How to set up a company store for employees, in six steps

A company store is a private online store where a client's employees order branded apparel and gear without emailing anyone. Setting one up is six decisions, made in the right order. Most stores that fail skipped the first two.

A client asks for a company store. The temptation is to open a store, load everything they ever bought and send the link. Six months later nobody uses it, and the orders are back in your inbox.

The store itself is not the hard part. The decisions behind it are. Make them in this order, because each one shapes the next.

Step 1: decide who the store is for

Head office staff, field crews, new hires and managers do not buy the same things. Write down the groups before anything else. Each group can get its own products, its own prices and its own rules, and the group should be set at login, not chosen by the buyer.

Step 2: decide who pays

This one decision changes the whole store. There are three common models:

• The company pays everything, often with a budget or allowance per person.
• Employees pay with their own card, sometimes with a company subsidy.
• Orders go to an approver, who signs off before anything is produced.

Pick one per group and write it down. If head office is billed instead of the buyer, that has to be a rule in the store, not a note in an email.

Step 3: load only the approved products

A company store is not a catalogue. Start with the ten to twenty items the client actually approves. Every product needs its real size chart, its decoration method and the logo placement already applied. Fewer choices mean faster orders and fewer returns.

Step 4: lock the brand

Brand control is the reason the client wants a store at all. Fix the logo file, the placement and the size on every product, yourself. Show each item with the logo already on it, so the buyer sees exactly what will arrive.

Step 5: set the shipping rule

Bulk to one office, to several sites, or to individual homes. Decide before launch, and show the cost honestly before checkout. A surprise at the last step is where orders get abandoned.

Step 6: launch small, then open it

Send the link to five or ten people first. Watch what they order, what they ask, and where they get stuck. Fix that, then announce it to the whole company with a short message from the client, not from you.

What the client sees, and what you see

The employee logs in, sees only their group's products at their group's price, and orders. You see the order arrive with the artwork already approved, the sizes already chosen and the payment rule already applied. That is the difference between a store and a catalogue with a checkout.