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If you’ve ever set up an e-commerce store, you know that it’s a bit more complex than it seems like it should be. This guide’s purpose is to help you think about what needs to go into the store before getting into the actual setup. If you’re setting up the store for someone else, you can use these questions to direct setting up the store with your client’s specific needs in mind.
We encourage you to put together a detailed order flow plan before starting to set things up in Foxy, especially if you are one providing development/design services to a merchant. If you consider all the points in this document, you should be pretty well-covered, and you can ask questions before you get too deep in development.
In order for this document to be a manageable length, we need to keep everything basic, and restrict the scope to things to think about, rather than a how-to guide. We’ll provide links to where you can go deeper into a topic, and of course, you can always contact our support team or presales if you have specific questions.
Let’s go!
How are the store's products managed?
Foxy doesn’t manage products, we provide the cart, checkout, and receipt functionality, so if you haven’t already, you’ll need to decide how the products on the site will be managed. Here are some common options:
Static HTML website (hardcoded, static-site generated, etc.)
Hosted CMS (Examples: Webflow, Wix, Squarespace)
Traditional CMS (Examples: Wordpress, Craft, MODX)
Headless CMS (Examples: Prismic, Contentful, Strapi)
For more information on how products are managed, you can check out this article. Whatever the method for managing products, our support team can guide you in setting up your products for integration with Foxy. If the store is offering subscriptions (aka Recurring Payments), you’ll want to thoroughly review the link below on subscriptions, as well as ensure that the gateway chosen (see next section for details on Gateways) to accept payment supports recurring payments.
Here are some more specific links on different types of products:
Detailed General Product Information
Information on Downloadable Products
Information on Subscription Products
How will the store accept payments?
The store’s payment gateway will allow the store to collect payments from the customers. The gateway provides a communication path between the merchant’s bank, customer’s bank, and Foxy. You’ve probably heard of Square or PayPal. These companies and many others provide gateway services, which typically send transactions to your merchant account to capture. Some gateways are provided by the merchant account provider. You can see more details on the flow of payments in the article here. You can see the gateways we integrate with here.
You may already have a gateway in mind ― if that’s the case, you can check our list to see if we integrate with it. If not, you can select the store’s country in the linked article and see which gateways we recommend for that country. You can also reach out to us for a recommendation, or take a look here for a short list of gateways.
If you need an offline payment method, we do support setting that up with our Purchase Orders feature (can be modified to work for specific use cases). To see how that’s set up, you can take a look at the article here.
How will shipping be configured?
Shipping is something well-worth considering up front. For most users, our built-in shipping options are all they need. If none of our built-in options work for the store, you can put together custom shipping logic that fits the store’s needs. This allows for complex shipping logic to display live rates, create your own rates, or get rates from a third party service, such as Shippo. If our custom shipping logic doesn’t cover the needs, you can use an external shipping endpoint to bring rates into the checkout flow.
Here are some things to consider:
Will the store use a live shipping rate, such as those gotten from USPS, UPS, or FedEx, or do they charge a flat shipping fee for all or portions of their product line?
If the store’s getting live rates, do they have an account with negotiated rates?
Does the store need to offer free or reduced (or increased) shipping (or other conditional rates)? This may be when the order reaches a certain threshold, if a coupon is applied, or shipping is inside or outside an area, for example.
Does the store need to factor in any charges for packaging or handling?
If flat rates are used, how are you determining how the rate is calculated? Is it by weight, quantity, or address, or perhaps broken down by specific combinations of products?
Do you need to consider what happens when there are different combinations of products in the cart for how the shipping would be combined?
Links for setting up shipping:
Built-in Shipping Options (top of settings page―you'll need to have a Foxy account to view)
What limitations are there on shipping?
The most common limitation is where the store will ship to. You can restrict countries and regions through our native locations configuration, but if you need something more specific, such as restricting by postcode, that can be accomplished through the custom shipping logic mentioned above.
If you need to display different rates based upon location, that’s possible as well. You should lay out your ideal scenario, and if it’s straightforward, you can probably proceed with setting everything up, but if it’s more complicated, we can guide you how that may be reached. Here are some examples of location-based custom shipping logic.
How should taxes be configured?
Most tax configuration requirements fall into one of the following:
No tax
Manual tax setup (maybe you’re just charging a flat tax rate for one area)
Tax with Foxy’s tax lookup (currently Thomson Reuters)
Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE
Tax with AvaTax or TaxJar
If you’re in a country that requires you to show tax-inclusive pricing on your site, while we’re working on handling that natively with settings, many of our users apply customizations to their cart, checkout, and receipt that will display taxes in a way that is satisfactory. Just reach out to our support team if you need help with this.
You can read more about taxes in our documentation here.
Does the store need to track shipping/fulfillment?
While Foxy doesn’t have a native integration for tracking shipping, it can integrate with just about any system. We have users on many different configurations for shipping tracking. Here are some common integrations:
Use Integromat or Zapier to receive a webhook of order data to send along to your shipping software
Use OrderDesk to integrate Foxy orders with your shipping software (OrderDesk also has many features other than integrating with shipping software)
Send a JSON-formatted payload to an endpoint for custom integration with your shipping software
You can contact us if you need ideas for Shipping & Fulfillment with regard to your unique situation or want more details on the methods above.
