This section is intended for both owners and designers of sites where the Catalog and Shopping Cart is enabled.

Note: Products can be configured to contain additional fields.  Consult your site specific documentation if the Product/Catalog Management page contains references to fields not listed here. The system is designed to adjust to the needs of each specific site.  How each field is used depends on the templates that are designed for that site as well as the presence of each field.

Kinds of Products

• Parent and Child Products:
  
  • Groups of products which can use the same images and long descriptions can be grouped as child products under a single parent product. Examples would be shirts which have the same pattern but come in different sizes. 
  • The parent product contains the main long description, images but has no inventory. It cannot be ordered.  It is connected to one or more categories.  The display order controls the order in which they will appear under any category.  Note: since they can appear under more than one category, this display order is evaluated for each category separately.
  • Child products are what can be ordered.  While they can have their own images and long descriptions, these are normally used by the  parent product.  These are the actual products which can be ordered, have weight, prices, and can have inventory (if the site supports inventory).  A child product can be connected to only one parent product.  The display order in the child products control their relative order under that parent product.  Typically they are displayed on a page displaying only one parent/standalone product.
• Stand alone products: these products contain all their own information.

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Setup a Product

• Think about how you want to arrange your products.  Remember you will need to create your Parent Products before you create any child products associated with them.  If you hide a product you will effectively hiding all the children under it.  You should never link to a child product directly always use the parent.
• Click on the Product/Catalog button to access the Product Management page.
• To Add a Standalone Product or Parent Product just enter the information in the fields. Consult your program specific documentation for the use of the long description fields.  See the background for the standard fields.

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Managing Quantity

• If the site is setup to track the amount of quantity on hand then the site can prevent visitors for ordering merchandise which is out of stock.
• A quantity of -1 is used to designate an item which will never be out of stock. This can include items which are delivered electronically, item which are dropped shipped from a manufacturer or which can be restocked quickly. 
• The system uses an 'early pull' strategy to minimize the chance of a customer getting to the payment stage and discovering an item is on back order. 
  
  • This means that when they place  an item in their shopping cart it is removed from the inventory for that product.  
  • When they pay for the item it is placed in the pending order state.
  • Periodically the system goes and looks for shopping carts which have not been touched for 6 hours.  These carts are considered abandoned and their contents is returned to inventory.
  • Note: if a visitor closes their browser and then comes back to the site, they will get a new shopping cart.  Because of the way the WEB works there is no way to connect them with their prior browser.  On the other hand if they leave the site and return without closing their browser they will reconnect with their cart.  For a technical explanation look up session cookies in Wikapedia.
• You enter the number of items that are in your current inventory into the product field.  The system automatically reserves items for pending order and items already in shopping carts.  Warning: if there are more items in pending order and in existing shopping carts than you input the system will reset the number to reflect the minimum number required to fill the existing pending order and shopping carts.  For this reason, always check the quantity that is displayed after you update the product field.  If its more than you entered you have a problem.  The system will not pull items out of the shopping carts because someone may be already paying for the item.  

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Referencing Products on Content Pages

• The simplest method to refer to a product is to open a browser window to your catalog and browse to the product display page or the category which contains the product.  Copy the link in the browser's location bar.  Use that as the link address to go to the page.
• Remember if you hide a product the category which contains the product will be displayed instead.  The same thing will happen if you delete the product.  This is considered better than displaying an error message.

