E-commerce Manager > Using the Product Inventory

The E-commerce Manager section of SoftPage is broken down further into various smaller managers. The two most common managers are the Product Inventory Manager and the Current Orders. The Inventory Manager is where you manage the products that you want to sell and the Current Orders are the orders that your customers place. (Basic in-and-out logic).

This document will look at the Product Inventory. The product inventory is a manager that you may spend a long time in. The Manager allows you to add products and categories, and also allows you to arrange the layout of the products manually. Arranging products manually differs to automatic products, in that under high volume sites you may choose not to manage the arrangement of the products - rather load the products and just let the dynamic lists and the search results do the listing and layout. For the moment we will just look at the manually managed products. 

To access the Product Inventory simply click the E-commerce Manager, then on the Product Inventory button.

The basic layout of the Product Inventory is the same as the rest of SoftPage. It consists of the Category lists on the left and the product lists on the right. Essentially the system works in the same way as the other SoftPage Managers, where selecting the category on the left shows the contents of the category on the right.

Adding and Working with Categories

To add a Product Category click the "Add Product Category" link from the Product Category options. It is important what category you have selected before you click this link since the categories can be nested within other categories. This category structure can be represented on your site. Typically sites will have categories within other categories, and this is where you would set this structure. Spend some time making the categories you require first, this will save you some time later. You will notice that the categories are created as "grayed-out" categories. This is because the categories have not been set up yet and will not be visible by default. You have to enable the category and set it up.

Setting up a product category

When you create a category, you will need to set up the category first in order to use it correctly. As you can see in the image on the left, the category is created as a grayed-out (invisible) category. Once the category is created, select it by simply clicking on it and click the Product Category Settings button from the Product Category Options.

The Product Category settings window will then open with the settings of the selected category. The General Details tab will be visible by default.

Current Location is just a display that indicates where in the tree structure of the categories and the current category is located.

Page Location This field is used to tell the system where the page that displays the products is located. This page can be selected by clicking the Browse button. A good example in this case would be the page called /pages/12345678/shoes.asp. This would then tell the system that if the user clicks this category from anywhere in the site, the shoes.asp page will display, and since we will be putting shoes in this category, the shoe products would then display on the page. In short this creates the relationship between pages and list of products.

SEO (Parse category ID parameters) This tick-box is then used in combination with the category Page Location to better the SEO (Search Engine Optimization). You do not need to enable this option if you have created a unique page for each category, since the page that you call in the Page Location will be sufficient to determine one category from the next. (Shoes list in the shoes.asp page, pants list in the pants.asp page) 
You will however have to enable this option if you are using a common product list page. This option is used in higher volume sites where there exists only a few list pages, that require the category ID to be parsed to the page in order to display the correct list of products. (More on this)

Category Name This is the name that you originally typed in when you created the category. This is also the name that will display on your page when listing the categories.

Category Description Some display options allow you to display a short description along with the name of the category to further explain the contents of the category. This again will display when listing categories but will not display when listing the products within this category.

Category Image Just like the description, the category properties also supports an icon/image. Simply use the browse button to locate the category associated with this category.

Sort Index Categories will sort by default alphabetically, however you can use the Sort Index field to set the order of the categories. The lowest number list first.
Sort Index = 1 (Top)
Sort Index = 5 (lower down)
.... etc etc

Visibility This option is what make a category visible or invisible on the page. The products within this category may still be visible, however when listing categories, this visibility option controls the visibility of the category. When visibility is off, the category is a grayed-out icon in the category list withing this Product Inventory Manager as you would have seen earlier.

Switching to the Advanced tab shows more options. These options are:

Category Contains This option is necessary to tell the system how you will be listing the products within this category. The default for manually added products (the most common form of product management) is the Manually Added Products option.
The Automatic List - Search Results is used to display products that list as a result of searching, This option is used in conjunction with the "Search Results Products" section below. If no items are specified the products will list all the items of the search results. Entering filters into these fields will display a predefined list of products as a result of the filters. This option is usefully if you have 100's of products and are using these filters to categorise the products. This way is easer to manage the products since you don't have to manually add the products to the categories as the search will automatically filter the list.

Once you have applied the settings you can click the Apply or OK button at the bottom of the screen to save these settings.

Adding a New Product

To create a new product in your inventory, click the "New Product" Bottom from the tool bar. The product name window will appear.

You will need to first add the product name and click OK. Be sure to describe the product name as clearly as you can. The product name should contain enough information to uniquely identify this product. When you click the OK button, the window will close, but the product details window will open a moment after.

Please note: You must assign this product to a category (categories tab) at this point otherwise the product will not be visible in the manual category listing. If you close the window now the product has already been created but is not assigned to any category, this is why the product may not be visible in manual lists.  

General Details Tab
In this tab the general product details are editable. They consist of:

Page Location This is the location of the page that displays when this product is clicked from a product listing. It's common to list the products in some sort of product listing, either from the home page or from a page that lists the contents of a category. Like the categories, you can either use one page to list all product in or you can individually display the details of a product in a unique page. It's suggested (to same time) that you use a common product details page in order to display the details of the product. You will see in the example the page I have used /pages/25143192/details.asp as a good example of the kind of page that will display the details of your product. Typically the details page is the page that you will navigate when you click on the "More Details" link that is typical when listing products.

SEO Using the common details page does mean that have to enable the tick-box next to the SEO option. This appends the ID of the product to the URL when the link is clicked. Although this is not as good for SEO as a completely unique URL per product, takes a lot of time. If you have the time, by all means make use of unique pages per product.

Product Code This is your own internal product code for your own internal reference. The code will also display on the site if required.

Product Name This is the product name for display purposes. The name can display any text. It some times better to keep this quite concise.

Basket Text. The Basket Text however can contain as much information as needed. Remember also that the basket text displays in the Shopping Basket and the Order Confirmation or Invoice.

Brand If you sell products by brand it may be a good idea to label the product brand. This can help organise products. I the product list is done automatically (See Product Categories) Then you will need to enter a Brand in order to filter product correctly. There is a handy feature that will automatically list the brands so that you can easily select a brand from the list if it exists already. 

Category The category text is very much like the Band. This is not to be confused with the display category. By entering a category it does not mean that the product will display in a category unless you are using automatic product listings. If you manually want to place a product in a category go to the "Categories" tab.

Visible The visibility tick-box is fairly straight forward in that it turns the visibility on or off. However the From date can make a product appear only from a specific date. Making use of the To date then can turn off the product visibility at another date. (The dates automatically use 12:00pm GMT as the time)

In stock This allows you to keep an on-line tally of the number of items in stock. This option can be used with the check stock tick-box to automatically check the stock quantity of the item and display a message if the product is not in stock of if there are not enough items in stock to for full the order. Using the decrement on checkout will automatically reduce the stock quantity when a customer checks out. (Items in the basket are not decremented, only at checkout)

(Document under construction - 02/09/2009)