Overview
Everything you need to master Storify — from your first sign-in to power-user shortcuts. Pick a chapter below or jump straight in.
Getting Started
Get into Storify in under a minute, then learn where everything lives. Fresh installs ship with sensible defaults so you can start selling on day one.
Read chapterOverview
Overview is the first thing you see after signing in. It answers one question — how is the store doing today — with six figures, two charts and your most recent activity.
Read chapterCatalog
Everything that makes up what you sell sits under Products in the sidebar: All Products, Global Variants, Collections, Categories, Brands, Inventory, Transfers and Reviews.
Read chapterCreate a Category
Categories are the shelf a product sits on — they drive storefront navigation, the mega menu, filters and search. Build the tree before you add products, because every product must be filed under one.
Read chapterGet into Storify in under a minute, then learn where everything lives. Fresh installs ship with sensible defaults so you can start selling on day one.
- 1
Open the dashboard
Go to /admin in any modern browser — it lands you on Overview. Sign in with the email and password created during installation. Vendors and staff sign in the same way and land in their own dashboard.
- 2
Learn the sidebar
The main list runs Overview, Analytics, Orders, Products, AI Studio, Sales Agent, Customers, Vendors, Staff, Payments, Discounts, Content and Inbox. Below it, SALES CHANNELS holds Online Store and Point of Sale. Settings is pinned at the bottom. Orders, Products, Vendors, Payments, Content and Online Store expand into sub-pages.
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Collapse the sidebar when you need room
Press Cmd/Ctrl + B, or use the panel toggle at the far left of the header, to shrink the sidebar to an icon rail. Hovering a group icon then opens a flyout of its sub-pages. Your choice is remembered for a week.
- 4
Jump between pages with Cmd+K
Cmd+K or Ctrl+K opens the page palette; type to filter and Esc to close. It jumps to admin pages — it is not a record search, so use each page's own search box to find an order, product or customer.
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Complete your profile
Open the avatar menu at the top right and choose Profile. That is also where you find Settings and Logout.
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Make the dashboard comfortable
The gear icon in the header opens Preferences: dark mode, contrast, right-to-left, collapsed sidebar, navigation colour, a brand preset colour and your dashboard language — plus Reset to defaults. The flag icon switches language on its own.
Preferences are yours alone
The Preferences drawer changes how the dashboard looks for you. Store-wide defaults — default language, currency, timezone — live in Settings → General, and permanent brand colours live in Settings → Branding.
Everyone sees a different sidebar
Vendors and staff get the same dashboard filtered by their permissions, so a staff member with POS access only will not see Payments or Settings at all.
Overview is the first thing you see after signing in. It answers one question — how is the store doing today — with six figures, two charts and your most recent activity.
Six KPI cards
In-store sales, Website sales, Total orders, Discount, Customers and Refunds. Each shows an all-time figure with a trend arrow comparing this month against last. With POS switched off, a Total sales card takes the in-store card's place so the grid stays at six.
Orders & sales chart
A twelve-month bar chart split into in-store and online. Toggle the side panel between Orders and Sales, or narrow it with the date-range picker. Show all sales data opens a month-by-month table.
Recent orders & latest products
The five newest orders with customer, quantity, status, payment method and total, plus the four most recently created products. Click any row to open it.
Total visitors
A month-to-date visitors and pageviews line from Plausible, with a trend against the same span last month. Without Plausible connected the card renders as an empty frame.
Quick actions
The + Add activity menu above the chart jumps straight to Add product, Add category, Add collection or Add customer.
Notifications live in the bell
New orders, vendor applications, returns, payments, reviews and low-stock alerts arrive in the bell drawer at the top right, with All, Unread and Archived tabs. New ones stream in and pop a toast.
Figures load with the page
Overview is rendered when you open it rather than streaming updates continuously, so refresh after a burst of sales to see the new numbers. Notifications in the bell are the part that arrives live.
Everything that makes up what you sell sits under Products in the sidebar: All Products, Global Variants, Collections, Categories, Brands, Inventory, Transfers and Reviews.
- 1
Build the category tree
Products → Categories shows categories indented parent-first. Create one with Add category, give it a name, description, image and icon, then set its parent and display order. A category can also carry variant option sets that flow into every product filed under it. Create a Category walks through the whole form.
- 2
Add your products
Products → All Products, then Add product. The list has All, Active, Draft and Archived tabs, search, tag and status filters, and a stat strip showing total products, active listings, drafts, out of stock and inventory units. Create a Product covers the form card by card.
- 3
Group products into collections
Products → Collections. A manual collection is one you fill by hand; an automated collection fills itself from conditions on title, type, vendor, tag, price, compare-at price, weight, stock or category — matching ALL or ANY of them. Set the sort order shoppers see and where it appears.
- 4
Set up brands
Products → Brands holds brand name, description, website and logo, with approval status for vendor-submitted brands. Tabs cover All, Pending, Active, Featured, Inactive, Rejected and Archived.
- 5
Define reusable options once
Products → Global Variants is where you create option sets like Color, Size or Storage with their values and a visual style — colour swatches get a picker. Any product can then pull those values instead of retyping them.
- 6
Moderate reviews
Products → Reviews lists customer reviews for approval, and lets you reply as the merchant. The reply box has an AI action if you would rather draft from a prompt.
