THE PRODUCTS MENU

Setting Up Your Store > Managing Your Products > The Products Menu

The Products Menu

Overview:

What are Products?

Products are the main item element of the store. However, keep in mind that products are not things that are directly orderable, Product Variants are. Products are a little bit like an abstract description of the product, where the are the specific implementations that can be ordered.

A simple example will make this clear.

Consider the product "The Lion King", which is the Disney motion picture. Customers cannot order "The Lion King" directly, they have to order the VHS or DVD version of "The Lion King". So in our case, the Product (which has the same basic picture and information) is "The Lion King", and there would be two variants for this product: "DVD Version" and "VHS Version", each with potentially different prices.

The structure would be:

The Lion King, no price (Product)

DVD, $19.95 (Variant)

VHS, $14.95 (Variant)

Product Variants can also have other differentiating factors, such as color and size, etc. Different sized products could be different Variants of the same Product, or they could be "size modifiers" of a single Variant.

Even if a product is a SINGLE ENTITY (e.g. a swimsuit calendar for instance), that product would be "The Swimsuit Calendar", and it would have ONE "empty" variant with no name, but a price specified. This is called a SIMPLE product. Even a simple product must have ONE variant defined, or no one could order it. The "add new product" form has an extended submit form on the button, that can be used if you're adding a simple product.

Product Pricing (how product prices are computed) is shown here.

Products are managed via the Products menu. The products list can be extensive, so the list allows for filtering by category, section, manufacturer, and product type.

Product info and structure is discussed in more detail here. Product Variant structure and detail is discussed here.

What is the Products Menu?

The Products Menu holds different options in managing the company’s product resources for sale. With this option the Administrator is able to oversee the status of available stocks as well as perform updates on present product information. In this section, the administrator must make a constant inspection to see to it that the products being offered conforms to the appropriate standards and the company’s strategic goals.

To Access : Login to the Admin Site. Click Products.

1) Products Menu - clicking on this menu itself will display the list of products that also allows the administrator to access and modify the products specification. Also, this is exactly the same page that show up when you click the Edit Products submenu.

2) Edit Products (Submenu) -allows the administrator to modify the specifications of each product they are selling.

3) Add/Edit Product Types (Submenu) - allows the administrator to customize the product types.

4) Edit/Update Prices (Submenu)- allows the administrator to customize the prices of products.

5) Show Products on Sale (Submenu)-allows the administrator to set and show products that are on sale.

6) Import (From XML File) (Submenu) - allows the administrator to import the products from xml format

7) Import (From Excel File) (Submenu)-allows the administrator to import the products from excel file

8) Export Prices to Excel/XML (Submenu)- allows the administrator to export the prices of the products in Excel OR XML format.

9) Import Prices from Excel/XML (Submenu)-allows the administrator to import the prices of the products from Excel OR XML format.

10) Feeds (Submenu)-allows the administrator to add, view, customize and/or delete feeds. By default, Froogle and Googlebase are installed which can be customized too

.

NOTE:

A product must have at least one (1) variant defined, even if that variant is basically empty (no name, description, picture, etc) with just a price set.

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