Getting Started with BestWebby

Welcome to BestWebby

This guide walks you through the essentials of setting up BestWebby for the first time. By the end, you'll have:

• Your account configured with business details
• A payment gateway connected
• Products added (manually or via import)
• Your store policies reviewed
• Your storefront live on your own domain
• Optionally, a sales channel connected

Estimated time: 45-60 minutes for a store with an existing product catalog.

This manual is always one click away: Docs in the dashboard menu opens it, and every page of it is also on bestwebby.com. Home explains the first page you see after signing in.

Prefer to watch first? The BestWebby Academy has short narrated lessons of these same screens, with English and French captions. Modules 1 to 11 take you from sign-up through store setup, your products, your theme and pages, your domain, payments and shipping, going live, your first orders and refunds, and growing your store, and each chapter links back to the page of this manual that covers it.

Before you start: activate your account

Register at dashboard.bestwebby.com/register and choose a plan. There is no setup fee. On the Activate screen, confirm your billing email, add your billing details and activate; nothing is charged and no card is needed. Each month is then invoiced at the end of the month it covers, with a payment link sent to your billing email. Prices for every plan are on the contact page.

Step 1: Complete your business profile

After registering, you land on the Welcome page with your get-started checklist. Confirm your email from the link we sent, then:

• Go to Settings → General → Business and check your business name and category. You can also upload a default product image, shown whenever a product has no images of its own.
• Set the currency your store charges in on Store currency.
• Set it before you add products. Your prices are typed in your store currency and are never converted, so once a product has a price, or you have an order or a gift card, the store currency can no longer be changed. Every storefront you add then starts in that currency. See Storefront prices.
• Add the tax rates you are registered to collect in Finance → Tax rules (Growth plan and above). Your get-started checklist says what applies on your plan.

Want to look around first? While your catalog is empty, Load sample data on the Welcome page adds eight sample products (tagged demo-data), five sample customers, ten sample orders, three reviews and a discount code, WELCOME10 (10% off), so every screen has something in it. Sample orders never count as a real sale, and sample products are not on your store until you click Publish to store. Remove sample data takes out the sample products, orders and reviews, keeping any sample product you have since sold for real. It also removes the sample WELCOME10 code if nobody has used it, and each sample customer who has no order left. A WELCOME10 code you made yourself is never removed. A sample code that has been used, or a sample customer with an order, stays: delete them under Marketing → Discount codes (legacy) and Customers before your store goes live.

Step 2: Connect your payment gateway

Navigate to Settings → General → Payments. Only the store owner or an admin can connect payments.

For Stripe: Click Connect Stripe account. You'll be taken to Stripe, which asks for your business details, a bank account (where your money lands) and an ID to verify it's you; it takes about five minutes. Card payments switch on once Stripe has verified your account. Until then shoppers can browse your storefront but cannot pay by card: there is no stand-in account that takes payments for you in the meantime. On a CAD storefront that offers Interac e-Transfer, shoppers can still pay that way, because the money goes straight to your bank. (BestWebby is not endorsed by or affiliated with Interac Corp.) Stripe is the fully supported card gateway today.

Apple Pay, Google Pay and Link: Once Stripe is connected, BestWebby registers each of your store's addresses with your Stripe account so these buttons can show at checkout: your bestwebby.com address straight away, and a custom domain as soon as it is verified. When you move a store to a new address the new one is registered and the old one is switched off once it only redirects. Settings → Payments lists every address with Stripe's answer (registered, being set up, or not registered with Stripe's reason) and a Retry now button. A button shows only on devices and browsers that support it, and only for wallets turned on in your Stripe Dashboard under Settings → Payment methods. Until an address is registered, shoppers there pay with the card form as usual.

Stripe fees and payouts: When a card payment on one of your orders or invoices succeeds, BestWebby reads the fee Stripe kept from your Stripe account and books it against that order as a Stripe processing fee, so Finance → Accounting shows your sales, the fees and what is left after them (Accounting is part of the Scale plan and above). Accounting → Payouts lists each payout from your Stripe account to your bank with every payment, refund and fee it covered, and links each payment to its order. A payout you start by hand in Stripe is listed without that breakdown, because Stripe cannot say which payments it covered. Payments on your Stripe account that did not come through BestWebby appear in the payout list but are never booked in your ledger.

Pay later: Klarna, Afterpay (Clearpay in the UK) and Affirm come through the same Stripe account. Turn on the ones you want in your Stripe settings and they appear at checkout whenever the order qualifies; each provider sets the currencies, countries and order amounts it takes, and Stripe decides which a shopper is offered.

Razorpay and Flutterwave: On the roadmap and not live yet — Stripe is the only card gateway available today, and PayPal is not offered. Tell us which gateway you need on the contact form and we'll prioritize by demand.