Bulk actions save real time
Select rows in any catalog table for bulk changes — products can be set active, draft or archived, or deleted, in one pass. Products, categories and collections all support CSV import and export from the Import / Export toolbar button.
Three product states, no scheduling
A product is Active, Draft or Unlisted — unlisted means reachable by direct link only. There is no publish-on date for products; that exists for blog posts.
Categories are the shelf a product sits on — they drive storefront navigation, the mega menu, filters and search. Build the tree before you add products, because every product must be filed under one.
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Open the category list
Products → Categories. The table lists categories indented parent-first, with a stat strip showing total, active and inactive categories, how many are parents, and how many products are assigned. Search by name, filter by status, or use Import / Export for CSV. Click Add category to start.
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Name and describe it
The Details card asks for a Name — required, at least two characters, such as Electronics — and an optional Description of up to 500 characters with a live counter under the box. Generate beside the Description label drafts one with AI; it needs the name filled in first.
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Add the image and the icon
Media takes a single image, used wherever the category is shown as a card. Icon takes a small square image used in the header, mega menu and category navigation — a transparent square works best. Both have an AI Studio action, and icon generation starts on a transparent 1024 × 1024 canvas so you do not have to cut the background out yourself.
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Set the variant options products should inherit
The Variants card defines an option template — names like Size or Colour and their values, pulled from Global Variants or typed by hand, with a swatch on colour values. It stops there: no prices, stock or images, because a category stores the options, not the variants. The summary line at the bottom shows how many variants those options would produce.
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Write the search listing
The Search engine listing card shows a live Google-style preview. Set the page title (keep it under 70 characters), the meta description (under 320) and the URL handle. Improve SEO drafts all of them from the name and description.
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Choose status and where it sits
In the right column, Status is Active — visible in category navigation and filters — or Inactive, which hides it from the storefront. Featured category adds it to the storefront's featured categories section. Under Organization, leave Parent category as None (root category) for a top-level entry, or pick a parent to make this a sub-category, and set Display order — lower numbers appear first.
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Save
Save in the sticky header at the top; you land back on the category list. Reopen a saved category and the Organization card also shows how many products are currently assigned to it.
Products attach to the deepest level only
The product form's category picker offers leaf categories — ones with no children — and shows their parents only as breadcrumb context. The moment you add a sub-category under a category, that parent stops being selectable on new products. Plan the depth of the tree before you start assigning products to it.
Category options merge, they never overwrite
Picking a category on a product pulls that category's option template into the product's variants. Options you typed yourself are left untouched, options with a name the product already uses are skipped, and switching to a different category swaps the old category's options out for the new one's.
Bulk work is on the list, not the form
The category table handles the repetitive parts: search and status filters, marking rows featured or removing them from featured in bulk, and CSV import and export from the toolbar.
This is the path from an empty form to a live listing, card by card, in the order the form is laid out. The next section is the field-by-field reference for the same screen.
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Start a new product
Products → All Products, then Add product. Vendors and staff with the products permission open the same form from their own dashboard. Make sure at least one category exists first — Category is a required field, and the picker tells you to create one if the list is empty.
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Write the details
Title needs at least three characters. The URL handle beneath it follows the title while you type and stops the moment you edit it, so a published link keeps working after a rename. Summary is the short line used on cards. The Description tab needs at least ten characters; the Specifications tab holds label/value pairs — Brand: ESR, Battery: 130 mAh — that render as a spec table on the product page. Generate drafts the summary or description with AI.
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Choose the format — this choice is permanent
Product format is either Physical product or Digital product or service, and it is set at creation and locked afterwards. Physical shows Inventory and Shipping; digital hides both, skips the shipping step at checkout, and shows a Digital files card instead. To sell the same thing in the other format, create a second product.
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Add media
Drag, drop or paste (Ctrl+V) up to ten images, videos and 3D models. The first image becomes the storefront cover — drag to reorder. Add video embeds a YouTube or Vimeo link rather than uploading a file. AI Studio above the grid opens the image studio, and each image carries its own Write with AI action for alt text inside its preview.
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Set the price
Pricing takes the Price, an optional Compare at price that shows a strikethrough when it is higher, unit pricing for goods sold by measure, Charge tax on this product, and Cost per item — which turns into a live profit and margin readout. Once the product has variants, prices move into the variant grid and this card shows the resulting range instead.
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Set stock
Leave SKU and Barcode empty and both are generated for you; the barcode standard can be left on auto or fixed to EAN-13, UPC-A, GTIN-14 or Code 128, with an identifier source to record whether it came from the manufacturer, GS1 or your own numbering. Then set Track quantity, the Quantity itself, and whether to Continue selling when out of stock. With store locations configured, the quantity field becomes Inventory by Location — a quantity per branch with a running total, and an inline field to add a new location without leaving the form.
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Fill in shipping
Physical products only: weight and unit, country of origin, HS code and a customs description for international parcels. If weight-based rates are switched on and a weight is missing, saving is blocked with a message naming exactly that — including for individual variants.
- 8
Build the variants
If the product comes in more than one size, colour or configuration, add its options here — up to five of them — and every combination is generated into a grid you can price and stock. The full walkthrough is below, under Variant creation in depth.
