Basic Magento Configurations
Firstly, I suggest that you go to the system and then to the user roles to create a specific role for yourself. I will be creating a manager role which will prompt me for my current password and what permissions I want to give this user. I will give them all the permissions, so I will save this role. This is not a standard for Magento but is a standard for AWS and other communities as well where you keep your root account separate. This is my administrator account, which I will keep separate. Although both accounts have the same privileges, we can reduce the manager’s privileges to ensure that my Magento is completely secure. We can reduce certain permissions and restrict the creation of new users or giving access to your Magento’s partner place or Marketplace. This way, things are under your control only. Once you create the user role, you have to create a user for your manager. From there, you can create a new user. But for now, let’s skip that since it’s only for demo purposes.
Next, we’ll go to Store and Configurations. Firstly, I’ll give you a basic idea that you should definitely set your store’s country. For now, I’ll set it to India and only select India as the country from which I am willing to accept orders. In Top Destination, let’s ignore that. State is not required now because we have changed the country. Our timezone is set from our setup screen. In Store Information, we can set the basic information for our store like store name and phone number. We can keep it at that since nothing else is required. I’ll set Single Store Mode to “Yes” because I’m not expecting any store views or multiple languages for customers to switch from. This will give me performance optimization. In case your store is finally going to have multiple languages in the future or there is a slight possibility of that, you can even enable Single Store Mode for now and then disable it whenever you want. In the initial stages, it will give you a decent performance optimization because overall layout XML files in Magento are combined together, and a complete tree of XML is built when website front ends are loaded. So if you enable this mode, that tree is short, and it loads fast.
Next, we will go to the Web section where we have URL options. I won’t touch that, but search engine optimization seems okay. Another thing you should consider checking is default cookie settings. There are certain countries inside the UK and European countries where it’s mandatory that if your website is accepting cookies, you should give them notice. It’s legally mandatory, so you should enable this cookie restriction mode. To enable this, you just uncheck this checkbox and click “Yes.” In other countries, it’s not required. Based on your requirements, you can set it or unset it however you want.
Now we will go to our Currency Setup. Here, we will set what will be our base currency. From our setup screen, we set Indian Rupees as our base currency, so it’s Indian Rupees here. Default currency is the currency in which our products will be displayed on the front end. Allowed currencies are the other currencies in which a customer can switch, but we will only keep one currency for our ease, so that’s fine.
Now again, we’ll go to Store Email Addresses and key in a couple of email addresses that belong to us. In the Contact Us form, this is Magento standard, and this is enabled. You can change the settings here so that the contact us email reaches you. Now in the Report screen, it’s your dashboard from the report, so you can set your date, or you can use the system’s value.
Here we will enable and configure the payment methods that we want to offer to our customers. Magento comes with some default payment methods such as PayPal, credit card, and bank transfer. We can enable these by clicking on them and entering the required information.
For example, for PayPal, we will need to enter our PayPal account email address. For credit card, we will need to select the credit card types we want to accept and enter our merchant account information. For bank transfer, we will need to enter our bank account details.
Once we have configured our payment methods, we will need to test them to make sure they are working properly. We can do this by placing test orders using different payment methods and verifying that the payment is processed correctly.
Finally, we will go to the shipping methods section. Here we will enable and configure the shipping methods that we want to offer to our customers. Magento comes with some default shipping methods such as flat rate, table rate, and free shipping. We can enable these by clicking on them and entering the required information.
For example, for flat rate, we will need to enter the shipping price. For table rate, we will need to set up a table of shipping prices based on weight, destination, and other factors. For free shipping, we will need to set up the minimum order amount required for free shipping.
Once we have configured our shipping methods, we will need to test them to make sure they are working properly. We can do this by placing test orders with different shipping methods and verifying that the shipping is calculated correctly.
That’s it! We have now completed the basic setup of our Magento store. Of course, there are many more settings and configurations that we can adjust to customize our store further, but the steps we have taken so far should be enough to get us up and running. Good luck with your new store!