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Product Management


The product management admin page is the main place to create, update, and delete products to be sold online.

On the left side is the product tree showing all the products defined in the site. Just above that is the product list filter which lets you search for specific products. The product department only checkbox will toggle the visibility of products in the tree so that you can see only product department nodes in the tree.

The tree displays products within their department structure. Departments help to organize your products in a way that is more natural for managing them. Departments are a grouping mechanism, but they can also be used to public pages to display the products from a particular department. You don’t need to create departments and can just have one flat list of all products. When you have over a dozen items or so, departments can be very helpful for managing them.

As you select products in the tree, its details are shown on the right side. The product details area is broken up into 4 tabs.

Description Tab

Products are based on articles, and the details tab let's you setup the title, summary, image, and body of the product or category.

Product types

One of the important fields on the Description tab is the type field. This defines how the product is displayed or if it’s a category of products.

  • Default - this is a general product that can be put in the shopping cart and purchased. This is the most common value to use.
  • Store department - This should be used to organize the site's products in a way that is most natural for managing them.
  • Bundled - the product can be purchased, but it is actually a bundle of products that define it
  • W/ options - the product itself is not able to be puchased, but its children are shown as options that can be purchased. This is a good choice for products that have various options like a mug with differt colors, each mug color is a separate child option product with its own pricing.
  • Option - the product is purchasable but is meant to be shown in relationship to its parent and sibling options for the product.

Product Parent

In order to properly place the product within the product tree, you should pick a product parent. Most likely this will be a store department, but for option type products, the “with options” product would be the parent.

Details Tab

The details tab is where the main product values, such as pricing and size information is provided.

  • Part number - The site's specific part number. This part number is sometimes used forward backend processing, such as user membership products that create new user accounts. Details of the part number are used to define the privileges of the new account. For physical products, this is typically used for display only.
  • Manufacturer part number - This is a place to put the manufacturer number if you want to display it to the user or have it be searchable by part number.
  • List price - This price is used against sale price to show discounts. You can leave this field blank and only the sale price is shown to users.
  • Sale price - The price that the item will sell for on the site. You can leave this price at zero for free products.
  • Quantity available - The quantity of the product you have on hand for sale. As users check out this number is reduced. If this value is zero the user cannot add the item to the cart and will show that the product is unavailable. if set to -1 then there is no quantity check and users can buy as many as desired. When the product quantity is zero, the public pages showing products will not have the display to add the item to the cart and will display an “unavailable” message.
  • Weight - The first field is the decimal value for the weight. The second field can be set to pounds, kg, or gram.
  • Length, width, depth - These thee fields are decimal values used for the size of the box the product is.
  • Dimension unit - The unit of measure can be inches or meters.

Note that the dimensions and weight are normally shown to the user in product detail views. However, Its most important use is to calculate how to ship an order. The size helps determine what shipping boxes to use and what items can be packed into a given box.

Product taxes - if no taxes have been defined then the list is empty, otherwise it will show a list of checkboxes. Pick which taxes are applicable to the product. You must first define which taxes apply to your site in the “discounts and taxes” admin page.

Quantity price discounts - if no discounts have been defined this list will be empty, otherwise it will show a list of checkboxes. Pick which quantity discounts you want to be available. You must first define which taxes apply to your site in the “discounts and taxes” admin page.

Coded price discounts - if no discounts have been defined this list will be empty, otherwise it will show a list of checkboxes. Pick which coded discounts you want to be available. You must first define which taxes apply to your site in the “discounts and taxes” admin page.

Categories Tab

This area will show any categories that are available for the product to be tagged with. If a product is tagged with a category and the category has custom properties, then this tab will also show those as fields to provide values.

Note that when you first tag a product with a category that has custom properties, the custom property fields won't display until you save the product. This leads to a two step process where you select the categories, then save, then you will see the custom properties and can provide values, then save again.

You can use categories to help create displays on public pages. For example, if you created a category called “just arrived”, you could also have a page that displays only products in the just arrived category.

Shipping Tab

At the top of the tab area is the shipping option dropdown, which lets you pick how the product is shipped. Options include:

  • Not Shippable Product – Use this for non-physical products like downloads, site membership and other things that don’t ship.
  • Box w/Other Products – Use this for products that will ship in the boxes that you use to ship with. Typically you will have a set of box sizes that you use to fulfill orders.
  • Product is Shipping Box – For products that you will send directly in the box the product was sent by the vendor. 
  • Use Custom Shipping Boxes – Sometimes you may have special boxes only used for one product, and a single product may need more than one box to ship. The shipping box calculates used for a sales order are not capable of recognizing that a single product can be broken up into multiple boxes. An example of such a situation would be a large book set, like an encyclopedia that needs several boxes to be shipped.

When use custom shipping boxes is chosen, you can provide the list of boxes and their sizes in the grid shown in this tab. The grid will always show a blank line at the bottom that you can set values for. Use the save button in the grid’s footer toolbar to save the changes.

Options Form Tab

If you have products that need information from the user to properly ship, then you can use an option form. For example, if you have bracelet that can be engraved, you could define an option form that had a text field for the user to type the text for engraving and a dropdown for picking the font to engrave with.

  • Pricing BizRule – This is an advanced option for specifying custom code written to help calculate the actual sale price based on the options chosen. Unless you have written your own BizRule, you would leave this blank.
  • Checkout BizRule – This is another advanced option that is called when the user completes the checkout process. Unless you have written your own BizRule, you would leave this blank.
  • Must have Form Each Item – If checked and the user buys more than one quantity of the product, they must fill out the form for each item. 
  • Optional – If checked, the user doesn’t have to fill out the option fields.
  • Form Name – This is a drop down, but also a text box. If you already have an option form defined that you want to use, just pick it from the list and the form will show in the fields. Note that if you change the form here and save it, it will impact all products that use that form. 

    If you want to define a new form, type a unique name to use.
  • Form Body – The rich text editor shown on this tab is the main form body that is shown to the user to fill out for the product. This is similar to a regular article in the system and can contain images and other content needed to help explain to the user what to do.

There are special items that can go in here to allow you to show lists of other products, which can be used to help “build a product”. For example, you might have a PC product that has options for what size HD to use, or what CPU to put in. These options can be shown as a list of radio buttons, checkboxes or a drop down. The price of the main product can be changed based on the options chosen.

For example, the base price of the PC may be $500 with no hard drive. The user can pick a hard drive they want, and the price of the drive they pick will be added to the price of the pc. If the hard drive they picked is priced at $150, then the pc price would change to $650.