3. Welcome - Main Menu

 

 

The Welcome or Main Menu page is command central for the Interchange User Interface (UI).  You arrive at this page either from the login page, after you successfully enter a username and password, or from any number of places within the UI by clicking on the IC Logo.  Once you have logged in, this page is normally located at http://www.your_url.com/cgi-bin/your_catalog/admin/index.html .  Again remember that it is highly possible that your url will be different.

 

 

The Main Menu has many links to the different areas of the Interchange UI.  You will normally begin your sessions from this page. An important thing to note is that normally each item on the Menu has a corresponding Tab across the upper portion of the screen. The menus as well as the tabs are configurable, so as usual they may be different than the picture above.  But for our purposes, and as long as we are using the demo, there will be a Tab for each Menu Item.  That being said, the Tabs will normally be available to you regardless of where your are in the UI.  So while the Main Menu is a handy place to start out, you normally WILL NOT have to come back to it to navigate around within the UI.  Just use the Tabs that will be at the upper portion of most all of the UI pages!

We are going to go into each of the following links more in depth in the next sections, so for now we will just list each link with a brief description of what each area includes, in most cases we will simply use the descriptions displayed on the IC Menu:

  • Orders - View and Manage incoming orders.  Archive and access past orders

  • Customers - View and Manage customers. This includes addresses, orders, mailings, etc.

  • Items - Add/remove items from the site, set pricing, control inventory, some promotional settings.

  • Content - Create, edit, upload and download pages. This page will not be used much by the average Store Administrator, and will depend largely on your business structure. We will cover some of the more likely uses.

  • Design - Organize Site navigation, manage site layout. Again, an average Store Administrator will not normally use this page. Some information will be covered.

  • Merchandising - Set up Quantity pricing, up-sell, promotions, and affiliate management. This area overlaps with the Items area. Again options available here will depend largely on your developers choices

  • Miscellaneous - Legacy and other functions. Go get a cup of coffee this is for the developers.

  • Tables - The Tables area allows you access to some of the underlying tables that supply your Interchange Store with its data. If your administrator allows, you can upload, download and otherwise manipulate data for your site. This area can be very handy if you need to do large updates of items, or to export information for use in other applications. Formerly there was a reports link here. Reports have been somewhat discontinued, and may not be revived. Talk to your developer about integration with report writing software. (Or use the download utility on this page to download your data into an Excel spreadsheet and create your own reports!)

  • Administration - Administrator and Developer tools. Get the hint? There are a few functions here that you may have access to so we will discuss them briefly

That pretty much covers what is located on the Main Menu page, and where you can go from here. So lets move on to the first real working page, Orders.

 

 

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