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Turn on pre-orders if you need them
On a physical product, Pre-orders takes an expected ship date, a storefront message, a limit, and how money is collected — full payment, a percentage or fixed deposit, or pay later. You can sell a product only as a pre-order, or have pre-orders stop automatically after the release date.
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Fill the search listing
Search engine listing previews the product the way Google would show it, with an editable page title, meta description and URL handle. Improve SEO fills all three from what you have already written.
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File it under a category
The Organization card in the right column carries Category — required, searchable, showing the full breadcrumb path — plus Brand, Type, Collections and Tags. Assign the category before you build variants and its option template comes in on its own.
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Choose status and sales channels
Status is Active — sells through the channels selected below — Draft, which is not visible on any channel, or Unlisted, reachable by direct link only. Featured promotes it on the storefront. Publishing has an independent switch for Online Store and Point of Sale, so a product can sell at the register without appearing online.
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Save
Save sits in the sticky header and stays in view as you scroll. Saving returns you to the product list. Reopen the product and the header gains View, which opens the live storefront page in a new tab, and Delete product.
Variant creation in depth
1. Add an option
The Variants card starts with a single link — Add options like size or color. Click it and an option editor opens expanded, ready for a name. A product holds up to five options, and Add another option appears beneath the last one until you reach that limit.
2. Name it, or pull a saved one in
Option name is a combobox, not a plain field: type your own — Size, Colour, Material, Storage — or pick one of your Global Variants from the list, which drops in its name, all of its values and its visual style in one go. Names must be unique within the product, and the placeholder suggests the usual first, second and third option.
3. Choose how shoppers see it
Visual controls how the option renders on the product page: Rectangle, Dropdown, Circle, Color, Color & Label or Radio Button. Naming an option Colour — or picking a swatch visual — switches the editor into colour mode, where every value gains a swatch alongside it.
4. Type the values
Add another value takes one value per line and stays focused, so you can type S, Enter, M, Enter, L without touching the mouse. In colour mode a picker sits beside the field and a recognised colour name fills the swatch in for you; any swatch can be corrected afterwards. Drag values by their handle to set the order shoppers see, and remove one with the × beside it.
5. Save it for reuse, then close
Save for reuse pushes the finished option into Global Variants so it is offered on every future product — the button confirms with Saved for reuse and greys out once the option is already there. Done collapses the editor to a one-line summary showing the name and its values as chips; Delete removes the option and the variants built from it.
6. Read the generated grid
As soon as one option has values, the variant table appears beneath a Group by selector and a total variant count. Rows are grouped by whichever option you group on, and each group can be folded away — Collapse all in the header folds every group at once. Each row shows the variant image, its name, Price and Available.
7. Price and stock each row inline
Price is editable directly in the row. Available depends on your locations: with none configured it is a plain quantity, with one location it writes to that location, and with two or more it becomes a read-only total with a pin icon — click it for a per-location popover with a quantity per branch and a running total.
8. Edit many at once
Tick the checkbox on any rows and a bulk bar appears above the table with the count selected: Set price, Set compare-at price, Generate SKUs, Generate barcodes, Set stock, and a delete button. Generated barcodes are valid EAN-13 codes marked as internal, and they are checked against the barcodes already on the other variants so no two collide.
9. Give a variant its own image
Click a row's image square to pick from the product's media, so choosing Midnight on the storefront swaps the gallery to that colour's photo. The same control has an AI action that generates the variant's image when you have no photo of that combination yet.
10. Open a row for everything else
Opening a single variant gives it a dialog of its own: price, compare-at price, cost, SKU, barcode with its standard and identifier source, its own inventory and shipping weight — which falls back to the product weight when left empty — and its own pre-order settings including payment mode, deposit and batch name. Create this variant at the top is the switch that excludes a combination you do not actually sell.
Only three fields are actually required
Title, Description and Category. Everything else carries a working default, so a listing can go live with those three plus a price — and you can come back for media, variants and SEO afterwards.
Physical or digital cannot be changed later
The two formats carry different data, different checkout paths and different stock rules, so the choice is locked once the product exists — in the form and in the API. If you picked wrong, create a new product and archive the old one.
Save as a draft and finish later
Set Status to Draft on the first save and the product is stored without appearing anywhere. That is the safest way to work through media, variants and pricing across several sittings, then flip it to Active in one edit.
Variants take over pricing and stock
The moment a product has variants, the Pricing card stops asking for a price and shows the resulting range instead, and the Inventory card reports the total across all variants. Track quantity and Continue selling when out of stock stay on the product and apply to every variant.
Pick the category before you build options
A category can carry a variant option template, and choosing it drops those options straight into the grid — so a shirt filed under Apparel arrives with Size and Colour already filled in. Options you added yourself are never overwritten, and switching category swaps the old one's options out for the new one's.
The product editor is a two-column form. The left column carries the content cards in the order you fill them; the right column holds status, publishing and organization.
Details
Title, URL handle, summary, and a two-tab editor for the rich Description and a Specifications table of label/value pairs. The handle follows the title until you edit it, then stays put so published links keep working.
Product format
Physical product or digital product/service. You choose once at creation and it locks after that — the two formats carry different data and checkout paths. Digital hides Inventory and Shipping; physical hides Digital files.
Media
Drag, drop or paste up to ten images, videos and 3D models — the first image becomes the storefront cover. Add video embeds a YouTube or Vimeo URL instead of uploading. One AI Studio button above the grid opens the image studio, where you can switch between images, and each image has its own Write with AI alt-text action inside its preview.
