Resources & information

Shop Maker V4 User Guide

Products and categories

Categories

The first step in setting up your shop will be to create the categories required. Shop Maker works on a parent child system where a category can have a parent category. For example, you may have a Clothing category with a sub category of Mens and a further sub category of T-shirts: Clothing > Mens > T-shirts

To do this you need to create the category Clothing with the parent category set to No parent. You will then create a category called Mens with the parent category set to Clothing followed by another category called T-shirts with the parent category set to Mens. This way, you can go as deep as you like with your category structure.

This will display the category Clothing in your shops categories box which when clicked will display the Mens category in your shops body. If the shopper clicks on Mens, it will display T-shirts. You can add a sub category image and a sub category description to each category if required which will be displayed in the shops body if the parent category has been selected.

Products

Once your categories are set-up, you can then add your product details, which include the title, price, quantity, weight, tax status, short description, full description and up to 6 images.

Product quantities

The quantity will be adjusted when an orders payment status is set to Paid and your stock control status is set to yes. If you have unlimited stock quantities, simply set the quantity to a high number like 9999999. If you have product options and choices, the system will display a button to your product quantities administration page. This area will allow you to enter a quantity for every combination.

For example, you may have a T-shirt, which may have an option of size with the choices Small, Medium and Large. You may have another option of colour with the choices Red and Blue.
The system will display every combination and allow you to enter a quantity for each:
Small > Red
Small > Blue
Medium > Red
Medium > Blue
Large > Red
Large > Blue

Product options and choices

To add options and choices to a product, you click the Product options button followed by the New option button. The system will allow you to choose a drop down menu, radio buttons or a text field. The drop down menu and radio buttons are suitable for options like size and colour while the text field is suitable for item personalisation. If you click the Add a new drop down menu, you can enter the option title. For our example, this will be Size and required should be set to Yes. Once you have added this option, you can then add a choice to this option. You can then enter the choice title, extra cost and extra weight values to the choice.

Once you have entered all of your product options and choices, you can then choose which order to display them in by changing the Order value on the product options and choices administration area. As standard, the options and choices order value is set to 0, which means they will be displayed alphabetically.
In our example, they would be displayed in the wrong order because Large would come before Medium and Small. To make them display correctly, you could enter the order values of Small to 0, Medium to 1 and Large to 2. You can also order the options in the same way.

Default product options and choices

If you have multiple items with the same options and choices, to save you time, we have built a facility so you can set the default product options and apply them to another product. Once you have set-up a product with the options you require for another product, simply click the Set default product options button followed by the Set this product as default button.
You can then add or edit another product and apply these product options to it by clicking the Copy product options button.

Product relationships

Once you have created your products you can create product relationships. If a shopper chooses to view a product and it has related products, these will be displayed at the bottom of the page. For example, you may have portable radio so it would be relevant to offer some batteries too.

Product weight

This is used to calculate the delivery cost. See Delivery for information on how the delivery cost is calculated.

Short description

If you enter a short description, it will be displayed on the category pages with the product thumbnail image and beneath the product title on the product page.