This article covers creating and managing products within the admin of your site. For information on how to configure the initial setup of products such as layout display and customization, see Setting and and Customizing Products.
To create a new product go to eCommerce > Products and click on Add Product button.
1. Specify product name
NOTE: Product name cannot use special characters (/,#,.,@,$,%,&,*,etc) because it is used in the URL and special characters can not be part of URLs. They are used in URLs for SEO reasons. This is also true for product import.
2. You need to specify a path to a small image and a large image or use the Browse link to select an image you have uploaded or upload a new image. Small image is used in small product layout and large image is used in large product layout.
3. Enable - enables and disables the product. When product is disabled it will not be displayed.
4. On Sale? - when set, the tag {tag_onsale} in the large product layout renders 1 if product on sale, otherwise 0.
These are the miscellaneous options which you can select. Here are the detailed explanations of what they are:
Similarly to catalogues you can use the Weighting field to control the order in which products appear within a catalogue. Using this field is highly useful as you can ensure your most popular products are displayed first followed by least popular products. If you use Weighting then any product with a higher weighting is displayed first otherwise products are displayed in Alphabetical order or any other sort option that you choose when customizing the online store. A product with the highest number in Weighting field is displayed first.
To add a price to a product you need to select that product and click on Prices tab on top of the page.
Then you need to select which country you want to add a price to and enter Recommended Retail Price and Sell price. Recommended Retail Price is a manufacturer's price which tells the customer how much they could be paying and the Sell Price is the real price that gets added to the cart. You can also specify the tax rate that applies to this product when sold in that country.
To setup volume discounts you need to click on Prices, select the Enable Volume Discount when you're in product details and enter the relevant information.
Here we have setup the product pricing and so that the individual product when purchased costs $164.95. If customer adds two of these products to cart at $164.95, every product they add to the cart after that will cost $155.95 up to 5 products. After 5 products the cost per product drops to 145.95.
You can setup your online store to offer your customers either retail or wholesale prices for every product. This means your wholesalers will see one set of prices whilst your end-customers will see another. It's easy to set this up:
To assign a product to the catalogue you need to go to a product, under eCommerce > Products and then click on Cataloges tab on top of the page. Then highlight the catalogues on the left an move them into the box on the right. You can highlight more than one catalogue by holding down Command/Control key and clicking on product names.
Products may be assigned to more than one catalogue. Its unlikely that you will assign a Rock album to the Rock and Classical catalogues at the same time. However, from time-to-time you can create new Catalogues other than those mentioned above and assign existing products to them.
For example, when approaching the Christmas period, you may want to create a Catalogue called Christmas Specials and assign any album that is on special during this time to this Catalogue. When a customer visits your website and choose to view the contents of this catalogue they will see all albums that you've assigned to it, including Rock and possibly Classical albums.
Here are the explanations of the options inside inventory control and the way they work and the way they can be used. For most online shops inventory control will not be required. From time-to-time however you will need to track inventory for products.
Product dimensions must be entered if you are using integrated shipping. Integrated shipping function sends this information to the courier and post services such as FedEx, USPS, Aust. Post and those services send back the corresponding costs.
These can also be used in custom shipping options. You can setup the shipping options yourself where the system will apply the correct option according to the product dimensions. For more information on shipping, see Configuring shipping options.
The options below are displayed in inches and ounces for United States websites and in grams and milliliters for the rest of the world.
If you wish to group certain product with other products, all you have to do is go to eCommerce -> Products and click on the product name, then click on Group Products Together. There you have to move products you want to group together from box on the left to the box on the right by clicking onto the arrow outlined below.
You then need to enter the product descriptions you want to be displayed in the dropdown. If you do not enter these, the product names will be used. You can then populate the below fields:
This option allows you to create attribute groups for any Product. For example a t-shirt can have a few attribute groups, e.g. Size selection (Small, Medium, Large), Color selection (Blue, Green, Yellow) and Type selection (Short Sleeved, Long Sleeved). Each attribute group is displayed as a drop down which the customer can choose a value from. Each attributes does not represent a different product unlike Product Grouping where each option in the group is a different product.
