www/apps/bloom/app/going-live/page.mdx
import { InProductAction } from "docs-ui"
export const metadata = {
title: Going Live,
}
This guide walks you through everything you need to publish your Bloom store and start selling to customers. Follow this as a checklist to ensure your store is ready for launch, then publish your store and share it with the world.
<Note title="Tip">You can continue making design and feature changes to your store with Bloom after publishing. This guide walks you through publishing your store for the first time.
</Note>The following sections walk you through important steps to complete before publishing your store. These ensure your store is polished, functional, and ready for customers.
Publishing requires you to be on the Hobby plan, which includes production deployment and more credits.
To upgrade to the Hobby plan:
You'll be charged immediately for the new plan, and your account will be upgraded. After this, you can publish your store.
See Credits and Plans for details on plans and features.
Before publishing, make sure your store's design and features are complete. This includes customizing the layout, colors, fonts, and adding any desired features.
Make sure that:
You can continue making design and feature changes with Bloom after publishing, but it's best to have the core experience ready before going live. This way, customers see a polished store from day one.
Next, replace any demo or sample data with your actual products and store information.
Ask Bloom to:
Or manage this data manually through the preview admin dashboard.
<Note title="Important">Store data gets copied to your published store only on the first publish. After that, any new products or data changes must be made directly in the published admin dashboard, not in Bloom's preview.
</Note>Next, configure your store settings based on your business needs and target customers.
Ask Bloom to help set up:
Or manage this data manually through the preview admin dashboard.
<Note title="Important">Store data gets copied to your published store only on the first publish. After that, any new data changes must be made directly in the published admin dashboard, not in Bloom's preview.
</Note>Bloom supports integrating services like payment providers, marketing tools, and more to enhance your store's functionality.
Ask Bloom to integrate Stripe for payments, Klaviyo for email marketing, Slack for notifications, and any other services you want to use.
See the Integrations guide for instructions on integrating services with Bloom.
Bloom allows you to design and customize transactional emails that customers receive for important events like order confirmations and shipping notifications.
Before publishing, make sure transactional emails are set up and customized to match your brand. This ensures customers receive professional and branded communications from your store.
See the Emails guide for detailed setup instructions.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is crucial for helping customers find your store through search engines like Google. Before publishing, optimize your store's SEO to improve visibility and attract organic traffic.
Bloom has the expertise to optimize your store's SEO. So, ask Bloom to help optimize your store's SEO with a prompt like:
Improve my store for SEO. Use keywords related to my products and industry.
Bloom optimizes your store's SEO by:
And more.
You can also upload images and ask Bloom to use them for OpenGraph meta tags, which improve how your store looks when shared on social media.
Most customers shop from their phones, so it's crucial to ensure your store looks and works great on mobile devices before publishing.
Use the Responsive View feature to view and test your store's mobile experience directly within Bloom. This lets you identify issues and ask Bloom to fix them before customers see your store.
See the Responsive View guide for instructions on testing and optimizing your store for mobile devices.
At this point, your store is ready to go live. The following sections walk you through publishing your Bloom store and accessing it.
Publishing your store takes about 10 minutes, during which Bloom sets up hosting and deploys your store to a live URL.
To publish your store:
Bloom will show you the publishing progress, where you can see the steps being completed.
Once publishing completes, access your live store using the buttons below the store's image:
To log into your store's admin dashboard:
After logging in, you can manage your store's data and settings through the admin dashboard.
Your store is now live. However, there's more work to ensure your store provides a great experience for customers and runs smoothly.
The following sections cover important steps to take after publishing.
By default, your store uses a .medusajs.site domain (for example, your-store.medusajs.site). This works fine for testing, but for a professional appearance, it's best to connect your own custom domain (for example, yourstore.com).
See the Custom Domains guide for setup instructions.
Bloom stores are hosted on Medusa Cloud, a hosting service for Medusa applications with zero configuration.
Your Bloom account on the Hobby plan includes hosting for one published store on Medusa Cloud. This is sufficient for testing and small stores.
However, for better performance, reliability, and features, or to publish more than one store, upgrade to the Pro or Enterprise plans on Medusa Cloud.
<Note>See Medusa Cloud Pricing for details on plans and features.
</Note>To upgrade the Medusa Cloud hosting plan of your Bloom stores:
Once your store is live, manage its products, orders, customers, and other data only through the published store's admin dashboard.
Bloom can still customize your store's design, edit content in pages, and manage features after publishing. However, any data changes like adding products will not be reflected on the live store.
See the Medusa Admin User Guide for detailed instructions on managing your store's data through the admin dashboard.
After publishing, optionally invite team members to access the admin dashboard of your published store. This lets them help manage products, orders, customers, and other aspects of the business.
See Invite Admin Users to Published Store for detailed instructions on inviting users.
Once your store is live, customers can start placing orders. Track and manage these orders through the published store's admin dashboard.
See the Medusa Admin User Guide on how to view orders, manage their payment and fulfillment, and handle customer communications.