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Background

• Standard Product Fields (the names used in the database are different, but these are the names that are normally displayed and which match the tags used in templates. Must be entered exactly as it appears here, e.g., PrID will not work for PRID.
  • PRID: product ID number, numeric field generated by the system which uniquely identifies the product.
  • PrNumber: SKU or Product Number: unique number assigned by the site owner to identify the product.  Note: parent products must have their own PrNumber.
  • PrName: Name of the Product, does not have to be unique.
  • PrHide: Hide: values 'Y' or 'N', set to determine whether to hide a given product.  If 'Y' product will normally not display unless called directly.
  • PrDisPriority: product display priority: decimal number.  Lowest values are displayed first.  If two Products have the same PrDisPriority, they will be displayed in alphabetic order by Product Name.
  • PrOptType: Option Type: values: none, radio button, select List, check list (aka, a series of check boxes). 
  • PrOption: Option Group: site specific option group name to be applied to the product or 'None'.
  • PrDisQuan: Discount Quantity: # which must be purchased to qualify for a discounted price. '0' means no quantity discount is available.
  • PrWeight: Unit Weight of product: -1 used to indicate manual shipping calculations will be needed.
  • PrSDesc: Short Description: free text up to 255 characters long.
  • PrLDesc: Long Description: text fields which can include the same formatting options as the content engine.  Single media library for catalog is available directly in the drop downs.
  • PrSpare1: Thumbnail of product image uploaded, width normally constrained to 125 pixels.  In catprodC.plx and proddisp.plx, if it ends in '.jpg', '.gif',  or '.png' it will be converted to an image tag.
  • PrSpare2: Full size image of product, width normally constrained to 4000 pixels.  In catprodC.plx, it it ends in '.jpg', '.gif',  or '.png' it will be converted to an image tag.
  • PrSpare3,4: not used in standard setup.
  • PrSpare5: Second Long description.
  • PrNPrice: Standard selling price for the product. 
  • PrDPrice: Discount price applicable if Discount Quantity of the item is ordered.
  • PrTaxable: Item is taxable: set to 'Y' if item is taxable, 'N' if not.
  • PrShowSpare: Show Spare Input Field: special text input field is displayed to collect product specific text.  Contents are passed unaltered to the Order/Shipping documents.  Example: collect initials to be applied to a bathrobe. Values: 'Y' or 'N'.
  • PrQuant: Quantity on hand. If set to -1 then item will never run out of stock.  Put the value you have on your shelf.  Warning: If you set a value less than the total needed to fill pending orders and in active shopping carts the system will display the quantity needed to meet those commitments.  (i.e., it will not display an error nor will it remove items already in someone's shopping cart).
  • PrPPRID: Parent Product PRID not the SKU.  set to assign a product as a child to a given parent product.
  • PrHasChild: Product can have child products. Values: 'Y' and 'N'
• Synthetic values: generated by the system and used for display purposes.
  • PR_OPTIONS: "None" or the list of options for a given product.  If Option type is 'Radio' then a series of radio buttons, if type 'List' then a Select List, and if type 'Multi' then a series of check boxes and their corresponding values.
    Note: other fields may be configured as Option Type.  These fields will always be displayed as a Select List.
  • PR_DISCOUNT: if discount quantity is non-zero: "Minimum Quantity to Receive Discount is enclosed in span class='pr-6', note:pr-6 is the fixed class for this.   Otherwise, the field is suppressed (
  • PRPRICE:
    
    • If discount quantity is non-zero, replaced by: $|.PrNPrice.| / $|.PrDPrice.|  that is the regular price followed by the discount price in italics.
    • If discount quantity is zero then, replaced by: $|.PrNPrice.|  that is the regular price.
  • PRGRAPHIC: if PrSpare1 contains an image (i.e, a file whose name ends in .png, .jpg, .jpeg, or .gif) then that |.PRGRAPHIC.| is created as image tag with a link to the graphic contained in PrSpare2 with the words: "Click image to enlarge!" below it.  Otherwise it is suppressed.
  • PR_SPARE: if PrShowSpare is true (i.e., 'Y') then PR_SPARE is replaced with a text input box to take the Spare String. Whatever is placed in this input box is added to the Option information for that product in the shopping cart/order. The input box is enclosed in span class='prSpare'  See discussion on the Product Line template for how to test and add text describing the use of the box if more control is needed.
  • PR_AUTH: set to non-zero if visitor to the page has signed in.  Requires site to have support for Authorized Groups and Authorized Members. Again, this is used with the conditional statements

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Please see here for explanation of how to use the WYSIWYG Editor for any long description fields.