Name: Adding Products
Availability: InStock

Adding Products
In this article, we review the Categorization process in the store builder as well as creating Products and placing them into particular Departments OBJECTIVES Upon completing this section, you should be able to: Understand the role of Departments in your Store Create Departments for your Store Edit Departments for your Store Create Sub Departments for your Store Create Products Add Products to Departments Creating Departments Organizing your products into departments is essential to the success of your online store. Making the products customers are looking for easy to find makes their online shopping experience a pleasure, rather than an ordeal. Frustrated customers won't come back. If you analyze a typical department store, you'll see that products are organized and placed into distinct categories. For example, shoes are sold within the footwear category. Within the footwear category there are subcategories, beginning with sex, male or female, under which there could be athletic footwear, casual footwear, and formal footwear. Customers looking for formal footwear won't have to look through athletic and casual footwear first. They can go directly to the formal section. Similarly, by organizing your products into categories and subcategories, customers can navigate directly to the product they have in mind. To create categories for your online store, you have to analyze the products you plan to offer and categorize them appropriately. It's important to make logical categories that make sense to customers. Its also important not to create too many subcategories as customers can get frustrated if they have to step through section after section to find the product they're interested in. For example, adding another subcategory to footwear, such as size, would be a mistake as size can be an attribute of the product itself. To add a department select Inventory..>Departments..>Add Department Input the name of your department in the Department field. Any combination of letters and numbers is valid. Description Input a description for this department. The description will be shown along with the department name. Image Input an image name to show with this department. Image is optional and should usually be small in size. Use the image icon to choose from the current list of images. Parent If you wish to place your department within another department (making it a sub department), select the name of the category in the Parent field. Department Listing Top HTML Input the text or html that should be shown at the top of the page for this department. Department Display To control how many products within each department are displayed per page, click General...>Item Settings. By default, products are limited to 10 rows and 1 product across.Select the drop down options in Item List to designate how many Items should be listed on a single row and input how many rows of Items you wish to display per page in the "Down" drop down menu. Sub departments Once you have created a main department, you can create sub departments by clicking the Add Sub Department link next to the department you want as the parent. Adding a sub department is an identical process to adding a major department, except that it is automatically a child of the parent department you selected. Sub departments are only visible when the customer selects the main department. You can create main departments, such as the Pants category, and place a sub department, such as "Jeans", within Pants. In addition, you can create a main "Jeans" category and place a "Levis" sub department within it. Adding Items Once you've created your departments, you need to add your items and place them under the appropriate departments. Select Inventory -> Items --> Add Item SKU Input an item sku in the Item SKU field. Any combination of letters and numbers is valid. Item Name Input the name of your product in the Item name field. Any combination of letters and numbers is valid, as well as HTML to format the appearance of the name. This is the name that will be shown to customers. Select save to continue adding further detail about your item. The next page shown allows the addition of several additional fields about your item. Placing Items in Departments Once you have created departments, and sub departments - you'll need to place the products in the appropriate departments. Select the Department this item should be placed in the department option. If an item is valid in more than one department then use the CTRL key to select multiple departments. Retail Price Input the retail price of the item in the Retail Price field. Quantity Discount Check Quantity Discount if this item is available at a different price if larger quantities are selected. Quantity discounts are defined elsewhere. Homepage Check Homepage if this item is to be shown on the homepage of the store. Taxable Check Taxable if the item is Taxable by law. Please note that actual tax rates are defined elsewhere. Visible Check Visible to show this item in the store. If unchecked item will not be shown, this can be used when an item is out of stock or needs to be temporarily removed. Hide Price Check Hide Price to hide the item price from customer display and prohibit adding to cart. Customers must call to order this item. Description Input a description of the item in the small and large Description field. Any combination of letters and numbers is valid, as well as HTML to format the appearance. Use the Editor link to open an editor box. Small description is shown on the summary page, large description on the item detail page Images To designate a thumbnail image and/or a full-sized image for the product, click the Image Icon button to select the image by navigating through the images you have uploaded. To ensure proper display with the The store builder Look & Feel, small images should be no larger than 150 to 200 pixels wide. Full-size images should be no more than 300 pixels wide. These constraints should be followed to allow users who are visiting your site at a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels to navigate properly. Weight Input the weight of the item in the Weight field. This information is applicable when shipping products and selecting real-time shipping or shipping calculated by weight. By default, weight is in pounds. If the weight is less than 1 pound then fractional values can be used to give the weight of the item. Shipping Fee Input the shipping fee of this item to be used if per item shipping fee is defined. Stock Input the number of items currently in inventory stock. This will be displayed to the shopper if quantity control is enabled. Quantity Control Check this box to enable quantity control and stop selling this item when you are low or out of stock. Control # Input the quantity to stop selling item at if quantity control is enabled. If quantity control is not enabled this field will do nothing. For most items this will be zero but if your store is very busy you may want to consider a number above 0 since the stock is not actually updated until an order is verified as paid. Minimum Quantity The minimum number of items that a shopper must purchase. This field is normally 1 but in some cases you may require a customer to purchase multiple items. Fractional Check this box if the customer should be allowed to order less than a whole item? I.e. 1.5 widgets or .2 widgets? Cost Input the actual cost of the product in the Cost field. While not required this field will give more meaningful profit and loss reports for your store. Special Price Discount Input the percentage to discount this item between the special start and end date. You should enter this as a whole number i.e. 30% would be entered as 30 and not .3. Any customer who purchases this item between the special dates will receive the discounted price. Specials Dates Input the dates to start and end the special pricing. Any purchase made outside these dates will not receive the special pricing. ESD Filename Input the name of the file that should be available to the shopper upon successful order completion. Use the icon to the right of the field for a popup list of files you have uploaded. This option is used for softgoods. User Fields Input the name of the special field and whether it should be displayed or not to the shopper. Each user definable field, which is checked for display, will create a text box for the shopper to type in. This should be used primarily for special unique text if you have a choice, i.e. Choose a color red, blue or green we recommend using the item attributes instead.

Welcome to our Support Portal!

Adding Products

A place where you can easily find solutions and ask questions