Once you've conifgured the store and added one or more items you can start checking out the Web Store. To fire up the store simply go to:

http://localhost/webstore/

At this point the store is very generic and will require a handful of HTML customizations, but the mechanics of navigating items and shopping are now functional:

As you can see the basic home page includes a generic logo at the top with your Web store name and the text of the page in various places reflects your company name. On the left you see the basic navigation menu which should include the categories you have configured in Step 3.

The home page is a mostly static page at the top that contains a message that you probably will want to customize for your store. It also contains a list of any Specials items that were set up as part of the Inventory Item creation. Any item that has a Specials Sort Order set will show up here with the Specials text supplied and the image specified for the item. The idea is that you can mark certain of your hot items to show up on the Home Page.

You certainly will want to customize the store look and feel. We'll come back to customizing the store a little later, but for now lets quickly see how we can use the store's functionality with just the default layout.

Since we previously added only a single item and put it in the Paintings category to get to it we can click either on the All Categories or Painting categories to see and select the item. When you do you'll see a view like this:

From there you can then click on the item to display it:

To buy the item click on the Add to Shopping Cart button, which takes you to the shopping cart page:

Again notice that this store isn't 100% customized at this point and the Ship CD link is not really appropriate. We'll come back to this later in the customization section. Next you can place the order by clicking on the Place Order button. You can fill your customer information into this form as shown here:

Note that there's an error on the form - I forgot to type in a password and last name - which results in an error message at the top of the form and also a marking of the field in question. To correct I fill in a password which is mapped to the profile record kept for this customer. The password is linked to the the email address to allow the user to log on to his profile for repeat orders. The user is also assigned a permanent cookie that will automatically reattach to this profile. Note that the profile contains no sensitive information (ie. credit cards etc.).

If the user is a returning customer the Sign in button can be used to reconnect to their existing profile and retrieve their customer information.

The next form redisplays the order information and prompts for payment info:

Here you can enter credit card information and any additional info that you might need to write about the order in the Comments field.

The payment types displayed here depend on the choices that were made on the Configuration form during setup. If Credit Cards are disabled the credit cards won't show. If PayPal is disabled PayPal won't show up. Note that it's possible to have the store operate without any payment types altogether in which case orders are simply captured and you can later decide how to collect payment (or not).

If online Credit Card processing is enabled, submittting this form will go out and try to validate the credit card (or go to PayPal).
Assuming that the info entered in was valid the order is now saved to the database. Up to this point the order was only stored in temporary tables and only now is the actual order written to disk and the inventory updated.

Note that the default store installation doesn't process credit cards at this point. Rather you can use the admin module to process the credit card at a later point in time. However, it's easy to add this functionality to the store with a switch.

Once the order has been placed the user sees a confirmation page:

The content of this form is also emailed to the user in HTML format. You'll probably want to customize this page with some specific text for the user. We'll come back to this later. Voila, you've processed your first order.

Finally you can check out the order or orders placed in the store from the admin page. Go to:

http://localhost/webstore/admin/default.aspx

then click on the Show Invoices Link. You should see a form like this:

This page will show placed invoices and you can managed the list through this interface by viewing and deleting invoices as needed. Invoices can also be downloaded by the Offline Application. The list allows you to drill into an individual invoice:

This page is a small administration interface for an individual invoice and you can now go and process this invoice by processing a credit card, or sending an email confirmation to the customer. You can also send a Decline Notification via email or delete the invoice altogher.

Finally you can also mark the Invoice as a physical shipment that's been completed along with a status noted (such as completeed). This information shows on the customers Order History Form.

From this page you can manage the invoice easily including credit card processing if you have configured it for the application (see Credit Card Processing topic for more info on what's required for CC Processing to be integrated).