your country laws, as far as if you have to tax online on your eCommerce store.

If you do, you could click “+Add Country” right here. I'll say United States, we'll select a state I'm from Arizona. So I'll click Arizona and then we'll add a percentage. Maybe we just want to keep it 3% and then you can choose whether you Tax on Digital Products and or Tax on Shipping. So you could add it to both, or you could add it to digital product shipping or you don't add it to either. But that would be a problem. So if I click that, you could then click tax on digital products.

The reason they do tax on digital products and tax on shipping is because shipping would be a physical product. Whereas taxing digital products would be solely digital products. So you can add which ones you tax. So if you don't want to tax everything that happens online, including digital products, just do a tax on shipping. And then you would just simply click Save and you could go through and out of country and out of state, and you could add tax percentages and tax brackets based off of whatever country and whatever state you're selling to. If you're doing the entire country, you might want to do all 50 States, but again, it gets a little rocky just research the tax information for your state in your country. That's the best thing I could say.

Then you could see right here, Tax Settings. “Is tax included in your product prices?” So this is an interesting point here. So I talked to you about how hidden costs turn people off that cart abandonment. So you can actually show tax included in your price of your product. And that would keep people actually a little happier in the long run. Even if the price reflects a higher amount at the start, people won't show up to your cart and start getting a whole bunch of crap load of hidden costs added to their product, because they don't want that. That's what turns people off. So I would argue, you might actually want to turn this portion on Yes, taxes already included.

In that case, your tax is already included on your pike, or if you don't want to deal with that, just has say “No, add tasks at checkout”. People do understand that tax and shipping are two costs they can expect at checkout. So it's not like they're going to be surprised by those two, nut it's typically the amount that it costs of those two that surprises people.

So just stay within the guidelines, play it real with people, play it safe with people. As far as you know, don't throw in any crazy prices that people would not expect. And you should be good to go, guys!

Conclusion

If you enjoyed this video, I know this was a little bit lengthier drop a like down below. Comment what you enjoyed about it and what you're looking forward to next, as we dive into Wix code plus Wix stores combo tomorrow. And don't forget to hit that subscribe button right down below and turn on those bell notifications so you never miss a single upload.

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Thank you guys so much for watching this video and I will catch you in tomorrow's video!