General:
Check your General settings every 4-6 months to make sure all your contact information is current and your social media connections are accurate/working properly.

Also, make sure there is a / (forward-slash) at the end of your URL in this section.
​https://www.yourwinery.com/

Configure:
Allows you to set up designations on several trackable parameters for customers, orders, wine clubs, and your sales team/employees. It is wise to explore this area early and get your designations setup so you can train yourself to track all these parameters:

-Where did a new client come from?
-What type of orders will be processed through your Figure account?
-Order cancellation reasons?

-What avenue did a new wine club sign up come from?

-Reasons that a customer canceled their wine club membership?

-What concierge services send you the most tasting visits?

If you go several months, or even a year without setting up these details in the Settings>Configure section, you will miss having those data points later on.

Emails:
This section allows custom interaction for every form of automated email that Figure sends to your clients regarding sign up, orders, clubs, cancellations, etc.

*Partially Important*—Just as advice, in selecting an email address for basic company wide email communication with customers for order confirmations, wine release campaigns, contact email on your website, etc, you may want to steer away from an email that starts with info@. Spamming bots are notorious for automatically finding any newly registered domain name, putting info@ in front of it, and sending you unwanted messages. Perhaps think up something less common and go with it, fun options could be...queries@, notices@, remarks@, salutations@, bulletin@, advisements@, counsel@, publications@, statements@, broadcast@, briefing@

**Very Important**—If you are going to use a personalized reference to your first names in the Admin Email cell (Jack and Jill <[email protected]>), don’t use the ‘&’ symbol. Spell out ‘and’. Using the ‘&’ is just asking for spam filters to kick your emails out of the inbox.

**Very Important Again**—At some point a client will email you and say, “I did not get my order email confirmation or the Wine Club Member sign up welcome email. If you contact us and ask why didn’t they receive this email, our response, with a smile, will be...

All emails, direct, transactional, or marketing, are functions generated when triggered by their respective systems. 

Whether the person on the receiving end actually receives the message is up to numerous factors once that email leaves its respective system - spam filtering, security settings, email program settings, what email program they're using, if they are using a personal email or work email that has more strict levels of filtering outside of their control, if they just missed it among the dozens of other emails that came through their inbox that day, etc. 

You could send a message direct from your email and it will likely, but might not, get to your customer. A marketing email gets sent out and customers might not receive it, a transactional email is sent and again, it might not be received.

The situation we have noticed over the past decade, over 99% of the time, it is receiver related. Which means you will have to work with your customer to determine which of the factors mentioned above could be contributing to the missed email. 

The other 1% of the time is when the servers hosting the Figure platform go offline and you in turn receive several dozen calls/emails from clients over a short span of time. Which usually means our team has also received a couple dozen calls/emails about the system.

Sometimes people will not receive an email. An unfortunate reality.

​Warnings about Cox.net email addresses
With a bit of fury and past headaches, yet in the most kind way possible, we will say that email addresses with Cox.net are notorious for bouncing. Both our existing winery and retail clients, plus our team, have spent hours on the phone with Cox.net customer service teams trying to get both sides on the same page. However, we have come to the conclusion that success with getting email through the Cox.net filters will only be 100% effective if your customer, the one that has the Cox.net email address, contacts the service department themselves and demands that emails come through from your company domain name. Good luck. It is a very frustrating process.

Customers/Groups/Allocations:
You can set up Groups and apply all your clients to those Groups, which will help to begin determining your allocation levels. Some wineries with low quantity production and a high number of potential customers create a Waiting List group, along with additional Groups called Tier One, Tier Two, Tier Three, etc. Then, on the Settings>Customers page, they designate the Waiting List as the initial Group where new clients automatically get placed after signing up on the website or after an admin user creates a new customer account. 

Then, as the Waiting List grows, past clients fall away, or your production increases, you can shift blocks of clients, based on their signup date, from the Waiting List into your lowest Tier group.

​Allocations:
Set the Custom Cart Expiration Length to ‘900’. This allows a client to hold wines in the checkout process for only 15 minutes. Any longer and the cart clears out. This keeps stock from being unavailable to other clients for long periods of time. Product in a cart will remove quantity from stock. You don’t want dozens of potential buyers holding stock in a cart for hours, accidentally or on purpose, denying ready buyers from making a purchase. Read more in the article, Carts and How They Work

​Shipping States & Taxes:
Determine the states you cannot ship to and mark them as prohibited.

Determining zones is a preference on how you want to segment your shipping. Work with your shipping carriers to analyze their rates to states/areas of the US to determine the grouping of numerous states into zones...perhaps group all states east of the Mississippi into one zone.

After designating all your states into zones, click the edit button on the right side of that state to customize which of your shipping methods you allow for that state (Available where it applies—some sites don’t support all features). For example, let’s say you as a business would like to use GSO for all California shipments and FedEx for all other states. In this section for the state of California you would activate the GSO shipping method but deactivate the FedEx shipping method. Plus, for shipping to Hawaii and Alaska, you would need to turn off the Ground option, and only show the rate table for 2Day Air. Or, in summer months, you might want to activate Ice Pack rate tables.

​Shipping Rates:
Probably the most time consuming portion of your Figure account setup. You need to create grids (rate tables), based on your zones for each state, that determine how much shipping costs get applied to orders, with separate grids for Ground, 2Day, Overnight, Pickup, perhaps even delivery options to storage facilities like 55 Degrees, Vinfolio, etc. There needs to be grids for different bottle sizes within each of those rate tables as well, which you can activate overall at the bottom of the Shipping Rates screen. When you are creating those rate tables you will have to populate the cells for every bottle size you have created for the number of bottles in a shipment up to 12 for 375ml - 750ml, up to 6 for 1.5L and singles boxes for 3L and above. You have to keep in mind the cost of foam & boxes, ASR fees (adult signature required), fuel surcharges, residential fees, and base rates and calculate that into your cells.

Details for setting up your separate Shipping Methods…

Method title: Ground, 2 Day Air, Overnight, etc.
You have multiple options here depending on the shipping flavors you decide to offer. Your main ground shipping option could be simply called ‘Ground’. But if you want to offer both FedEx and UPS, then you should name them ‘FedEx Ground’ and ‘UPS Ground’. If you are going to offer GSO in California you should create a ‘GSO CA’ shipping method
-Type: Shipping
-Visibility: ‘Active’ for web orders or ‘Inactive’ which is only for admin users to apply to an order
-Fulfillment: Which company are you using?
-Method Code: If you can’t find one that applies make it a Custom. You can’t use the same Custom code more than once.

Method title: Pickup
-Type: Pickup
-Visibility: ‘Active’ for web orders or ‘Inactive’ which is only for admin users to apply to an order.
-Apply a Default Pickup Address: This is where you enter the address of the location where customers pick up the order.

Method title: Transfers to Vinfolio, 55 Degrees, Oeno Vaults, etc
You will need a different entry for each storage company.
-Type: 3rd Party
-Visibility: ‘Active’ for web orders or ‘Inactive’ which is only for admin users to apply to an order
-Fulfillment: Which company are you using?
-Method Code: If you can’t find one that applies make it a Custom. You can’t use the same Custom more than once.
-Apply a Default Pickup Address: This is where you enter the address of that storage company.

After setting those up jump over to Shipping States & Taxes to populate states properly into Zones so that they apply to those rate tables.

​Payments:
Once you have entered your banking information into your Figure account, you still need to verify the account. There will be a green button saying ‘Verify Account’ which will take you through the final setup process. It looks like this:

As a reference, funds from Stripe can take 2-3 business days, after the customer order is processed, to post your bank account.