A Store Owner's Guide to Your First Week on Waly Market

Getting your store onto Waly Market is the easy part. Turning it into a steady stream of orders takes a little setup in your first week. The good news: the stores that put in a few focused hours up front tend to see orders faster and keep customers coming back. Here is the playbook our partner team walks new stores through.

Day 1: Build your catalog the fast way

Everything a customer sees starts with your catalog. If you run a restaurant with a defined menu, you can add items one at a time in the Waly Market Store app, complete with photos, descriptions, and modifiers like size or spice level. If you run a grocery store or international market with hundreds or thousands of products, do not do it by hand. Use the bulk upload template.

The template is a simple spreadsheet: product name, category, price, and whether the item is in stock. Fill it in, upload it, and your whole catalog appears at once. If your inventory already lives in another system, our team can help you map your existing export into the template when you join. A grocer who might have spent a week typing products can be fully online in an afternoon.

• Use clear, searchable product names: customers search by what they call the item, not by SKU.
• Add a photo wherever you can. Items with photos get ordered noticeably more often.
• Group products into sensible categories so people can browse your store the way they would walk your aisles.

Day 2: Set your hours and your rules

You are in control of when and how you sell. Set your store hours to match when you can actually prepare orders. If you close on Sundays, your store shows as closed on Sundays. If you want to accept scheduled pickup orders while you are closed, turn that on. The order waits safely in your app and moves into your active queue when it is time to prepare it, so you never miss a sale overnight.

You also set your own prices. Many stores price their Waly Market catalog exactly like in-store; others build in a small margin to cover packaging and time. That is your call. What matters is that the price a customer sees is the price you set.

Day 3: Learn Busy Mode before you need it

The single most common mistake new stores make is accepting more orders than they can prepare during a rush. When the lunch wave hits or a promotion takes off, you have a tool for that: Busy Mode. One tap tells the app you need more preparation time, and delivery estimates adjust automatically so customers set realistic expectations. When things calm down, turn it off.

A store that manages its pace keeps its ratings high. A store that drowns in orders during a rush does not.

Day 4: Get your first orders right

Your first handful of orders matter more than any others, because early ratings shape how often you show up in search. Package food carefully and seal it. Double-check that every item on the ticket is in the bag. If something is out of stock, mark it out of stock in the app immediately with one tap, so no one can order what you do not have. Nothing frustrates a new customer faster than a missing item on their first order.

Day 5: Understand how you get paid

Payouts go directly to your bank account through our secure payment partner, Stripe. You can see every order, every fee, and every payout in the Store app at any time, so your books stay clean. Joining is free: there are no sign-up fees and no monthly fees. Waly Market earns a commission only when you make a sale, which means we only do well when you do.

Day 6: Help customers find you

Customers see stores near them, sorted by distance, and can filter by category. Beyond that, you have levers to stand out. Featured placement and promotions can put your store in front of more nearby shoppers during the hours you most want orders. A first-order discount is one of the most effective ways to convert someone browsing into a regular.

Day 7: Review and refine

At the end of week one, open your dashboard and look at three things: which products are selling, what times orders come in, and whether any items are frequently marked out of stock. Adjust your catalog and hours to match reality. If you run more than one location, remember you can manage all of them from a single account and switch between them in a tap.

That is it. Catalog up, hours set, Busy Mode understood, payouts flowing. Do those well in your first week and Waly Market becomes a dependable second storefront, one that reaches customers who never would have walked past your door. If you get stuck at any point, our partner team is one message away.