Overview

The online stores allow you to resell our services on your website and look like an independent hosting company in the eyes of your customers and website visitors. The Online Stores menu in the ICDSoft Account Panel consists of three pages: Management allows you to view your online stores and manage their settings. You can find a detailed explanation of the available settings there in the Online stores -> Management help section. Orders allows you to view and/or edit the orders of your online store. Additional details about the page are available in the Online Stores -> Orders help section. Payment Requests allows you to create custom orders for your customers. Refer to the Online Stores -> Payment Requests help section to learn more about this feature.

Here are several advantages of having and using an online store: Resell our services on your website - use our complete hosted storefront solution or embed storefront forms to your existing website using our widget or WordPress plugin. Choose what products (hosting plans, domains, and SSL certificates) you wish to resell on your website by enabling or disabling them. Set your own prices and choose the supported currencies. Select from a list of supported payment processors, or add a custom payment method that will contain a page with instructions on how your customers can pay to you through another payment processor that we do not support. View all the orders placed on your website in one place - the ICDSoft Account Panel -> "Online Stores" -> "Orders" section. Decide how completed orders will be processed - manually (you can activate the ordered services on your own after you receive the payment) or automatically (we will process your orders, so your customers can use their ordered services right away). Modify the default content of the renewal reminder emails, so it matches your brand style. Generate payment requests to allow your customers renew a single service or multiple services at once, take advantage of a discount, or pay you for a custom service that you provide directly to them (like web design or web development services related to their sites).

To set up an online store, you need to follow these general steps: Create an online store in the ICDSoft Account Panel. Add at least one payment processor to your online store. Configure your store settings, products, and prices. Choose the right storefront for your needs. Edit the content of your hosted or self-hosted storefront. (optional) Set up a reseller balance to enable automatic order processing. Additional information about these steps is available further in this Help section.

You can find the main differences between the hosted and self-hosted storefronts listed below, so you can decide which one you should use for your online store. Hosted storefront: Getting started - setup takes literally seconds as we set up everything automatically for you. Programming/coding skills - little to none HTML knowledge is required. Editing content and customization - limited number of pages and content. You can only modify the content of your hosted storefront pages through the ICDSoft Account Panel. Maintenance - we take care of the website and server maintenance. Uptime - expected 99.997% uptime according to the average uptime of our hosting servers since 2003. Fee/s - the hosting and subdomain for the hosted storefront are completely free. If you want to use your own domain, you will need to cover the domain registration fee/s. Self-hosted storefront: Getting started - requires implementation of our widget or installation of our WordPress plugin on your existing website. Programming/coding skills - programming/coding skills are recommended for the WordPress plugin and completely required for the widget. Editing content and customization - you have full control over your storefront pages and content, so the only limit is your imagination. Maintenance - you have to take care of your website maintenance, and we take care of the widget and WordPress plugin maintenance. Uptime - depends on the stability of your website software and server uptime of your hosting provider. If your storefront is hosted on a shared/VPS account on our servers, you should expect 99.997% server uptime. Fee/s - since you need to use your own domain/subdomain and hosting, your costs will depend on your domain/subdomain and hosting fee/s.