Launch Store University
Store Settings In this lesson, you will learn about: Completing your Store Profile Down for maintenance, physical dimensions and SEO settings Display and image settings Time zone, sharing, in-store search and miscellaneous settings Transcript Who doesn t love tweaking their settings? and your Bigcommerce store has a boatload of settings to cater to all types of businesses. Bigcommerce has done an excellent job giving you the flexibility you may need, but now it s up to you to flip a few switches and turn a few knobs. Let me show you a few key areas inside the control panel where you can adjust your store s settings. The first step is to fill out your Store Profile. We ll click on the Settings link - and then Store Profile. Here you should enter your store s name, store s address, what type of address, Customer facing email address, and business phone number. This number may show on your site depending on your theme. You can choose to omit your phone number, but public contact numbers are a proven trust signal, and will increase conversion rates. This is the email address customer s will see when your Bigcommerce store sends them an email. Save and let s head on to our Store Settings. To access your store s settings, we ll go back to our Settings menu, and up to Store Settings. The first item we see within the Website tab of your Store settings is the
Down for Maintenance switch. This allows you to take your store offline for whatever reason. You can customize a message here that will display on your homepage alerting potential customers what s going on with your store. This text area even allows HTML if you need it. To bring your store back online simply flip the switch back ON, and click Save. But first, look below and you ll see your store s physical dimension settings. Physical storefront settings should be set to your preferred unit of measure before you begin adding products. Changing this later on will not convert your current products to your preferred unit of measure. Next we have the Search Engine Optimization fields. These are very important to your success in search engine results. Ranking on search engines is a huge help in attracting shoppers. You will see these fields in different areas of your Bigcommerce store. Try to fill them out where ever you see them. We ll learn a whole lot more regarding S-E-O in later lessons. Then we see the www redirect preference. The redirect forces your store address to one URL style or the other. Either with or without the WWW. It has no effect on the operation of your store, but choosing one of the other will be beneficial for your SEO. Choose either WWW or NO WWW. Choosing No preference may negatively affect your SEO ranking in the eyes of Google or Bing. Bigcommerce offers the ability to enable https sitewide, which may improve your search engine ranking, but you may need to upgrade your Bigcommerce plan to be eligible for this feature. And lastly you ll find your Robots.txt area. A website s Robots Text file gives directions to the search engine robots that crawl your website. It is primarily used to tell those bots not to index certain pages. Sometimes you don t want certain webpages to be seen and shared by search engines. Robots.txt allows you to do this, but if you re not
familiar with this document it s best to stay away as you can really upset your SEO performance by editing it. The next tab along the top of your Settings area is the Display tab. There s a ton of options in here. I m just going to point out some really important items, or we ll be here all day. Remember you can always hover the information i for a quick explanation. The very first option for Featured Products is really useful. This allows you to change how many products you want to show on your home page. Some stores only want a row of 5 while others want to show 20 products on their home page. Adjust this number accordingly. If you are going to use 20 featured products make sure you ve marked 20 products as featured. Another popular setting is the breadcrumb display. Below we have Product Settings. Another important area. Some stores want to show the SKU on each product for the customer s reference. Some stores don t want to show the weight of each product. Other store owners don t want to waste space on Shipping cost if it s calculated at checkout. Whatever your need or style you can adjust these Product display settings, and change the look of your Product pages. At the very bottom you ll see Quick View button text. This text appears when you hover a product s thumbnail on your storefront or a category page. The color setting below, may not apply depending on which theme you re store is using. You d have to adjust your store s CSS coding in those instances. The Images tab allows you to control different image settings in your store. You can change the size of your thumbnails storewide, or decide to upload a branded category image, or perhaps customize your default product image when there is no product image available. You will probably want to keep your Product image sizes at their default sizes especially to start, as these sizes are optimal for your theme.
The Share Tab allows you to select which social sharing tabs you d like to display on your products. This is a great way to get your customers to do some marketing for you. This is also why Product photography really helps when selling online. A great feature already enabled for you is Pinterest Rich Pins. This allows important product info to get carried over to Pinterest whenever someone Pins your product photos. Just another way Bigcommerce is helping you sell more. Next up is the Language & Date tab. You should definitely set your time zone here. This helps accurately record and track your Orders and Store Logs. The URL Structure tab allows store owners to customize how their URLs display in their store. This is an impressive feature, but it s probably more for advanced users. If you d like to learn more about custom URLs check out support.bigcommerce.com for an indepth article. Just know, Bigcommerce provides the most SEO friendly URL structure by default, so no need to adjust these settings, if you re not an experienced user. The search tab allows you to adjust the in-store search function. You can choose how you d like your customers searches to result. Should they be sorted by featured item, by price, by date created, alphabetically, how many results do you want per page? Whatever! The important part is you have control. The very last tab in your Store Settings is the Miscellaneous tab. Here, you ll find great settings such as Product Review Email frequency and Forward Order Invoices. The forward order invoice option allows you to send a copy of each order s invoice to anyone you d like. This is great to send each order to a Fulfillment Center or Warehouse Manager, or even to yourself so you can see exactly what your customer sees. Your administrator s email is the email address where you ll receive all store emails
and notifications. Any type of email that is generated from Bigcommerce to your store will be sent to the administrator s email address. Customers will not see this email address, so don t worry. OK. Even though there s a lot of options in here, rest assured Bigcommerce has set the defaults for optimal store performance, but again we know every business is a bit different, so we want to give you the flexibility to adjust your store as needed.