Pricing
Price, plus compare-at price, unit pricing, tax charging, and cost per item with live profit and margin. Once variants exist, prices move to the variant grid and this card shows the range.
Inventory
SKU and barcode — both auto-generated if you leave them empty — with barcode standard and identifier source, quantity, Track quantity, and Continue selling when out of stock. With two or more locations the quantity field becomes a per-location editor.
Shipping
Weight and unit, country of origin, HS code and customs description. It warns you when weight-based rates are switched on but the weight is missing.
Variants
Add options like size or colour — pulling values from Global Variants or typing your own — then edit the generated grid. Select variants to bulk-set price, generate SKUs, generate barcodes or set stock, and open any one for its full detail including per-variant pre-orders.
Pre-orders
Enable pre-orders on a physical product with an expected ship date, a limit, and how you collect money — full payment, a percentage or fixed deposit, or pay later. You can also sell a product only as a pre-order, or stop pre-orders after the release date.
Search engine listing
A live Google-style preview with editable page title, meta description and URL handle. Improve SEO fills all three at once.
Status, publishing & organization
Right column: Active, Draft or Unlisted plus a Featured toggle; per-channel switches for Online Store and Point of Sale; and category, brand, type, collections and tags.
AI can draft the copy
Generate sits next to Summary and Description and streams a draft you preview before applying, and Improve SEO fills the listing card. Enable the surfaces you want in Settings → AI Configuration first.
Set a product's format to digital and it stops behaving like stock on a shelf: nothing ships, nothing runs out, and buyers get their files from the order page after payment.
- 1
Choose the digital format at creation
On the Product format card pick Digital product or service. The Inventory and Shipping cards disappear and a Digital files card takes their place. This choice cannot be changed later, so create a new product if you need to switch.
- 2
Attach the deliverables
Upload the files buyers receive — any file type, up to 5 GB each. They are stored privately, never linked from the storefront, and delivered only through a paid order.
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Set a download limit
Download limit per order caps how many times a buyer can pull the file down. Leave it at 0 for unlimited.
- 4
Add a free sample
Upload one public preview file and it appears on the product page before purchase, the way a book preview works. This one is deliberately public — everything else stays behind the order.
Stock never blocks a digital sale
Digital products carry no stock count, so they never show as out of stock. The same is true of physical products with Track quantity switched off, and of anything set to continue selling when out of stock.
Products → Inventory is a variant-level view of everything you hold, with the transfer workflow and the barcode label studio attached to it.
- 1
Adjust stock inline
The inventory table lists every tracked variant with SKU, barcode, unavailable, committed, available and on-hand. Available and On hand are editable in place — edits queue up and a floating bar shows how many rows changed, with Cancel and Save.
- 2
Find what needs attention
Tabs cover All, In stock, Low Stock and Out of Stock, and you can filter by location or by whether a row has a barcode. The stat strip counts tracked SKUs, low stock, out of stock, on-hand units and active locations.
- 3
Move stock between locations
Products → Transfers, then Create transfer. Pick a source and destination location, add products with quantities against the source's available stock, then walk the transfer through Draft, Ready to ship, In transit and Completed. You can cancel at any point before completion.
- 4
Print barcode labels
Select rows and choose Print barcode labels. Pick 40×25, 50×30 or 60×40 mm, ZPL or TSPL, and 203 or 300 DPI, then decide whether to print the current on-hand quantity and whether to show SKU and price. The live preview counts the labels before you commit.
- 5
Send the labels to a printer
Direct thermal print goes to a QZ Tray printer you discover once and save on that terminal; Browser / driver print uses exact millimetre page sizes; Download writes the raw ZPL or TSPL. Your printer, language, DPI and label size are remembered locally.
Let Storify assign barcodes
Leave a SKU or barcode blank and it is generated for you — internal barcodes are valid EAN-13 codes marked as internal so you can tell them from manufacturer GTINs. The Variants card can generate them in bulk.
Calibrate before a production run
When printing through the browser, turn off browser headers and footers and print at 100% or Actual size. Calibrate the printer's media and gap sensor first, and test one label before running a batch.
Storefront and POS orders land in the same list. Every status change, payment and refund is recorded on the order's timeline, and your team can leave comments there too.
- 1
Find the order
Orders → All Orders has tabs for All, Unfulfilled, Unpaid, Open and Archived, plus filters for order status, payment status and channel. The strip above shows total orders, open orders, paid orders, total revenue and average order value.
- 2
Open it
An order opens as three panels: the header with order number, payment and status badges, tracking and any return badges; the left column with Order Items and the Timeline; and the right column with the customer, addresses, payment method and internal notes.
- 3
Move it forward
The More actions menu in the header carries Mark Processing, Mark Shipped — which asks for carrier and tracking number — Mark Delivered, and Cancel order with a reason. Cancelling restores inventory while the order is still eligible.
- 4
Take payment on manual orders
Online gateways confirm themselves. For cash-on-delivery and manual orders, use Mark as paid once the money arrives. You can also build an order yourself with Create order — pick products, add a discount, shipping and estimated tax, attach a customer, then save it or mark it paid.
