Lesson 22. Products — General. Part 1

Product settings are the thing that make each product unique. So it would wise to spend some time to learn them all. This is the first part of this journey through settings of CS-Cart small business shopping cart solution.

This time we are looking at Information, Options, and Pricing sections of shopping cart software program settings. Availability and Extra will be discussed later.

The name of the product serves as its main identifier on a storefront.

Assign a product to one or several categories. Use the radio button to determine which of those categories is the main for a product. To avoid confusion we recommend to assign one product to one category or subcategory only.

Price — base product price in your store’s primary currency. All calculations are done in the primary currency.

Next is Description. Lay it all out about the product in this field. Present it to customers. You can use both a plain text and a formatted HTML text.

Status. Simply use it to make a product available or not.

Then there is the Images setting. Upload the main image for the product, and CS-Cart will generate thumbnails for it. Thumbnails are small product pictures used in different store lists. Fill Alternative text field. This text is shown when the image is missing or cannot be displayed. It is also good for SEO purposes.

The next section is Options settings.

The first setting is Options type. Here we decide how options of the current product will appear and work on a storefront. When we use simultaneous options, customers are free to select any options they want and in any order. If we use sequential options instead, options are selected one by one in a strict order.

The second setting is Exceptions type. This one determines how exceptions for product combinations work. Choose Forbidden to specify forbidden combinations on the Options tab. Customers won’t be able to purchase a product from the online shopping cart solution when they choose a forbidden combination of option variants. Choose Allowed to specify Allowed combinations on the Options tab. Customers will only be able to select these specified combinations of option variants.

And the last section for today is Pricing/inventory. It contains everything related to the product’s price and quantity.

CODE. The identifier of the product in your store. Each product must have a unique Code to avoid confusion during editing, and import/export procedure.

Use List price to quickly create a discount. If this price is higher that product’s Price, then a discount label will be displayed for the product.

The In stock setting simply shows how many products do you have in your store. Change the number to increase or decrease the number of products manually.

Zero price action determines what can be done on the storefront when the product’s price is set to zero. The first two options have a clear purpose. The third one, Ask customers to enter the price, can be used for charity events or donations.

Inventory tracks the amount of products in CS-Cart webstore software in automatic mode. There are three options here — Track with options, Track without options, Do not track. How does track with options work? If this is enabled each product option combination receives its own in stock field that exists independently from other in stock fields. When customers buy a product with a certain set of options, the quantity of the combination will decrease as well as the general quantity of the product itself. So, when using this option we recommend first to enter quantities for all combinations and only then specify the general quantity.

Minimum order quantity and maximum order quantity — the minimum and maximum number of products that a customer can buy at a time.

Quantity step determines the step by which a customer can increase or decrease the number of products in cart.

List quantity count defines the maximum number of quantity steps a customer can make when buying a product.

Taxes. Tick the taxes that should be applied for the selected product.

This was the first part of the General tab overview of CS-Cart business shopping cart software.