How to Set Up Your eCommerce Storefront
Welcome to your eCommerce application, purpose-built for firearm retailers and seamlessly embedded within your Point-of-Sale system. Your online store connects directly to your POS — inventory stays in sync automatically, orders flow into the same system you use at the register, and every firearm sale is handled in compliance with federal and state regulations. By the end of this guide, your store will be live, and you will be able to receive and fulfil your first online order.
All online store management lives under the Online tab in your POS. This is where you organize inventory into logical buckets, control how products display on the website, and manage your overall navigation.
Steps
1. Group Products
Start by organizing your inventory into Product Groups — these are the building blocks for almost everything else on your storefront (navigation menus, homepage features, filtered product selections). Go to Online → Define Products → Product Groups. Click Add Product Group, enter a name and optionally upload an image — this image controls how the group displays on your website if you choose to feature it.
You can then populate the group in one of two ways:
- Automatic selection by condition. Choose one or more conditions and any product matching them will be pulled into the group automatically. Available conditions include Firearm Type, AR Type, Category, Manufacturer, and others — these reflect the taxonomy used when inventory is imported from your vendors. You can stack multiple conditions (e.g., Firearm Type = Pistol AND Manufacturer = Sig Sauer).
- Manual selection. Pick individual products from your inventory and add them to the group. This is ideal for curated lists like a "Deal of the Week."
Once created, your Product Groups can be:
- Linked from a navigation menu item (see Step 2).
- Featured on your homepage as a Featured Product Group content section (see Step 3).
- Used to power filtered product selections like "Best Sellers" or "Deal of The Week."
2. Plan how users navigate your website
With your Product Groups in place, you can now build the navigation. In your POS, navigate to Online → Create Navigation → Navigation Menus. Your first step is to create the navigation links across the website header. The Navigation editor gives you full control over this menu structure. You do not need to finalize the menu at this time.
The navigation editor lets you:
- Create menus and sub-menus. Sub-menus power your header dropdowns. For example, you can create a "Firearms" sub-menu containing links to Sig, Canik, Wilson, Smith & Wesson, and Glock, then attach that sub-menu to your main "Shop" menu item so it appears as a dropdown on the site.
- Link menu items to multiple destination types. A menu item can point to a Product Group, a Blog, a Brand, a Course Group, a Calendar, an FAQ, a Gallery, or any external web address.
- Reorder items by drag-and-drop, and create as many menu items as you need.
Under Header & Footer, you choose which menu is displayed in your site's header and which is displayed in the footer. This is also where you control site-wide branding elements:
- Logo — upload or replace your site logo.
- Top-line info — the small text that appears in the top-left corner of your website.
- Hours & Policies — edit existing entries or add new ones if they don't yet exist.
- Contact details and email
- Promotion text — a banner that runs across your homepage slider with any message you want to highlight.
3. Customize Your Storefront Pages
Navigate to Online → Build & Manage Site → Pages & Content Blocks. At minimum, the following default pages are enabled during your website's implementation phase: Home, Shop / Product Listing, Product Detail, Cart & Checkout, Contact Us. Click the link corresponding to each page to edit the content displayed on the respective page directly within the builder. You can also create additional pages from here.
When editing a page (for example, your About Us page), you can:
- Swap out images. If the image you want isn't already in the library, click Upload, choose a file, and select it.
- Save your changes using the Save button in the bottom-right corner.
- View and restore previous saves — if you save something and don't like the result, you can roll back to any earlier version.
Configuring your Homepage
From Online → Build & Manage Site → Homepage, you have two main controls:
- Slider Settings. Enable up to five sliders on your homepage. Each slider can link to a different destination — a page on your site, a product, a Product Group, or an external URL like Gun Broker. If you have more than one enabled, they will rotate automatically.
- Defined Content Type. Choose up to ten content sections to display on your homepage. Each section can be set to one of the following types: Page Content, Featured Products, Featured Product Groups, or New Arrivals. Once you've chosen the type for each section, use Select Content Block and Preferred Block to choose exactly which page, product group, or product selection is injected into each slot.
4. Publish Products from Your POS Catalog
Go to Inventory → Manage Products → Inventory. You will see your full POS inventory listed here. To make a single product available on your online storefront, search for the product, click the Sales Channels tab at the bottom of the screen, and toggle eComm visibility on. To set website visibility across an entire category at once, go to Inventory → Manage Products → Taxonomy instead.
Product Visibility & Availability Settings
Beyond the per-product toggle, you have site-wide rules under Product Visibility & Availability. These let you control:
- Whether to hide products that are missing an image
- Whether to allow consigned items to be sold online
- Whether to disable sales on $0 items
- How in-store quantity is displayed — actual quantity, a capped maximum, or a custom stock status label (for example, "In Store" for in-store inventory and "Ships from Warehouse" for vendor inventory)
Note on vendor inventory: Distributor-held inventory is always shown as in-stock or out-of-stock only — actual quantities are never displayed for vendor stock, regardless of the setting you choose above.
5. Configure Shipping & Delivery
Your Orchid eCommerce Storefront supports three shipping options. You can choose integration with ShipStation, or define your own shipping rates from the built-in options. You will need at least one active shipping method before your store can accept orders.
Shipping is configured under Configure Checkout, which is also where you control checkout notifications, sales tax, and terms.
6. Fulfill Your First Order
- Go to Sell → Invoices & Online Orders and toggle Show Online Orders Only to ON when your first customer places an order.
- Click the Review link to review the order details, including items, shipping address, and payment confirmation.
- Click Actions → Ship Items from the top right to review and ship the items. Then return to the Review Invoice screen and click Mark as Fulfilled corresponding to the items whose shipment is dispatched. The customer will receive an automated shipping confirmation email with their tracking information.
7. Engage Your Customers (Optional)
Once your store is live, the Engage Customers section gives you tools to drive repeat traffic and conversions: pop-ups, coupons, and blog posts are all managed here.
Expected Result
- Your online store is live and you have fulfilled your first order
- Products sync automatically between your POS and eCommerce
- Orders flow into the same system you use at the register
- Every firearm sale is handled in compliance with federal and state regulations