- 5
Refund
More actions offers Refund Full Amount and Refund Partial Amount. The dialog shows what is still refundable and blocks anything above it. Storify reverses the charge through the original gateway where the gateway supports it.
- 6
Ship it
The Shipping label dropdown creates the shipment and gives you a 4 × 6 label — Download saves the PDF, Print 4 × 6 sends it straight to your saved QZ Tray thermal printer. Download invoice produces the customer's invoice PDF, and Print prints the order page itself without the sidebar or header.
- 7
Talk to your team on the order
The Timeline merges system events — created, paid, shipped, refunded, cancelled — with staff comments. Post a comment for context, edit your own, and see who changed what and when.
Refunding money does not put stock back
Neither the order refund dialog nor the refund on a return adjusts inventory, so a refunded item stays out of stock until you say otherwise. Marking a return received records how many units came back; add them to stock yourself with the inline edit on Products → Inventory. Cancelling an order is the one action that restores inventory on its own.
Customers are emailed automatically
Confirmation, status and refund emails go out on their own. Settings → Notification Settings controls which events notify whom over which channel; the email wording itself is part of the source, not an in-app template editor.
Three screens sit alongside Orders in the sidebar: Returns for goods coming back, Pre-orders for goods that have not arrived yet, and Abandoned checkouts for carts that never converted.
Work a return
Orders → Returns lists every request with its items, refund amount and status. Approve or reject it with a reason, mark it received when the parcel lands, then issue the refund from a dialog pre-filled with the estimated amount.
Handle returns from the order
You do not have to leave the order — its More actions menu carries Approve return and Mark return received, and return badges in the header show the return number and where it has got to.
Track pre-orders
Orders → Pre-orders opens on five tiles: pre-orders waiting for release, reserved quantities, payment due, ready for fulfillment, and due in the next fortnight. Tabs break the same list down by state, including Delayed and Overdue.
Collect pre-order balances
Row and bulk actions cover Move to fulfillment, Request balance, Send balance reminder, Update release date and Cancel pre-order — so a slipped supplier date is one bulk edit rather than a message to every buyer.
Recover abandoned carts
Orders → Abandoned checkouts shows how many were abandoned, are still open, were recovered, how many emails went out and the revenue at stake. Send a recovery email, copy the recovery link to paste into a chat, or open the checkout yourself.
POS shares the same catalog, customers and inventory as your online store. Open Point of Sale under SALES CHANNELS — admins, vendors and staff each get it in their own dashboard once it is enabled in settings.
- 1
Open the register
Point of Sale → New Sale fills the screen with a product grid on one side and the current sale on the other. Search by name or SKU and filter by category, stock status, source or vendor. On a phone the panels stack and scroll, with checkout pinned in view.
- 2
Scan instead of searching
The Scan SKU or barcode box is built for a hardware scanner and shows a ready/resolving indicator with a queue. Scan with Camera opens the device camera when you have no scanner to hand.
- 3
Attach a customer
Add Customer (F2) offers a walk-in with no details, a search across existing customers by name, phone or email, or a quick Create New with name, email and phone.
- 4
Discount the sale
Discount (F3) applies a percentage or fixed amount to the whole order with a reason — returning customer, damaged item, staff discount, price match, promotion or your own note. Each cart line also takes its own discount and note.
- 5
Park a sale and come back to it
Hold (F4) saves the cart under a label like "Table 5 · Mrs. Patel". When the cart is empty the same button reads Resume with a count. Holds belong to the register they were parked at, and resuming re-prices every line against live stock and prices and tells you what moved.
- 6
Take payment
Checkout (F9) opens Take payment with the methods you enabled: Cash with a tendered field, quick amounts and change calculation; Card as tap-or-insert on a reader or typed into Stripe; Bank Transfer with a reference; and Manual with your own note.
- 7
Hand over the receipt
The Sale complete modal shows the order number, total, item count and payment method, with View receipt, Print receipt and New sale. Printed receipts render at 80 mm with your store details, tax split, a barcode and a QR code to the tracking page, and print automatically when that is switched on in POS settings.
Learn the shortcuts
F2 customer, F3 discount, F4 hold or resume, F8 focus the scan box, F9 checkout, / focus product search, ALT+C open the calculator. There is a calculator button in the scan bar too.
Locations, not tills
Point of Sale → Locations manages the shops you sell from, including which is the default. Stock and held sales are tracked per location. There is no cash-drawer or end-of-shift Z-report — in-store takings roll up as the In-store sales figure on Overview.
Vendor stock is opt-in
In a marketplace, vendor-owned products do not appear on your register unless you enable that in POS settings and pick a location — without a per-store count there is nothing proving the goods are physically on your shelf.
Storify ships with seven ways to get paid. Enable the ones you need from Settings → Payment Settings, then watch the money move through Payments, Transactions and Payouts.
Seven gateways out of the box
Stripe, PayPal, Razorpay, Paystack, Pesapal for East African cards and mobile money, ioTec Pay for Ugandan mobile money and cards, and cash on delivery.
Payments overview
Paid revenue, refunded amount, pending payments and refunded orders, plus payout totals in a marketplace — with a gateway health card telling you which providers are connected, need setup or are switched off.
Transaction log
Payments → Transactions records every charge, refund and adjustment with its provider, gross and net. Filter by status, type or provider, or search by order or external ID.
