Working with Products
Products are the core feature of any ecommerce website and as such I'm going to take a bit of time to explain a few things here about how products work within the EasyWebstore system.
Products are an object within the system and they can contain a lot of information. Not all of this information may be displayed on your store, this depends on your template, but generally the following fields would be sufficiant to create a working product.
| Heading |
Data Type |
Description |
| ProductCode |
text |
This is the product code/EAN/SKU/ISBN or whatever you prefer to call it for the product. |
| ShortDescription |
text |
This is the product name or title. |
| Teaser |
text |
This is the product teaser. This field can contain HTML. |
| Details |
text |
This is the products full description. This field can also contain HTML. |
| Price |
number |
This is the price of the product in pounds and pence.
i.e. 4.5 = £4.50 |
In addition to this you may also want to categorise your products to allow for clearer navigation on your store and to allow customers to find the products they are looking for more easily. To do this first of all take a look at the article "Working with Categories" to learn how to create categories for your products.
Once you have some categories you will see a couple of dropdown boxes at the top of the "New Product" and "Edit Product" pages.
| Heading |
Data Type |
Description |
| Primary Category |
DropDown Box |
This is the main category for this product. |
| Additional Categories |
DropDown Boxes |
You can also put the product into up to 10 additional categories to allow multiple paths through your site for customer to find your products.
i.e. a can of coca-cola might come under "Drinks", "Drinks > Cans", "Drinks > Fizzy", etc. That would make the primary category "Drinks" and 2 additional categories. |
Depending on your template you can also add one or more images to your product. This is done by clicking the "Browse for images" link which will open a new window similar to the image uploader in the teaser and details sections. You upload as many images as you like from your computer and they will appear below the upload box in this new window with a "Select" button next to them.
Each image is attached to the product you are editing but only one can be the teaser image that is used by default. Whichever one you click "Select" next to will be the default teaser image. The others will still be attached to the product and, if your template uses the ContentImageBrowser, they will be displayed as small thumbnails on the product full details page.
Products with Options
Some products can have optional components to them. Cars for example might have options for with or without electric windows, etc. A t-shirt could come in many different colours. In all these cases you may want to use the product options capability of the products system.
For the purposes of this article we will look at the "Simple" product options which does not include independant stock tracking for the options.
Look for the field called "Simple Purchase Options". In this field you will need to enter a string of text, formatted in a particular way, to tell the system what options you want to have.
In my example imagine a t-shirt... we have 3 different colours for the t-shirt. red, green and blue. If I enter...
red;green;blue
... and then go and look at the product on the store, we should see a drop-down box with those three colours in it just waiting to be selected.
now, we also have this t-shirt in 3 different sizes. Small, medium and large. Lets add those.
red;green;blue|small;medium;large
notice the | symbol... this tells it that we need another drop-down box. Take another look at the product page now and you should see 2 drop-down boxes... but how do we know which is which other than by their content? They need labels.
Colour: red;green;blue|Size: small;medium;large
Now if we look at the product on the store again we will see that the drop-down boxes have labels.
We just have one final thing to do now. Our medium and large t-shirts cost more than the small ones. We have already set the "Price" field on the product to the price of the small t-shirts so now we just need to tell the system how much to adjust the price by for the other two.
Colour: red;green;blue|Size: small;medium[500];large[800]
Now if you look at the store again you will see that in the drop-down box it is showing different prices for the medium and large options. The numbers in square brackets above are the amount in pence to adjust the "Price" field by for those options. Therefore in our example above the "medium" option costs £5.00 more than the "small" and the "large costs £8.00 more than the "small".
