Product

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1 Introduction
2 Creating new product
3 Displaying product price as on sale (crossed out)
- 3.1 Inventory Control
- 3.2 Weighting/Order
4 Adding product prices
5 Product grouping
- 5.1 Adding products to product grouping
- 5.2 Adding grouping to your product layouts
6 Related Products - Cross-Selling and Up-selling
7 Product Attributes
8 Assigning a product to a Catalogue
- 8.1 Assigning Products to More than One Catalogue
9 Adding Products to a Web Page
10 E-Product
11 Selling Recurring Products
- 11.1 Important: Not all payment gateways support recurring billing
12 Customizing how product list appears
13 Product Layouts
- 13.1 Small product layout (used to display list)
- 13.2 Large product layout (used to display individual product)
14 Related Videos
15 Related Articles

Introduction

Setting up of your online shop and creating your catalogues is generally done upfront. After you've completed these tasks, you rarely need to go back to make further adjustments. Most of your time henceforward will be spent managing products and processing online orders.

Creating products is an equally simple and painless process. However many more options apply to products and its important to familiarize yourself with those. As discussed earlier, its important to decide whether you will be using the web-based Admin interface or the Product import file for the management of products of your online shop.

Here are a few key points that you should consider when creating products:

Is this a physical product or an e-product such as PDF document or an MP3 file?
Do you require inventory control for this product? i.e. the system tracks number of products in inventory and can stop the sale of a product when its out of stock
Is this product part of a group? Product Grouping is a highly useful and intuitive way to organize your products, e.g. the same t-shirt that comes in small, medium and large products can be grouped together.

Creating new product

To create a new product go to eCommerce -> Products and click on create a new product.

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. Small image is used in small product layout and large image is used in large product layout.

3. Release and expiry date are very useful when a product needs to be put on sale and taken of the sale automatically:

release date - the date on which product will become available and be displayed
expiry date - the date on which product will become unavailable and be taken of the live site

4. Enable - enables and disables the product. When product is disabled it will not be displayed.

5. On Sale? - when set, the tag {tag_onsale} in the large product layout renders 1 if product on sale, otherwise 0.

Displaying product price as on sale (crossed out)

Sometimes you may want to show the RRP price crossed out to emphasize your sale price. To do this, firstly you will need to ensure you have checked the 'on-sale' box for the product as mentioned above. The next step is to ensure you have set the prices for the RRP and Sale price for the product. Next, you will need to add the tag {tag_retailprice} (this is the price that will be crossed out) and the {tag_saleprice} to your Product Layouts.

This will display as below:

Inventory Control

For most online shops inventory control will not be required. From time-to-time however you will need to track inventory for products. This system allows you to track inventory for every product. Inventory control allows you to do the following:

Stop the sale of products when the product is out of stock
Allow an out of stock product to be pre-ordered
If a product reaches its inventory stock threshold then you can be notified

The notification that is triggered once the 'Re-order' threshold is reached is sent to the 'role responsible' for this product. To set the role responsible, expand the product details screen via the 'show more options' link and here you will see the option as below:

Weighting/Order

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 shop.

Adding product prices

To add a price to a product you need to select that product and click step 2 in the wizard Add Prices to this Product.

Then you need to select which country you want to add a price to and enter RRP and sell price. You can also specify the tax rate that applies to this product when sold in that country.

Enabling Volume Discounts

To enable volume discount pricing for a product, simply select the 'Enable volume discount' checkbox. This will expand the amount of prices, and give you a threshold quantity for each price.

Set the prices for the various thresholds, and you're done!

Adding a wholesale price to a product

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:

Go to any Product and click on the 'Add Prices to this Product' and choose between Consumer/Wholesaler and add the relevant price.
Go to any Customer record and click on 'Manage Subscriptions', you can then choose to make that customer a wholesaler
In your online shop simply provide a generic Secure Zone login box so your wholesalers can login and see wholesale prices

Please also see:

Volume Pricing

To setup volume discounts you need to click on Add product prices when you're in product details and enter the relevant information. Please see the following screenshot for example:

Here we have setup the product pricing and so that the individual product when purchased costs $164.95. If customer add to cart two of these products 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.

Product grouping

http://videotutorials.onlinebusinessconsole.com/CustomContentRetrieve.aspx?ID=973718

You can use product grouping where you have the same product that comes in different sizes, colours, weight, quantities etc.

E.g. if you have the following products:

Black cotton t-shirt M
Black cotton t-shirt L
Black cotton t-shirt XL

Instead of showing all of those t-shirts on the page, you group them and show one and the system will automatically render the other products in the dropdown menu wherever you place {tag_grouping} in the product layout

I have used http://www.catfishdesigns.com.au website in this example. Twister (CB) product has been grouped with other 4 products that are of the different size.