Does the store need post-order customer processing?
If you need to send customer data to CRM systems for further processing such as adding to a mailing list, you can use one of the methods in the shipping/fulfillment section.
Does the store need to track inventory?
Post-order inventory tracking can be accomplished similar to Shipping & Fulfillment ― you choose your method of sending inventory data to your inventory software for updates. Additionally, you can use our pre-payment webhook to check inventory right before order completion and present the customer with a message on checkout if the check indicates an inventory issue.
If you’re using Webflow, we have an integration for tracking inventory. You can review this article in our documentation. If you’re using WordPress, we have a plug-in (FoxyShop) that includes inventory management.
What will be the URL for the cart, checkout, and receipt?
We currently offer a secure foxycart.com domain, so the URL may be something like https://your-store.foxycart.com. This is what your customers will see in the address bar on the cart, checkout, and receipt.
We also offer a secure, optional custom subdomain that you can use to have a consistent appearance from your site to the checkout within the browser’s address bar. You can read more about that in our documentation here.
Does the store need a customer dashboard?
Foxy has some modular components that you can add on to your Foxy store, and we are adding more as time goes on. Our customer portal allows customers to log in to see and interact with subscriptions, personal information, and past orders. You can see and try out our demo customer portal here.
As of this writing, the customer portal is in Beta, but we have many users who have implemented it with much success. If you just need a quick portal, you can set it up with a little effort. With more expertise and time to work on it, you can customize it as needed.
When you are ready to get started with the portal: If you’re using Webflow, start here. Otherwise, see here.
Does the store's cart, checkout, web receipt, and/or email receipt need extensive customization?
For most of our users, our standard templates work just fine for their needs. However, the templates can be customized as much as needed. The extent to which customization is needed will correlate with the amount of technical skill required, so this should be kept in mind if you are a designer/developer working for a client. While our support team does their best to provide direction and snippets where available, there are some complex situations which will be beyond the scope of our support team for users who have the Standard plan.
Some things to think about (this is not all-encompassing, just common examples):
- Colors, fonts, string changes, required/hidden/optional standard field settings and logos are very simple changes and require little skill. You can see details on simple changes here.
- A bit more advanced, you can embed our checkout into your own site design by designing your templates and then caching them to Foxy using the details in this article. If you’re using Webflow, you can reference the article here to place your Foxy checkout within your website’s custom header and footer design.
- Adding a simple checkout field that applies to every customer placing an order is fairly simple. You can see this article for details. There are scenarios where you may need to conditionally show the field or some other deviation from a basic custom checkout field. In many cases, we can help you set that up, but there are limitations to how much our support team can do with these use cases.
- Re-arranging fields, changing the behavior of fields, hiding and showing fields dynamically, and changing the behavior of checkout, cart, and receipt add another level of complexity that will require more skill on your part. While our support team can provide guidance on achieving these, you’ll likely need to be able to write html, JavaScript, and twig to be able to make these types of changes.
- It is possible to customise all aspects of the checkout, but this requires a high level of skill and while our support team can provide direction, giving detailed instructions on achieving your changes are out of our support’s scope.
You can see what the default templates look like here, and see snippets for common customizations here.
What are the store's reporting needs?
Our Foxy admin currently has some basic reporting and exporting capabilities. From the Foxy admin, you can filter, display, and export transaction data (limit of 300 records at a time) and filter/display subscription data.
We are working on a new admin that has richer reporting capabilities that are easy for non-technical people to use, but in the meantime, if you have a reporting need that exceeds the features above, here are some options that are available to you.
Add orders to your reporting software as they occur using our JSON-formatted payload, Integromat, Zapier, or OrderDesk.
All of your store data is available using our API. If you’re not very experienced with APIs, you can try out our Postman tutorial. You can perform on-demand requests and copy out JSON data to import into (for example) Microsoft Excel. You can also build simple to complex scripts using the technology of your choice to get the data and format it the way you need it.
Less technical is to use our bulk transactions or subscriptions exporters.
One final option is to reach out to us to discuss your reporting needs.
Is there any other post-transaction processing or special need?
You can note and ask about anything else that comes up in the order flow plan that we haven’t addressed in this document.
Note that most special use cases are possible with Foxy, but require custom programming.
Checklist Overview
Lastly, here’s a checklist for you to get a bird-eye view of things to consider:
How are the store’s products managed?
How will the store accept payments?
How will shipping be configured?
What limitations are there on shipping?
How should taxes be configured?
Do you need to track shipping/fulfillment?
Does the store need post-order customer processing?
Does the store need to track inventory?
What will be the URL for the cart, checkout, and receipt?
Does the store need a customer dashboard?
Does the store’s cart, checkout, web receipt, and/or email receipt need extensive customization?
What are the store’s reporting needs?
Is there any other post-transaction processing or special need?