This video will show you a few key areas inside the control panel where you can adjust your
store’s settings for your specific business needs.
The first step is to fill out your Store Profile.
We’ll click on Store Setup, then Store Profile.
Here you should enter your store’s name as you want it to appear in all communication from your store.
Enter your physical store address or place of business.
This address is not used to calculate shipping quotes, but for displaying your contact information.
Depending on your theme, this may show on your storefront.
Next, choose your Store’s Country and select one of these options.
Enter in a customer facing email address, which will be used to send emails like invoices and order status updates.
And finally, provide a phone number that will appear on your storefront.
You can choose to omit your phone number, but public contact numbers are a proven trust signal
and will increase conversion rates.
Save and let’s head to Store Settings in the navigation.
The first item we see within the Website tab is the Down for Maintenance switch.
This allows you to take your store offline for whatever reason.
You can customize a message here that will display on your homepage alerting potential
customers what’s going on with your store.
This text area even allows HTML if you need it.
To bring your store back online, flip the switch back on!
Look below and you’ll see your store’s physical dimension settings.
These should be set to your preferred unit of measure before you begin adding products.
This determines how your dimensions will be labeled.
Changing this, later on, will not convert your product’s shipping dimensions to a
new system of measure.
Next, we have the default Search Engine Optimization information for your store.
Ranking on search engines is a huge help in attracting shoppers.
You will see these fields in different areas of your Bigcommerce store and you will want
to fill them out wherever you see them.
Pages that do not have SEO information filled out will default using this information.
At the bottom of this section is the WWW redirect preference.
The redirect forces your store address to one URL style either with or without the WWW.
It has no effect on the operation of your store, but choosing one or the other will
be beneficial for your SEO.
Choosing No preference may negatively affect your SEO ranking.
Bigcommerce offers the ability to enable site-wide HTTPs, which will improve your search engine
ranking and increase buyer’s confidence.
You may need to upgrade your Bigcommerce plan to be eligible for this feature.
If you are interested, you can click here to learn more.
And lastly, you'll see the Search Engine Robots area.
A robots text file tells the search engine robots which parts of your site that should not be indexed.
BigCommerce automatically generates a robots text file which follows SEO best practices.
We do not recommend editing these files unless you know what you are doing since it can really
upset your SEO performance.
Let’s click save and continue to the Display Tab.
It’s important to note that the settings in the following tabs will be different for
blueprint & stencil themes.
If you are seeing different options, then you are likely on a blueprint theme.
Check the support portal for articles about store settings.
For quick reference or an explanation of the setting, You can hover over these Question Mark icons.
Scroll down to find product settings.
This section determines whether or not certain product attributes are visible to your customers.
For example, some stores want to show the SKU on each product for the customer’s reference
or don’t want to show the weight.
Check or uncheck the boxes to select what should be displayed.
Next is the Share Tab.
Here you can choose the social media sharing links you’d like to display on your products by clicking on the icon.
They will show up as small icons on product pages and blog posts.
Next up is the Language & Date tab.
Be sure to set your timezone here.
This helps accurately record and track your Orders, Store Logs and discount expirations.
If you’re based in the US, click to enable automatic daylight savings time correction.
The URL Structure tab allows advanced users to customize how their URLs display in their store.
BigCommerce provides the most SEO friendly URL structure by default.
If you’d like to learn more about custom URLs click here to check out an in-depth article.
The Search tab allows you to adjust the in-store search function.
You can choose how you’d like your customers’ product searches to result.
They can be sorted by relevance, featured item, newest items, or price, among other options.
And finally, the very last tab in your Store Settings is Miscellaneous.
Here, you can choose when Product Review Emails are sent and which emails to Forward Order
This is great if you are using a Fulfillment Center, have a Warehouse Manager, or even
to yourself so you can see exactly what your customer sees.
On select plans, you can enable your store to send abandoned cart notifications when
a customer doesn’t complete their checkout.
Click this box to turn on this feature.
These other settings below are how often you receive emails when a cart is abandoned.
Your administrator’s email is the address where all system notifications will be sent.
Only one may be entered and customers will not see this email address.
We know every business is a bit different, so we want to give you the flexibility to
adjust your store settings as needed.
Even though there are a lot of options here, rest assured Bigcommerce has set the defaults
for optimal store performance.