Setup And Launch

Use This Doc For

Before You Start

Storefront setup turns the business model you select into a working customer experience. It creates the starting sections and items, selects the customer interaction model (booking, purchase, inquiry, or donation), and connects that model to the rest of the platform.

Use the closest built-in template when one fits. A template is more than a visual theme: it carries the archetype, vocabulary, capabilities, operational value stream, and starting public content. If none fits, choose Can’t find your business? to define a custom operating model, customer interaction, and offerings.

Only create the storefront after the organization and its business basics are correct. Setup can be run once. After a storefront exists, /storefront/setup redirects to the Storefront dashboard.

From Setup To A Live Portal

flowchart LR
    A["Choose a business template"] --> B["Confirm what the business sells"]
    B --> C["Preview sections, items, and capabilities"]
    C --> D["Set the public slug and presentation"]
    D --> E["Complete financial setup"]
    E --> F["Review content, business settings, and hours"]
    F --> G{"Ready for customers?"}
    G -- "Not yet" --> F
    G -- "Yes" --> H["Publish from Storefront"]
    H --> I["Verify /s/your-slug as a customer"]

Complete The Guided Setup

  1. Open Storefront → Setup and search for the business template that best matches how customers interact with you. Review any suggested template; suggestions are a starting point, not an automatic selection.
  2. Under What does your business sell?, confirm the main product line. The suggested line is selected by default and can be renamed without changing its identity. Select an adjacent line only when customers genuinely buy that different kind of good or service. Use Add product line for a line that is not suggested. A salon might confirm Salon services and optionally Hair-care products; a restaurant might confirm Dining and optionally Private events.
  3. Review the template preview. It names the sections and items that will be created and shows which platform modules and workspace experience the archetype activates. Answer any capability questions shown for that template.
  4. Set the URL slug. The public path shown below the field is /s/{your-slug}. Choose a short, durable value that represents the organization. Also add the tagline and an externally reachable hero-image URL if they are ready.
  5. Select Create Portal. The platform creates the storefront, its starting sections and items, the confirmed product-line and product hierarchy, the matching default commercial offerings and catalog items, the matching archetype compositions, and the corresponding business and operational architecture. Storefront items are channel presentations of those shared catalog items, not a second commercial source of truth. The organization is the provider. Setup does not invent product teams, business units, subscribers, entitlements, or customers; consumer context appears only after real customer, booking, order, subscription, or fulfilment evidence exists. Booking-oriented templates also receive starter provider availability and booking configuration.
  6. Complete the financial setup step. Confirm the currency and the archetype-matched financial choices. Regulated financial-services setups continue to the licensing workspace; other setups return to Storefront.

The new portal is deliberately unpublished. Until you publish it, the customer-facing content path returns 404. This is a launch gate, not a setup failure.

Launch Readiness Check

Before publishing, review the Storefront dashboard’s setup-status steps and open each relevant workspace:

Check Where Confirm
Public identity Settings → Portal slug, tagline, description, contact details, and hero image
Business truth Settings → Your Business mission, market, address, jurisdictions, payment handling, and risk posture
Product mix Products / Portfolio the main and adjacent product lines match what the organization actually sells
Customer content Sections and Items only intended sections are visible; names, descriptions, prices, calls to action, and images are accurate
Fulfilment Team, Tables & Capacity, or Units when shown the people or resources that receive work exist and have the right capacity
Time and availability Settings → Operating Hours timezone and every open/closed day are correct
Customer response Inbox the team knows where inquiries, bookings, orders, or donations arrive

Select Publish now on the Storefront dashboard only after these checks. Publishing makes the portal available immediately at /s/{your-slug}.

Confirm Restaurant Tables And Capacity

Restaurant storefronts have a dedicated Tables & Capacity workspace. Tables are physical operating resources, not members of Staff. Before accepting reservations:

  1. Add every table guests can actually be seated at. Use the label staff use during service, record its true seat count, and identify its service area (for example, dining room, patio, or bar).
  2. Record the table’s physical shape. If tables can be joined, give them the same combination group and select only the neighboring tables staff can actually combine.
  3. Open each table and set its weekly availability. Add dated exceptions for closures, maintenance, private events, or other temporary restrictions.
  4. Mark a table Blocked when it must not be assigned and give the team a useful reason. Use Retired only when the table is no longer part of the operating floor.
  5. Under Tables right now, choose Adjust layout, move each table to its real position, and save. Layout changes move the drawing only; they do not change reservations or seat a party.
  6. Compare the table totals, saved floor, and current availability with the physical room before publishing and after any layout change.

An upgraded storefront may show a blocked table with Confirm seat capacity after migration. DPF intentionally does not guess a physical capacity when the legacy record contains no reliable seat count. Confirm the table, correct its seats and service area, set its availability, and then mark it available. Blocked or out-of-hours tables are rejected by the same allocation rule used by the owner view and public booking flow.

If an older item shows Needs setup link, DPF could not find real product-line evidence for it during upgrade reconciliation. The item remains usable through the compatibility path, but it is not silently attached to a guessed product. Confirm the business’s product mix before treating that item as catalog-backed.

Setup also derives the ordinary customer route from real storefront evidence: booking items book a time, purchase items buy directly, rental items reserve, and quote-required items request a quote. Setup does not guess a route for an ambiguous inquiry. After launch, use an item’s contextual Manage packaging and sales options action only when it needs packages, seasonal prices, reusable configurations, or another verified route. Those controls are collapsed by default so a simple one-line business keeps the ordinary one-item/one-price workflow.

The same confirmed hierarchy becomes the boundary for later product-management summaries. Setup does not need extra product-management fields: the organization is the provider, and the operating context remains empty or marks a source unavailable until real offerings, purchases, research, delivery work, or architecture links exist. Adding another product line changes what is disclosed, not the underlying provider/consumer model.

Setup also does not ask for targets, baseline values, owners, or outcome observations. After launch, define those only for a real business Product from Products → Direction → Outcomes. A one-line business sees the same simple outcome form as a mixed business; product-line rollups remain derived from the Products underneath rather than requiring enterprise planning fields during setup.

Setup does not schedule market research or invent competitor knowledge. After launch, an operator may open a business Product’s Direction → Intelligence page to preview a focused proposal or an optional recurring proposal-only scan. Research still requires explicit approval, and its draft must be reviewed before publication.

After setup, open Products → Goods and Services for Sale. The hierarchy is shown above the digital-product inventory. A simple one-line business sees one line and can go directly to its managed product. A mixed salon, hotel, or restaurant can open each confirmed line and compare only the sales evidence actually recorded for its products. The Products view does not manufacture teams, consumers, subscriptions, outcome scores, or cross-line currency totals to make the page look complete.

Verify The Customer Experience

Use View Live to open the public URL in a new tab. Verify it as a customer, not only from the management view:

  1. Confirm the organization name, branding, tagline, and contact information.
  2. Open each visible section and active item.
  3. Exercise the applicable call to action: check booking dates, begin an order, open the inquiry form, or start a donation.
  4. Check the page at both desktop and narrow/mobile width.
  5. Confirm that public hours and trust information match the business.

If the portal is not ready, select Unpublish on the Storefront dashboard. The public content path returns 404 again while the internal configuration and submitted records remain available. Fix the content, recheck the public path, and publish again.

What To Watch

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