Step 9

The "Fonts" tab sets the font face and size for your store.   The Merchant defaults are shown below.  You can specify any font you like, but keep in mind that if you do not use a standard one (one that comes pre-loaded on most computers) some of your customers may not see your site the same way you do. 

You can also set "alternate" fonts (fonts that will display in case the viewer does not have your font of choice) by putting a coma between them.  Some common font choices are Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; or Times New Roman, Courier, serif.  Also, it has recently become common to use Verdana and Comic Sans.  The size must be set in whole integers.  This portion of Merchant doesn't offer much freedom to customize, so you will have to experiment and find one that you are happy with - or try to anyway. :o)  Oddly enough, a valid choice is -0 or +0 (but not plain 0) which is the size between -1 and 1. 

Step 10

Now onto the best part, you get to make your store your own!  Actually images alone won't do it but once you add your logo you will really begin to feel that the store is yours.  Merchant provides a set of default images, but frankly they are not very attractive and can only be used on a black background.   The default paths for each image are shown below.  Although you will probably not be using them, you can make a note of your particular default path so that you have the ability to use them in the future if you wish to do so. 

Most of the images are fairly straight forward and we will not go over them individually, but there are a few points we should mention.  First, this is the place where you can specify a background image if you wish to use one.   You can leave this field blank, in fact Merchant defaults on having no background image.

Second, you should take advantage of the "Navigation Bar Logo Link" by putting in your home page URL if you have integrated Merchant into a non commerce site.  If you are only using Merchant and have your domain routed directly to the storefront page, you can leave this blank and make the storefront button say "Home" instead. 

Third, the "Select Store" button only applies to Merchant "malls" where there is more than one store under the same domain.   Whether you use it depends on if you would like customers to be able to move from store to store throughout the mall. 

And last but not least, if you do not wish customers to see a particular function on the navigation bar (such as the product list), you must replace it with a 1x1 pixel transparent GIF instead of leaving it empty.  If you leave any of the fields (other than the background image) empty they will show as a broken images.   Merchant has a blank image already built in to the store.  All you need to do is enter the default path for the button you wish to replace and put the word "dot" instead of the button's name.  e.g. Instead of graphics/en-US/mmui/prodlist.gif the path would be graphics/en-US/mmui/dot.gif.  

To upload an image for a particular link, click on the "Upload" button and it will bring up a pop-up window that allows you to browse your disk to find your image.  Click upload and the image is uploaded to the graphics folder in Merchant.

Don't use absolute file paths to reference images such as http://YOURSITE.com/images/yourimage.gif.   Instead use relative paths like ../images/yourimage.gif.  If you use an absolute path a message will come up alerting the customer that there are non-secure items on the page each time the customer accesses a secure page (account, checkout, the storefront after the customer logs in).  These are the hard-coded images, but the customer doesn't know that, and it may scare him/her off.