Build your online store, edit it with AI and publish it on Howe

Your own store, in the same place as the rest of your business

Howe is two things at once. On one side it's the dashboard where you run your business: the catalog, orders, prices, suppliers and competition. On the other it's an online store builder. The store you build here is published and hosted on Howe, and its products and orders are managed alongside those from Mercado Libre and Tiendanube.

You don't need to know how to code. This post goes through the whole path, from the first template to the published store.

How your first store is built

1. Decide who you sell to

First you choose whether you sell to the public or to other businesses, and you name your store. That choice sets the rules: further down we look at what changes between a retail store and a wholesale one.

2. Pick a template

There are four templates designed to sell, and each one comes with three styles to choose from. All of them adapt to the phone.

• Pasarela, for fashion: big photos and firm headlines. Its styles are Monocromo, Editorial and Urbano.
• Botica, for beauty and personal care: clean and tidy, with the product photo as the star. Its styles are Botica, Clínica and Color.
• Ambiente, for home and furniture: it shows whole rooms instead of single product cards. Its styles are Casa, Nórdico and Material.
• Mostrador, for large catalogs and wholesale: search, categories and deals for many products. Its styles are Técnico, Almacén and Accesible.

3. Add your products

You can add them one by one, with their variants, price, stock and photos (with a gallery), or all at once by importing an Excel or CSV file. Then you see them in a table with what's sold in each store: the price, the stock and a switch to publish.

4. Make it yours and publish

In the visual editor you adjust the design, see how it looks and publish when you like it. We cover it in the next section.

The visual editor, without writing code

The editor lets you add, reorder, hide and duplicate sections and blocks, and change the colors, font and corners of the whole store. You pick a section and see its settings next to it, with the store in view.

You see it on desktop and on mobile: while you build it, the editor shows you how a buyer sees it from an iPhone. What you save stays as a draft until you publish; you can undo and redo while you edit and, afterwards, go back to an earlier version from "Other versions". It's the way to publish without fear: there's always a step back.

Ask Howe for the changes

If you'd rather say it in words, you mark a part of your store and ask for the change. For example: "Make the cover button purple and the title bigger." Howe prepares it and you see it in the editor as unsaved changes. Only then do you save it and publish it.

Howe doesn't change your store on its own. When you ask for something, it proposes it; nothing reaches your buyers until you save and publish. Howe's assistant comes with the Pro and Ultra plans.

To go further than the editor there's Howe Code, an AI code editor on your store's theme. It's explained in the post Howe Code: an AI code editor for your store.

More than a storefront: running the business

Every store has its own screens, and they all live in the same place:

• Home: what you sold, orders waiting to be paid and to be shipped, products out of stock or without a price and your best sellers, from Mercado Libre, Tiendanube and your own store.
• Products: price, stock and publishing for each product in each store.
• Orders: you filter by status (to be paid, to ship, shipped, delivered) and see each order with its payment and shipping. Collecting, shipping and delivering is done from the list.
• Suppliers: you add your suppliers to create purchase orders, check what arrives and know how much you owe them and when it's due.
• Costs: what you sold, the merchandise, each channel's commission and what's left, with what each product earns. Howe takes the cost from your supplier's list.
• Competition: Howe uses what it already knows about your business to see who sells the same thing, at what price and what you should do. It comes with the Pro and Ultra plans.
• Design: the visual editor.

Retail, wholesale and several stores

You can have several stores, for example one per brand, and when you create each one you choose whether it's retail or wholesale. In the wholesale one you set rules like the minimum order, selling by the bundle, who sees the prices and how buyers get in. So you can have, at the same time, one store for the public and another for other businesses, each with its own rules.

How many stores each plan includes is in the post Free, Pro and Ultra plans.

What comes with each plan

The store with its templates and visual editor comes from the Free plan. Howe's assistant, competition analysis and the AI code editor come with the Pro and Ultra plans. All the prices are on the pricing page.