Setting up your ecommerce on Small Farm Central is easy to do through the control panel that comes with each Small Farm Central membership.

1. Create a new department page

Departments are like sections in a grocery store. They are individual pages on your site that sell logically-related items. Perhaps one department page sells dried herbs while another page sells jam. It is up to you how to organize your departments -- you can do it any way you want. The basic ecommerce package comes with one department page while the advanced ecommerce options comes with up to five department pages.

To create a new department, login to your control panel, and navigate to:
Sell / Administrate Stores / Create department

The resulting page will allow you to create a store page based on your options. See the screenshot below to get an idea of the options you have:

The option "Menu category to create department" allows you to select exactly where the navigation for this department will appear on your site. You can change this later.

2. Create an item
Now that your store is ready, you need to fill it with items that customers can buy.

In your control panel, navigate to:
Sell / Administrate stores / Create item

Now you can enter the details for your item. You can create a long description using the Small Farm Central rich-text editor that you find throughout the control panel. The default price is just to help you later, it does not fix the price for the item. The last option allows you to optionally choose a default photo for the item -- remember, the photo must first be uploaded to your gallery area (Create content / gallery / upload photo)

3. Add item to inventory
Once you have created your item, you are not completely done. You now need to explicitly add that item to a department. We make that easy on you because when you create an item, you are automatically taken to a "create inventory" page.

Choose a department to add the item to, fill out the amount of inventory you have for the item, and put in the price. You will also see a "weight" option. This helps you order the items on your department store; the lightest items float to the top and the heaviest sink. So an item with a -5 weight will always shown up before a -4 weight.

Small Farm Central acts as an inventory control mechanism, so when your inventory is sold, the item is automatically removed from the store until you add more inventory. This ensures that you do not oversell your stock.

Now you are ready!

Now your department and item are available for customers to purchase! Repeat the steps above as necessary and we have many advanced options to help you with checkout and selling to specific customers.

If you would like to get started with an ecommerce system for your website, see:
http://www.smallfarmcentral.com/buynow [1]

Now your item is ready for sale!