To add attributes to any product go to eCommerce -> Products and choose a Product, click on Attributes on top of the page and click Add New Products Attribute button . Type in Attribute Name e.g. Color, save it, and then add the items, such as black,red, blue etc.
You'll also need to add {tag_attributes} to the Large Product template.
Attributes can also be imported.
Product attributes can be rendered inside a dropdown, as checkboxes and as radio buttons. Here's the syntax for these different types:
Dropdown
color:red,green,blue
Checkboxes
color|6:red,green,blue
Radio buttons
color|7:red,green,blue
Each attribute group can be displayed as a drop down, radio or check box list in your online shop. Each attribute can optionally have a title, separate values in a group by comma (,) and separate groups by a semi-colon (;). Also, to specify that an attribute is required, add * after the attribute name
Example with titles: color:green,yellow,black;size:small,medium,large;type:short sleeve,long sleeve
Example without titles: green,yellow,black;small,medium,large;short sleeve,long sleeve
Example with required attributes: color*:green,yellow,black;size:small,medium,large;type*:short sleeve,long sleeve - in this example the color and type attributes are required, and the size one is not.
More advanced uses of attributes is to give each attribute value a price and/or image:
color:green|/Image.gif|US/12.99,yellow|/Image2.gif|US/24.99,black|/Image2.gif|US/29.99
Image and price are optional. If providing price for other currencies simply separate with |, e.g. green|/Image1.gif|US/12.99|AU/15.99. Do not use following characters in attribute names and titles: semi-colon (;), colon (:), comma (,) and pipe (|)
Note that images can only be used with checkboxes and radio buttons.
You have the ability to setup cross and up-selling of products. For example, if a customer purchasing a Cell Phone, you can significantly increase sales if at the time of adding the Cell Phone to the shopping cart, the customer was invited to also add a Hands Free Kit or a Car Charger or both. This is done using the Related Products feature.
To setup related products, login to the admin of your site and go to eCommerce > Products. You will need to ensure you have created both products you would like to link. Now select the product you would like to add the related item to and then click on the Upsell / Cross-sell option from the menu on the right.
You will now be provided with a full list of existing products, use the arrows to move products from the left pane to the right in order to add this as a related product.
Watch the video for further details on how to sell related products:
These digital products are also referred to as e-products. This is the product in electronic form, which can be any computer file format such as video (mov, avi, mpg etc.), audio (mp3, wav, wma, etc.), image (jpg, gif etc.) and any other computer format. E-products can only be a single file. If you need to sell multiple files you to create an archive and distribute those files in a ZIP archive.
To set a product as an e-product, this is done during the process of creating a new product as described above. Go to eCommerce > Products and select the product you would like to modify. From within the product details screen, check the Downloadable Product checkbox.
When you tick the Downloadable Product checkbox additional fields will reveal. Here is the explanation of these fields:
NOTE: With some Payment gateways (such as Offline processing and non-seamless gateways), the payment is initially put in pending status until manually confirmed by the site owner or confirmed by the external payment gateway. e-Products within the order cannot be downloaded under this circumstances until the payment is confirmed as successful.
For any given product you can choose its recurring cycle and have the system automatically create orders that recur when a customer purchases such products.
To take advantage of this:
Now for example if a customer buys a handful of products in which a couple have a monthly recurring cycle, then upon successfully paying for the order the system will create a new recurring order with the recurring products.
The system will use payment details from the initial order for subsequent recurring orders. Also the original shipping charges will apply to subsequent orders.
When designing an online store, it is often helpful to provide prospective customers with several different views of the same product. This can be achieved using a feature called Poplets, which generates a photo gallery-like display mechanism for your online store.
Watch the following video that illustrates how Poplets work and how to create them:
To add Poplets to your products, follow the below steps:
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