Vendor payouts
Payments → Payouts holds settlement runs per vendor and period, each showing gross sales, commission and net payout with the orders behind them.
Webhooks are what mark orders paid
Each enabled gateway needs its webhook or callback URL configured, in the same test-or-live mode as its keys. A payment that succeeds while the order stays pending is almost always a webhook mismatch — the exact endpoints are in the Documentation.
One store currency at a time
Shoppers browse and pay in the currency you set as default in Settings → General. There is no shopper-facing currency picker and no exchange-rate conversion — each order stores the currency it was placed in, so historical totals never shift when you change the default.
Customers records everyone who buys from you; Staff records everyone who works the store. Both are permission-aware, so what a teammate can open depends on what you granted them.
- 1
Open a customer
Customers lists your buyers; clicking one opens a workspace with a header summary and tabs for their profile, order history and activity. You can edit their details — name, contact, account status, acquisition source, tags, marketing opt-in and addresses — and add a customer by hand with Add customer.
- 2
Invite your team
Staff → Add staff creates a teammate with their own login. Each staff member gets a permission set rather than a blanket role, so you can grant orders without payments, or POS without settings.
- 3
Scope staff to what they own
A staff member can be limited to particular vendors, POS locations or regions. That scope applies everywhere — lists, detail pages and the API alike — so a scoped teammate cannot open an out-of-scope order even with its direct link.
- 4
Give inbox access separately
Answering customer conversations is its own permission. Grant it to the people who handle messages, then use assignment in the Inbox to divide the workload.
One login per person
Shared accounts make the order timeline and audit trail useless — you lose the ability to say who cancelled an order or issued a refund. Create a separate staff account for every real person.
Storify runs as a single-vendor store or a full marketplace. Turn marketplace mode on and a Vendors group appears in the sidebar with the vendor list, plans, configuration and the onboarding flow builder.
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Choose your commerce model
Settings → Multi-Vendor Mode is a single switch with a confirmation dialog. Leave it off and every product belongs to the main store, and the Vendors group stays hidden entirely.
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Decide how sellers join
Vendors → Configuration sets whether registration is open, whether you approve applications by hand, the free-trial length, whether plans are required, and your default commission.
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Shape the signup form
Vendors → Onboarding Flow owns the registration wizard and the documents you require. Rename and reorder steps, mark fields required or hidden, add your own fields, and preview the result as an applicant would see it.
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Review applications
Vendors lists everyone with status tabs — All, Pending, Payment Required, Approved, Suspended, Rejected — plus tiles for total, approved, pending review, flagged vendors and lifetime vendor sales. Row actions cover Details, Edit, Visit store, Approve, Suspend, Ban or activate the account, and Delete.
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Sell subscription plans (optional)
Vendors → Vendor Plans defines each plan's price, billing interval, commission rate, trial length, product and staff limits and whether AI authoring is included. Vendors pay through Stripe Checkout and manage their own card in the customer portal.
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Settle up
Payments → Payouts is where you create a settlement run: pick the vendor and the period, then track it through Pending, Processing, Paid, Failed or Cancelled. Opening a run shows gross sales, commission, net payout and the orders it covers.
You start payouts, not the vendor
Vendors can see their payouts but cannot request one — you create the run for a period and record the settlement. Payment itself happens outside Storify; the record tracks status, date and who marked it paid.
Commission has one source of truth
A vendor's rate resolves from their store, then their plan, then your default. If a paid plan lapses, the commission reverts on its own without cutting off the vendor's access.
Inbox unifies storefront live chat with WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram Direct and Telegram. One list, one thread view, one set of rules — whichever channel the customer chose.
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Work the list
Inbox opens as three panes: conversations, the thread, and details. Filter with the All, Unread, Open, Pending and Resolved chips, or search across contact name, email, subject, attached product and last message. New conversations and messages stream in without a refresh.
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Know which channel you are on
Every conversation is badged Live chat, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram or Telegram. Outbound messages on the external channels show their delivery state — queued, sent, delivered, read or failed.
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Divide the work
The details panel assigns a conversation to a teammate, or lets someone claim it with Assign to me. Resolve closes a thread and Reopen brings it back. Everyone else sees who owns it without being able to reassign.
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Reply, with attachments
The composer takes up to 4000 characters — Enter sends, Shift+Enter starts a new line — and the paperclip attaches images, video or PDFs up to 16 MB, with tighter per-channel limits enforced for you.
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Reopen a closed WhatsApp window
When a provider's reply window expires the composer locks and explains why. On WhatsApp, send an approved template from inside the thread — fill in each placeholder and the conversation reopens.
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See the context
The details panel carries the customer's contact rows, the subject, and any product they were looking at, plus a Media, files and links panel collecting everything shared in the thread.
Live chat needs no accounts
Storefront live chat and the public contact form flow into this inbox with no third-party setup. Connecting WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram or Telegram happens in Settings → Omnichannel Messaging, which needs a Meta app or a Telegram bot.
Vendors and staff get their own inbox
The same screen appears for vendors scoped to their own store's conversations and for staff scoped to the vendors assigned to them — as long as they hold the inbox permission.
The AI Sales Agent is a storefront chat widget that answers product, payment and delivery questions, recommends items and guides shoppers toward checkout. Configure it under Sales Agent in the sidebar.
