This is an example of a product list. Inputting products is again a case of working through and filling in the blanks. The first task will be to give the product a name, short description and price – all the basic information that will be displayed on your site. This is also the information that will normally appear in any list of products i.e. when a customer clicks on a department name and sees an initial list of 20-30 products in that department.
In this screenshot you can see the product name, price and stock level along with a unique product code used to identify the product within the ecommerce software. Additional product data is normally entered through a product input template. The template allows you to add your detailed product description plus options such as sizes, colours and stock levels (these elements are often referred to as ‘attributes’).
An important step here is to ‘associate’ the image file for the product. Most shopping catalogues will allow you to upload a thubmnail image (smaller) to dipslay in product listings and a large image to display with the product page itself (see the next section).
Some professional solutions allow you to add extra product information (attributes) and even choose the layout of products and product information on the page. It is also possible to link or relate products, so if a customer buys, for example, a hockey stick then a hockey ball is also offered for purchase. A further feature would be the ability to configure the product to offer a discount when it is order in bulk i.e. 10% off when you purchase three hockey balls. You can use the ecommerce comparison tool to investigate all these features.
One thing to investigate in your chosen shop solution is that the individual products are well optimised for the internet search-engines. It is very important that each product page can be accessed and catalogued by the search-engines and that the product name and description can be recorded too. There are a comple of technical approaches to this but it should be easy to check if your solution does it well or badly by visiting some example sites. Enter an example site URL (web address) in to Google and if it list all the individual products with some good product info then you should be OK.
Like everything, solutions vary, so do a bit of research to check how customisable your solution is and how many products it can store. Remember, if you want a very professional solution with thousands of products, it may be worth paying a bit more for a high-quality solution.