Card payments go directly to your own Stripe account, and e-Transfers to your own bank. BestWebby never sees or holds customer payment data.

Step 3: Add your products

You have three options:

Manual entry: Go to Catalog → Products and click Add product. Fill in name, description, SKUs, pricing, and images. Draft description for me writes a first draft of the description for you to edit. Scan looks a product up by its barcode and pre-fills the form.

CSV import (recommended for existing catalogs): Go to Catalog → Products → Import → Import from CSV. Upload any CSV — including exports from Shopify, WooCommerce, or BigCommerce, or your own spreadsheet — with names, SKUs, prices, and stock. A Shopify product export is recognised automatically: the rows that share a handle become one product with its options, variants, prices, SKUs, stock and images, and the preview shows how many products and variants your file will become. Any other file brings in one product per row; add size or colour options in the product's Variants section afterwards. We auto-detect columns and let you re-map before importing. Imported products are created as drafts so you can review them before publishing.

Connect a store: On the same import screen, the Marketplace sync tab connects a WooCommerce or Shopify store (or a supplier's own JSON API) and pulls its catalog in on demand with Sync now. Each connection has its own markup, because the imported price is treated as your cost; leave it at 0% to keep the prices as they are. A sync brings each product in as a draft with its main price, SKU, stock and images, but not its options or variants, so to move a whole Shopify catalog with its variants, use the Shopify CSV export above.

To connect a Shopify store, the store needs its own app, made by whoever runs that store. Since January 2026 Shopify makes new apps in its Dev Dashboard: create the app in the same Shopify organization as the store, give it the read_products scope, install it on the store, and copy the Client ID and Client secret from the app's Settings. Enter those with the store's myshopify.com address (for example your-store.myshopify.com); Shopify only issues access for these apps there. A custom app made in the Shopify admin before 2026 can use its Admin API token (shpat_…) instead: leave the client ID and secret blank. On each sync BestWebby asks Shopify for a fresh access token with the client ID and secret and keeps it only in memory. If the sync shows "shop_not_permitted", the app and the store are not in the same Shopify organization.

eBay, Etsy and WordPress have no connection yet: export your catalog from them as a CSV and import it as above.

Step 4: Configure your storefront

Go to Channels → Sites and click Add site (or edit the one you have) to set its name, domain, brand colour and logo. Open Pages on the site to build its pages, and use Channels → Appearance for fonts, corners and theme presets. If you run more than one storefront, each product can have its own price on each one; see Storefront prices.

Your store goes live on a domain you own. A yourshop.bestwebby.com address is where you set the store up, and it cannot be published: store email sends from your own domain, never ours. To connect your own domain:

1. Go to Settings → Domains and click Connect domain
2. Enter your domain, keep your main store selected (it moves onto the domain with everything in it) and click Add & show DNS records
3. Follow the DNS steps shown: add the TXT verification record we display to prove ownership, then point your domain at the IP address shown with an A record (subdomains too). Optionally add the www CNAME shown, so www. addresses reach your store
4. Click Verify & issue SSL — BestWebby issues an SSL certificate via Let's Encrypt, typically within a few minutes

Once DNS has propagated, the certificate is usually issued within a few minutes. Then publish your email records on Settings → Email. When the domain, certificate and email are all ready, the site shows Ready to publish on Channels → Sites. It does not go live until you switch it on.

Before you switch the site on, open Settings → Legal and review the privacy, refund, terms and shipping pages every store shows. When you switch the site on, BestWebby lists what still has to be done before it can go live, and anything a shopper would trip over, such as missing payments or a shipping rate. See Going live.

Step 5: Bring in orders from other channels

Navigate to Channels → Sell everywhere to connect a sales channel. The custom webhook channel is live today: your other system (a marketplace, an ERP, or a custom storefront) pushes orders to a token-authed ingest URL, BestWebby records them alongside the rest of your orders, and stock changes are pushed back to a webhook you configure. The order ingest is idempotent and the inventory path is oversell-safe.

Connectors for Shopify, Etsy, eBay, and Amazon are built and sit in the same screen on the Scale plan and above. Each connects with your own marketplace account, and each channel shows whether it is syncing and, when it is not, what is missing. They have not yet been run against a live merchant account, so talk to us before you depend on one. For any other system, use the custom webhook channel described above.

What's next

• Set up your POS: Open Channels → POS and follow Set up locations to add your store locations and registers
• Set your pricing rules: Visit Catalog → Pricing rules to adjust prices by time window, order quantity or demand, and Marketing → Clearance for scheduled markdowns that never go below a price floor you set
• Invite your team: Settings → Team to invite members and assign roles
• Understand your billing: see Billing and your plan

Questions? Get in touch or visit the FAQ at bestwebby.com/faq.