Step 1: Test Your Store

Free 5-Day Course: Start Selling Online & Shipping Your Product Step 1: Test Your Store

Welcome to Day 4 of our “Shipping in 5 Days” Course!

If you’ve been following the daily tasks of the course, by now you should have your webstore almost ready for launch, your shipping materials on the way, and your payment gateway and shipping settings set up. That’s quite a lot to get done in 3 days!

Today, we’ll cover how to test your online store to make sure everything’s working properly, and the final steps to making it live to the world! You’re actually almost done with the computer aspect of launching your farm online. Tomorrow will be mostly about setting up your shipping system and announcing your new online store to the world!

First, click here for today’s free printout to download.

So let’s get started. Begin by watching the video below, then go through the checklist after the video on how to set up these things. As always with these videos, it’s best to play the video on your phone or something while directly following along on your desktop and pausing when you need to!

Video: how to test your store settings

step-by-step tasks

Activate your Shopify plan if you haven’t already! Just go to “Home” on your Shopify dashboard, then click “choose a plan.” To find out which plan is best for you, click here. Enter your sales and other info in the “Shopify Pricing Calculator” that’s provided
Create a test product that is only about $10 that you can check out with with your real credit card. This way you can make sure payments are actually going through to your account. It’s best to do it with a cheap test product though because Shopify charges a percentage on all transactions, so you don’t want to pay a percentage of a high dollar product!
Go through the check out with your test product. Make sure your shipping calculator is working right and all the text on your checkout looks good.
Now delete your $10 test product and go to “Settings”–>”Payment Settings.” Click “Manage” next to “Shopify Payments,” then scroll to the very bottom of the page and click “Enable test mode.”
Your store is now in test mode, so any transactions processed through it will be fake. Go and place orders of some of your regular products, going through the checkout process in test mode. Don’t forget that you have to use Shopify’s fake credit card numbers for this. Find those here.
Try checking out in a state that isn’t allowed under your shipping settings and see if Shopify allows it. If it lets you check out in a state you don’t ship to, go check your shipping settings to see if something’s wrong!
Now go to your Shopify dashboard and click “Orders.” You should see all the orders you’ve just placed here. Play around with refunding all or part of the order, adding more products to the order, deleting products from the order, fulfilling the order, and more. Try printing at least one shipping label just to make sure that’s working. Test everything!
Now go to “Apps” and install Order Printer (we show you how in the video). NOTE: You only need to do this if you think you’ll be getting lots of orders! Otherwise, you can just print one order at a time by going to orders, clicking on an order, and then clicking “Print” in the lefthand upper corner.
Once Order Printer is installed (if you’ve chosen to install it), go to Orders and select all the orders you’d like to print by checking the boxes next to them.
Click “Actions” and then scroll down in the box that appears to select “Print with Order Printer.”
You can print using the templates that Shopify gives you. However, if you’d rather print using our template, you can (ours includes a little more information that we find useful when packing, such as notes a customer added to their order).
To use our template, first click “Add Template.” This will open up a text box. Name your template, then click in the box. Copy and paste the text I’ve provided at the bottom of this page into the box. Don’t edit anything! Just click save and you’re done.
When you save, it will take you back to the template page but you might have to reselect the orders you wanted to print. So go back to Orders, select them, click “Actions,” and then click “Print with Order Printer.” They should reappear again. Select your new template, then click print.

3 things you must do before activating your new store

You MUST pick a plan! You should’ve already done this because you can’t place test orders (or any orders) without a plan.
You MUST disable “test mode” in your payment gateway, otherwise you won’t be able to accept real payments. Just go to “Settings”–>”Payments” and then click “disable test mode” where it appears right at the top of the page.
You MUST deactivate the password protection on your site. To do this, click “Online Store” and then click “Disable Password” on the following page. This is all shown in the video!

here’s our order printer template…

Just copy and paste this into your new template. Don’t edit it!

<p style="float: right; text-align: right; margin: 0;">
Order Date: {{ date }}<br />
<strong>Invoice for {{ order_name }}</strong>
</p>

<div style="float: left; margin: 0 0 0.5em 0;" >
<strong style="font-size: 1em;">{{ shop_name }}</strong><br /><br />
</div>

<hr />

<h4 style="margin: 0 0 0.5em 0;">Order Items</h4>

<table class="table-tabular" style="margin: 0 0 0.0em 0;">
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Quantity</th>
<th>Item</th>
<th>Weight</th>
{% if show_line_item_taxes %}
<th>Taxes</th>
{% endif %}
<th>Price Per Unit</th>
<th>Price</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
{% for line_item in line_items %}
<tr>
<!--<td>{{ line_item.image | img_url: 'thumb' | img_tag }}</td>-->
<td>{{ line_item.quantity }} x</td>
<td><b>{{ line_item.title }}</b></td>
<td>{{ line_item.weight | weight_with_unit}}</td>
{% if line_item.tax_lines %}
<td>
{% for tax_line in line_item.tax_lines %}
{{ tax_line.price | money }} {{ tax_line.title }}<br/>
{% endfor %}
</td>
{% endif %}
<td>
{% if line_item.original_price != line_item.price %}
<s>{{ line_item.original_price | money }}</s>
{% endif %}
{{ line_item.price | money }}
</td>
<td>{{ line_item.line_price | money}}</td>
</tr>
{% endfor %}
</tbody>
</table>

<div style="float: left; margin: 0 0 0.5em 0;" >
<h4 style="margin: 0.25 0 0.25em 0;">Payment Details</h4>

<table class="table-tabular" style="margin: 0 0 0.5em 0;">
<tr>
<td>Subtotal price:</td>
<td>{{ subtotal_price | money }}</td>
</tr>
{% for discount in discounts %}
<tr>
<td>Includes discount "{{ discount.code }}"</td>
<td>{{ discount.savings | money }}</td>
</tr>
{% endfor %}
<tr>
<td>Total tax:</td>
<td>{{ tax_price | money }}</td>
</tr>
{% if shipping_address %}
<tr>
<td>Shipping:</td>
<td>{{ shipping_price | money }}</td>
</tr>
{% endif %}
<tr>
<td><strong>Total price:</strong></td>
<td><strong>{{ total_price | money }}</strong></td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>

<div style="float: right; margin: 0 0 0.5em 0;" >{% if shipping_address %}
<h4 style="margin: 0.25 0 0.25em 0;">Ship To</h4>

<div style="margin: 0 0 0.5em 0; padding: 0.5em; border: .25px solid black;">
<strong>{{ shipping_address.name }}</strong><br/>
{% if shipping_address.company %}
{{ shipping_address.company }}<br/>
{% endif %}
{{ shipping_address.street }}<br/>
{{ shipping_address.city }}
{{ shipping_address.province_code }}
{{ shipping_address.zip | upcase }}<br/>
{{ shipping_address.country }}
<p>{{ shipping_line.title }}</p>
<p>Customer Phone: {{ shipping_address.phone }}</p>
<p>Customer Email: {{ customer.email }}</p>
<p>Number of Orders Placed by this Customer:{{ customer.orders_count }}</p>
</div>
</div>
{% endif %}
{% if note %}
<div><h3 style="margin: 0 0 0.5em 0;">Note</h3>
<p>{{ note }}</p>
<p>{{ customer.note }}</p>
</div>
{% endif %}

So that’s all for today! Tomorrow we’ll turn on your store and prepare you for your first shipping day!

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