Building eCommerce Applications

Chapter 12. Magento, Part 2: How to Set Up Your Magento Store

Travis Robertson

If you’re just joining us, this is the second part of the multipart series I’m doing about the Magento platform. PayPal recently acquired the ecommerce platform and there is so much this powerful platform is capable of doing for your business—especially when used in conjunction with PayPal.

In the first part of the series, we looked at how to install Magento, in Chapter 11. If you missed it or haven’t yet had a chance to get it installed, click here to go back and walk through the tutorial. You’re going to need a working installation of Magento for the rest of this series (and because a lot of articles and blog posts on the new X.com will center around Magento).

In this chapter, we’re going to take a look at getting products into your new store and setting up payments with PayPal. So, without further ado, let’s dive in.

Creating Categories

Before adding a product, it is important to create and establish categories for them. These categories could be differentiated by the kind of product, a brand name, or anything that distinguishes one product from another.

From the dashboard, hover the mouse cursor over the “Catalog” tab and click on “Manage Categories” from the drop-down menu. This will open the section of Magento where we can find the different categories within our store—or, as is the case here, create a new category, since this is a newly installed Magento store.

The left sidebar of the window displays ...