OR… If you’ve been here for a little while and you want to check you have what you need to for your Hive Store Page, you can use this page as your checklist too, of course.
FIRST OF ALL; WELCOME!!!!
We are so stoked to have you on board and are looking forward to find out more about you and your business!
Within a short time of registering you would have / will receive a welcome announcement in your email as well as your vendor dashboard from our Queen Bee.
Please read it carefully as it has important information AND the link to our vendor Facebook community!
When you just newly registered, you would have gotten prompted to use our ‘wizard’ which takes you through your vital steps in 10-15 minutes… if you have done that, some of the below steps you might have already done
1. Set up your Shipping
It is vital you set up your shipping first from your vendor dashboard>settings as your listings cannot go live without shipping set up!
Unless you have more than 4 different shipping classes, you can do it all with our (Advanced) Flat Rate Shipping,
Please head on over to our Flat Rate Shipping Guide to get you started.
Don’t forget to do configure your shipping tab. It will give your customers shipping information on your listings without having to go look at the checkout.
2. Connect your store to your STRIPE account
In your vendor dashboard, go to settings>payment and use the button to connect to your Stripe account.
If you do not have one, it will take you to Stripe and there it will take you through the steps to set up a Stripe account for your business.
You can find more about the process of connecting to Stripe here.
Once set up and an order is placed with your business. the payment will go directly to your Stripe account. Stripe will take a fee for the order. View current New Zealand Stripe fees here.
- FREE Starter plan; the 15% success fee will be deducted before the payment is sent to your Stripe account.
- Pro Plan: the 8% success fee will be deducted before the payment is sent to your Stripe account.
- Pro+ Boost Plan, no success fee will be taken by The Hive NZ over your orders.
3. Add your logo / Cover Image
In your vendor dashboard>settings please add your Logo and Cover image.
These are the images that will leave a first impression when our customers browse our Vendors List
Once they see your store page, you will want them to see a beautiful page so make sure your images represent your quality as a business!
- Advice is 1000p x 1000p for your logo image but make sure there is loads of white space around it as it will be cut as a circle for some views.
- Your Cover Image needs to be 2000p x 500p for the best view on the live site.
- Please make sure your images are never bigger than 200kb in file size.
Pro+ Boost vendor? We will use the logo you load as the logo showing on our home page, on our ‘ vip vendors’ page as well as ‘our vendor’s page, which will link to your store page.
PLEASE NOTE: no external links, phone numbers, emails, etc. allowed.
4. Add your first listing
From your vendor dashboard>products you can start adding listings.
Our system lets you set up the pure basics and then shows you more information to add.
Please use our Product Listing Guide here for more info
The above are the BARE basics you need to keep your store active – but NOW you want to make it the best you possibly can, right?!
Here’s the steps for that… you can do these in any order you like.
p.s. only covering the things that might not speak for themselves or have some rules/guidelines/information attached.
The more you do, the more you add, not only does your store page look better and impress more; it also adds more badges to your profile which show on the top left of your vendor store page. Some of the settings also add tabs to your product listings; more info for your customers!
SETTINGS>STORE
Store Categories
This matters for when the customer uses the search function on the Vendor List page.
If you add no categories here, you will not show up when you want to.
Please only add categories you actually fit in, we do not want to annoy customers with content they did not ask/look for.
Address
This SHOULD already be there but if it is not, please add it now. It is vital and we are required by law to have it on file.
Your address will not be shown to our shopping customers.
Show Terms & Conditions in store page
When you add in your store’s Terms & Conditions, it will add an extra tab to your store page with your Terms & Conditions in it.
Go to vacation
When you use this, all your products will go into ‘vacation’ which means customers cannot order them but they do stay live.
Only use this for a maximum period of one month, please contact admin if your store needs to go inactive for longer.
Biography
Write your business description here, what the customer will want to know about your business. When adding this, it adds another tab to your store page for customers to see.
Enable Support
Always keep these ticked on, it means customers can contact you directly.
When a customer uses the ‘contact vendor’ button, you will get notified and will see their question in your vendor dashboard>support tab. You can reply to them there too.
PLEASE NOTE: no external links allowed and you will need to keep future sales within The Hive’s website.
DON’T FORGET – always hit ‘update settings’ to save your changes!
SETTINGS>VERIFICATION
Here you can verify your name, address AND business.
This will give your store page a blue tick – visible to our customers on your store page as well as all your product pages, this creates TRUST!
Your verification level (the more you send in for verification the higher the level) will also show on your store page under ‘badges’ (top left corner)
SETTINGS>SOCIAL PROFILE
the links you fill in here will then show as social icons on top of your cover photo on your vendor store page.
It is the only place on the website where you can leave external links.
SETTINGS>STORE SEO
What you put here will be what search engines, Facebook and Twitter pick up when you share your store links.
Rather than showing all Hive’s branding when you share your store online, it will show YOUR branding.
This does take a little time to ‘populate’ after you have set this up so please be patient.