Home → Arctic Reservations → E-Commerce → E-commerce Settings
35.1. E-commerce Settings
Before you are able to sell retail items online through your e-commerce store, you must configure some settings regarding shipping, tax rules and other details that are crucial to the e-commerce store.
To do so, go to the "Settings" page, and open the "E-commerce" section.
Enable Store
By default, the e-commerce store is not enabled on your installation. This ensures that you have time to configure your items before guests can begin purchasing items.. Once you are ready to open the store online, edit this setting and choose "Enabled."
This also allows you to take your e-commerce store offline if you need to close your office for any extended period of time.
Header
By default, the header at the top of the store is left blank. This is usually for the best, as your items will be front and center when a guest arrives. However, if you have special promotions or want to highlight certain details of your e-commerce offerings, you can choose to add text to the page header.
The header text will appear at the top of the "Shop" page.
Handling Of Unavailable Items
You can customize how out of stock items are handled on the e-commerce site. Arctic can be configured to hide items that are out of stock (preventing anyone seeing or purchasing the items), or it can be configured to continue to show items even if they are out of stock.
If out of stock items are visible, you will have additional options to determine if guests can purchase out of stock items. You can configure it to prevent purchasing out of stock items, or to allow purchasing only if the item is back ordered (i.e., the quantity is scheduled to go up in the future), or to always allow purchasing of out of stock items.
Terms
Input any text regarding your terms of sale and refund policy here. Arctic will display this information to the guest during checkout and require their consent.
Categories
Arctic can optionally organize the e-commerce store into categories — helpful if you have many items. Items can be assigned to multiple categories (e.g., a hat could be assigned to a "hats" category, and an "accessories" category). Categories can be nested like business groups, so one category can contain multiple subcategories.
Tax Rules
Depending on your state, you may be required to collect tax on e-commerce transactions. The tax rules allow you to define conditions when taxes are charged to guests. For example, many states require that tax is collected for items being shipped within the state. You can use tax rules to configure this.
Each tax rule will apply one or more taxes if and only if the order meets the conditions defined. For example, the image below will charge "sales tax" to all items being shipped within the state of New Mexico.
Shipping Methods and Classifications
The most important configuration step before enabling e-commerce for individual retail items is to define shipping methods and classifications, to help Arctic determine how to charge for shipping when guests purchase online. The next section is devoted to configuring shipping methods and classifications.