CafeCommerce Tips

Activation
Here are a few things to be aware of when activating your trial store.

Custom Domain
If you want to run your store on a custom domain, not a sub-domain of mycafecommerce.com, DreamHost must be the domain registrar. If you register the domain with another registrar (goDaddy for instance), you must transfer the domain registration to DreamHost before you can add that domain for custom CafeCommerce store name. Don't worry, if the domain isn't registered with DreamHost when you activate your store, you can just add the custom store name after the store is activated. (Settings/Domains&SSL)

If DreamHost is currently hosting a website for your custom domain, you must remove the web hosting from the domain in your Control Panel under Domains/Manage Domains, before you can add the domain as custom store name (during activation or later).

If you can't or don't want to transfer the domain registration to DreamHost, you can get some limited custom domain features. Add the custom domain to your DreamHost panel and set the hosting to Redirect to your store.mycafecommerce.com. You can give out links to your_store.com and your_store.com/products and they will be redirected to store.mycafecommerce.com and store.mycafecommerce.com/products.

Sample data and test sales
There is no way to remove the sample data installed into your trial store once "... you've already added your own store data..." While you can delete products, customers, categories, coupons and sales promotions manually, there is no way to remove sales.

If, like me, you customized your trial store and then activated your account, the recommendation from tech support is to manually edit each order and change the status to refunded.

A possible workaround is to test one trial store, customizing data and dismissing the Dashboard wizard. Then, once you've made your decision to activate, create a new trial store, delete the sample data and activate the second store.

Usage

 * CafeCommerce uses in-place editing for much of the text that displays on the store's front end. Login to the admin interface, then click the View Store link at the top. You will see a bunch of Edit icons hovering over the areas you can edit. Click the edit icon to change the text.