Catalogue
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Creating a new catalog
Creating catalogs is a simple and painless process. Go to eCommerce -> Catalogs and select Create New Catalog. Enter the name for your catalog and click Save.
For most catalogs, that’s all it takes to create them. Below is an explanation of the fields on the new catalog screen:
Weighting/Order
You can use this field to control the order in which a catalog’s sub-catalogs appear in. Sub-catalogs are either displayed in Alphabetical or Weighting order. If you use Weighting then any catalog with a higher weighting is displayed first.
Weighting is used for item ordering across the system. You wili find it in products, web apps and many other items.
Show product prices?
By default the price of products is displayed to every customer. You can however choose to only show prices to existing customers only for any product within this catalog, e.g. resellers or partners. This is different to a Secure Catalog as with option any customer can view this catalog except that prices are hidden.
Role Responsible
You can configure a Role (which consists of users) to be responsible for a catalogue. If a catalog has release and expiry dates set, then 7-days before an expiry is reached, any user in this role will be notified.
Release/Expiry Date
The system allows you to set a release and expiry date for all catalogs and products. For example, a Christmas Catalog may have a release date of 1-Dec and an expiry of 30-Dec. This set-and-forget approach enables you to setup catalogs and products in advance and have these appear on a website at a given date and then automatically be removed when the expiry date is reached.
Making a Catalogue Secure
You can make any catalog secure by assigning it to one or more secure zones. Only customers who are subscribed to the same secure zone will be able to browse the catalog.
Catalog Discounts
You have an ability assign catalog discounts to individual customers. Naturally, customer needs to login into the website to be identified by the system. So, firstly, you need to create a secure zone and you need to create a contact. You then need to go to "Manage Customer Subscriptions" screen.
You then need to subscribe that contact to a secure zone you have just created.
On that same screen you need to click Edit button under Catalog Discount Subscriptions and assign the discount percentages you want to give to that customer on certain catalogs. Once you are done simply click Save.
Lastly, you have to replace the {tag_saleprice} in the product layouts with {tag_discountprice}. That tag will display the normal price to everyone who does not have a discount to a catalog the current product they are viewing belongs to. If the customer has a discount on that catalog they will see the discounted price.
Creating a new sub-catalog
You create a sub-catalog in the same way you create a catalog, except that you choose for Parent Catalog one of the existing catalogs or sub-catalogs instead of "Root".
Adding products to catalogs
But before you go any further please endure that you assign every product to at least one catalog. In fact products cannot be purchased by customers unless they belong to a catalog.
There are a number of ways to add products to catalogs.
- You can choose a catalog via eCommerce -> Catalogs and choose the “Add products to this Catalog” link from Action Box and assign one or more product to the catalog
- You can choose a product via eCommerce -> Products and choose the “Add this Product to a Catalog” link from Action Box and assign the product to one or more catalogs
- Or you can define the catalogs a product should be assigned to in your Product import file.
Customizing how sub-catalogs list appears
{tag_cataloguelist,rowLength,targetFrame,notUsed,sortType,hideEmptyMessage,list/table}
- rowLength Number of catalogs per row
- targetFrame e.g. _blank. Specify the frame you want the product to open in
- resultsPerPage Number of catalogs you wish to display before the page paginates
- notUsed this field is not currently used. Leave empty.
- sortType
- Alphabetical
- Weight (Defaut)
- hideEmptyMessage if a catalog does not have any sub-catalogs you will see a message</br> This catalog has no sub-catalogs. You can hide it by setting it to true.
E.g.
{tag_cataloguelist,4,,,Alphabetical,true}
- list/table - if you place true here, the products will be rendered as LIs instead of being rendered in a table. (By default they are rendered in a table).
Adding Catalogs to your website’s Navigational Menus
The most common way to link to your online shop is to add a link for a catalog to your website’s navigation menu, e.g. create a menu item called “Online Shop” and link this to your main top-level catalog.
If you have more than one catalog, you can create a separate menu item and link to each one. You can retrieve the URL for each catalog via eCommerce -> Catalogs or alternatively you can use the Link Manager and pick the catalog to link to, the system will automatically create the relevant hyperlinks.
Adding Catalogs to Web Page
You can also manually add single catalogs to any web page by clicking on Add Catalog to a web page in the Action Box or by using a Triangle. To add a Catalog to a web page, go to ECommerce -> Catalogs and choose your catalog. Click on the Add Catalog to a web page in the Action Box and use “1-Click Insert” drop down and drop the catalog onto a web page.
Customizing catalogs
There are times where you want to personalize catalogs even further by displaying a catalogue image, catalog related information or just an image for the catalog name.
To do this go to any catalog and click on Show Advanced Options link (shown in red below) and enter your catalog related information (including any HTML) in the catalog Description field.
For example to display a different catalog header image simply enter:
<img src=”/images/mycatalogue.gif” />
Ensure you have added the {tag_description} to the Main Catalog Layout
(Admin -> More Customization Options -> Online Shop Templates).
Image:Catalogue - Catalog details.png
XML product feed
You now have an ability to enable the XML product feed for individual catalog which you can then feed into an external application.
The feed for your site can be found at http://yourURL.com/productfeed.xml, however please note that by default this is not created. Please contact the support team with the URL of your site if you would like it enabled, and they can do so for you.
To Once the feed is enabled, to add catalogs to the feed you need to go to eCommerce -> Catalogs -> select the catalog you want to add to the feed and click on Include Products in XML Feed checkbox, then click Save.
The product feed XML file is updated every 24 hours once active.
Displaying catalogues
There are couple of ways to display the list of catalogues on the page.
1) If you wish to render information such as catalogue image, name etc. you need to link directly to the root catalogue and that will display all the sub-catalogues under that catalogue according to the Individual Catalogue Layout in Admin -> More Customization Options -> Online Shop Layouts.
Example - http://www.hiphome.com.au/_catalog_24962/Rugs
Here is are a couple of useful links -
If you simply want to dump the names of catalogues onto the page you can use {module_cataloguelistdump,-1,rowLength,targetFrame,sortBy}
That module will simply render the catalogue links as LIs.
To insert the module into a page, you simply need to go to that page and click on "Add module to web page" and in the module manager, click on Catalog -> List of all catalogs.
You then need to choose if you want to display the list of all catalogs or simply display the list of sub-catalogs of some catalog you select. To display the whole list simply select Top Level and click Insert. Otherwise, select the name of a particular catalogue and click Insert.
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