Guides - setting up your Squaark shop

Start here

A shop needs nine things set before it can take its first order. In this order, because each one depends on the last - you cannot quote a delivery cost before you have a shipping zone, and you cannot test a confirmation email before you have somewhere to send it from.

Settings > Store - name, currency, contact email and tagline. Set the currency first: it is the one thing that is awkward to change once you have taken an order.
Settings > Payments - paste in your Stripe and/or PayPal credentials. Both can be active at once, and Apple Pay and Google Pay come with Stripe.
Shipping and Tax - add at least one shipping zone and the tax rates for the regions you sell to, so checkout can quote a real total.
Products and Collections - add what you sell and group it. Moving from WooCommerce? Use Import instead and bring the history with you.
Themes - pick Linen or Nova and set your colours and fonts. The preview is live, so this takes minutes rather than an afternoon.
Pages and Navigation - build your home page from sections, then point the menus at it. Nothing goes live until you press Publish.
Emails - check the order confirmation reads the way you want. On Squaark Cloud sending already works; self-hosting, point Settings > Email at a real mail provider first, because the default sends nothing.
Users - add anyone else who needs access, and turn on two-factor authentication.
Go live - point your domain at the shop and place a test order through it, start to finish, including the confirmation email.

Note

The only step that differs by how you are hosted is the last one. On Squaark Cloud you add a domain from your dashboard and HTTPS is issued for you - your shop is reachable at yourshop.squaark.com from the moment it starts. Self-hosting, you point DNS at your own server and terminate TLS yourself.

Catalogue

Everything you sell, and how it is grouped.

Products and variants: Add products under Products > New product - title, description, images, price, stock. Variants cover size, colour and anything else that changes the price or the stock count.
Collections: Group products into collections under Collections. A product can sit in as many as you like, and collections are what your navigation and mega menus are usually built from.
Digital products: Attach a file to a product and Squaark delivers it automatically once payment clears. Nothing to fulfil, and the download link is tied to the order.
Pre-orders and launch dates: Give a product an available-from and available-until date. It goes up early with a Coming soon badge, takes pre-orders, and closes itself when the window ends.
Stock and low-stock alerts: Stock counts down as orders come in. Set a threshold and Squaark emails you when a product runs low, so you reorder before you are caught out.
Search: Product search is built in and needs no configuration or third-party service. It is relevance-ranked with prefix matching, and title matches outrank description matches.
Moving in from WooCommerce: Bring products, collections, customers and order history across under Import - from a WooCommerce export file or straight from the WordPress API.
CSV export: Export products, orders or customers as CSV whenever you need them elsewhere - an accountant, a spreadsheet, a mailing tool.

Selling

Getting paid, and getting orders to the door.

Taking payments: Connect Stripe and PayPal under Settings > Payments. Both can run at once, and Stripe brings Apple Pay and Google Pay with it. Payouts go straight to your own account - we never sit in the middle and never take a percentage.
Shipping zones: Under Shipping, set rates by zone or region so the cost a customer sees at checkout matches where the order is actually going.
Tax: Set rates per region under Tax and Squaark applies them at checkout. Whether prices display inclusive or exclusive of tax is a setting, not a theme edit.
Delivery and collection slots: Let customers book a date and a time window. The booking lands on the order, the confirmation email and the admin, so nobody has to relay it by hand.
Local pickup: Offer collection in person as an alternative to shipping, with its own instructions on the order and in the confirmation email.
Trade pricing and customer groups: Put buyers in a Trade or Wholesale group with a real store-wide discount, and force inclusive or exclusive tax display for that group.
Pay by invoice: Let approved trade customers check out on account rather than paying up front, on the net terms you set.
Promotions and discounts: Classic discount codes under Promotions, plus automatic offers that need no code at all - spend thresholds and buy-one-get-one.
Cart, Basket or Bag: Call it whatever your customers call it. The wording changes across the whole storefront from one setting.

Content and storefront

How the shop looks, and how you change it.