Configuration
One master switch turns the storefront widget on. Pick the model and reasoning effort, set temperature and how many products it may recommend, then enable the capabilities you want: product Q&A, recommendations, cart actions, checkout handoff and order status.
Behavior
Give the agent a name, a tone — friendly, professional, playful or luxury — a greeting, custom instructions and an escalation message. The Knowledge & FAQ list holds up to fifty question-and-answer entries it uses for policy questions.
Widget
Set the header title and avatar, corner position, expanded width and height, primary and accent colours and the footer text — with a live preview beside the form.
Chat logs
The Conversations tab is a searchable, paginated record of shopper sessions with locale and status filters. Open one for the full transcript, session details and message counts, or delete it.
Test before you launch
Test chat runs the agent with your saved settings so you can try it privately, and How it works walks an eight-step setup checklist with live status against your configuration.
Chat logs are read-only
This is a record of what the agent said, not a place to take over a conversation. Human replies happen in Inbox, which is a separate system for live chat and the messaging channels.
AI Studio is the hub for AI authoring. The hub page itself is a launchpad — the real work happens inside the forms you already use, wherever you see a Generate button or the AI Studio image launcher.
Writing help where you write
Generate buttons sit in the product, category, collection, brand and blog post forms, and in review replies. Each one takes a prompt, streams a draft you preview, and applies it only when you accept.
Improve SEO
On the search engine listing card, one action fills the page title, meta description and URL handle together instead of writing three fields by hand.
The image studio
Any media field with the AI Studio button opens an overlay to remove backgrounds, enhance, upscale, erase objects, resize, expand or apply style presets — with compare, zoom, and a preview of how the result looks as a storefront card.
Export for social
The same overlay exports at Open Graph, square post, portrait post, story or reel, and landscape sizes, with an optional brand logo, so one product shot covers every channel.
Hero banners
The home page builder's hero editor can generate banner artwork at the exact slide size. This one is opt-in because it consumes image credits quickly.
One place to control it
Settings → AI Configuration holds the API key, the text and image models, per-surface switches, whether staff and vendors may use it, daily limits per user, brand voice and tone, image style guidance and a brand kit of colours and logo.
Every generation costs money
Usage is billed by OpenAI at their rates. Set daily limits before you give staff or vendors access, and enable only the surfaces you actually want generated.
Online Store, under SALES CHANNELS, is where the shop itself is built: the theme, the home page, the header and footer, navigation menus and your policy pages.
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Arrange the home page
Online Store → Home is the Page Builder. Drag the nine sections into the order you want and toggle any of them off: Hero, Featured Categories, Products on Sale, Promotions & Offers, Featured Products, Top Vendors, Become a Vendor, Top Articles and From Instagram. Preview opens the storefront in a new tab.
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Fill the hero and promo grid
The hero holds as many slides as you want, each with a wide cover image, alt text and an optional link. Promotions & Offers is a fixed bento of five named slots — two tall cards, two squares and a wide banner — and each card takes an image and the link it points at.
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Choose what the product sections show
Products on Sale draws from discounted, featured, latest or hand-picked products, with a maximum count and a desktop cards-per-row setting. Featured Products adds an all-products source that browses the catalog with infinite scroll, and drops the count once you pick that or hand-pick. Hand-picked lets you drag the exact products into order.
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Customize the header
Online Store → Menus → Headers → Customize opens Header Studio with a live preview and five tabs: Brand, Navigation, Search, Widgets and Mobile. Turn individual widgets on or off, configure the mega menu and its promo card, style the search bar, and tune the mobile drawer separately. Changes stay a draft until you Publish.
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Build the footer
Menus → Footer → Customize gives you a live preview with undo and redo. Add quick-link columns and links, set contact info, social links, the copyright line and the payment-methods image.
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Manage menus
Menus lists your navigation. Header and Footer are system rows you customize; other menus you create and edit in a builder with Structure, Preview, Item, Sync and Menu tabs. Mega menus go exactly three levels deep, and the Sync tab can build one from your category tree automatically.
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Edit your pages
Online Store → Pages splits into seven built-in store pages — Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, Return & Refund Policy, Cookie Policy, Accessibility, Contact and FAQ — and any custom pages you add. Contact and FAQ are structured editors, with a map block and a question repeater respectively.
The section list is fixed
You can reorder, hide and edit the nine home sections and the five promo slots, but you cannot add a tenth section or a sixth card. Preview opens the real storefront rather than rendering inline.
Storefront content is not per-language
The page builder and page editors store one set of values, so home page and page copy is not translated per locale. Interface strings are translated; your own content is not.
Content holds your blog; Discounts holds your codes. Both are ordinary list-and-editor screens with the same bulk actions you use elsewhere.
Write a post
Content → Blog posts, then Add blog post. Title, URL handle, excerpt, content, featured image with alt text, categories and tags — plus AI Generate and Improve SEO if you want a first draft.
Schedule and control visibility
Posts can be Draft, Scheduled with a publish-on date, Published or Archived, and set to public, private to admins, or password protected. Featured and Allow comments are separate toggles.
Moderate comments
Manage comments on the blog posts screen opens moderation with Pending, Approved and Spam tabs, bulk approve and mark-as-spam, and per-row delete. Manage categories sits next to it.