If you click on the Size dropdown menu you will notice that other products are there. When you click on one of the other product in the dropdown, the price, name, image will change in case they are different for the other products in the menu.

Adding products to product grouping

If you wish to group certain product with other products, all you have to do is go to eCommerce -> Products -> click on the product name and 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.
Default will let you choose the product you want to display as default when customer views the product.
Weighting lets you re-order the products. Product with the highest weighting is displayed first in the dropdown menu.
Description in Group is added to the product name when product is rendered.

Adding grouping to your product layouts

To display the grouped products in the dropdown list you need to add corresponding tags to the product layouts -

{tag_grouping} - displays grouped products in the dropdown menu

or

{tag_groupinglist} - displays groped products as a list

Product layouts can be found in Admin -> More Customization Options -> Online Shop Layouts.

Related Products - Cross-Selling and Up-selling

http://videotutorials.onlinebusinessconsole.com/CustomContentRetrieve.aspx?ID=973716

This e-commerce system allows for effective cross and up-selling of products. Imagine 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. The Related Products feature of the system allows you to easily link products to each other in order to up sell and cross sell as one is added to the cart.

The related list may only be displayed on the large product layout. All you have to do is place {tag_relatedproducts} inside this layout wherever you want the related products to be displayed. If you require customers to see the related list before adding a product to the list then you may remove the Add to Cart and Buy Now options from the small product layout so customers are forced to click on a product and see its details. And hence see all the related products.

Below is an active example of related products where Warranty is being recommended to the customer at the time when they add a Plasma TV to their shopping cart.

Use {tag_relatedproductslist} to display checkboxes. Alternatively use {tag_relatedproductslist,7} to display radio fields instead.

Below is a more passive example of related products where these are displayed separately on the large product layout. To display related products in this format use {tag_relatedproducts}. To only display the product image without any text use {tag_relatedproductslist,8}

Product Attributes

http://videotutorials.onlinebusinessconsole.com/CustomContentRetrieve.aspx?ID=973713

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 -> Choose a Product and select the "Create Attribute Groups for this Product" from the Action Box. You'll also need to add {tag_attributes} to the Large Product template. Finally 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 (;)

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

More advanced uses of attributes is to give each attribute value a price and/or image:

Note that images can only be used with checkboxes and radio buttons.

Here is an example of what the attribute images may look like on a site that sells t-shirts:

Assigning a product to a Catalogue

Assigning Products to More than One Catalogue

Products may be assigned to more than one catalogue. Its unlikely that you will assign a Rock album to the Rock and Classical catalogues. 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.

Adding Products to a Web Page

Adding individual products to a web page is achieved in the same manner as adding individual catalogues to a web page. However individual products should ever only be added to web pages where a product is on special or you want to highlight a product, such as the product of the month. In all other instances you should instead provide a link to the relevant Catalogue that then enable customers to browse and view the products contained within them.

E-Product

Making any product an e-product is a matter of selecting the This is an E-Product checkbox. You will then be presented with an option to upload your E-Product and set your limitations around the downloading of this file. When a customer purchases an e-product, if the payment is successful the customer is able to instantly download the product via a link included in the email invoice.

It is important to 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.

Selling Recurring Products

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:

Go to eCommerce->Products and choose a product
Click on "Show More Options" and locate "Cycle Type" drop down
Set the appropriate recurring frequency for this product, you can choose between Once, Daily, Weekly, Fortnightly, Monthly, Quarterly, Half Yearly and Yearly

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.

Important: Not all payment gateways support recurring billing

Not all payment gateways support this feature. Your Payment Gateway must support recurring billing if you wish to create recurring orders to charge your customers periodically. For a list of the gateways which support this, see HERE

Customizing how product list appears

{tag_productlist,rowLength,targetFrame,resultsPerPage,sortType,hideEmptyMessage,list/table}

rowLength – Number of products per row
targetFrame – e.g. _blank. Specify the frame you want the product to open in
resultsPerPage– Number of products per page
sortType –
- Alphabetical
- Price (Cheapest to most expensive)
- Date (Newest to oldest)
- Weight (Default)
hideEmptyMessage – if a catalogue does not have any products you will see a message “This catalogue has no products.”. You can hide it by setting it to true.

E.g.

{tag_productlist, 4, , 12, Alphabetical, true}

list/table - if you place true here, the products will be rendered as LIs instead of being rendered in a table

Product Layouts

These Layouts control how individual products are displayed in your online shop. These layouts provide very granular levels of customization as tags are used to display information about the different product attributes. Just like the Individual Catalogue Template, these tags can be placed anywhere on the page and use a CSS class of your choosing.

There are a number of tags that you can use to customize the look and feel of your product layouts.

Small product layout (used to display list)

When a catalogue is being browsed and a list of products being displayed, each product uses the Small Product layout.

Large product layout (used to display individual product)

When a customer selects a small product to view its details, the Large Product layout is used to display the details of the product.