Themes: Two are bundled: Linen is clean and editorial, Nova is bold with a hero product slider. Pick one under Themes, or upload your own - a theme is a folder of Handlebars files and CSS, with no build pipeline.
The live theme editor: Change colours, fonts and layout and watch the real storefront update beside you. No theme code, and no deploy step to find out how it looks.
The page builder: Build any page from sections under Pages. Edits save as a private draft - your storefront keeps showing the published version until you hit Publish, and Discard rolls you back.
Reusable blocks: Save a set of sections as a block, drop it on any page, and edit it once to update every page using it.
Product and collection templates: Shared templates add your sections to every product or collection page at once, while an individual product can still add its own.
Navigation and mega menus: Edit the main and footer menus under Navigation. Mega menus can be built from links, collections or product thumbnails.
The blog: Posts use the same page builder, so a post can be as rich as a landing page. Bylines, scheduling, RSS and sitemap are included.
SEO: Titles, descriptions, canonical URLs, sitemap and structured data are generated as you go, rather than being an app you install afterwards.

Orders and customers

What happens after someone buys.

Orders, fulfilment and tracking: Work through orders under Orders: mark them fulfilled, add a tracking number, and the customer is emailed automatically.
Refunds: Issue a full or partial refund from the order itself. It syncs back to Stripe or PayPal without you leaving the admin.
Customers: Every order builds up a customer record - contact details, order history, group membership - under Customers.
Customer accounts: Shoppers can register, sign in and see their own order history and shipment status on your storefront. Turn accounts off entirely if you would rather they did not.
Reviews: Moderated star ratings on the product page, with an automatic Verified purchase badge and rich stars in Google results.

Marketing and growth

The tools most shops rent from five separate apps.

Abandoned cart recovery: An abandoned checkout triggers an automatic nudge email. On Squaark Cloud it goes out over our signed sending domain, so it reaches the inbox rather than the spam folder.
Site-wide banners: Schedule a promo banner with your own colours and a click-to-copy code. It turns itself off when the sale ends.
Newsletter and broadcasts: Collect signups and send a broadcast straight from Newsletter, without paying for a separate email platform.
Analytics: Revenue, orders, average order value and conversion under Analytics, with period-over-period trends and best-sellers. Traffic is measured too - page views, unique visitors, top pages and referrers - collected from storefront requests rather than from a third party. Bots are filtered by user agent and visitor IPs are hashed before they are stored, so there is nothing to put behind a cookie banner and no data leaves the server.
Pixels and product feed: Drop Meta and Google pixels in under Settings > Marketing, and keep a product feed in sync for Google Shopping and paid social.

Configuration

The settings you touch once and then forget about.

Store settings: Store name, currency, contact email and tagline live under Settings > Store. Currency is worth getting right before your first order.
Staff accounts: Add staff under Users. They manage products and orders but cannot reach settings, users or themes. Every account can turn on two-factor authentication from its own account page.
Transactional emails: Order confirmation, shipping, admin notifications and password resets are editable Handlebars templates under Emails, with a live preview against sample data. On Squaark Cloud sending is already set up and signed for you, from yourshop@squaark.com, with replies going to your account address - see Email in your Cloud dashboard to send from your own domain instead. Self-hosting, you choose a provider under Settings > Email: Resend needs only an API key, or point it at your own SMTP. Send a test before you rely on it, because the default writes to the server console and sends nothing.
System logs: Settings > Logs is a live view of payment events, sent email and server errors - enough to debug most problems without touching a terminal.
Export and import your store: Take the whole shop out as a single file from Settings > Server, and import it somewhere else. This is what makes leaving possible, which is rather the point.
Updates and backups: On Squaark Cloud both are handled for you: updates are applied as they ship, and your shop is snapshotted every night. Self-hosted, you update and back up from Settings > Server or on the command line.

Self-hosting

Everything above applies whether Squaark is running on your own machine or on Squaark Cloud - the admin is the same admin. Installing it, configuring the environment, Docker and the project layout are covered separately in Running squaark.