Adding Products to Your Shop

Adding Products to Your Shop

In Peter’s Square, you can list any of three classes of products. They are: Simple products, Downloadable products, and Variable products. We will cover each one of these separately, but we’ll begin by covering the facets that are common to all three types. In your Dashboard, after clicking on the “Add Product” button, the form you see has the following fields:

Product Name – Exactly that. Short and descriptive is best.

Product Description – This description is displayed in a tab on the product page beneath the Add to Cart button. It is not required. This is where you’d put product details.

Product Short Description – This description is required, and it’s displayed above the Add to Cart button. Best to keep it short.

Categories – Assign your product to between one and three categories or subcategories. Please, do not assign a subcategory and that subcategory’s parent category. Doing so is pointless. It’s not possible to create new categories. However, if you think a category or subcategory is missing, please, don’t hesitate to let us know.

Tags – Add appropriate tags here. You can create new tags, but tags that you create cannot contain spaces. Please use a hyphen in place of a space. Also, it’s best to use pre-existing tags if possible. Existent tags will be shown as you type.

Featured Image – Very important. Images sell products. Hover over the + symbol and click on “Set Featured Image”. You’ll be able to upload a product photo, or select one from your Media Library that was uploaded previously. All product images should be atleast 547px wide. Anything less may result in a blurry image on the product page.

Gallery – Not necessary, but you may add a few additional product images here. These will appear as thumbnails that can be clicked to display the larger image.

So, those are the basics. Onward…

Product Type – Simple Product or Variable Product. A simple product is one without variations. A variable product is one with variations, such as a t-shirt. T-shirts usually have atleast one attribute that determines variations: Size.

First, let’s cover the Simple Product, which is what most products are.

Virtual – Check this box to disable shipping. This should be checked for products that do not get shipped, such as an ebook or pdf document.

Downloadable – Check this if you are attaching a downloadable item to your product, such as assembly instructions, or if the product itself is just a downloadable item.

General Tab

SKU – Optional. Use it if it suits your purposes.

Private Listing, hide this product from the catalog – Check this if the product shouldn’t be listed in your shop. This is useful when you create a custom item and list it simply to collect payment.

Regular Price – What it says. This is required.

Sale Price – A temporary sale price. IMPORTANT: If you set a sale price, you must click “Schedule” and set a window of time. Failure to do so will result in the sale being immediately expired.

Inventory Tab

Manage Stock – Check this if you want to manage stock. If you have a limited number of this product, then you should check this.

Stock Qty – How many do you have available to sell?

Allow Backorders – Do you want customers to be able to place an order even if stock runs out?

Stock status – Currently in stock or not?

Sold Individually – By checking this box, you disallow customers from purchasing more than one of this product per order. Rarely necessary, but you may find need of it.

Shipping Tab

This is where you may override your store-wide shipping settings that you configured when you first setup shop – they’re located in Dashboard > Settings > Shipping. These are product specific settings; they’ll only apply to this one product. Please note, if a checkbox (such as “Free National Shipping”) is checked in your shop’s shipping settings, then leaving that checkbox unchecked here will have no effect. The product will still ship free.

Weight & Dimensions – Optional. Meant for your purposes only (for now).

Linked Products

Up-Sells – You may select one or more of your other products to be displayed alongside this product. Best to do none, one, or two.

Cross-Sells – Again, keep it to one or two items. These will be shown in your customer’s cart as suggestions.

Attributes Tab

As mentioned earlier, attributes are essential for variable products, but they’re helpful for even simple products. Attributes are just that, characteristics of your product. There are pre-configured attributes from which you can choose particular attribute terms. For example: Size, Material, and Color are a few Attributes. XXL, Brass, and Magenta are all Attribute Terms. By configuring some of your product’s attributes here, customers browsing Peter’s Square can more easily find what they’re looking for.

To add an attribute, click on the “Custom Product Attribute” dropdown; pick the attribute you want; then click the “Add” button.

Once the attribute is added, you’ll see a Value(s) field where you should enter your attribute terms. If the term you want doesn’t yet exist, find the “Add new” button. Click it, and enter the desired term in the pop-up that appears; then hit OK.

There are two checkboxes that appear for each attribute, but the second only appears if the product type is set to Variable Product.

Visible on the product page – Unchecked by default. There’s probably no reason to check this box. It merely causes these terms to display in the Product description tab on the product page.

Used for variations – Check this box if you will have product variations based on this attribute. For example, if you were selling a t-shirt, you would have the attribute of Size, with terms for each available size: Small, Medium, Large, X-Large. In this case, it’d be important to check this box so that customers would see a dropdown list of Sizes on the product page.

For more detailed information about Attributes and Attribute Terms, read here.

Variations Tab

This tab is visible as soon as the Product Type is set to Variable Product, but it is empty until you add attributes that are “Used for variations”.

There’s a dropdown box on this page which you can use to create variations or to make bulk modifications to the variations you’ve created. If you go ahead and add a variation, you’ll see that a new variation is created. By clicking on it, you can choose to add an image specifically for this variation, and you can configure a bunch of things already covered above.

The relevant attributes are shown for each variation. Note that it is not always necessary to create a variation for every single combination of attributes. For example: If you are selling custom drawings of saints in two different sizes (Small and Large), and you have a list of 20 different saints from which customers can pick, then you probably only need two variations. One variation for Size>Small and one for Size>Large. Then, for the Saint attribute, you would leave the dropdown set to “Any Saint”.

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