Create a discount
Discounts → Add discount takes a code, a label, a type — percentage, fixed amount or free shipping — and a value, with a minimum order amount, a maximum cap, total and per-customer usage limits and a date range.
Track redemptions
The Discounts page opens on four figures: total discounts, active discounts, total redemptions and how many codes expire within seven days. Tabs and search narrow the list, and bulk actions set codes active or inactive.
Expired codes fail closed
Tax is calculated after the discount, and an expired code is rejected at checkout automatically — you do not have to deactivate it by hand to stop it being used.
Storify splits reporting in two: commercial figures sit on Overview and on each list's stat strip, while Analytics is a dedicated web-traffic screen powered by Plausible.
Analytics is traffic
Online now, unique visitors, total pageviews, total visits, bounce rate and average duration, with top sources, top pages, countries and devices. Choose today, 7d, 30d, month, 6mo, 12mo or a custom range.
It needs Plausible
Without a Plausible key the page shows a Configure Plausible Analytics prompt. Connect it in Settings → Analytics, where Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Meta Pixel and TikTok Pixel IDs also live.
Sales figures live on Overview
In-store and website sales, total orders, discounts, customers and refunds, plus the twelve-month in-store versus online chart and its month-by-month table. Orders, products, inventory and vendors each carry their own stat strip too.
Export as CSV
Orders, products, inventory, categories and collections export to CSV from their Import / Export toolbar button, respecting the filters you have applied. Pre-orders has its own Export CSV button on the admin screen. Invoices and shipping labels download as PDFs from an order.
What is not here
There is no scheduled email digest, no PDF or Excel report export, and no built-in tax-summary or best-seller report for the admin. The Vendors table shows an Import / Export button, but neither half is wired up yet. For accounting, export the orders CSV.
Settings is pinned at the bottom of the sidebar and holds twenty pages. These are the ones you touch most often — the Documentation has the complete reference.
General
Store name, description, contact details, address and timezone, plus default and supported languages and currencies — and the country availability policy that decides which countries you ship to and accept addresses from.
Branding
Your logo, dark-mode logo and favicon, primary, secondary and accent colours, preset palettes, theme mode, contrast, right-to-left and navigation colour. The favicon is also the icon used when someone installs the app.
Multi-Vendor Mode & POS
Turn marketplace mode on or off and set vendor permissions; enable POS for admins, vendors and sellers with its default location, receipt behaviour, accepted payment methods and return rules.
Security & Access Control
Session duration, login attempts and lockout, password policy, and rate limits for admin, vendor, checkout, cart, coupon, auth and IP routes. Two-Factor Authentication and OAuth login are their own pages, and the email and vendor verification switches live on Email Configuration.
Payment, Email & Notifications
Gateway credentials and connection tests; SMTP host, credentials, sender identity, delivery logs and a test send; and a matrix deciding which events notify admins, vendors, staff and customers by in-app, email and push.
Messaging, AI & Storage
Connect and verify your chat channels; set the OpenAI key, models, per-surface switches and daily limits; and choose local, Cloudflare R2 or S3-compatible storage with a media library attached.
Permissions, not custom roles
The roles are admin, vendor, staff and customer. You cannot invent a new role, but you can give each staff member and vendor their own permission set and scope, which covers most of what custom roles are used for.
Storify installs as an app on desktop and mobile, and pushes alerts to your device so you do not have to keep the dashboard open.
- 1
Install the app
Open the bell at the top right, click the gear, and use the Install app card. You can also install from Chrome or Edge's address bar, or on iOS Safari with Share → Add to Home Screen.
- 2
Turn on browser push
In that same gear panel, the Browser push card shows whether push is enabled, off, blocked or unsupported, counts how many browsers you have enrolled, and offers Send test. Enabling prompts for browser permission.
- 3
Choose what reaches you
Settings → Notification Settings decides which events raise a notification and over which channel, for admins, vendors, staff and customers — new orders, new customers, vendor applications, returns, payments and low stock.
- 4
Work the bell
The notifications sheet has All, Unread and Archived tabs with Mark all as read, and per-item open, archive and delete. New items arrive live and pop a toast.
There is no offline dashboard
The installed app is a shortcut to the live store, not an offline copy. Without a connection you get an offline notice rather than a cached admin or POS screen, and nothing queues up to sync later — so do not rely on it in a shop with patchy signal.
Tell shoppers about it too
The storefront is installable as well, so customers can add it to their home screen and receive order and shipping notifications.
A few shortcuts and habits that will help you fly through Storify every day.
Cmd+K jumps between pages
Cmd+K or Ctrl+K opens the page palette from anywhere. It navigates to admin pages — to find a specific order or product, use that page's own search box.
Cmd+B reclaims screen space
Collapse the sidebar to an icon rail when you are working in a wide table. Hover a group icon to get its sub-pages without expanding again.
Learn the register keys
At the POS: F2 customer, F3 discount, F4 hold or resume, F8 scan box, F9 checkout, / product search, ALT+C calculator. They are the difference between a queue moving and a queue waiting.
Filter, then export
CSV exports respect the filters and sort you have applied, so narrow the list first and you get exactly the rows you wanted rather than everything.
Print without the chrome
Printing any dashboard page leaves out the sidebar and header, so an order prints as a clean document straight from the browser.
One account per person
Never share a login. The order timeline and audit trail record who did what, and that is only useful when each account belongs to one human being.