5b.Add Product To Shopping Cart- Step2

joe @ July 5, 2008

Add Product - As the name implies this is where you add your products. Below is a screen shot of the Add Products page it has been improved, it now has tax options and a long description editing tool.

How you fill out this page for each product determines what will be seen on your category, sub-category and individual product pages, it also determines what and how you will listed in the major search engines.

Do yourself a favor and completely fill out the form, by doing so you are taking advantage of the built in SEO capabilities of MemberSpeed.

TIP: Lately I have noticed the major search engines are in love with MemberSpeed product pages. There is a large pool of free targeted traffic looking for your products will you get you share?

Important Note: When adding a product, if you are offering free shipping for a physical product, DO NOT enter the weigh or size info into the “ADD PRODUCT”  form,  if you do your customers will see a database error during checkout.

As near as I can tell, a conflict in the configuration settings is causing the error.

The problem is this, the MS software  needs to have shipping configured to ship physical products, so the logical thing to do is to set “flat rate shipping” to $0.00.

If you set the shipping weight to anything other then “0″ the database will try to calculate a shipping charge during checkout, causing the database error.

My recommendation is to skip over (ignore) the Product Weight, Product Height and Product Width settings when offering Free Shipping for a physical product. Leave them blank by default .

Do your part when filling out your product pages, you’ll be glad you did.

Manage Products – This is where you manage your products.

Your Options are:

Active – Inactivate – All products are added “inactive” by default. To active a product simply click the check box next to a product and scroll to the bottom of the page, click the “activate” button and the product will be live on your website.

To Inactive an active product click the check box, scroll to the bottom of the page, then click the “inactivate” button. The product will be inactivated, it will not be seen on your website, it can be reactivated at any time. This differs from “delete” which removes a product permanently from the database.

Category - The category link allows you to associate your products with one or more categories, To accomplish this, click on the Category link of a product.

This is also where you manage these category associations.

Product Attributes - this is where you setup your product options i.e. color, size, etc.

To setup your product attributes go to: Shopping Cart Manager> Product Attributes>List Options Click on add option, give the option a name, click save it will show up on the list. You now need to give your option some value(s), click on the value link. Now you need to add value(s) one at a time, saving each.

Take your time, making sure each value/option is correct, this will save you loads of time later.

Now that you have created Attributes you need to associate your attributes to your products.

Go to: Shopping Cart Manager>Manage Products choose the product you wish to add attributes to by clicking on the attributes link for that product.

As you can see in the image above you need to select a Option Name, Option Value, Price Difference and Image (if applicable) for each attribute. You can create unlimited product attribute for each product pending on what option you wish to offer you customers. i.e. if your store was a clothing store you would create an attribute for each color / size combination you were offering for sale.

Some e-tailers will want to show the image of chosen attribute (i.e color options) for this you would add the appropriate image and image alt text (for SEO) for each attribute.

Setting up Product attributes is a time consuming tedious process, it may be the most difficult part of setting up the shopping cart, but it you take your time at set it up correctly the first time you will reap rewards for years to come.

TIP: I highly recommend you fully setup one or two products, to test until you have worked out the bugs in your system, before you slug through you entire product line. do this initial setup, testing and tweeking or 4 or 5 days.. under no circumstance do I recommend you do all at once. give yourself some time to mentally work through how the page pages look and feel, and tweek accordingly… You will save yourself a lot of time and re-work if you give yourself this additional time

Addition Images – For some products you may want to show additional views or close ups of features of your product, this option makes it a breeze to add these images.

Related Products – This is where you link products for cross selling. Many e-tailers sell many different but similar products. Your visitor may not be interested in the product they are looking at, but they are interested in the category, so why not show them your other products in that category. The related products tool makes setting this up a snap. Once setup your related products will be displayed below the featured products.

Think of the related products tool as a banner making tool for creating creating mini ads of related / similar products and placing them on your page with a few clicks.

In the images below you see the related products tool. To use the tool click browse categories.

A window will pop-up, it will look like the image below. Select a category from the drop down list, the available products in that category will show below, select the desired products you wish to cross sell.

Once you have made you selection, click assign, the window will close the selections will be added to the form on the previous page, to save them and make the assignment click the submit button.

Product Help Guide – Some products require additional information be made available, to help the customer make a purchasing decision. The product help guide is the tool for this. it is a full text edting tool.

To use the Product Help Guide tool click on the Product Help Guide link, a window will open showing all existing Product Help Guides for this product, to create a new one click on the “add Product Help Guide” link

A new window will open with a full text editing tool. Give this new Product Help Guide a new, then you can manually create a new Product Help Guide by typing in the text box or you can paste your previously created content. When you are satisfied with your new content, click on the submit button.

It will be added to the list of available Product Help Guides for your product. ALL Product Help Guides are inactive by default, you must activate the Product Help Guide(s) you wish to be made available for your product, inorder for them to be visable to your visitor.

Search Product – this is a search tool of MemberSpeed

Tip: I always use the advanced search feature, then I simply scroll the drop down list make my selection and click search. my search resulted is shown. This is a real time saver when I need to make minor changes to my product lisitings. it saves me having to scroll pager after page of products looking the one(s) I need to edit.

Joe

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Filed under: 09.Shopping Cart