Ecommerce - Running an Online Store

Brightpearl websites support full e-commerce, which gives you an online shop that:

• Creates new sales directly in your Brightpearl back-office admin
• Uses the same product set as your accounting and other sales
• Creates contacts directly in your Brightpearl CRM
• Allows customers to pay for quotes online, view full financial statement and invoice history
• And much more! See the full feature list here

To set up your account to trade online, you'll need to do the following:

Add a website to your Brightpearl account

It's a simple case of switching it on! As soon as you add the website module to your account, you'll get a load of extra features. See how to add a website here.

Build your website on the development domain

Your trial website will be on a domain (URL) similar to http://mycompany.est.brightpearl.com

This let's you add products, images, design your layout and get everything ready for a go-live.

Set up payment methods

You'll need a way to take payment from customers. PayPal is the easiest to get started with, since you don't require a merchant number.

If you want to use any of our other supported payment providers, you'll need to :

1. Set up a merchant number with your bank. Get in touch with your business bank manager to discuss this.
2. Choose a Payment Services Provider (PSP), like SagePay, Secure Trading etc. This company will handle the online authorisation of credit cards, and pass the money to your bank account, usually via an intermediary that works with your bank.

Once you've got details from your PSP, set up your Brightpearl system using the information here. Note that getting a merchant account set up is dependent on your credit rating and your line of business, and can take a few weeks, so make sure you apply early!

Check the website go-live guide

We've written a go-live guide to help you get all your settings right before you launch your store. Please, please - make sure you read it!

Go-live!

When you're happy to launch your store, raise a ticket on our support system and we'll set up our servers to handle your real domain name. It's worth having a look through our Frequently Asked Questions too. All the information you need about setting up the domain name (like DNS settings) are here.

Need some help?

We've got a team on hand that can help you with design, setup and testing; with a number of Service packs available to purchase.

	Flexible design capabilities Brightpearl has a powerful templating system with a set of professional themes ready for you to launch an e-commerce site in just 10 minutes. This particular theme (available in your account from Website : Design & Layout : Theme loader) contains a home page slide show that you can easily update by editing the content in the SLIDE1/2/3 snippets, at Website : Design & Layout : Snippets. There are a number of Widgets that automatically pull in dynamic content to keep your store up to date; here we can see the "recently added items" at the bottom of the home page.
	Unlimited categories and products Here you can see a number of chairs in the "chairs" category. The category itself has some text at the top of the page - this can be any HTML content. The theme loaded on this store has images that are taller than they are wide - suited for tall items! All this can be configured without technical knowledge. Multiple pricing groups for b2b / b2c You can set up as many price lists as you like, and choose which customers are set to each price list. This means that you can run your store for end consumers at one price, and also use it to take trade/wholesale sales using another price list.	Multiple images, multiple options This screen shows the product detail screen - the product has 3 images, which open in a "lightbox" when clicked to give a larger view. The chair is available in 3 colours - you can add as many options and attributes as you like.
	One page checkout Brightpearl e-commerce sites feature a fast, simple one page checkout to help your customers complete their sale with minimal fuss. You can define your own shipping methods for different customers in different geographical locations, and of course add your own payment methods too. Configurable and customisable You can capture additional data as part of the checkout process using Custom fields, perhaps you might want to take special printing instructions, or a gift message.
	Full self service access Your customers can use your website to view the status of their orders, add comments, pay for quotes and see full financial history too, since the site runs on the same database as your accounting. Read more about your web portal