The Network Store is your own internal shop. Head office lists what tribes can order — merchandise, signage, event tickets, software seats, marketing services — and tribes buy from it with their own payment details. Everything after that (invoicing, chasing, renewals, reporting) happens inside Gorilla Dash.
It is not the same as your public online store. The Network Store sells to your own network, and only people you have given access can see it.
The pieces
Each item in the left-hand menu is one of these. It helps to know which is which before you start.
| Piece | What it is |
|---|---|
| Products | What you sell. Each product has one or more variants, and the variant carries the price. |
| Categories | How products are grouped on the storefront so a buyer can find things. |
| Storefront | What a tribe sees when they shop. Preview Storefront shows you exactly that. |
| Orders | A completed purchase. Holds the items bought, the charges, and any payments against it. |
| Subscriptions | A product that bills again on a schedule rather than once. |
| Customers | The buying tribes, with their saved payment details and history. |
| Accounts Receivable | What is owed, how overdue it is, and where payments have been applied. |
| Allocations | A thing being handed out that needs a list — conference places, shirts, dinner seats. |
| Register | The list itself: every individual seat or entry, and who it belongs to. |
| Reports | Sales, recurring revenue, subscriptions, outstanding payments and transactions. |
| Settings | Store name, currency, tax, notifications and failed-payment handling. |
How an order travels
- A tribe opens the storefront and sees the products their organisation is allowed to buy.
- They choose a product and a variant, answer anything you ask for at checkout, and pay.
- An order is created. You see it under Orders, and whoever you nominated is notified.
- If the product bills on a schedule, a subscription is created alongside the order and renews on its own.
- Anything unpaid shows in Accounts Receivable until it is settled.
- If the product hands something out, its entries appear in the Register.
Products and variants
This trips people up more than anything else, so it is worth being precise. A product is the thing ("Branded Polo Shirt"). A variant is the version of it a buyer actually picks, and the variant is what carries the price, the billing interval and the quantity rules. A product with no variants cannot be bought.
Who can see and do what
A store belongs to the organisation that created it, and can be shared with other organisations at one of three levels.
| Access | Can do |
|---|---|
| Owner | Everything, including settings and deleting the store. |
| Manager | Run the store day to day — products, orders, subscriptions, receivables. |
| Buyer | Shop the storefront and see their own orders. No admin screens at all. |
Someone who only shops does not need a role in your organisation. That is deliberate: a tribe manager can buy without being given access to anything else.
Before you launch
- Set your currency, tax and store name under Settings — currency in particular is painful to change once orders exist.
- Add at least one payment method, or nobody can check out.
- Create your categories before your products, so products can be filed as you go.
- Use Preview Storefront and buy something yourself before you tell anyone the store is open.
- Decide who should get order notifications, and set that up under Settings.