Creating Products

Two types of products can be created in your NOP store. Simple products will generally be the most common. Grouped products are products that have simple products grouped under them. These simple products would be considered variants.

Navigate to Catalog > Products in the admin menu to create new products and manage your existing products.;

Adding a New Product

1. Click the “Add new” button in the upper button bar
2. Toggle the Basic/Advanced button in the upper left to display more options in each of the sections
3. Fill in the Product info section
   1. Product Name is required (denoted by red asterisk)
   2. Other fields are optional and would be filled in based on what information you wish to display in your product information
      1. Categories - Click box to associate a category or categories with your product
      2. Published - The published checkbox makes your product to the public
      3. Product Tags - Add various terms, phrases or even model numbers of a competitor’s product here. These tags are searchable by core NOP Commerce search functionality
      4. Show on home page - Checking box will display product on home page if your template contains a section to display them
      5. Product Type - Simple or Grouped (Product with variants)
      6. Product Template - If you have additional custom templates you can select them here
      7. Visible Individually - Check it if you want the product to be on catalog or search results. You can uncheck this box to hide associated products from the catalog and make them accessible only from the grouped product details page.
      8. Customer roles - Choose one or several customer roles i.e. administrators, vendors, guests, who will be able to see this product in catalog. If you don't need this option just leave this field empty. In order to use this functionality, you have to disable the following setting: Configuration > Settings > Catalog > Ignore ACL rules (sitewide).
      9. Limited to stores - If you have a multi-store you can choose which stores to display a product in
      10. Require other products - Check if you have a product that requires purchase of another product. Add the Required product IDs in the field that displays upon checking the box and choose whether to automatically add them to cart.
      11. Allow customer reviews - Toggle off if you do not wish to manage or display reviews
      12. Available start date/Available end date - Fill in if you wish to control when product is available
      13. Mark as new - This will display products in a home page section for promoting new products and is template based. If you have a completely custom template, this area may not be available.
4. Price
   1. In this section you can set the price and other specifics such as disabling the wish list button or making the customer call for pricing.
   2. Tiered pricing - requires product is saved first, so choose Save & Continue Edit button in upper right corner before completing this info.
      1. Tiered pricing is used for quantity based pricing or role based pricing
5. Shipping
   1. If you ship products using real time rates, you’ll need to complete the weight, length, width and height fields so that proper rates are returned.
   2. Enable Free shipping, Ship separately, Additional shipping charge and Delivery date options as applicable
6. Inventory
   1. Inventory Method - Tracking is optional and it defaults to Don’t track inventory. Other methods are track inventory and track inventory by product attributes.
   2. Other settings for inventory include:
      1. Minimum cart quantity
      2. Maximum cart quantity
      3. Allowed quantities
      4. Not returnable
7. Pictures
   1. Upload your product images making sure to include the alt tag info which should be a brief description of the image
      1. Limit to no more than 125 characters
8. Product attributes
   1. Product attributes are quantifiable or descriptive aspects of a product (such as, color).
9. Specification Attributes
   1. Specification attributes are product features i.e, screen size, number of USB-ports, visible on product details page. Specification attributes can be used for filtering products on the category details page.
10. Gift card
    1. Toggle on and allows for selection of Gift Card Type (virtual or physical) and Overridden gift card amount (if not filled in, price will be used)
11. Downloadable Product
    1. Toggle on to use
    2. Upload file associated and specifics (unlimited downloads, number of days, download activation type, has user agreement, has sample download file) as needed
12. Rental
    1. Toggle on to use and set rental period length and rental period
13. Recurring Product
    1. Toggle on to use and set cycle length, cycle period and total cycles
14. SEO
    1. Search engine friendly page name is automatically generated from product name if you leave it blank, but you can customize that using the format of “the-best-product” where spaces are replaced with hyphens.
    2. Meta title - this displays in the browser tab and is used by search engines. Foremost Media recommends always filling in this information
    3. Meta keywords - this does not carry much weight any longer as most search engines no longer use them
    4. Meta description - fill in field describing page content and limit to a max of 155-160 characters
15. Related products
    1. The Related Products option provides the opportunity to advertise products that are not part of the selected category, to your visitors. These products are displayed on the product details pages.
16. Cross-sells
    1. The Cross-sell products option provides the opportunity to buy additional products that generally go with the selected product. They are displayed at the bottom of the checkout page.