The ecommerce system in Syrinx CS is a combination of many different features that together make up for a powerful product, though still a bit rough around the edges. It has some interesting abilities like calculating the boxes needed to ship a given order and the ability to attach product options forms amongst others.
Products
The core element of the ecommerce features is the Product. A product is based on an Article from the CMS of Syrinx CS. There are sites in production with over 25 thousand products using Syrinx CS, but you can also easily use it to sell only one product.
As with Articles, Products are managed in a tree structure. You could just have a flat list of products without the tree, which is fine when you only have a few products. If you start to have over a handful of products, you can create “store departments”, which let you organize products within them. Store departments can contain store departments such that the depth of the tree can get deep.
The organization you use should be what feels most natural for how you would like to see them organized for administration. This organization can be used for shopping pages for site users, but you can also have custom category names that you apply to products which can also be used for public displays.
For example, if you sell technology equipment, you might prefer to organize departments for vendors, then have departments for product type such as hard drives, laptops, etc. However, you can also have a category called hard drive, which you apply to products that are hard drives. Then you can easily have a display of all hard drives from all vendors.
Product Types
You can sell Physical products that have to be shipping in boxes and delivered, or have in store pickup options. These types of products should have dimensions if you want to use shipping providers like Fedex which offer live shipping quotes. If you mail your product and different orders can use different amounts and types of boxes based on what they order and quantity, then you need to get that quote from the delivery provider like Fedex so you can quote the shipping costs in the check out process.
You can also sell products that are not physical, like site memberships or downloads. Site memberships can be setup as products so that the user picks their membership and goes through the checkout process. After they have paid, the site will create an account with the site access and privileges specified by the product definition.
Product Pricing
Each product should have a price from zero to whatever the price needs to be. Prices with zero for the price will allow the user to checkout without having to provide a payment provider.
If all your products are priced at zero, and you use displays that don’t show a price, you can use the ecommerce system for an online quote system where the users doesn’t have to pay anything during checkout.
You can also set a list price versus a sell price so that a product can show a display that indicates there is a sale price or discounted price.
Product Categories
Building custom categories specifically for products allows not only for lists of products to be organized by category, but also allows for custom fields. As an example, if you were selling computer hard drives, you could define a category called hard drive, then add custom properties to the category such has the drive’s RPM, interface type, size, etc. Then you can show these properties in grouping displays such that products with the same RPM are shown grouped together.