To Access your CMS Admin / Control Panel:
Open the Administrator Page by typing in your web address and adding /administrator to the end of your domain name. i.e. www.mywebsite.com/administrator
Type in the Username and Password provided to you. You will be directed to the main Control Panel Screen where you will see links to various sections of the site. Be sure to bookmark this page or Add to Favorites before proceeding.
Your shopping Cart Admin / Control Panel
Make sure you're logged into your main CMS admin site first i.e. www.mywebsite.com/administrator and then click on the menu item Components | VirtueMart
Managing, Adding, Deleting Products
To manage existing products in your shopping cart, from the Virtuemart menu click on Products | List Products. This will display a list of all your products in your site. If you have a large number of products in your site, you can filter the list by selecting a cateogry from the dropdown box at the top of the list. Once you select a category, it will only show products located within that category. If more than 30 products exist in the category, you will see a menu at the bottom of the page where you can click to cycle through to the next 30 products in that category and so on.
Editing A Product
Once you see the product in the list that you want to edit, click it's name to open the product editor page. You will see 5 tabs that allow you to manage various aspects of this product. Most of the tabs and fields on this page are self explanatory such as price, description, SKU and so on. If your product has attributes like various colors, sizes and so on, then you would click on the tab labeled Product Status. In the middle of this page you will see a text area field where you need to enter text exactly like the example that is listed right below it. Note the commas, brackets and spacing for each. This attribute feature will display a drop down list on your page where customers can select variations of your product. An example code to use for colors would be: Color,Red,Green,Yellow
Once you have all the information entered for that product, click the Save located in upper right corner of the page
Inserting A New Product
To insert a new product into your online shop, click Products | Add Product from the Virtuemart menu. A page will appear with the same 5 tabs described above that will allow you to specify all the product information. Be sure to select a PRODUCT CATEGORY on the first tab where you see the drop down for CATEGORIES.
Shipping
We install different shipping programs for different clients so we can not go through and explain each here. Most of our clients use either the Australia Post module or the Standard Shipping Module to configure their shipping. To access these modules and configure shipping, from the Virtuemart menu click Store | Shipping Module List. This will display all the available shipping modules which you can click on to edit. The Australia Post module works directly with Australia Post and obtains shipping rates right from their website. You will need to set up an account with them in order to use this module. The Standard Shipping module can be used if you want to set up your own rates based on weight, price or other parameters. We highly recommend using this module as default so you have full control over your shipping rates.
Order and Customer Information
Each order that is placed on your site is stored in your websites database. For security, the last 4 digits of the credit card are emailed to you and the rest of the numbers will have to be obtained through this VirtueMart Admin section. To view orders and customer details, from the Virtuemart menu click Orders | List Orders. This will display all the orders placed on your site along with the customer's name. To view the details of an order, click on the Order Number, and to view details about the customer click on their Name. You can choose to leave all the orders in your database if you like. You will more then likely never exceed your memory usage. You can also choose to delete them for better organization. If you delete an order, the customer information is still retained in the system. Note also that there are options that allow you to communicate the status of the order to the customer such as (pending, shipped, cancelled and so on).
5. Other features
There are several other features in this shopping cart program but most are very self explanatory. Most of the features and menu items you will not have to mess with at all. Full instructions created by Spoonful of Love will available from the website soon. In the meantime you can find more information from the Virtuemart site or the offical Virtuemart forum.